Curvature has asked attending Gartner infrastructure delegates in their London plenary session to seriously dive into the costs and overhead associated with deploying eternal 3-5 year rip and replace cycles of their server, storage and networking estates. In what was to become a vital plenary session, Linda York, VP, Curvature, suggested that vendor-led EOL notifications were about to become outdated as we move towards the next decade. Instead, she proposed that an obvious, but hybrid, alternative already existed to extend the life of 80% of attendees’ infrastructure hardware allowing IT to instead focus solely on the top 20% for innovation and new technology adoption. “The theme of the Gartner summit is @thecoreofchange and what we asked session attendees to do was to seriously consider the ongoing impact that deploying bi-modal IT might have on their infrastructure. We illustrated that by bi-furcating infrastructures and promoting only the top 20% of hardware to the domain of ongoing innovation adoption, we, at Curvature, have proven how customers still maintain maximum benefit from innovation, yet dramatically cut their overhead for the relegated 80% with zero impact on infrastructure.”
Within the session, Linda used real life Curvature customer examples to explore the ongoing drive between global pressures to cut overhead and recycle where possible across the board; versus IT Departments demanding ongoing investment (that also ensures their very own survival into 2020 and beyond). By cannily dividing the infrastructure of tomorrow into an access layer, an edge layer and the data centre itself, Linda gave recommendations and highlighted examples of grossly unnecessary rip and replace vendor-led 3-5 year programmes with switches that last up to three decades, and even spinning hard drives – (high up there on the IT Manager’s maintenance list), only failing on average around once every 9 years.
Glenn Fassett, General Manager International at Curvature is responsible for Curvature’s fast growing business across Europe attended the Conference across the two days. “The behaviours we highlighted in Linda’s session are a natural IT default position of wanting adoption of the very latest technology onsite but without cost justification as to its importance and criticality. It’s a re-invention of the Emperor’s New Clothes story that we were taught about in school and in a vendor-led IT world, it’s one that we have all fallen for across the last 40 years. Talking to the delegates after the session leads me to believe that in today’s budget freezes, there is a very real appetite and desire for adoption of a different methodology.”
Alongside Gartner, Curvature is recommending a different approach. Curvature, for over 30 years, has been procuring, maintaining and supporting multi-vendor infrastructure environments and is well placed to highlight which equipment will comfortably stretch - way, way, past it’s vendor decreed sell-by date. The company was recently named ‘Top Performer – Network in Gartner’s Competitive Landscape: Leveraging Third-Party Maintenance Providers for Data Center and Network Maintenance Cost Optimization, North America report. Curvature’s NetSure programme supports OEM server, storage and networking devices from vendors like Cisco, HP, Sun, IBM, Dell, EMC & NetApp. With this programme, NetSure, companies have the flexibility to maintain both current-generation and end-of-life products to extend equipment lifecycles while slashing operational and capital expenditures.
