WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

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1 July 2016 I n f l u e n ce and insight t h ro u g h social media Virtualized Communications: Turnkey vs. Do It Yourself WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW W H I T E P A P E R Prepared by Zeus Kerravala ZK Research A Division of Kerravala Consulting 2016 ZK Research

2 ZK RESEARCH Virtualized Communications: Turnkey vs. ZK Do RESEARCH It Yourself What Report You Title Need Goes to Know Here INTRODUCTION: THE RISE OF VIRTUALIZED COMMUNICATIONS ABOUT THE AUTHOR Zeus Kerravala is the founder and principal analyst with ZK Research. Kerravala provides tactical advice and strategic guidance to help his clients in both the current business climate and the long term. He delivers research and insight to the following constituents: end-user IT and network managers; vendors of IT hardware, software and services; and members of the financial community looking to invest in the companies that he covers. There is no question that the benefits of virtualizing communications are compelling. The ability to reduce the footprint in your data center and remove racks and racks of communications servers can have a significant and positive impact on your bottom line. The ZK Research 2016 Data Center Survey found that by virtualizing an application, the data center footprint can be reduced by as much as 75%. This can have a significant impact on real estate costs as well as power and cooling requirements. Combined with the benefits of a single administrative process for all applications, better uptime, more cost-effective business continuity and increased speed and velocity in turning up advanced applications, the decision to virtualize almost becomes a no brainer. These are the primary reasons why the number of virtual workloads has increased so dramatically in the past five years (Exhibit 1). Although the benefits of virtualized communications are clear, the path to virtualization might not be as obvious. One consideration is whether the existing virtualization technology can handle the demands of high-performance applications like contact center (CC) systems and unified communications (UC). One approach is to build a separate virtualized environment for real-time applications, but the risks in doing so are high given the importance of communications to most companies and the complexity of the tasks. Any disruption to the contact center can have a significant impact on customer satisfaction. Also, in the digital era, a high-quality unified communications experience is a key to business agility. Exhibit 1: Virtual Workloads Dominate the Data Center Percentage of Workloads Virtualized 75% + 50% to 74% 30% to 49% 10% to 29% What percentage of your workloads are virtualized compared to five years ago? 10% 12% 16% 17% 21% 25% 30% 40% % to 9% 7% 22% ZK Research 2016 Data Center Survey 0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35% 40% 45% Percentage of Respondents 82

3 Another approach is to choose a turnkey solution. A pre-built and pre-tested solution can enable an organization to rapidly virtualize communications without the associated risks of building an environment specifically for real-time applications. SECTION II: IMPLEMENTING VIRTUALIZED COMMUNICATIONS: DO IT YOURSELF VS. TURNKEY When it comes to virtualized communications, do it yourself (DIY) and turnkey are both viable options. But before embarking on the DIY journey, it s important to consider how a turnkey alternative might enable a business to get a virtualized environment up and running faster with a superior total cost of ownership (TCO). The key considerations involved in making the most informed decision are provided below. Components Required for a DIY Implementation > High-end servers > High-end storage arrays > Disk array enclosure > Virtualization software > Management applications Design > Power distribution units The first step in building a DIY environment is coming > Cabling up with the right design. This requires a deep level of > Enclosure understanding of the applications, the hypervisor technology as well as the compute, storage and networking > Application licenses > Network switches technologies. Simply producing a workable design may necessitate additional training and certifications of existing team members. Based on anecdotal conversations with IT leaders, ZK Research estimates the time to design the system is likely 12 to 18 months in a DIY model. The advantage of the right turnkey solution is that a best-in-class design would have already been completed alleviating the need for deep design skills in-house and virtually eliminating this lengthy and complex process. Build One of the most compelling arguments for DIY is that the business has many of the components required to build a virtualized environment for communications already installed in the data center. However, ZK Research discovered that even if organizations are planning to use their own virtualized resources, the IT department will likely have an initial chargeback for every item needed to complete the DIY configuration. The IT department may also charge a monthly fee for support. For example, in one customer environment, the internal IT department charged $2,000 to acquire compute resources and then charged a monthly fee for support above and beyond the initial infrastructure charge. 8 3

4 The right turnkey solution can be implemented quickly. Another consideration when looking to build the virtual environment (VE) is the amount of compute resources required. A DIY design will need to use CPU reservations to protect the real-time applications. Abiding by the reservations requirement means that the DIY VE needs more compute resources than what are required in a turnkey solution. ZK Research estimates this can be at least two to three times as much. Having more compute resources translates into having more servers and potentially more Ethernet switches, more PDUs and more racks. In comparison, the right turnkey solution is delivered fully racked, stacked and cabled with all of the components right sized for the particular environment. Because the solution offers a standalone environment specifically for the UC/CC applications, reservations are not relevant; therefore, the number of servers can be optimized. Implementation With a DIY solution, there are many pieces to install, configure and test. This can consume significant cycles of the most skilled resources in a company. One of the biggest challenges is sizing the servers, storage and networking to support both the databases and the real-time applications. Undersizing the resources can be catastrophic and require a complete rebuild of the infrastructure. Video and audio recording applications further complicate the design process and often require extensive load testing. Additionally, if the DIY implementation does not meet performance standards after it is installed, negotiations may be required to make changes to the data center standards so that, for example, different compute resources can be used to boost performance. Changing data center standards is typically not an easy task and can take a significant amount of time. The right turnkey solution can be implemented quickly especially if IP addresses are all preassigned with assistance from the customer. With a turnkey solution, the only requirements for getting up and running are power and network connectivity. Customers who have deployed turnkey solutions such as Avaya Pod Fx report having dial tone and even live agents turned up within hours/ days of delivery. Also, because the solution has been validated and tested, customers are assured that it will meet the performance and quality-of-experience benchmarks demanded by real-time applications, right out of the box. High Availability With a DIY approach, failover and recovery need to be engineered into the solution and validated through extensive testing. Ensuring virtual machines can survive and recover in the event of a failover of the networking, servers and storage components is critical and requires in-depth knowledge of the components and the configuration. Multiple failure scenarios must be tested and retested so that the recovery characteristics of the applications are well understood. To protect against failures, turnkey solutions such as Pod Fx offer multiple levels of resiliency to ensure continuous operations for critical communications applications. This should include full hardware redundancy from the storage array to the compute servers to the networking switches and the 8 4

5 One of the biggest challenges to building a virtualized communications environment is integrating the necessary management tools. power. Any individual hardware component should be able to fail without impacting overall system availability. Furthermore, virtualization tools such as VMware s High Availability and Distributed Resource Scheduler should be leveraged to ensure high availability and automatic fault protection. Additionally, the embedded real-time applications should also support mechanisms such as clustering and automatic failover and recovery. Finally, the networking should be highly resilient, offering subsecond recovery for any core or link failures that might occur when interconnecting solutions locally and between geographically dispersed data centers. In addition, because turnkey solutions have undergone significant testing and validation, if something unexpected does occur, the vendor would have a solid understanding of the recovery characteristics and could provide appropriate support to resolve the issue speedily. Licensing Licensing can be one of the most complex issues in a DIY model, as all necessary licenses must be sourced from the individual vendors. With the right turnkey approach, necessary licenses are included in the packaged solution, simplifying deployment significantly. Support For a DIY virtualized environment, support must be purchased from any vendor that provides solution components. This means the burden of coordinating any effort that involves two or more vendors falls on the company, since no single vendor will take ownership of the environment. This can add time and cost to the trouble resolution process. In fact, the ZK Research 2016 Network Purchase Intention Study revealed that identifying the source of an outage takes 90% of the total time to resolve that outage. With a turnkey approach, customers only require a single support contract. This ensures a quick and concentrated response to any issues that arise anywhere in the stack. SECTION III: THE LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT COSTS OF VIRTUALIZED COMMUNICATIONS When making a build-versus-buy decision, it is important to also consider the ongoing lifecycle management costs and the potential operational savings that can be recognized by deploying a turnkey solution. Lifecycle management includes the following factors: Management and Configuration One of the biggest challenges to building a virtualized communications environment is integrating the necessary management tools. This can be a long, complicated process depending on how many tools are required. One of the biggest advantages with a turnkey solution is having integrated management tools. With the right turnkey solution, custom management tools are provided for end-to-end visualization, configuration, and fault and performance management of the complete environment. With Pod Fx 8 5

6 ZK RESEARCH Virtualized Communications: Turnkey vs. Do It Yourself What You Need to Know specifically, this includes a custom-designed remote monitoring tool that provides graphical user interface (GUI) images of the solution with real-time status updates for each component. This includes the ability to drill down easily for additional diagnostic information and to make configuration changes. In a DIY environment, several tools must be acquired and then stitched together. In this scenario, faults and alarms must be manually correlated to determine the root cause of an issue. This can impede the ability to troubleshoot issues in a timely manner. Integrating intelligent discovery, visibility and fault management tools that span virtual and physical resources can save businesses a tremendous amount of time, as the tools can collect, analyze, correlate and perform root cause analysis of network events automatically. This will save the IT staff a significant amount of time and, more importantly, improve network uptime by reducing human error. In fact, the ZK Research 2016 Network Purchase Intention Study found that human error is the largest cause of network downtime much of which is due to the fact that IT network operations must manually gather and correlate data from disparate systems (Exhibit 2). Upgrades, Patches and Regression Testing Another component of day-to-day management and operations is making sure the virtualized environment remains current. Exhibit 2: Human Error Is the Largest Component of Network Downtime What is the main cause of network downtime in your organization today? Security breaches Software bugs 8% 7% Human error Hardware failure 9% 35% 18% Power outage ZK Research 2016 Network Purchase Intention Study 23% Telecom outage 86

7 An important yet understated value of a turnkey solution is a reduction in the time and resources needed for dayto-day lifecycle management tasks. In a DIY environment, keeping track of every vendor s security alerts, recommended patches and hardware/software upgrades can be complex. Careful documentation of all the hardware/software releases for each component that makes up the virtualized environment is critical. Then the interdependencies and compatibilities between the various technologies must be understood. Completion and maintenance of a compatibility matrix especially in more complex UC and CC environments that contain a wide array of applications is an important task once all the interdependencies are understood. Finally, a captive system must also be built to perform regression testing as well as other compliance, security or failover testing that needs to be done for each software release. Software patches or new releases from each vendor must be carefully tested to ensure they don t impact any other technology in the stack or the quality of the applications. For major software releases, regression testing can take many months and require many skilled engineering resources to complete. And then the end-to-end environment must be fine-tuned to ensure everything performs as required. From a hardware perspective, ensuring hardware inventory is on hand for return merchandise authorizations (RMAs) would need to be coordinated across all the vendors. Furthermore, just simple server maintenance functions including patching and memory upgrades according to research can take approximately 40 hours per year for each individual server, and this is just one component in the stack! In summary, all of these day-to-day lifecycle management tasks can consume significant cycles of highly skilled engineers. An important yet understated value of a turnkey solution is a reduction in the time and resources needed for day-to-day lifecycle management tasks. A turnkey solution comes with a full suite of documentation eliminating the need to document configuration, software/hardware releases and compatibility. In many environments, a turnkey solution can even eliminate the need for a separate test environment or captive system because the vendor would perform ongoing validation of new versions, patches, upgrades, updates of infrastructure and applications hosted on the solution for each release cycle. A turnkey solution may also include a smart upgrade function, which automatically checks if an infrastructure or application upgrade is needed and if so, examines compatibility. It may also provide notification and recommendations for patching. From a hardware perspective, the turnkey solution is streamlined as well. Hardware inventory is sourced through a single supplier. Furthermore, with optimized compute on the turnkey solution (due to not having reservations), server maintenance costs are lower and less time is required compared to a DIY implementation. Combined, all of these factors can significantly reduce the number of working hours spent on day-to-day maintenance. Training and Expertise Due to the reasons mentioned above, a DIY implementation would likely require engineering resources that have additional training and certification requirements over and above what would be required for a turnkey solution. Today, the majority of workloads that are virtualized are not conduct- 87

8 Control is a critical factor to consider when deciding whether to use a turnkey solution or to develop a DIY solution with internal resources. ed in real time, so a certain level of delay can be tolerated. With communications, any kind of network interruption can impair the performance of the real-time services, and most organizations don t have the necessary experience running real-time applications on virtual machines. A pre-qualified solution such as Pod Fx is designed with the expertise necessary to handle real-time demands in a virtualized environment. It also offers a single pane of glass management interface to dramatically simplify the ongoing administration of the virtualized environment. Single-call support can also have a tremendous impact because even with skilled resources, it is a huge benefit to have a direct line for expert support or questions for the entire stack especially when issues arise. Other Considerations: Control Although this may not factor into the financial analysis, control is a critical factor to consider when deciding whether to use a turnkey solution or to develop a DIY solution with internal resources. Typically, a team purchasing a standalone piece of infrastructure wants to maintain end-to-end control of the entire system. A virtualized communication environment would most likely be deployed by either a communications or a customer experience group. In a corresponding DIY implementation, there could be a number different teams controlling different aspects of communications: IT or server administrators looking after compute and virtual machines, a separate networking team working on service connectivity, etc. Coordinating with IT could lead to challenges in responding to new service requests in a timely manner. It could also lead to challenges with change control and troubleshooting. Other Considerations: Time to Market As stated in the introduction, there can be a significant financial benefit to virtualizing communications. For large communications implementations, there is the opportunity to remove a huge amount of infrastructure costs directly from the budget and take advantage of a reduced footprint within the data center. The quicker the company gets the system up and running, the faster it can start reducing costs. The right turnkey solution could only take weeks from time of order to delivery at the customer site. Based on feedback, ZK Research estimates the entire DIY project will take between 12 and 18 months or even longer if integration issues arise. Therefore, there may be a significant delay in recognizing cost savings from virtualization with a DIY implementation. SECTION IV: CONCLUSION Although the majority of workloads run as virtual services today, communications has been lagging behind with respect to the virtualization trend. However, more and more businesses are recognizing the many significant benefits involved in virtualizing the communication environment. Businesses that choose to embrace virtual communications will realize a number of cost benefits including lower power and cooling requirements, savings on infrastructure and lower administrative 8

9 Exhibit 3: DIY vs. Pod Fx CONSIDERATION DIY MODEL POD FX Design Customer responsibility Pod Fx was designed with a cross section of application, virtualization, networking and storage expertise, with a unique focus on the demands of real-time applications. Source Customer responsibility Pod Fx is based on best-of-breed vendor components technology, including the latest generation of compute/storage technology. Source licenses Customer responsibility Pod Fx includes Avaya and third-party licenses, including a VMware enterprise license. Build Customer responsibility Pod Fx delivers the applications, virtualized environment compute, high-performance networking and storage arrays, and PDUs all racked, stacked and cabled. Implementation Customer responsibility Pod Fx is delivered pre-integrated and pre-configured. Only a few hours/days are needed to network the Pod and deliver a dial tone to users. Validation and Customer responsibility Pod Fx is delivered pre-tested and pre-validated. compliance, Only minor work would need to be conducted to security, failover ensure it complies with a customer s specific and capacity environment. testing Management Customer responsibility Pod Fx comes with purpose-built management integration tools for single pane of glass management of the entire infrastructure. Configuration Customer responsibility Pod Fx comes with a complete documentation and procedural suite including configuration and addressing documentation details. Support Customer responsibility Pod Fx offers a single point of contact for support for the entire stack. Upgrades and Customer responsibility Pod Fx pre-validates and tests patches of patches third-party components and applications. It has a smart upgrade feature to ensure compatibility across components when something is upgraded or patched. Regression Customer responsibility The Pod Fx pre-validation and testing process testing simplifies or even eliminates customer regression test requirements. Time to market 12 to 18 months based In the vast majority of locations, it takes four on customer input weeks for Pod Fx to be delivered to the customer site after the order is placed. It may take another couple of hours/days to configure the UC/CC applications and roll it out to the user/customer population. ZK Research and Avaya,

10 costs. Also, virtualized communications can deliver a level of agility to the core services that cannot be achieved with traditional infrastructure. This is a key requirement of the digital business era. Virtualizing communications must be a top priority for business and technology leaders today. However, there are two paths to virtualization: DIY and a turnkey solution. The DIY approach can provide some custom features, but it requires a very high level of technical prowess to develop the solution, and then a large number of skilled engineers to maintain the system. Also, DIY typically involves a long lead time to deploy. Businesses that do not have the technical skills in house or want a solution deployed up to 90% faster should look to a turnkey solution, such as Avaya Pod Fx. The solution provides a validated, pre-configured, tested solution that works out of the box. ZK Research believes the turnkey approach is the better solution for most organizations today. CONTACT zeus@zkresearch.com Cell: Office: ZK Research: A Division of Kerravala Consulting All rights reserved. Reproduction or redistribution in any form without the express prior permission of ZK Research is expressly prohibited. For questions, comments or further information, zeus@zkresearch.com. 18 0