Evaluating and Deploying State-of-the-Art Hardware to Meet the Challenges of Modern Workloads

At GEICO we are on a journey to entirely modernize our Infrastructure. We are building an open-source, cloud-agnostic hybrid stack to run across public and on prem private cloud infrastructure without having to expose vendor specific stacks to our application developers. This hybrid stack gives us flexibility to run workloads wherever we need them, and to migrate significant workloads from the public cloud to our on-prem infrastructure where cost or latency are better served for those workloads. 

Through that process we had to select new colocation facilities (moving from 6 facilities to 3 better balanced and geo-distributed sites), Open Hardware servers (based on the workload characteristics of our legacy and cloud footprints leveraging OpenBMC and Redfish for management), Open Network solutions (switches, routers and our own NOS for those systems), and OpenStack (including Ceph for SDS) to deliver fleet management solutions across our on prem footprint. 

This change is driving 30% to 3x cost savings per workload relative to the equivalent capacity, latency, and up time in our current cloud providers. We have also completely redesigned our current on prem network and servers from a demilitarized zone isolated network approach on MPLS cirtuits to a fully untrusted network (only decrypt where the user/account/application is allowed to have access) using direct internet access, and profoundly simplifying our hardware skus (going from over 200 instances in the public cloud down to 5 primary, and 15 specialty solutions to be phased out as our applications modernize). 

In this session we will walk through the hardware selection process taking our workload characteristics from the cloud and using that to optimize a subset of SKUs for our on prem cloud.