HudsonAlpha Institute is testing HPE's Onesphere to simplify management of its complex hybrid cloud environment, which supports the production of around 6 petabytes of data annually. The goal is to gain better visibility, optimize costs, and allow researchers to provision resources efficiently across multiple clouds without requiring extensive technical knowledge. This approach supports HudsonAlpha's mission of leveraging genomics for practical applications while enabling rapid innovation and collaboration.

1. How HudsonAlpha Transforms
Hybrid Cloud Deployment Complexity
Into a Management Force Multiplier
Transcript of a discussion on how HudsonAlpha is testing a new Hewlett Packard
Enterprise solution, OneSphere, to gain a simple and more common interface to manage
hybrid computing.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the
transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of
the Customer podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor
Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on digital transformation
success stories. Stay with us now to learn how agile businesses are fending off
disruption -- in favor of innovation.
Our next hybrid IT management success story examines how the nonprofit research
institute HudsonAlpha improves how it harnesses and leverages a spectrum of IT
deployment environments. We’ll now learn how HudsonAlpha has been testing a new
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) solution, OneSphere, to gain a common and
simplified management interface to rule them all.
Here to help explore the benefits of improved levels of multi-
cloud visibility and process automation is Katreena Mullican,
Senior Architect and Cloud Whisperer at HudsonAlpha Institute
for Biotechnology in Huntsville, Alabama.
Welcome, Katreena.
Katreena Mullican: Thank you, Dana. Thank you for having me
as a part of your podcast.
Gardner: We’re delighted to have you with us. What’s driving
the need to solve hybrid IT complexity at HudsonAlpha?
Mullican: The big drivers at HudsonAlpha are the requirements for data locality and
ease-of-adoption. We produce about 6 petabytes of new data every year, and that rate is
increasing with every project that we do.
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Mullican

2. We support hundreds of research programs with data and trend analysis. Our
infrastructure requires quickly iterating to identify the approaches that are both cost-
effective and the best fit for the needs of our users.
Gardner: Do you find that having multiple types of IT platforms, environments, and
architectures creates a level of complexity that’s increasingly difficult to manage?
Mullican: Gaining a competitive edge requires adopting new approaches to hybrid IT.
Even carefully contained shadow IT is a great way to develop new approaches and
attain breakthroughs.
Gardner: You want to give people enough leash where they can go and roam and
experiment, but perhaps not so much that you don’t know where they are, what they are
doing.
Software-defined everything
Mullican: Right. “Software-defined everything” is our mantra. That’s what we aim to do
at HudsonAlpha for gaining rapid innovation.
Gardner: How do you gain balance from too hard-to-manage complexity, with a potential
of chaos, to the point where you can harness and optimize -- yet allow for
experimentation, too?
Mullican: IT is ultimately responsible for the
security and the uptime of the infrastructure. So it’s
important to have a good framework on which the
developers and the researchers can compute. It’s
about finding a balance between letting them have
provisioning access to those resources versus
being able to keep an eye on what they are doing.
And not only from a usage perspective, but from a
cost perspective, too.
Gardner: Tell us about HudsonAlpha and its fairly
extreme IT requirements.
Mullican: HudsonAlpha is a nonprofit organization of entrepreneurs, scientists, and
educators who apply the benefits of genomics to everyday life. We also provide IT
services and support for about 40 affiliate companies on our 150-acre campus in
Huntsville, Alabama.
Gardner: What about the IT requirements? How you fulfill that mandate using
technology?
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It’s important to have a good
framework on which the developers
and the researchers can compute.
It’s about finding a balance between
letting them have provisioning
access to those resources versus
being able to keep an eye on what
they are doing.

3. Mullican: We produce 6 petabytes of new data every year. We have millions of hours of
compute processing time running on our infrastructure. We have hardware acceleration.
We have direct connections to clouds. We have collaboration for our researchers that
extends throughout the world to external organizations. We use containers, and we use
multiple cloud providers.
Gardner: So you have been doing multi-cloud before there was even a word for multi-
cloud?
Mullican: We are the hybrid-scale and hybrid IT organization that no one has ever heard
of.
Gardner: Let’s unpack some of the hurdles you need to overcome to keep all of your
scientists and researchers happy. How do you avoid lock-in? How do you keep it so that
you can remain open and competitive?
Agnostic arrangements of clouds
Mullican: It’s important for us to keep our local
datacenters agnostic, as well as our private and
public clouds. So we strive to communicate with
all of our resources through application
programming interfaces (APIs), and we use
open-source technologies at HudsonAlpha. We
are proud of that. Yet there are a lot of possibilities for arranging all of those pieces.
There are a lot [of services] that you can combine with the right toolsets, not only in your
local datacenter but also in the clouds. If you put in the effort to write the code with that
in mind -- so you don’t lock into any one solution necessarily -- then you can optimize
and put everything together.
Simplified
Hybrid
Cloud management
Gardner: Because you are a nonprofit institute, you often seek grants. But those grants
can come with unique requirements, even IT use benefits and cloud choice
considerations.
Cloud cost control, granted
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It’s important for us to keep our
local data centers agnostic, as well
as our private and public clouds.

4. Mullican: Right. Researchers are applying for grants throughout the year, and now with
the National Institutes of Health (NIH), when grants are awarded, they come with
community cloud credits, which is an exciting idea for the researchers. It means they can
immediately begin consuming resources in the cloud -- from storage to compute -- and
that cost is covered by the grant.
So they are anxious to get started on that, which brings challenges to IT. We certainly
don’t want to be the holdup for that innovation. We want the projects to progress as
rapidly as possible. At the same time, we need to be aware of what is happening in a
cloud and not lose control over usage and cost.
Gardner: Certainly HudsonAlpha is an extreme test bed for multi-cloud management,
with lots of different systems, changing requirements, and the need to provide the
flexibility to innovate to your clientele. When you wanted a better management capability,
to gain an overview into that full hybrid IT environment, how did you come together with
HPE and test what they are doing?
Variety is the spice of IT
Mullican: We’ve invested in composable
infrastructure and hyperconverged infrastructure
(HCI) in our datacenter, as well as blade server
technology. We have a wide variety of compute,
networking, and storage resources available to us.
The key is: How do we rapidly provision those
resources in an automated fashion? I think the key there is not only for IT to be aware of
those resources, but for developers to be as well.
We have groups of developers dealing with bioinformatics at HudsonAlpha. They can
benefit from all of the different types of infrastructure in our datacenter. What HPE
OneSphere does is enable them to access --through a common API -- that infrastructure.
So it’s very exciting.
Gardner: What did HPE OneSphere bring to the table for you in order to be able to
rationalize, visualize, and even prioritize this very large mixture of hybrid IT assets?
Mullican: We have been beta testing HPE OneSphere since October 2017, and we
have tied it into our VMware ESX Server environment, as well as our Amazon Web
Services (AWS) environment successfully -- and that’s at an IT level. So our next step is
to give that to researchers as a single pane of glass where they can go and provision the
resources themselves.
Gardner: What this might capability bring to you and your organization?
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We’ve invested in composable
infrastructure and HCI in our
datacenter, as well as blade
server technology.

5. Cross-training the clouds
Mullican: We want to do more with cross-cloud. Right now we are very adept at
provisioning within our datacenters, provisioning within each individual cloud.
HudsonAlpha has a presence in all the major public clouds -- AWS, Google, Microsoft
Azure. But the next step would be to go cross-cloud, to provision applications across
them all.
For example, you might have an application that runs as a series of microservices. So
you can have one microservice take advantage of your on-premises datacenter, such as
for local storage. And then another piece could take advantage of object storage in the
cloud. And even another piece could be in another separate public cloud.
But the key here is that our developer and researchers -- the end users of OneSphere –
they don’t need to know all of the specifics of provisioning in each of those
environments. That is not a level of expertise in their wheelhouse. In this new
OneSphere way, all they know is that they are provisioning the application in the pipeline
-- and that’s what the researchers will use. Then it’s up to us in IT to come along and
keep an eye on what they are doing through the analytics that HPE OneSphere
provides.
Simplified
Hybrid
Cloud management
Gardner: Because OneSphere gives you the visibility to see what the end users are
doing, potentially, for cost optimization and remaining competitive, you may be able to
play one cloud off another. You may even be able to automate and orchestrate that.
Mullican: Right, and that will be an ongoing
effort to always optimize cost -- but not at the risk
of slowing the research. We want the research to
happen, and to innovate as quickly as possible.
We don’t want to be the holdup for that. But we
definitely do need to loop back around and keep
an eye on how the different clouds are being
used and make decisions going forward based
on the analytics.
Gardner: There may be other organizations that are going to be more cost-focused, and
they will probably want to dial back to get the best deals. It’s nice that we have the
flexibility to choose an algorithmic approach to business, if you will.
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That will be an ongoing effort to
always optimize cost – but not
at the risk of slowing the
research. We want the research
to happen, and to innovate as
quickly as possible.

6. Mullican: Right. The research that we do at HudsonAlpha saves lives and the utmost
importance is to be able to conduct that research at the fastest speed.
Gardner: HPE OneSphere seems geared toward being cloud-agnostic. They are
beginning on AWS, yet they are going to be adding more clouds. And they are
supporting more internal private cloud infrastructures, and using an API-driven approach
to microservices and containers.
As an early tester, and someone who has been a long-time user of HPE infrastructure, is
there anything about the combination of HPE Synergy, HPE SimpliVity HCI, and HPE
3PAR intelligent storage -- in conjunction with OneSphere -- that’s given you a ‘whole
greater than the sum of the parts’ effect?
Mullican: HPE Synergy and composable infrastructure is something that is very near
and dear to me. I have a lot of hours invested with HPE Synergy Image Streamer and
customizing open-source applications on Image Streamer – open-source operating
systems and applications.
The ability to utilize that in the mix that I have architected natively with OneSphere -- in
addition to the public clouds -- is very powerful, and I am excited to see where that goes.
Gardner: Any words of wisdom to others who may be have not yet gone down this
road? What do you advise others to consider as they are seeking to better compose,
automate, and optimize their infrastructure?
Get adept at DevOps
Mullican: It needs to start with IT. IT needs to take on more of a DevOps approach.
As far as putting an emphasis on automation -- and
being able to provision infrastructure in the
datacenter and the cloud through automated APIs -- a
lot of companies probably are still slow to adopt that.
They are still provisioning in older methods, and I
think it’s important that they do that. But then, once
your IT department is adept with DevOps, your
developers can begin feeding from that and using
what IT has laid down as a foundation. So it needs to start with IT.
It involves a skill set change for some of the traditional system administrators and
network administrators. But now, with software-defined networking (SDN) and with
automated deployments and provisioning of resources -- that’s a skill set that IT really
needs to step up and master. That’s because they are going to need to set the example
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Once your IT department is
adept with DevOps, your
developers can begin feeding
from that and using what IT has
laid down as a foundation.

7. for the developers who are going to come along and be able to then use those same
tools.
That’s the partnership that companies really need to foster -- and it’s between IT and
developers. And something like HPE OneSphere is a good fit for that, because it
provides a unified API.
On one hand, your IT department can be busy mastering how to communicate with their
infrastructure through that tool. And at the same time, they can be refactoring
applications as microservices, and that’s up to the developer teams. So both can be
working on all of this at the same time.
Then when it all comes together with a service catalog of options, in the end it’s just a
simple interface. That’s what we want, to provide a simple interface for the researchers.
They don’t have to think about all the work that went into the infrastructure, they are just
choosing the proper workflow and pipeline for future projects.
Simplified
Hybrid
Cloud management
Gardner: It also sounds, Katreena, like you are able to elevate IT to a solutions-level
abstraction, and that OneSphere is an accelerant to elevating IT. At the same time,
OneSphere is an accelerant to the adoption of DevOps, which means it’s also elevating
the developers. So are we really finally bringing people to that higher plane of business-
focus and digital transformation?
HCI advances across the globe
Mullican: Yes. HPE OneSphere is an advantage to both of those departments, which
in some companies can be still quite disparate. Now at HudsonAlpha, we are DevOps in
IT. It’s not a distinguished department, but in some companies that’s not the case.
And I think we have a lot of advantages because we think in terms of automation, and
we think in terms of APIs from the infrastructure standpoint. And the tools that we have
invested in, the types of composable and hyperconverged infrastructure, are helping
accomplish that.
Gardner: I speak with a number of organizations that are global, and they have some
data sovereignty concerns. I’d like to explore, before we close out, how OneSphere also
might be powerful in helping to decide where data sets reside in different clouds, private
and public, for various regulatory reasons.
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8. Is there something about having that visibility into hybrid IT that extends into hybrid data
environments?
Mullican: Data locality is one of our driving factors in IT, and we do have on-premises
storage as well as cloud storage. There is a time and a place for both of those, and they
do not always mix, but we have requirements for our data to be available worldwide for
collaboration.
So, the services that HPE OneSphere makes available are designed to use the
appropriate data connections, whether that would be back to your object storage on-
premises, or AWS Simple Storage Service (S3), for example, in the cloud.
Gardner: Now we can think of HPE OneSphere as also elevating data scientists -- and
even the people in charge of governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) around adhering
to regulations. It seems like it’s a gift that keeps giving.
Hybrid hard work pays off
Mullican: It is a good fit for hybrid IT and what we do at HudsonAlpha. It’s a natural
addition to all of the preparation work that we have done in IT around automated
provisioning with HPE Synergy and Image Streamer.
HPE OneSphere is a way to showcase to the end user all of the efforts that have been,
and are being, done by IT. That’s why it’s a satisfying tool to implement, because, in the
end, you want what you have worked on so hard to be available to the researchers and
be put to use easily and quickly.
Gardner: It was a long time coming, right?
Mullican: Yes, yeah. I think so.
Gardner: I’m afraid we will have to leave it there. We have been exploring how nonprofit
research institute HudsonAlpha is better managing its multiple cloud and hybrid IT
deployment environments. And we have learned how HPE OneSphere is delivering
consolidated and deep insights across multiple clouds and IT deployments at
HudsonAlpha, an early beta tester and user.
So please join me in thanking our guest, Katreena Mullican, Senior Architect and Cloud
Whisperer at HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology.
Mullican: Thank you very much.
Gardner: And a big thank you to our audience as well for joining us for this
BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer digital transformation success story. I’m Dana
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9. Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of
Hewlett Packard Enterprise-sponsored interviews.
Thanks again for listening. Please pass this content along to your IT community and do
come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the
transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Transcript of a discussion on how HudsonAlpha is testing a new Hewlett Packard
Enterprise solution, OneSphere, to gain a simple and more common interface to manage
hybrid computing. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2018. All rights reserved.
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