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It’s the buzzword of the moment. It’s growing so fast in popularity according to Gartner that a quarter of Global 2000 organisations will deploy it by the end of this year. So what exactly is DevOps?

At the heart of DevOps are four crucial elements: speed, quality, control and cost. Speed is fundamental to competitive execution and market positioning. Quality is vital to successful implementation and long-term viability. Control, the command of data use, security, access and process is crucial to safe operations. And cost as we all know is a key element of nearly all business decisions.

As Tony Bradley, editor in chief of TechSpective, explains, “DevOps really is more about the culture than the tools and technology. A group of traditional developers and IT engineers who understand and embrace DevOps culture can be successful, whereas a team of DevOps experts experienced with Chef, Puppet, Docker, and other DevOps tools that doesn’t accept and adapt to the cooperative, collaborative nature of DevOps culture is more or less doomed to failure.”

While it is a common assumption that implementing DevOps is a primarily technical process, we see here that the cultural aspects and adjustments are equally as important. Every DevOps team need to possess certain traits in order to successfully tackle this cultural shift.

Communication is key

Up until fairly recently, IT professionals had strictly defined roles and responsibilities that allowed them to work more independently than collaboratively. As a result, communication skills weren’t a priority for when putting together an IT team.

However, as rapid deployment and newer, streamlined processes have emerged, communication has become key to making smooth transitions from one phase of the project to the next. Enforcing good communication can lead to better results in a shorter amount of time and ultimately help organisations save money.

There’s no ‘i’ in team

Flexibility is key in effectively implementing a DevOps methodology in an organisation. For those jumping on the DevOps bandwagon, the phrase “it’s not my job” shouldn’t be spoken. While it’s common for organisations to experience a clash between development and operations teams when first implementing a DevOps strategy, successful interdepartmental integration requires collaboration in order for the team to reach their end goal–satisfying the needs of the business.

Think of implementing DevOps as working with a team of teams. While each team brings different skills to the table, it is important for all teams to provide support to deliver the most powerful results as effectively and quickly possible.

Welcoming change

We’ve all heard the saying that the only constant in life is change, whether it involves something as small as adjusting our daily commute or as big as a new career. And like everything else, the implementation of DevOps brings about a large cultural shift for an organisation.

Gartner analyst George Spafford recommends implementing a cultural change programme to make team members aware of the end goals. To begin, he encourages developing a small pilot plan to test the waters initially by deploying tests and taking careful note of what works and what doesn’t. It’s important to know your team what works best to motivate the group to keep them positive and interested. Laying out such a road map and embracing the cultural change will result in a more focused team that will optimise the outcome.

Don’t be afraid of failure

If you’ve been doing your DevOps research, you’ll know that there are just about as many articles on DevOps failures as there are successes. To be on a DevOps team you need to accept that failures can happen, but you can’t fear it.

According to a Gartner study, 75% of enterprise IT departments will have tried to create a bimodal capacity by 2018. However, less than 50% of them will reap the benefits that new methodologies like DevOps promise. Willing to fail and being patient is crucial for a team to get the most out of their DevOps efforts.

Sustain the enthusiasm

DevOps is here and it’s the next big thing. You’re probably getting tired of hearing that by now. A successful DevOps team needs people that want to make a difference with the excitement to drive a significant business transformation. This involves the willingness to listen to customer feedback and adjust accordingly. Since consumers are the main driver on continual software updates and releases, it is crucial to be interested in what they have to say and be more than willing to be accommodating. There will be many highs and lows, and despite processes breaking and things not going according to plan, people involved in DevOps need to maintain continuous enthusiasm for the journey ahead of them.

With these five traits, your team will be able to successfully implement a DevOps strategy and navigate the minefield of cultural change that comes along with it.

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The volume of data within companies is growing day by day due to new data – most of which comes from the uncontrolled proliferation of data copies. This avalanche of data is a great challenge for businesses having to manage it efficiently and securely. So, where does this copy data come from?

Copy data is redundantly generated copies of production data for purposes such as backup, disaster recovery, test and development, analytics, snapshots or migrations. According to IDC, companies might face up to 120 copies of certain production data in circulation.

In addition, IDC estimated in a 2013 study that companies spend up to $44 billion worldwide managing redundant copies of of data. According to IDC, 85% of the storage hardware investments, and 65% in storage software, are owed to data copies. Their management in the company is now taking more resources than the actual production data. Therefore, IT departments are faced with the question of how to control data growth caused by redundant copies through cost-effective data management. This applies both to companies that hold data in their own house and data centre operators.

Ban the data flood with copy data virtualisation

The virtualisation of data copies has proven to be an effective measure to take data management to the next level. By further integration of global data de-duplication and optimisation of the network utilisation, very efficient data handling is possible. Since less bandwidth and storage is required, very short recovery times can be achieved.

A possible principle is the use of a so-called «Virtual Data Pipeline». It is a distributed object file system in which the fundamentals of data management – copying, storing, moving and restoring – are virtualised. In this way, virtual copies can be time-specific data from the collection of unique data blocks at any time. If the data must be restored, the underlying virtual object file is then extracted and analysed on a user-defined recovery point in any application format. Since the recovered data can be mounted directly on a server; no data movement is required at all, which contributes to extremely fast recovery times. The recovered data is immediately available.

More efficiency in data handling

The Virtual Data Pipeline technology is used to collect, manage and provide data as efficiently and effectively as possible. After creating and storing a single complete snapshot, only changed blocks of the application data are captured using Change Block Tracking with an incremental-forever principle. Data is collected at the block level, as this is the most efficient way to track and transfer changes. Since data will always be used in its native format, it is beneficial to store it in its native format. This way there is no need to create or restore data from backup files. The data can be both managed and accessed more efficiently.

Another angle of Copy Data Virtualisation is the possibility to capture data on the basis of SLAs that are set by the administrator. These include the frequency of the snapshots, the type of memory in which to store the data, the location and the retention policy. Also, replication to a remote location or a cloud service provider can be defined. Once an SLA is created, this can be connected with any application or virtual machine to capture the data accordingly.

The prerequisite for the generation of virtual copies is the creation of a single physical «golden» image or a «master copy» of the production data. From this an indefinite number of virtual copies can be made available instantly for all day-to-day use cases such as backup, test and development, and analytics, without affecting the production environment. The «golden copy» can also be mirrored to an outsourced location for disaster recovery.

Data virtualisation on the rise

An increasing level of virtualisation in the data centre is clearly noticeable. Data virtualisation represents the next consequent step after server, compute and network virtualisation. Virtualised infrastructures are easier to manage, more energy and cost-effective, because the model is demand-oriented compared to traditional environments. It matches today’s reality where an increasing amount of challenges in the data centre need to be managed with fewer resources.

The proven efficiency gains from server, client and network virtualisation can now be extended to data protection and management. This comes with less bandwidth requirements and instant restore possibilities. With a recent expansion for VMware and Oracle integration, Actifio leads this data virtualisation trend. The platform accelerates data management, reduces the complexity in data centres and distributed environments as well as enables access to the cloud.

By combining virtualisation with smart data management, companies can benefit from greater efficiency, flexibility and performance – and save money.