I have been blessed to work on SevOne NPM had two deployment options: physical and virtual appliances. Data Insight and solutions covering SD-WAN, SDN and Wifi didn’t exist. Physical appliances were shipped with SevOne software pre-installed, and virtual appliances could be deployed using Open Virtual Appliance (OVA) and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) file formats. Physical appliances were SevOne orange, racked, and stacked in the back of the data center where they resided without much scrutiny. Customers considered appliances standalone and safe.
Starting in 2017, we noticed an uptick in questions from customers on product security, data center footprint, support for new software-defined device types, and other questions about the orange box in the back rack. In response, we delivered larger appliances, enhanced security with the addition of data encryption at rest and in motion, and added a security hardening guide to the product documentation. It is important to note that when SevOne joined IBM in 2022, we enhanced our focus on security by adopting IBM Security and Privacy by Design (SPbD@IBM). SPbD is a set of best practices committing to embedding security and privacy into the design of our products.
SevOne also began its journey to modernize SevOne NPM by delivering the first release of Data Insight and solutions for SD-WAN, Wifi and SDN (Cisco ACI) devices. The approach we took for these new SevOne components was not appliances. At the time, it was more cost effective for customers to choose their preferred infrastructure. Although we did offer hardware for Data Insight, very few customers chose this deployment type.
In 2018, SevOne started receiving strong demand for additional modern and flexible deployment options so that customers can choose the best infrastructure at the right cost. Many new customers didn’t have data centers but knew an appliance experience was desired. Existing customers faced headwinds in the form of limited data center resources and cloud-first initiatives. Neither wanted to maintain hardware and software infrastructure. They wanted a reliable and scalable NPM solution at a low cost of ownership. “Turn it on, give it an IP address, and point it to a range of IP addresses” to begin discovery and data collection”. In 2019, we added deployments on both AWS and Azure while maintaining ease of use. It was clear the Orange Box could not hide in the back of the data center any longer.
As part of the acquisition of Turbonomic (including SevOne) by IBM in 2021, we analyzed deployment options used historically. We learned the following about how SevOne was being deployed.
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Historically (2005 to 2021), 40% of all appliances deployed were on physical hardware.
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But more recently, from 2017 to 2021, physical deployments dropped 70% down to 12% of all peers deployed in that 3-year timespan.
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The data was clear: the market preference was to deploy SevOne NPM on virtual infrastructure, not physical hardware.
We speculated some reasons for this change below:
1. Virtual infrastructure reached the mainstream
2. Virtual mandate from CIOs
3. Data center cost reduction initiatives
4. Lack of data center space
5. New cloud-first initiatives
6. Higher availability requirements
SevOne transitioned to IBM SevOne in June of 2022 and a decision was made to exit selling hardware (orange boxes). The approach we took was to work with our longtime partner to establish a friction less way for customers to procure hardware via a Value-Added Reseller (VAR). Based on our historical data, a win/win for our customers.
Change in preferred deployment options in 2023
Continuing our path to modernization, earlier this year, we added support for deploying IBM SevOne NPM on VMware Cloud Infrastructure. This new option meant any customer running VMware Cloud Infrastructure on any cloud can deploy SevOne NPM.
We recently looked at new peer deployments year-to-date for 2023. It confirmed that physical appliances were not the preferred deployment method. The market had transitioned to virtual appliances.
2024 SevOne NPM delivered as a container
IBM is researching and prototyping the deployment of IBM SevOne NPM using containers. The early returns look very promising. Stay tuned in the IBM TechXchange Community. We will share more as we get closer to making this a reality.
We continue to monitor industry trends, talk with our customers to understand their needs, and evaluate deployment options. We will continue to focus on ease of deployment, reliability, maintainability, and cost of ownership. Our approach to developing products our customers love is collaboration; if you have a different idea around deployment options or anything else, please let us know by submitting an IBM Idea at Ideas.IBM.com.