Are Homogeneous Environments Better?

Not so many decades ago if you wanted software for your IBM computing environment you commissioned a software house to write it for you, you owned it and altered it to suit changes in the marketplace. Nowadays we buy off-the-shelf products and make them fit our needs. There's a whole marketplace of software vendors and when we need to achieve a particular business function we have many products to choose from.

So how should we make our choice? Do we go with the cheapest, the one with the best support contract, or the one that offers us the most functions?
As with any business procurement we should choose the one that, after everything is taken into consideration, offers the biggest return on our investment over a measured period. This could be through additional generated business or reducing operating costs.

Typically it means that we tend to grow our IT environments around multiple vendors which, at the time of purchase, may have offered the best product for us. In slightly less able organisations it's steered by whichever salesman does the best job as the internal team just don't have the skill-set to make the right choices.

There is a case to say that taking each business function in isolation it is correct to choose from the whole of the market an application which best meets its needs, but this will lead to a heterogeneous environment with multiple vendors. Applications which must be tied together which have not been designed to do so, much greater complexity in supporting the environment, less uniformity, a greater chance of a failure and when something does go wrong a "pass the blame" attitude from the vendors.

Taking all of our electronic business functions into consideration, not just the usual authentication, file storage and e-mail but also telephony. It hasn't been possible until recently to build a truly homogeneous environment based around one set of centralised management tools, for many organisations a holy grail. Over the past three years, Microsoft have gone strongly into innovation mode on many product lines. For the first time it seems they have a master plan of cohesiveness with development teams using a high degree of communication to ensure uniformity over the entire product range. For the first time these products are truly designed to work with each other using common management interfaces right across the data centre for our n-tier applications whether on-premise or private cloud. The turnaround started with Exchange 2010 and its leveraging of local storage as opposed to complete reliance on expensive shared storage and extends from there to System Center 2012, the new version of SQL Server following in Exchange 2010's footsteps and technology, Windows Server, Windows 8, the new App-V, Office 365 and not forgetting Lync Sever.
Many of the products in Microsoft new line require us to invest in yet others. Take Lync Server. We may have decided to move from an old PBX system for Enterprise Voice, so we invest in a Lync server infrastructure, we then need Microsoft SQL servers and although we were going to migrate away from it we now have a reason to retain Exchange and upgrade to the latest version. While we are doing that we should probably virtualise using Hyper-V and for management of the whole infrastructure, the one stop shop of System Center suite.

There are many benefits to this approach:

• A common management interface. All of these products share a common installation routine and web / MMC based tools. Of course we're supposed to be using PowerShell commands for them all and that's a standard across everything.
• Guaranteed interoperability. With all platforms and applications designed to work with each other there's less time spent on workarounds.
• Documentation on everything in one place. Microsoft Technet, if we need to know something we just go there.
• More timely training of support staff. Skills can migrate quicker across applications for the administrators and engineers as many products have shared concepts and terminology.
• One point of contact for troubleshooting; it's all Microsoft software, we have no one else to be directed to.
• Less complex environment leading to less downtime.
• A centralised management and deployment point. Using System Center we can deploy, manage, secure and update our entire infrastructure.

The above benefits feed into a lower total cost of ownership due to requiring fewer support personnel; each staff member can cover a bigger skill base and support multiple products. No more having "the Exchange guy" we now have "the UC guy" and he looks after all of our messaging and telephony. We also don't need to maintain system integrators or hire consultants by the hour to integrate disparate technologies and less downtime ensures less business hours lost through loss of service.

Despite obvious benefits of a homogeneous many organisations don't subscribe to this system and prefer to remain vendor neutral, whatever the case Microsoft will continue to roll out their master plan as we move forward through 2013. I suspect they have many more surprises for us over the next few years.