>> You've been hearing a lot about Hybrid,
but what does that have to do with SQL Server?
Learn more in this episode of Data Exposed.
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>> Hi, I'm Anna Hoffman,
and welcome to this episode of Data Exposed, MBP edition.
Today I'm joined by Alan Hirt.
Thanks for joining us today, Allan.
>> Thanks for having me.
>> Before we get started, and we're
going to talk about Hybrid, which is very interesting.
It's something we haven't talked about before on the show,
but before we get started,
can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do?
>> Sure. I've been working with SQL Server actually since 1992.
I interned at Sybase up the street here in
Massachusetts where I was in college,
and that set me on my database journey.
I've basically seen every version of
SQL Server that's been made for Windows since.
Got into clustering in the late '90s,
and I've been doing consulting now for basically about 20 years,
speaking and training and doing all that stuff.
I have a long history with the product,
long history of seeing lots of different deployments
from physical on up to the Cloud and everything in between.
>> Awesome, great. Well, I
think we're going to be able to leverage
a lot of your experience here as we start to talk about Hybrid.
Now, I'm sure you've seen a lot of
deployments on-prem like you've mentioned,
but what are some reasons
that people might consider going to Hybrid,
or what are some challenges that lead people to Hybrid?
Can you just give us your perspective on that?
>> Well, Hybrid, I think, to a degree,
is where people feel comfortable, at least today.
People viewing this in the future
might have a different viewpoint.
I just want to clarify here.
A lot of customers who are traditional on-premises,
are very still skeptical of the Cloud-based deployments,
so doing something like a Hybrid deployment,
and in a few moments here,
I'm going to explain more what that is,
it's more of a comfort zone for them because it's
neither all Cloud and it's neither all on-premise,
it's somewhere in between.
Again, we'll talk more about that here in a few moments.
>> Awesome. Thanks Allan.
Well, I'd love to see a look at what you're seeing in deployments.
>> When I'm working with customers,
I've seen a pretty big shift over the years.
Let's take a little bit of a way back machine.
Twenty years ago, everybody was
doing full on-premises deployments.
Virtualization really didn't come in,
in full force till about 10 years ago,
in the volumes that we're seeing it now.
Now, most on-premises workloads are virtualized,
although we've still customers deploying physical systems.
But there's also been the public Cloud.
Now to me, the public Cloud is a bit like
virtualization in the sense that when it first came out,
nobody wanted to do it,
everybody was just like,
"The heck with this.
We're never going to the Cloud,
it's not secure, whatever."
Everybody had a reason to do it.
But over the years, that's evolved,
but the problem is, a lot of people see this as an all or nothing.
We're either in the Cloud or we're on-premises,
and the truth is,
there's something in between and that's exactly what Hybrid is.
Because it doesn't need to be an
all or nothing type of deployment that you're doing.
Coming up, we're going to talk a little bit about the uses for
SQL Server and what that looks like for Hybrid.
But there are some key things
that you need to understand with regards to Hybrid,
that if you don't grasp this,
it might be a little harder.
First of all, when you're thinking about Azure,
for example, everything is just
going to be an extension of your on-premises data center.
What does that mean? Simply put,
what that means is today if you're doing,
let's say disaster recovery,
it's in another data center.
It could be co-located or it could be owned by your company.
Well, think of Azure is another data center.
But in Azure, they have
their own data centers and they have regions and all that stuff.
But what that also means is that,
all your core infrastructure,
meaning active directory, how you're dealing with DNS,
all that stuff has to work with the Cloud.
Now, if you're using Microsoft DNS for example,
that means all that stuff needs to be there too.
If you're using something else,
you can't just have those core bits of infrastructure on-premises.
Now it doesn't matter if
your on-premises services and servers are physical, virtual,
whatever, because when you're connecting it to the Cloud,
because it's just an extension of your data center, nothing cares.
It'd be like you are connecting on-premises to anything.
Now, the two key things that I want to
zoom in on here because Hybrid
to a large degree is based on what
we call Infrastructure as a Service, or IaaS.
Simply put, all that is virtual machines up in Azure.
It's just like if you're doing virtualization on-premises,
just a bit of a different interface,
some different knobs that you may touch.
Whereas, there is also Platform as a Service, or PaaS.
Now, that would be things like Azure SQL database,
Azure SQL Managed Instance,
those generally are not hybrid,
because those are their own things and hooking up,
let's say your traditional SQL Server Instance to PaaS,
doesn't always work or isn't always supported.
All the hybrid scenarios I'm going to talk to
you about coming up here,
are all IaaS based up in the Cloud.
Finally, people are calling this now,
the terms are shifting.
A lot of people are calling,
if I want to go from Azure to another public Cloud provider,
and an example here would be AWS.
Hybrid means Cloud but
people are morphing that and they're starting
to call that multi-Cloud.
But it's still a hybrid, because what you're doing,
is you're taking two things that
aren't necessarily meant to talk to each other,
and making them work together.
Now, the biggest thing that you need to worry about,
and I've seen this with a lot of my customers,
is that your security obviously has to be paramount,
but you also have to get from
point A to point B, and that's networking.
But how you do that is going to depend on your company.
This picture is from the Azure documentation and it
represents site-to-site virtual private network or VPN.
Basically, you're using, say the public Internet
to have a secure point-to-point conversation between,
say your on-premises data centers and Azure.
This is standard stuff.
Chances are your infrastructure folks
do this all the time already.
They may even use hardware for things like this.
The thing that you have to worry about here is what, for example,
would be your Internet speed and how much of that would be gated,
and that would factor into your hybrid scenarios for SQL Server.
Obviously, performance matters.
We also have a direct pipe up
to Azure and that's called Express Route.
It's a premium option that's not free unfortunately,
and you have to work with Microsoft and potentially
your telco provider or somebody,
some partner to get that in place and obviously,
the faster you want your networking up to Azure directly,
it's going to be more or less
expensive depending on what tier you want.
But I will tell you most of my customers
ultimately wound up going this
way because this becomes critical infrastructure for them.
There's no direct connect right now from Cloud to Cloud,
there are other options to connect the Clouds,
but right now there's nothing
direct in the way like Express Route.
>> Thanks for explaining this.
I think you've almost
demystified in a lot of ways what
moving to the Cloud actually means,
and what hybrid means for real-world customers.
I really appreciate that.
I'm curious though, what about
actual SQL Server solutions
that people can start to leverage today?
>> That's a great question, Anna,
and that leads directly into my next slide because that's
where I'm seeing a lot of customers deploy things.
So let's actually talk about
these hybrid scenarios for SQL Server.
The number one thing I see and
the number one scenario
that I implement with customers is disaster recovery.
If you think about this for a second,
it makes a whole lot of sense.
Many customers can afford to have
their own data-center somewhere else and
sometimes maybe it's even if they have DR in another data-center,
it's in the same region,
so you're less than 50 or a 100 miles away.
While you could for example,
setup a disaster recovery scenario where you have some on-premises
services for local high availability and your DR strategies
to flip up to Azure,
let say here, and you extend your data-center,
you can pick another region that's not even close
to within your geographical region,
and it makes a whole lot of sense, right?
Ultimately, it's probably cheaper
than running your own data-center too.
But obviously, your mileage will vary depending on
your scenarios but this is probably
the number one thing I see with a lot of customers.
Another one I don't see very much of but it's possible,
it was introduced, I believe a version or two ago in SQL Server,
is you can actually use Azure storage for
your on-premises SQL Server deployments
to store their user data files,
not the system databases,
but the Azure data files.
So the interesting thing there is for example,
if you had storage failures,
Azure has reliability guarantees.
Now, obviously what I talked about earlier,
that's all going to go across
the network that needs to be secure so you need
something to handle that and your performance needs to be great.
Otherwise, if you have a very high performing system,
that's not going to work.
There are some other caveats and if you look at the links below,
there will be a link to the docs about this,
so you can read up more on it.
Another one that I will consider to degree is probably one of
the more important ones is you
can put SQL Server backups up in Azure.
Now, that could be you're doing backups
directly to Azure through backup to URL,
or if you have an Azure file share setup
and treat it just like an SMB,
or Server Message Block share.
Now, the thing there to keep in mind
is that if you're doing all your backups
on-premises and you're not copying
them somewhere else and they're staying in the same data-center,
and something happens to your data-center,
you might have no backups, right?
Even just the act of if you're not using
the native SQL Server stuff to backup to Azure,
just copying them up to Azure and using it is archival storage.
One of the best benefits that nobody
really talks about here actually is,
because we can have VMs in the Cloud and a lot of
people don't cast their backups
on-premises because they don't have a lot of resources,
you can spin up a VM,
test your most important backups periodically and that's
a great hybrid scenario and it gives you a lot of peace of mind.
Finally, the last real scenario that we have today,
and it was just announced
recently when we were
recording this but by the time you're seeing this,
this will be hopefully
more available is Azure Arc enabled SQL Server.
Now, what does that mean?
Azure Arc is a new concept which
uses Kubernetes and you can have multi-Cloud scenarios,
it's a really good thing when they
lit up stuff for SQL Server which is this newer capability.
For example, you can now take the inventory of
your on-premises instances and servers and have them up in Azure.
You can have Azure based services
look at your security as it relates to SQL Server.
So this might be part of
an extended data-center or software defined thing that
your company is trying to do where you're centralizing
security in inventory and all
that and Azure Arc enables all of that.
>> Thanks, Alan. Again, I just really like the way that you've
laid this out and you've given us this story but more importantly,
you've shown us and viewers what people are actually doing,
what you're actually seeing customers do.
So I really appreciate
that perspective that you brought here today.
If I could ask you one last question,
as you look at your customers,
what would be the number one piece of advice that you
might give to people today when they start to think about hybrid?
>> I would say, honestly look at how
you're going to get to Azure and what that means.
Because I have a lot of folks,
especially on the networking side that don't think
that adding an extra hopper there,
or they think that ping is a measurement
of network performance and the reality is,
is that it's not always.
So dealing with networking is probably the number one thing that I
would start looking at today because it'll be
the thing that costs you probably the most.
Then probably another quick piece of advice
is make sure when you're doing stuff in Azure,
you size things appropriately.
We have another upcoming video that'll
be a part 2 that will be talking more about
disaster recovery but sizing VMs is going to be
very crucial to that scenario
and we'll talk about that more in that video.
>> Awesome. Thanks, Alan,
again for joining us today and to our viewers,
thanks for tuning in.
We are doing a part 2,
so be sure to tune into that next week
and if you liked this video please like our video,
and leave us a comment,
and let us know what you're doing as far as hybrid goes.
See you next time on Data Exposed.
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