Brennan IT boosts cloud capacity, rolls out new core network

Managed services provider Brennan IT is significantly boosting the capacity of its infrastructure as a service cloud, according to chief operating officer Dayle Wilson.

“It’s about a 40 per cent increase in capacity,” the COO said.

The company is just finishing rolling out additional HP servers to provide the boost, Wilson said.

The expansion of the MSP’s cloud infrastructure was one of three key areas of investment for the company in 2017, the COO said.

Earlier this year Brennan kicked off a refresh of its core network, rolling out new Juniper switches, with the project expected to be completed in July 2018.

“We’re basically rebuilding the entire core network, which is a huge project, and migrating all the customers over to it,” Wilson said.

“We’ve refreshed all the hardware and upgraded all the capacity for all the links and the capacity of the routers themselves,” the COO said.

In total Brennan has spent around $5 million on the new network and its cloud expansion, he said.

The third major area of investment during the year has been “people”, adding some 50 new staff, the COO said. That has included the recent launch of a new team dedicated to automation, Wilson said.

The team has been focused on automating the execution of operational changes, he said. “If a  customer says to us they want to add a user or change access for a distribution list, or adding  a network or adding a new site — there’s  a whole bunch of operational activities they do on a day-to-day basis that are just perfect for automation, so we’re heavily investing in that space.”

Brennan has stood up a team of 21 people focused on the area, working in Agile-style two week sprints, and rolled out ServiceNow to act as an orchestration engine. “They’ve already kicked some goals – they’ve already got a couple of thousand automation activities already going per month,” Wilson said.

Hybrid IT

The key technology trend that Brennan is trying to focus on at the moment is the rise of hybrid IT, the COO said.

“Customers have got different requirements to put workloads in different locations,” Wilson said.

“Unless you’re one of these new companies that is less than two years old — then you might be a cloud native and have nothing on-prem — but if you’re a business that’s over 10 years old, there’s always going to be a mix of SaaS applications, IaaS applications, on-prem applications with legacy and other stuff that works just fine but only works on-prem.

“For us that hybrid IT message is really powerful and suits our proposition — which is we can manage anything anywhere. We’re doubling down on that from a marketing perspective and we’re doubling down on that from a capability perspective.”