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PaaS Next Cloud Battleground

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Frost & Sullivan, an IT analysis and consulting firm, predicts that the platform as a service market will be the next area of keen competition for cloud innovators, as the infrastructure- and software-as-a-service spaces have been commoditized.

The platform-as-a-service space will be the next battleground for cloud service providers, as the infrastructure-as-a-service and software-as-a-service markets face commoditization, according to a study by Frost & Sullivan.

Frost & Sullivan’s new “Asia-Pacific Platform as a Service Market 2011” report shows that in that region the PaaS market is attracting considerable interest from businesses due to the flexibility it brings to application development and SaaS.

As most software available from the cloud is standardized, enterprises are looking to leverage PaaS offerings as it will be the only stack where a service provider can create differentiation.

Frost & Sullivan said the Asia-Pacific PaaS market had revenues of $43.2 million in 2010 and will reach $523 million in 2016. Frost & Sullivan provides consulting and services to companies poised for growth.

“The growing developer community, with an increasing number of small/part-time developers, is also creating a strong opportunity for the market,” said Frost & Sullivan industry analyst Mayank Kapoor, in a statement. “PaaS provides them access to a scalable IT infrastructure and the tools required to develop and test their applications, on a pay-as-you-go basis.”

The high level of flexibility and the ability to reduce costs while developing, testing and deploying new applications is creating a strong case for greater adoption of PaaS, the Frost & Sullivan report said.

Although enterprises have begun to recognize the benefits and need for cloud computing, PaaS is still only a fledgling concept. Its lack of regulation and standardization has restrained adoption among enterprises in the highly regulated sectors, Frost and Sullivan said.

Moreover, the differences in the choice of platforms, such as Java, Ruby, or others – represented by CloudBees, Heroku and a growing list of players — are hindering porting applications and data between PaaS vendors and to on-premise, the report said.

Therefore, openness and integration with other platforms and mobile devices will be important in the future. Constant technical innovations will ensure that the PaaS market evolves and sheds its embryonic tag, Frost & Sullivan said in a press release on the report.

Meanwhile, Frost & Sullivan predicts that the PaaS market will continue to attract new players as it matures. The influx of competitors can also be attributed to enterprises’ demand for local data center presence of cloud service providers, the company said. For instance, today, an increasing number of companies are demanding that IT teams serve as internal service providers.

“There is increasing pressure amongst both internal IT teams and third-party service providers to streamline operations through automation and intelligent management,” said Kapoor. “Cloud can be one of the frontline options to meet this demand and eventually, will bode well for PaaS.”

Author: Darryl K. Taft
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Virtualization & Management

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The future belongs to a virtualized IT world, which functions on the basis of business processes. In fact, fifty-nine percent of European CIOs surveyed by IDG Research Services for a recent ‘CIO2CIO Perspectives’ report on Optimizing Virtualization Investments indicated that their companies are actively investing in virtualization initiatives.

Additionally, they confirmed that virtualization technology is increasingly showing its influence in business-critical services. More than half those users plan to virtualize business-critical services as part of the coming year’s agenda.

However, few companies are currently able to reap the maximum benefit from their investment in virtualization. According to the analysis, only one in four companies has the necessary method in place to perform an ROI assessment. To make matters worse, the majority of them struggle to understand the current performance of their virtualized environment from a business perspective. The CIOs are painfully aware of these shortcomings, and to them the solution is clear: Seventy-three percent of European IT managers surveyed are convinced that their organization must be capable of centralizing the management of heterogeneous virtualized and physical environments.

The following ten tips highlight the main concerns in the management of virtualized infrastructures:

1. Go the ‘whole hog’

Today, IT is a key catalyst to growing your business. Therefore, an IT manager should work towards establishing a management environment that can centralize the management of not only traditional physical resources but also cutting-edge virtual technology with equal efficiency. Otherwise, the company will risk establishing a separate administration with no connection to proven management processes for data centre operations. When operating in such isolation, that second world will necessitate additional expertise as well as manual correlation between the two management systems.

2. Know what’s running

A well-known saying among administrators is, “If it can’t be measured, it can’t be managed.” Without having information on the location of a virtual machine, as well as its performance and availability, efforts to ensure optimal, secure business operations can become a game of chance. The consequences of that game could be severe in terms of compliance, regulations and licensing costs.

3. Control virtual server sprawl

The irony, though slight, is undeniable: Virtualization solutions are considered a means to limit physical server proliferation, even though consolidation efforts can result in a proliferation of virtual machines and images. Consequently, due to the ease with which virtual images and machines are generated, this proliferation is encouraged. To keep up with the proliferation of servers you need a management system that encompasses high-performance discovery that discovers and depicts virtual systems as well as physical systems. These capabilities, coupled with automation, enable IT managers to keep everything in check.

4. Pay attention to differences

The opportunity to optimize hardware loads is one of the most significant drivers in the move towards virtualization, but one should never allow it to interfere with applications at the service level. Instead, selecting the optimal host server for individual virtual machines is a key task in system administration. For example, a memory-intensive load is scarcely affected by an additional Virtual Machine (VM), which requires a great deal of computing power but relatively little disk-drive capacity. A centralized analysis of all resources for performance and load will determine the optimal allocation.

5. Measure and evaluate

A key aspect of the process is the need to monitor the overall performance of virtual and physical environments. This may include monitoring an individual VM, a given virtual container (ESX, P5, etc.), the relative performance of a given VM compared with other VMs, or the relative performance of a group of VMs (constituting an IT or a business service). This level of performance analysis allows the administrator to effectively manage the demands on resources and maintain the desired service levels. For example, it could be that several applications experience peak load at the same time or completely tie up the physical network adapter for the host computer. To recognize and prevent such a dangerous situation, the management environment needs to evaluate and correlate the performance metrics for both the virtual and physical computers in real-time and using historical trending.

6. Actively manage relationships

Complexity affects the interaction between physical and virtual resources at every level, particularly in larger infrastructures. Introducing a configuration management database (CMDB) helps administrators maintain the necessary overview. It stores detailed data on all the resources within an IT environment, using that data to track, analyze and maintain the configuration and its corresponding relationships.

7. Wanting only what’s best for the business

The advantages of virtualization technology are not a subject of dispute nowadays, but virtualization is not ideal for every situation. Virtual machines should be utilized wherever possible unless for specific reasons of application performance or availability separate physical servers are required. For example, mission-critical applications like Oracle, SAP or Web applications require dedicated physical servers.

8. Allow some interplay

Generally, operating systems, applications and services perform better when they are run directly on the server, thereby countering any loss of performance caused by the virtualization level. At the same time the available system performance becomes more predictable when resources are subjected to a smaller load. One can readily see the logic in switching the load between the virtual and physical environments for business-critical IT services or during certain periods when peak load occurs. Consequently, the provisioning function should not be limited exclusively to a VM image.

9. Simplify and standardize

Virtualization introduces consolidation on the one hand, while increasing management complexity on the other. IT managers commonly counter the heterogeneity and complexity of IT infrastructures by implementing best practices and standardization. However, a company’s established processes and methods for operating the physical systems must encompass the virtual resources as well, or it must formulate additional processes and methods to incorporate the virtual world.

10. Keep your eyes on the finish line

Ultimately the objective of IT administration is to dynamically allocate available resources so they automatically adapt to changing business conditions. Virtualization is among the most critical technologies available to meet that objective. Nevertheless, only when we integrate them into comprehensive solutions, such as data centre automation and IT infrastructure management, can the potential of virtualization emerge in a broader context and produce the most beneficial result.

Author: Maria Medvedeva
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Cloud Computing—The Next Automation Wave

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3M, the St. Paul, Minn.-based diversified manufacturer, built a visual application for design. Initially, it was used for the staff of 7,000 in 3M’s research and development group. Recently, the company started to offer it as a cloud service for customers—that is, a service running on remote servers accessed via the Internet. There were two factors driving the development of the cloud design application—cost and innovation. “The way it’s set up, images are stored on Microsoft Azure servers. The design analysis is also on the Microsoft servers,” says William Smith, business manager of 3M Commercial Graphics, in St. Paul. “We also have a public Web site on a 3M server.”

One of the major advantages of living in Microsoft’s cloud is scale. “The other thing Azure can do that would be difficult for us is expand,” says Smith. “As the data grows, it expands at Microsoft.”

Cloud computing has come into its own over the past couple of years. A recent TV advertising campaign by Microsoft Corp., the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant, has made the “cloud” a household word. Security concerns about letting plant data reside on someone else’s server are evaporating, as plant managers come to understand that the server in the plant may be the least secure of all. Moving automation costs from a capital expense to an operations expense also helps. The biggest driver is savings. Instead of licensing the software, you buy the software services as you use them—and they’re always fresh.

The last two years have seen a profound change in how cloud computing is viewed by consumers and enterprises alike. “If you asked me two years ago, I would have said there wasn’t all that great a chance cloud computing would catch on,” says Kaj van de Loo, senior vice president for technology strategy at enterprise software supplier SAP, in Newtown Square, Pa. “People wanted the system close to their physical plant and their machines. But people needed to share information and run certain applications, so the idea of keeping it in one plant ended.”

Getting comfortable

Much of the shift in the perception of cloud services started in the home. “People are becoming accustomed to cloud implementation in their personal lives,” says Rob McGreevy, vice president of platform and applications at automation supplier Invensys Operations Management, in Plano, Texas. “There has been a massive proliferation of smart phones. People are doing online banking and trading, keeping back-ups of home files in the cloud. They’re comfortable with that.”

One of the strongest arguments for the value of the cloud is that individual companies and plants can’t devote the expense, expertise and time to create a large, complex analytical system. The vendors share the cost across a wide swath of customers and sell it by the slice. “More data is becoming available from the automation system. Plants are doing aggregation from historical systems, doing analytics on the data,” says Frank Schuler, vice president, ASM manufacturing, at SAP. “They’re processing large volumes of data. In the cloud, you don’t have to add capacity and you don’t have to invest in large servers. You can let it be somebody else’s problem.”

The ability to plow through historical data for sophisticated analytics is beyond the computing muscle of most plants. “You need sophisticated analytics in place, and that takes a lot of horsepower. By doing some of the work in the cloud, we can run through algorithms and eliminate some of the work for customers,” says Rich Carpenter, chief technology officer and head of the Software Technology Group at GE Intelligent Platforms, an automation supplier based in Charlottesville, Va. “Sometimes, catastrophic events can be predicted and prevented two to four days before they otherwise would have occured.”

The use of cloud computing lets plants access knowledge that may be in short supply on the premises of most plants. “We don’t call it the cloud because it gets information technology (IT) people upset. We say it’s other server providers,” says Robin Thompson, founder and chief technology officer of Sensei Solutions, a company in Charlotte, N.C., that provides technology for electric utilities. “We get the data over the wire and it ends up going through our master process. More than just providing storage, it’s collaborative analytics.”

Plants are starting to take their collective knowhow and automate it. Many managers with deep knowledge have either retired or were let go during the recession. So companies are programming much of the production knowledge into software and putting in the hands of IT professionals in somebody else’s office. “They communicate with our system to find out what temp should be set for the recipe. Our system automatically sets up the machine without having to rely on individuals looking it up,” says Mark Symonds, chief executive officer of Plex Systems Inc., an Auburn Hills, Mich.-based cloud services provider. “These are fast, consistent set-ups that come from our database and send the correct data to the PLCs.”

Cost is a huge factor in driving plants to the cloud. For one, the cost of cloud computing lives on a different side of the balance sheet than in-plant installations. “Cloud computing provides people with an opportunity to move the purchasing from the capital-expense side of the budget to the operations-expense side,” says Craig Resnick, research director at ARC Advisory Group Inc., in Dedham, Mass. “You’re paying every month to have it managed offsite instead of installing the software in your plant.”

Cloud computing allows small and medium-size manufacturers to utilize sophisticated technology. “Smaller manufacturers don’t have IT people. They use consultants on an hourly basis. They like cloud computing because they don’t have to manage or maintain it and they pay on a monthly basis,” says Chad Meyer, director of product marketing at Epicor Software Corp., in Irvine Calif. “Everything is built into the system, BOMs (bills of materials), set-up routines, scheduling production, inventory and materials.”

Plant operators, managers and corporate executives want to see plant data on the run. They’ve gone mobile with smart phones and tablet computers, and they want to see what’s going on. The cloud makes data sharing easy.

The ability to share data off-site can let managers monitor the plant from afar. “Say, you’re a manager or supervisor and you’re not on site. If you have a smart phone with Java, you can look at all relevant data. You can see how many units have been produced,” says Kevin Rutherford, senior applications engineer at supplier Software Toolbox Inc., in Matthews, N.C. “If the line is running slow, you can do historical trending and look back to see if the line trends at slower run times before something fails. If so, you can alert maintenance to look at it.”

Private clouds

Not all clouds have to live at the vendor’s house. Some plants are creating their own in-house clouds. “There are two dimensions to cloud computing. We see private clouds and public clouds,” says Craig Hodges, general manager, U.S. Manufacturing & Resources, at Microsoft. “Companies are setting up their own clouds, and they’re using public clouds where they don’t have the software. We’re also seeing a variety of form factors, whether it’s the traditional laptop and desktop, or a tablet, limited-function PC (personal computer) or a smart phone.”

Two of the simplest arguments for cloud computing are the safety of the data and the ease of upgrading and adding additional applications. The security argument usually begins with a customer’s skepticism of hosting plant data on a remote server, and ends with the discovery that the plant server is surprisingly vulnerable. With the lack of redundancy at most plants, a disgruntled employee only needs to “accidentally” spill a cup of coffee on the server to bring the plant to a standstill.

Plant professionals are beginning to see that technology companies have sophisticated security procedures to ensure the integrity and safety of data. The plant simply can’t match the security level at IT centers. “Security issues are disappearing. Hotmail is a cloud that serves 450 million users. Xbox has 25 million users,” says Microsoft’s Hodges. “Thousands of customers, and even the U.S. government, are moving into the cloud.”

Cloud computing also takes the pain out of upgrades and adding new services. In many cases, new applications can be deployed by simply asking the vendor to switch the new application in. “Upgrades are easier in the cloud. Cost is driving it. Daimler has created a business productivity infrastructure. They move projects that drive growth and let someone else manage the upgrades,” says Hodges. “This isn’t outsourcing. But you can migrate to new versions and functionality more easily than you could in your own world.”

The view of cloud computing as a viable option for automation tools and applications flipped from skepticism to widespread acceptance in a couple of years. Much of the change may have come through personal behavior. People realized that their bank manages to track their dollars with far greater accuracy and security than any home-based system. So why not trust top-notch IT companies to manage plant data and applications? Cost was the final tipping factor that pushed plants into the cloud.

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The Bumpy Road to Private Clouds

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When we first heard about cloud computing, public clouds got most of the attention. But as IT managers looked at the security risks of having data outside the corporate firewall, they turned their attention to private clouds, which analysts and various surveys suggest will get more enterprise investment in the next few years.

But private clouds have their share of challenges too. There are management issues and operational processes to figure out. And, of course, an on-premises private cloud needs to be built internally by IT, which takes time, money and a climb up the learning curve. Indeed, the transition from a traditional data center — even one with some servers virtualized — to a private cloud architecture is no easy task, especially given that the entire data center won’t be cloud-enabled, at least not right away.

(While we generally think of a private cloud as being inside a company’s firewall, a private cloud can also be off-premises — hosted by a third party — and still remain under the control of the company’s IT organization. But this article is only about on-premises private clouds.)

Also, despite the hype you might hear, no single vendor today provides all of the software required to build and manage a real private cloud — that is, one with server virtualization, storage virtualization, network virtualization, and resource automation and orchestration. Look for vendors to increasingly create their own definitions of private cloud to fit their product sets.

Moreover, you’ll have to determine whether your staff has the experience and skills required to support a private-cloud environment, or whether you need to hire someone who has been involved in building private clouds.

Not a Traditional Data Center

Many IT managers equate a private cloud with virtualization. What they describe is usually virtual infrastructure, meaning that “you can treat your servers, storage and networks as a single pool of resources that workloads can request on demand,” explains Tony Iams, an analyst at Ideas International Ltd., an IT research firm.

But virtualization and the cloud aren’t the same thing; to be considered a cloud, the architecture must be set up to provide resource orchestration and automation on top of the virtualization layer.

Orchestration is the coordinated delivery of many types of resources, such as processors, storage and networks, to provide an integrated provisioning process. It means that resources can be delivered in minutes rather than days or weeks. A single command or request causes a number of actions to occur, possibly in a specific sequence, to coordinate the provisioning request.

The whole point of a private cloud is to allow IT managers to reduce costs and provide so-called agile provisioning rather than just making management of the infrastructure more convenient. A private cloud with virtualization underpinnings turns the technology infrastructure into a pool of resources that can be provisioned on demand with minimal manual labor.

Are You Ready? Probably Not

Forrester Research estimates that only 5% of corporate IT shops are really ready to offer private cloud service. A recent Forrester report by analyst James Staten says that your IT operation is “cloud-ready” if:

* You have standardized procedures for the deployment, configuration and management of virtual machines.

* You have turned over the deployment and management of virtual machines to automated tools.

* You provide self-service access for end users.

* Your business units are ready to share the same infrastructure.

Before moving toward private clouds, IT shops must become even more efficient at server virtualization. Most IT departments lack consistent procedures for tracking the deployment, usage and ownership of virtual machines; that leads to “virtual machine sprawl,” which will cancel out the economic savings of a private cloud, Forrester says.

IT shops also need to learn to manage the entire pool of virtualized servers rather than single virtual machines or workloads, the report adds.

Once your virtualization house is in order, Forrester suggests the following steps to get started with a private cloud:

* Begin with noncritical workloads to show that it works.

* If a business unit is willing to invest in cloud computing, set up a brand-new cloud environment just for them.

* Get executive support — actually, a mandate — so that business units will share the pool of virtual resources.

* Show the benefits, such as dramatically faster deployment and lower costs.

* Embrace public clouds that can supplement your internal cloud.

In a traditional data center setup, “every time you add a server, somebody has to walk to a firewall console, set up firewall rules, attach the server to a VLAN, set up load balancing” and do many other tasks, explains Jeff Deacon, cloud computing principal at Verizon Business, a unit of Verizon Communications Inc. that provides managed services. But a private cloud needs little human intervention other than bringing in new computers or storage to keep up with demand. In a cloud environment, there is one console that lets operators set parameters to automate the entire process, rather than requiring IT personnel to log into different consoles for security, networking and server operating system functions.

Another big difference between private clouds and traditional data centers involves IT processes, which probably need to be revamped for a private cloud. Today, for example, to provide computing resources, IT organizations typically have to get budget approvals, discuss the implications with storage, network and server groups, and fill out tons of paperwork. This type of process is in stark contrast to the streamlined, short-duration provisioning done in clouds. The time-to-provision may go from weeks in the traditional data center to minutes in a cloud.

The systems running older applications may need an overhaul too, if they’re based on mainframes and proprietary Unix platforms. Most virtualized environments, including private clouds, are geared to run on x86-based systems. Also, in a virtualized environment, you generally don’t know exactly where an application is running at any given time. Because most legacy applications are tied to a specific platform, running them in a private cloud will often require re-architecting them.

Divorcing applications from the hardware is a hallmark of clouds, including private clouds. In a traditional data center, you might have 10 servers running billing applications, and five other servers running customer data apps. But with a private cloud, it’s not known ahead of time which servers will run which specific applications. The applications run on whichever servers have free cycles at the time the apps need to run.

Private clouds involve two groups of people: the IT operations staff and the business users who want to run applications. A private cloud gives business users the opportunity to quickly provision a server and run an application when they want to, without human intervention.

The IT operations staffers have to make sure that sufficient resources are available for the type of on-demand computing that business users have heard is available with public clouds, and that usually means that the wait for user-requested resources is minutes, not days. Anything short of this, and end users won’t be happy.

By the Numbers

Private Clouds: Pros and Cons

What kind of cloud computing are you planning or implementing?

* No clouds under consideration at this time: 53%

* Private cloud only: 18%

* A combination of public and private clouds: 17%

* Public cloud only: 12%

Base: 155 IT managers

What do you see as the advantages of private clouds over public clouds?

* 1. Better security/control

* 2. Self-service provisioning

* 3. Little or no learning curve for end users

* 4. Better or more-efficient scaling

Base: 54 respondents planning or implementing private clouds; multiple responses allowed.

What do you see as the drawbacks of private clouds compared to public clouds?

* 1. Having to build it all internally: time, cost, learning curve for IT

* 2. Scalability

* 3. Having to handle virtualization, automation and orchestration

Base: 54 respondents planning or implementing private clouds; multiple responses allowed.

What’s the most challenging part of implementing a private cloud?

* 1. Software licensing/pricing issues

(tie) Finding tools to help us build our cloud

(tie) Ensuring economies of scale

* 4. Finding tools to help us manage our cloud

* 5. Making it all work together (interoperability)

(tie) Technology obsolescence

* 7. Lack of cloud standards

Base: 54 respondents planning or implementing private clouds; multiple responses allowed.

Source: Computerworld online survey, November 2010; Research assistance provided by Mari Keefe, editorial project manager.

This is what private clouds are all about: providing the on-demand elasticity of public clouds, but doing it within the company’s firewall.

By the way, business users may expect private clouds to act like public clouds. In a public cloud, the public cloud provider’s IT operations group is responsible for the computer infrastructure, and the customer’s business application groups manage and monitor their own applications on the public cloud. If the private cloud is expected to operate in a similar manner, then the IT group may need to give up its traditional application-management role.

Getting Started

The first step down the path to a private cloud is to go beyond server virtualization. Iams outlines these subsequent steps:

• Virtualize your storage and try to achieve the same flexibility with storage that you already have with virtualized servers.

• Coordinate server virtualization and storage virtualization using management tools such as Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Azure Storage or VMware’s vStorage.

• Virtualize your network infrastructure and, again, coordinate that with your management tools.

You know that your infrastructure has been fully virtualized when you have server virtualization, storage virtualization and network virtualization. The crossover point from a virtual infrastructure to private cloud comes when you have the management tools that treat all three types of resources — servers, storage and networks — as a single pool that can be allocated on demand.

Of course, all this is from a technology point of view. Iams says that there is a parallel set of steps from the organizational perspective, including people, processes, governance, policy and funding. One key question: What does a private cloud structure do to budgets and financial flow within an organization?

Public clouds require users to pay only for what they use. Because a private cloud doesn’t provide users with a fixed amount of capacity like they may have had with a traditional data center, chargeback is almost certain to be an integral part of private cloud environments. Chargeback is a way of rationing computing resources, which is especially important when obtaining resources is as easy as filling out a Web form.

Paul Cameron, head of enterprise services at Suncorp Group, a major financial services provider in Brisbane, Australia, says that when his company began planning its private cloud, it created a service-based operating model and a service catalog. The service catalog contains the list of services being automated for internal use and is available to business users via a self-service portal.

A key to building that catalog was storing information about Suncorp’s assets and business application relationships in a configuration management database (CMDB). All of Suncorp’s major IT processes — incident, problem, asset and change — use the CMDB.

Populating a service catalog can be time-consuming. But if you’re using IT service management and change management tools such as BMC Software Inc.’s Remedy product line or Service-now.com and have a CMDB in place, it can be easier. You can work through the appropriate services in the CMDB to provide the automated services listed in a service catalog. This is what Suncorp is doing with its BMC Remedy-based CMDB.

Cameron says that Suncorp deployed a private cloud to provide better and faster IT provisioning to business users. Suncorp users can go to a self-service portal and request resources and services. Once the requests are made, the fulfillment of these services is automated. Cameron says that about 80% of Suncorp’s data center services are now covered by automated self-service portals.

While private clouds are pitched as ideal for companies concerned about security and regulatory compliance, Cameron cautions that private clouds force implementers to rethink how they do security. For example, traditional firewalls won’t always provide satisfactory security in cloud environments where workloads can be moved around to less-secure portions of the network. So Suncorp is now virtualizing its firewalls.

Keeping Up With Demand

Jeffrey Driscoll, a systems engineer at consultancy Precision IT Group LLC, says the basic building blocks of a private cloud are servers, storage (such as a SAN) and virtualization software. “Then you start building a cluster,” he says, and after that cluster is complete, “capacity planning becomes critical.”

Capacity planning involves figuring out what happens when you add servers and other resources to the cluster as needed to keep up with business demand. Capacity planning is a major component of the cluster and the cloud’s performance. If it’s done wrong, you might end up with useless systems or have to shoehorn-in traditional, noncloud systems to keep things running.

Most organizations aren’t good at monitoring and keeping ahead of capacity. To be able to satisfy user demands, you always need to have some extra capacity on the data center floor, which results in a certain amount of hardware sitting around in idle mode. Keeping a history of capacity usage in your enterprise can help you be reasonably confident that you have sufficient — but not too much — capacity.

One solution is to create a hybrid cloud environment and move requests for capacity to public clouds, such as Amazon.com Inc.’s Elastic Compute Cloud, when capacity isn’t available in the private cloud.

Once the cluster is up and running, you can start provisioning virtual servers. The result is a tiered architecture with a server layer, a network layer and a virtualization layer. There is a management tool at each layer. “Now you can start thinking about automation,” Driscoll says.

Storm Clouds On the Horizon

Building your own private cloud involves some challenges, including the following:

* Budget. Private clouds can be expensive, so figure out the upper and lower bounds for your return on investment.

* Integration with public clouds. Build your private cloud so you can move to a hybrid model if you need public cloud services. This will involve making sure systems are secure and verifying that you can run your workloads in both places, among other things.

* Scale. Private clouds usually don’t have the economies of scale that large public-cloud providers provide.

* On-the-fly reconfigurations. You may have to tear down servers and other infrastructure — while it’s still in use — to move it into the private cloud. This could create huge problems.

* Legacy hardware. Leave your oldest servers behind. Don’t try to repurpose any servers that require manual configuration with a private cloud, because it would be impossible to apply automation and orchestration management to these older machines.

* Technology obsolescence. The complexity and speed of technology change will be hard for any IT organization to handle, especially smaller ones. Once you make an investment in a private cloud, you need to protect that investment by staying up to date with new releases of software components.

* Fear of change. Your IT team may not be familiar with private clouds, and there will be a learning curve. You may need to create some new operational processes and rework some old ones. Turn this stressful situation into a growth opportunity for your staff, reminding them that these are important new skills in today’s business environment.

You’ll need to acquire management tools that can bridge the physical infrastructure and the virtual infrastructure. So choose tools that let you see the same view across execution environments.

One layer of management is the infrastructure, which includes managing virtual machines, storage, backup/recovery and so on. While vendors often claim that their products are targeted at private cloud infrastructures, they sometimes use a very loose definition of “cloud,” so carefully investigate the functions of each product.

The second layer, service-level management, involves managing workloads at a level of abstraction above virtual servers. This is where automation is applied. It is also where traditional management tools such as IBM’s Tivoli and Hewlett-Packard Co.’s Insight work within the private-cloud stack. Vendors that claim to have automation management tools include IBM Tivoli, HP, CA, LineSider Technologies, DynamicOps, VMware and BMC.

Iams says that almost all system and hardware vendors are pursuing some type of virtualization or cloud management tools. Microsoft’s System Center management product, for example, offers visibility into hypervisors and virtual servers.

But Iams says you should plan on managing multiple hypervisors, such as VMware’s ESX, Microsoft’s Hyper-V, the open-source Xen, and various implementations of the Linux KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine). Microsoft can manage Hyper-V virtual servers and some aspects of ESX virtual servers. Other cloud vendors, such as VMware and Red Hat Inc., can also manage virtual machines created by multiple hypervisors. Ideally, you want to control multiple hypervisors from a single interface.

Buy or Build?

The downside of commercial, off-the-shelf tools is that they will likely need to be customized to work with your environment. On the other hand, the downside of rolling your own tools is that your in-house IT group will need to maintain them and make feature enhancements. One alternative to homegrown tools is building mixed-component cloud stacks by acquiring various third-party components and putting them together. The question then becomes: Who do you call when there’s a problem?

You could choose to go with a single provider, such as Microsoft or VMware, but that can result in vendor lock-in.

Open-source software — from the OpenStack project and from vendors such as Abiquo, Cloud.com, Eucalyptus Systems and Red Hat — is a good choice for building private clouds. The software is essentially free and provides more flexibility than proprietary software licensed on physical CPUs. For example, proprietary software can create difficult licensing issues when migrating virtual machines from host to host.

Each alternative has its pluses and minuses, so weigh your options carefully, because switching gears once you’re already under way is expensive and time-consuming. Don’t lock yourself into a single vendor’s cloud stack. In particular, avoid vendors with cloud stacks that perform well when using only their components. Reserve the option to plug in third-party or homegrown tools.

Industry Players

Here’s a sampling of vendors that claim to have tools for building private clouds.

* BMC Software Inc. (Cloud Lifecycle Management)

* CA Inc. (3Tera AppLogic)

* Cisco/EMC/VMware (Vblock)

* Citrix Systems Inc. (Citrix Open Cloud)

* Cloud.com Inc. (CloudStack 2.0)

* Dell Inc. (Virtual Integrated System)

* Enomaly Inc. (Elastic Computing Platform)

* Eucalyptus Systems Inc. (Eucalyptus 2.0)

* Hewlett-Packard Co. (BladeSystem Matrix)

* IBM (CloudBurst)

* NewScale Inc. (NewScale 9)

* Platform Computing Corp. (Platform ISF)

* Tibco Software Inc. (Tibco Silver)

* VMware (vCloud)

Source: Forrester Research Inc., August 2010

So far, it isn’t possible to buy one commercial product that will do everything IT managers need to do for private clouds. You have to stitch together a number of different products from various vendors and place your own user interface on the front end.

But Verizon Business’ Deacon says that more-sophisticated enterprises are integrating multiple management tool sets — for instance, HP’s Server Automation suite and BMC’s Patrol suite. Security, firewall, networking and storage elements can be orchestrated from within both HP and BMC suites. IT shops that don’t link multiple tool sets may have to write a lot of their own software to get the necessary automation capabilities.

Is single-console management a real possibility for private clouds? Not everyone will be able to get by with just one console, says Iams, but even two or three consoles would be a huge improvement over the dozen that some shops use today.

Deacon says that single-console management is in the cards, noting that Verizon Business has built a high-level console management layer that collects data from VMware vCenter Server, HP Network Automation and HP Virtual Connect, among other products.

Vendors Will Consolidate

Frank Gillett, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., isn’t so optimistic. “It is unrealistic to think that we are going to get many of these management tools to work together,” he says. Instead, he predicts that over time, the market will shrink dramatically through acquisitions, leaving a handful of vendors that will offer “much more integrated capabilities.” And some IT managers prefer large, established vendors for cloud technology because they can’t trust their data centers to start-ups that may not be in business in a year or two.

Deacon agrees that consolidation is likely as large companies like HP and IBM buy up cloud-based start-ups and add the new software to their existing portfolios. That’s what HP did with its acquisition of OpsWare. Similarly, BMC absorbed BladeLogic, and CA has been on a buying spree, acquiring Nimsoft, Oblicore, 3Tera and others.

IT shops need federation and interoperability, Gillett adds, “and we are very early in those efforts. We may be able to bring private cloud management tools together, but it will be a messy interim period.”

Yet during that period, IT shops will be under enormous pressure from business users to engage in cloud computing. If the data center operations group can’t respond quickly with a private cloud, then business users will look at public clouds. To successfully compete with public cloud providers, IT departments will need to deploy similar services in-house, and those private clouds will have to be better and more attractive to use than public clouds.

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Time for Cloud Computing to Deliver

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This time last year I took the rather brazen step of optimistically suggesting that IT spend would recover from its annus horribilis in the new year. But even with a record number of costly tech disasters around data loss and security, lessons still are not being turned into budget realities. It is apparent to me that, for a great number of organisations, recession may have technically left the building but in the world of IT spend, it is still here. Many strategic IT projects are still on ice and the willingness to take risks remains at an historic low.

The issue is the level of scrutiny being levelled at those in charge of IT spend. Set against this backdrop of increased transparency, the impact of IT on businesses and individual workers is likely to become increasingly profound.

That is actually good news in the long run. The extent to which IT projects will need to demonstrate how they boost revenues directly, crossed with the increasing desire of the board to both recognise and quantify these benefits, will really shake up those responsible for delivering systems.

Gartner’s latest mid-term forecast reveals an increasingly visible link between technology decisions and outcomes, both for the economy and society. A very bold forecast is that, by 2015, new revenue generated each year by IT will emerge as the “primary factor” determining the annual compensation of most new chief information officers. This shift will apparently be powered by IT’s increasingly direct involvement in enterprise development efforts and a growing trend towards harnessing the power of social networks to improve communication, both within companies and with stakeholders.

Gartner further predicts that, also by 2015, tools and automation will eliminate a quarter of staff working hours associated with IT services. This is because the IT services industry will more and more come to emulate other industries, such as the manufacturing sector, as it gains maturity. This will see IT service providers replacing bespoke services with more generic “industrially-produced” offerings. It is expected that cloud computing – that spectre which still frightens some FDs, and rightly so when providers do not explain the benefits clearly enough but simply keep blathering about it – will accelerate the use of tools and automation in IT services, and that companies will shift from complex, expensive in-house technology infrastructures to “on-demand” self-service provisioning of commodity services customised to meet the specific requirements of individual clients. The good news is that Gartner thinks that this shift can help productivity levels to increase, leading to more cost-efficient logistics.

If this was not enough, the market forecast goes on to predict that – again, by 2015 – 20 percent of non-IT companies will be offering services to third parties through our friend, the cloud. So not only will companies be using cloud to operate their internal systems, they will be using it to sell to their customers and to supply their products and services. Such a model, which could for example see larger companies buying services wholesale and then retailing surplus capacity to smaller businesses, is another way for IT to add value to businesses – in this case: cold, hard cash.

It is time to fasten our seatbelts again and brace ourselves for the technology rollercoaster that awaits us in the new year. But at least it seems that, with increased transparency on the minds of many, we can finally look forward to tighter links between IT investments and commercial results. This echoes what FDs – and indeed what Financial Director and this column – have been saying for more years than we care to remember: that IT cannot remain about technology for its own sake, but must become more accountable and aligned to the needs of businesses as a whole.

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Cloud Computing Survey Points to Arrival of ‘Cloud Thinking’

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Cloud computing is coming of age in large enterprises, according to a new study of North American and European IT professionals conducted by Management Insight on behalf of CA Technologies. The group surveyed IT professionals in organizations with 1,000 to 10,000-plus employees, revealing that enterprises are active in the cloud, and their virtualization efforts are contributing to broader interest in cloud computing. The results also indicate a shift toward approaching IT using “cloud thinking,” accelerating the uses of cloud computing and helping to align IT decision makers and implementers around common goals of efficiency, flexibility and scalability.

Top line results of the study include:

* More than 80 percent of enterprises and 92 percent of the largest enterprises have at least one cloud service; 53 percent of IT implementers indicate having more than six cloud services.
* The primary incentives for organizations exploring the cloud are to save money (44 percent) and gain greater cost control (35 percent). IT staff are incented by increasing efficiency (35 percent) and a desire to work with the latest technologies (34 percent).
* Security and control remain perceived barriers to the cloud. Executives are primarily concerned about security (68 percent) and poor service quality (40 percent), while roughly half of all respondents consider risk of job loss and loss of control as top deterrents.
* Virtualization maturity leads to more optimistic attitudes toward cloud: Virtualization-intensive organizations are four times more likely to move as many services as possible to both public and private clouds.
* Attitudes toward public and private clouds align. Respondents cite cost savings, resource efficiencies, flexibility and servicing global users as drivers for public clouds; similarly, cost, scalability, flexibility and manageability are drivers for private clouds. Security is noted as both a driver and deterrent for public and private clouds.

Organizations Are Active in the Cloud

Collaboration tools lead cloud deployments at 75 percent, with hosted email, antivirus/spam filters and web conferencing noted as the most common applications being deployed in the cloud by large enterprises.

Infrastructure and development platforms in the cloud (Infrastructure- and Platform-as-a-Service) appear to be poised for growth with 58 percent of large organizations already using these services, and 43 percent considering them. Such use and consideration sets up infrastructure clouds as the next wave of cloud adoption.

“This study confirms that large enterprises are exploring the benefits of the cloud, and are looking to expand from basic services like collaboration to more complex Infrastructure and Platform cloud services,” said Adam Famularo, general manager, Cloud Computing Business, CA Technologies. “It validates a trend we predicted, that IT executives are rapidly becoming orchestrators of an IT supply chain made up of internal and external services. With this shift comes a growing need for sophisticated management and security, allowing enterprises to change how they think about IT to reap the full rewards that cloud computing offers – agility, efficiency and scalability.”

Virtualization Maturity is Contributing to Cloud Thinking

On average, roughly one-third of x86 servers are virtualized within the enterprise today. Nearly half of these companies (46 percent) indicate a “managed” stage of virtualization, with the ability to move virtual machines and manage them for high availability. As enterprises move along the virtualization maturity lifecycle from basic (unmanaged virtual servers), to managed, to advanced (dynamic resource scheduling and consolidated back-up), and on to “cloud-like” (advanced virtual automation, full disaster recovery via virtualization), the applications they earmark for the cloud also begin to shift.

Email leads in the managed stage (53 percent); desktop virtualization and databases peak during the advanced stage (30 percent); and industry-specific applications top all others in the cloud-like stage (32 percent).

In addition, respondents indicate plans to continue to move mission-critical applications from non-virtualized infrastructure to virtual machines over the next couple of years. Enterprises are running nearly half (47 percent) of these applications on non-virtualized infrastructure today, which will drop by 17 percent in the next two years. Of that 17 percent, 10 percent will shift to public and private clouds.

As IT reorganizes itself for more dynamic virtualized environments, the tendency to embrace the cloud rises. Virtualization-intensive organizations are roughly four times more likely to move as many services as possible into both public and private clouds. Overall, the perceptions of cloud computing take on a more optimistic tone as organizations advance their technical infrastructure to support more dynamic environments.

Adoption Polarizes Around Public and Private Clouds

When asked to share their viewpoints on drivers and barriers to the adoption of public and private clouds, respondents cite cost as a driver and barrier, suggesting the true impact and relevance of “cost savings” is still unresolved.

Drivers of public cloud adoption also cite resource efficiencies, flexibility and servicing global users as key drivers. Deterrents include security, compliance, internal resistance and the perception that public clouds are not suitable for some business applications.

Cost and security also confound private cloud adoption, with respondents citing them as both drivers and barriers. Additional drivers include scalability, flexibility and manageability, while complexity, availability and reliability, and slow adoption of new technology are seen as deterrents.

Survey participants also provided input on advocates and opponents of cloud computing within their organizations. Senior management (C-level and senior IT executives) are the primary advocates for public clouds, while those with more day-to-day responsibilities over virtualization and servers are seen as the leading private cloud advocates (32 percent of directors of IT operations or senior data center management, 31 percent of virtualization team, 30 percent of server management team). Not surprisingly, the security team topped the list as the primary opponent for both public and private clouds (44 percent and 27 percent respectively), with business unit leaders/managers sharing that attitude (23 percent and 18 percent respectively).

The Cloud is Coming of Age in Large Enterprises

Overall, the study confirms large organizations are embracing both public and private clouds. Enterprises are already active in cloud computing. Virtualization is fostering the confidence and skills needed to encourage further adoption among large organizations to build private clouds. Ultimately, living in this duopoly of public and private cloud environments will require enterprises to adapt their integration tools and management philosophies to provide end-user services across both types of clouds.

Methodology

This Management Insight Technologies study was executed as a web-based study. The sample was collected in September 2010 and is comprised of 434 IT professionals across two regions – North America (273) and Europe (161). Respondents working for companies that produce cloud computing software were excluded. Qualified respondents had to be sufficiently knowledgeable about their company’s IT environments. The screener and sample frame were developed to target a fairly even representation of IT decision makers and IT implementers and of the three company sizes within each region. The sample was then weighted to achieve a ratio of 60% IT decision makers and 40% IT implementers, and 36% Medium (1000-4999 employees), 29% Large (5000-9999 employees) and 35% Mega (10,000 or more employees) Enterprises within each region. To assure market-based representation of each region, the sample was also weighted based on total IT spend by country per data from the IDC Black Book.

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