Published: June 22 2009, 08:24 AM | no comments
by Stephen Elliot

I participated in three panels at the recent Interop in Las Vegas.  These were:

1) The Impact of IT Virtualization on Applications and Networks, moderated by Jim Metzler.  Additional executive panelists were from F5 and Cisco.

2) Technologies that Data Center Managers Can't Live Without, moderated by Forrester analyst Doug Washburn.  Additional executive panelists were from APC/ Schneider Electric and Perot Systems.

3) Virtualization Management Futures:  the Final Frontier?, moderated by Barb Goldworm of Focus.  Additional executive panelists were from VMware, Microsoft, and BMC.

The first two panels had about 80-100 attendees, while the third had about 40 or so who have network related titles at the manager level or above. Following are the key points of interest and discussion from each session.

The Impact of IT Virtualization on Applications and Networks

• Management is going to be a key requirement for network teams and NOCs to understand. The importance of end-to-end service availability and visibility into both the physical and virtual infrastructures are critical to success in emerging next generation data centers.
• The emergence of automation is a critical requirement, which many IT organizations are adopting, often in incremental steps.
• Virtualization is accelerating the need for automation; existing management processes can be incorporated into ITIL v2 and ITILv3; process standardization is a key requirement for automation.
• "Old school" management technologies will not scale with the pace that virtualization brings to IT organizations in areas such as provisioning. Key management technologies that enable both physical and virtual management scalability include patented root cause analytics, models-based management, and automated thresholding. Scalability of virtualization application infrastructures will become a common theme for IT organizations over next 5-10 years.
• The discussion of the idea of internal private clouds and external public clouds continues to garner IT's attention; however, management of the cloud continues to require attention to deliver SLA visibility.
• Virtualization is impacting most aspects of IT from application deployment to networking. Many teams are experiencing VM sprawl as VMs propagate the "IT silos"; management is a key requirement for on-going virtualization success.
• End-to-end service availability and granular performance visibility between the application and network flows are increasingly a requirement for problem identification and resolution.
• Element or platform management solutions are a good start, but not enough for IT organizations to provide the required visibility and end-to-end service visibility.

There is no doubt that IT organizations are facing new dynamic requirements that virtualization is forcing onto networks, storage, and server infrastructures. Automation and technologies such as root cause analytics, models-based management, automation, and process encapsulation will be critical to the success, and business alignment of IT in the future. To learn more about how CA is helping clients adjust to these new demands on performance visibility, please go to www.ca.com/virtualization.

Technologies that Data Center Managers Can't Live Without

This panel had several interesting key points of discussion, with audience members a mix of data center facilities management and IT operations.  The critical points were:

• Physical data center planning is more important now than ever before; the idea of KW/sq foot is no longer a reliable benchmark metric as hardware density and performance improves.
• The average temperature in the data center will likely continue to go up as hardware resiliency improves. 
• It is increasingly critical that power and cooling metrics be imported into management systems to drive improved automated actions. This is important as facilities managers and IT operations teams learn to collaborate over time. 
• Automation is increasingly a key part of data center transformations; IT organizations are adopting technologies that utilize automation to increase efficiencies and cost savings opportunities.
• Process standardization, power and cooling, capacity planning, virtualization, enterprise management, automation, and tighter business-to-IT alignment are now requirements for data center transformation projects. 
• End-to-end service level management is a key concern for customers, across physical and virtual infrastructures.   It requires granular performance metrics across the domains; increasingly the value will come from the analysis of the data.

This panel really took a deep look at how the IT organization and related technologies are changing.  While there is a chasm between IT operations and facilities management teams today, the general agreement was that the most effective and efficient organizations will bring these two groups together to drive impactful business decisions.  As energy costs continue to be a key concerns for the CIO, collaboration across the data center can drive further cost reductions, and beyond that impact business strategies that drive new lines of business.  

Virtualization Management Futures:  the Final Frontier?

This session featured a dynamic discussion among panelists from CA, BMC, Microsoft, and VMware.  The group addressed may of the leading topics of the day, including automation, partnerships, virtualization, and management.  Some of the key points of this discussion included:

• Vendors should continue to improve third party integrations; emerging standards will help but are not the "holy grail" of integrated management requirements.
• Virtualization is another architecture that must be managed and will become part of the data center fabric with critical applications residing on it. 
• Management and automation are ways that IT organizations can extend the value of virtualization deployments; the consideration of management and automation prior to rollout is delivering improved cost savings and an application service perspective.
• Customers want an integrated view of both their physical and virtual infrastructures to reduce costs and drive more management efficiencies.
• Process standardization is a key requirement for virtualization deployments as ITIL moves towards the broader definition of standards in version 3. 
• Virtualization and the idea of a cloud are interconnected; management from the application perspective will be a critical business differentiator and a key consideration for customers as it relates to tiered service level agreements and performance visibility.
• The real focus of management should be the service layer, whereby the consolidation, analysis, and automated actions taken by management solutions deliver insight to the service layer.
• Technology is getting more complex driving up the need for end-to-end service management; virtualization does not solve traditional management challenges, it asks for more focus on management and automation. 

The general take away was that management at the element level (i.e. hypervisor platform providers) and the end-to-end service level (i.e., CA solutions) are what customers require to deliver business outcomes.  IT is increasingly critical that customers recognize the need for both types of solutions.  Integrations betweens the element and service management solutions will be important, with a driving need to have an integrated console /solutions that do both physical and virtual analysis and present the data at the service level.  In the future, it won't matter if the application is on virtual or physical infrastructure; what matters will be how IT and LOB managers manage the infrastructures to optimize their business goals.    

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Published: June 08 2009, 06:24 AM | no comments
by Stephen Elliot

With its ability to reduce costs and optimize the IT infrastructure by abstracting resources, virtualization has become an increasingly popular tactic for enterprises having to compete in an ever more challenging global economy. According to a recent study CA conducted with 300 CIOs and top IT executives, 64 percent of respondents say they've already invested in virtualization, and the other 36 percent reported that they plan to invest in virtualization.

You don't have to look very hard to find the biggest reasons for virtualization's widespread adoption: cost savings and IT agility improvements. Because of the current global economic crisis, CIOs are being asked not only to do more with less, but also to do it with lower headcount while delivering higher IT service levels. By wringing out more performance without adding huge IT infrastructure line items to the budget, virtualization provides the more-bang-for-less-buck solution that organizations are looking for. Increasingly, enterprise IT organizations want to host more critical workloads on virtual machines; however the management risks must be reduced.

Respondents to CA's study stated they are also implementing virtualization for technical reasons like easier provisioning and software deployment. But although virtualization brings a tremendous opportunity for IT organizations to compress the processes and cycle times between production and application development teams, drive out more agility in the infrastructure and automate more processes, it brings a lot of complexity to the expertise needed to run the software and the management processes that must be tweaked and adjusted.

The Challenges Facing Virtual Infrastructure Management

One major technical issue facing organizations looking to add virtualization to their IT infrastructure is the limitations of system platform tools. As the virtual machine count begins to creep up, platform tools can't provide the amount of granular performance data necessary to give the IT staff a complete picture of what's going on. Couple that with the heterogeneous mix of virtualization platforms companies are using and management challenges begin to have an impact on IT's ability to accelerate the deployment of virtual machines. The bottom line is that both platform management and enterprise management solutions are required to deliver an integrated business service view of both physical and virtual environments.

Similarly, organizations need the ability to integrate the physical infrastructure with its virtual counterpart in order to automate configuration changes, patch management, server provisioning and resource allocation. The key business service outcomes of this are lower operations costs, improved ROI from virtualization deployments, and an end-to-end view of an IT service.

CIOs are also looking at virtualization for more than just cost savings. They're looking for a management solution that will transform their IT organizations and demonstrate success via measurable metrics and key performance indicators, whether they're business processes such as inventory churn and increasing margins, or technical metrics like server-to-admin ratio (or virtual-machine-to-admin ratios), or even a reduction in the number of trouble tickets sent to the service desk. The goal is to deliver business transformation in an ongoing, measurable manner to mitigate the business risk of a growing virtualization deployment.

The Solution: Virtualization as Strategy, Not Just Tactic

All of these challenges point to a common solution that transforms the deployment of virtualization from being an ad hoc cost-savings tactic to a more strategic enterprise platform. Rather than merely increasing the number of virtual machines, IT can take the opportunity to think about how it can get the most out of decompressing the processes between teams, increasing the workflow automation, reducing handoff times, reducing configuration check times and increasing compliance. These are the foundational steps that lead to IT transformation and successful business service outcomes. Without these capabilities, the failure rate of projects and associated costs substantially increase.

Where Virtual Infrastructure Management Is Headed

Another reason that viewing virtualization as an enterprise platform is becoming crucial to organizations is that virtual machines are taking on different forms as virtual technology transforms. The management of desktop virtualization is becoming increasingly important as the technology increases in popularity. One particular challenge is the number of different architectures that needs to be taken into consideration for any desktop virtualization solution.

Likewise, a growing number of organizations are investigating network virtualization. In particular, Cisco's new virtual switch technology, which includes embedded software from VMware, has been making ripples across the IT world.

Having an enterprise platform in place makes such new developments in virtualization easier to implement and manage. The better an organization plans for the management, processes and chargeback opportunities virtualization offers, the more IT can lead the business outcome discussion and drive out measurable success.

While virtualization has already helped transform data centers, drive consolidation efforts and reduce power and cooling costs, we've just scratched the surface. There's a lot more to go.

To learn how CA can help you manage your complex virtual infrastructure to ensure agility, service quality and efficiency - while mitigating IT and business risk, visit http://www.ca.com/us/virtualization.aspx.

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