Published: September 07 2011, 12:27 PM | 1 Comment(s)
by Bruce Milne

I spent last week at VMworld at the Venetian in Las Vegas. I was struck by 2 observations at the show:

The first observation was that interest in "clouds" of any stripe, private, public, or hybrid, is at an all-time high. Pretty much every vendor on the expo floor was explaining how they complement your cloud strategy.

In the session tracks, most of the technical sessions were based on virtualization deployment and best practices, but many of the "business" and roadmap sessions focused heavily on the evolution of private clouds. This says to me that we're early in cloud adoption and maturity, which brings me to my second observation: that there remains a great deal of confusion and concern about migrating mission-critical business services to a shared computing environment. Folks I talked to have, for the most part, adopted virtualization and are using it extensively in their businesses. Most also have implemented "virtual first" policies, meaning that any new business service requests are hosted in a virtual environment unless a business case can be made otherwise.

But despite their virtualization maturity, a consistent theme emerged from my conversations. They told me that the push for cloud in their organizations is driven by economics, not technical merit, and that their IT shops are now accountable for maximizing the economic return of the cloud investment. All are now expected to deliver cost savings and optimization of the data center cost structure by deploying entire business service portfolios into the cloud, as opposed to simply virtualizing workloads onto virtual hosts at what were admittedly sub-optimal levels of saturation. All agreed that this requires a different set of tools, techniques and skills to manage the IT environment.

 Exacerbating their concerns is the introduction of VMware vSphere 5, VMware's new cloud platform. This platform allows VMware's VM's to take advantage of larger and more powerful hardware, but brings with it licensing and pricing changes that are still new territory for customers. What is clear is that migration to vSphere 5 is a matter of when, not if, and that consolidation and optimization of the current environment will be critical in maximizing their investment in VMware and other cloud technologies.

The complexity of hosting business services in a private cloud, the importance of making sure those business services perform well, and the imperative to maximize the investment in cloud technologies make for a tough balancing act that cries out for an automated solution. VMware customers exploring cloud options or considering a move to vSphere 5 need to look at solutions that will automatically place workloads, balance virtual environments and optimize them for performance, saturation and cost. Ideally, the solution will also look forward and predict optimal configuration, since the initial placement of workloads is only optimal until something changes, and we all know that change is a constant. Anyone considering deploying a private cloud will need to account for this reality.

Our announcement today regarding a placement and balancing solution is a direct response to these concerns voiced by customers. As private clouds become more prevalent, automation will be a prerequisite to make them manageable. CA Technologies new solution not only balances and optimizes landscapes for current demand, it also looks into the future for optimal configuration under different circumstances. For customers looking at alternatives like converged infrastructures or cloud-bursting to public cloud vendors, the solution also allows them to predict the optimal configuration and to compare performance to their existing cloud infrastructure.

For virtualization customers confused and concerned about migrating mission-critical business services to the cloud, this innovation is a game-changer. Read more here: http://www.ca.com/us/news/Press-Releases/na/2011/CA-Technologies-Delivers-Capacity-Management-Solution-to-Help-Customers-Control-Costs.aspx.