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November 2010 - Posts

The private cloud debate keeps resurfacing, but is it even worth having?

Published: November 30 2010, 09:41 PM | no comments
by CA Community

Slowly but steadily the debate about private clouds is increasing. While debate can be a good thing, is this one worth having? In the long-term, will anyone care who owns a machine?

Under provocative titles like "Private cloud discredited, part 1" and "Do We Really Need Private Clouds?," the private cloud debate is building up steam. The first blog is actually called "part 1" because the author is sure there will be a part two, given the raging emotions and all the opinions being aired.  The second one is part of a very readable guest series by IT analyst Robin Bloor at Cloud Commons.

I vividly remember when we all got exited some years ago about Open Systems (with Open roughly being defined as anything running on Unix vs. anything that was not running on Unix -- including mainframes, AS/400s, HP3000s, etc. ). That debate was about as productive as the debate about private vs. public clouds may turn out to be. The most important benefit of cloud computing is that it (finally) facilitates the decoupling of the application from the underlying infrastructure. As a result, it matters a lot less where it runs (private or public). In a comment on Bloor's blog, Jonathan Davis, CTO of DNS Europe , introduces a good example of that principle. Using a cloud platform (CA 3Tera AppLogic in this case), DNS Europe enables applications to be deployed transparently and instantly over grids of compute capacity (for a discussion of grids, see this post by Bloor ) regardless of whether these clouds are private (hosted or on-premises), public or a combination (hybrid).

Getting beyond the private vs. public debate

The question we're getting most from customers is not "should we go public or private?" but rather, "where do I start with cloud computing?" Do you start with less sensitive applications on a public cloud and then expand what you learned to core apps in a private cloud, or do you start with a more sensitive app on a private cloud and expand to public when you feel that it is proven and secure enough for that application?

Surprisingly (at least to me) there was some very clear guidance given in the cloud scenario session at last month's annual Gartner Symposium/ITxpo. Basically a kind of "comply or explain" approach was suggested there. First explore whether a job can be done with a public cloud ("comply"), and only if there are valid and severe reasons to not go public ("explain") then consider private. I'm paraphrasing, so check with your analyst for exact wording and/or check out the free video recordings of this year's symposium at here .

During the symposium, Gartner also indicated that security concerns should be seen as valid but temporary challenges to be addressed and overcome, rather than as a reason (or excuse) to discard public clouds. At the recent Datacenter Summit, one of Gartner's lead analysts on cloud, Thomas Bittman, gave a slightly more nuanced view. Understandable as the folks in the room were predominantly the guys running today's private data centers. He highlighted some scenarios where private clouds make perfect sense (e.g. stable, predictable loads). He also noted that the current emphasis on IaaS (where the private versus public debate mainly plays today) over PaaS comes from the fact that IaaS can run today's existing applications and does not have to wait for a next generation of apps, as developing such new applications simply takes time.

A new generation of cloud applications

In my view this new generation of applications will be very different from the applications we run today, which makes it even more important that these new generations of applications no longer be tied to underlying infrastructures. This is a trend we've seen in the past: mainframes introduced OLTP, Mini's or distributed systems introduced departmental systems and later packaged applications like MRP and ERP, and internet web systems introduced the age of e-commerce, where we started buying books and gadgets online and doing our banking online. So I expect that "re-hosting" our existing apps to private or public clouds will be only a very small part of the long term cloud story. Not that next year won't be a very lucrative year for many vendors helping organizations move their existing applications to hosted or internal private clouds.

But the big long-term story is that cloud will be ideal for a generation of new applications. Applications that allow organizations to collaborate with other organizations -not just the much talked about in-company Twitter and Facebook clones that enable people to waste as much time at the office as they do at home. Through new collaboration applications, organizations can take business processes that were traditionally done in-house and source them as "as a service". These processes can vary from bill collecting, invoicing, physical distribution, repair handling and HR to full manufacturing or product design. Allowing companies to specialize and offer these services to many organizations will enable them to achieve massive economies of scale. Note that many of these services which will be largely or completely information/software based. 

Here's an example: Imagine the efficiencies of one company handling repairs for several large mobile phone manufacturers versus each company having to arrange repairs themselves. Most phone manufacturers sell through the same resellers, use the same repair centers, source form the same Chinese factories, etc. Hooking these up to a central platform used by multiple players can give an enormous platform effect.  An early European player in the area is eBuilder.com. These types of new generation cloud applications will render efficiencies far beyond any pure IT savings or efficiencies imaginable (see also my entry re: Gitex).

Now, you may say that companies have started this move towards specialization and outsourcing of processes already some years ago. And you're right. But so far, they have done so despite of support in IT applications. Thanks to the cloud, IT can now become the big promoter, enabler and catalyst for this.

 

This is an excerpt from a post that originally appeared at http://blog.gregorpetri.com/. Read the full-length version here. Follow Gregor on Twitter at @GregorPetri.

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By: CA Community
CA Community is the blog manager’s account used to post general updates and news items.
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Gaining Experience with Cloud Scenarios

Published: November 22 2010, 09:45 AM | 5 Comment(s)
by Marvin Waschke

What is the simplest, most common IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) public cloud scenario? Will it be the same a year from now? Five years from now?

These are important questions because the infrastructure that will support these scenarios is being designed today. If we don't understand where computing is today, we won't be able to plan accurately for tomorrow. And our vision of tomorrow must be as accurate as we can make it in order to design infrastructure that does a good job of supporting cloud computing in the future.

There is a tremendous amount of thought about applications that automatically "cloud burst" from the on-premise data center to a public cloud, and folks are planning for the day when entire on-premise data centers are replaced by public clouds, but this is mainly long-range strategy, not what is happening in the data center today.

Today's Successful Public Cloud Projects

Today, we hear from IT departments that the cloud has tremendous potential, but many are still cautious about the idea of public clouds. They are wary of the security and regulatory issues arising from mission critical services implemented on public clouds, but IT shops still are striving to gain cloud IaaS computing experience. One method is to try out public cloud services like Amazon EC2 with lower risk projects.

For instance, the CA Service Desk Manager (SDM) product group recently conducted a successful beta test program using Amazon EC2 for IaaS. In the "BCE" (Before Cloud Era), beta software had to be installed on the customer's premises. That was not ideal because the beta tied up resources that the customer was often loath to give up.

For the SDM team's latest beta program, customers had the option of deploying the beta software on EC2. Since beta installations are expendable and are not subject to the privacy and security issues of a full production-level service desk, there was little resistance to using public cloud resources for testing. A substantial number of beta tests were performed on the public cloud and the program was quite successful because it was both economical and it effectively exercised and displayed the beta code.

IT pros are also trying lower risk projects that involve testing and development. The generally accepted best practice for transitioning IT services to production is to exercise all changed software in a test environment that mimics the production environment before transitioning software to production. This applies both to applications developed in-house and software obtained from software vendors. This kind of testing can involve vast computing resources for relatively short periods.

Instead of purchasing or leasing test equipment, using a public cloud for a few hours at a time can be quite attractive financially.  Entire development projects can be developed and tested without purchasing equipment that may only be used temporarily. The security and governance risks during development and testing are much more easily managed than the risks involved in production.

Private Clouds as a Bridge to Public Clouds

Private clouds are another way in which IT departments are venturing into cloud computing. By setting up a private cloud, an enterprise can become familiar with cloud facilities with fewer worries about regulators and auditors. 

All equipment and data remains on-premise and under control of the enterprise, but only the team assigned to administer the private cloud need be aware where processes run and data is stored. Resources in the private cloud can still be allocated and administered with many of the efficiencies of a public cloud, but security and governance issues remain similar to those in force before the private cloud was developed.

Many virtualization projects could be described as "private cloud building" and our colleagues from the virtualization team have covered this topic - virtualization as a path to the cloud -- at length on the CA Virtualization & Automation blog.

The Future

Eventually, the security and governance issues surrounding the public cloud will be tamed and IT departments will find that the experience they have gained with lower risk IaaS projects and private clouds will stand them in good stead. There are many signs that questions over cloud safety are being answered.

The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) has published a second version of its document on security and governance, which has gained recognition as a careful study of the security and governance issues involved in using the cloud and is resulting in a growing body of cloud best practices.

ISO efforts, including ISO/IEC 27001 and ISO/IEC 27002 certification of cloud service providers, are also helping to build confidence in the cloud among auditors and security analysts.

These, and many more advances, point to a growing wave of acceptance of cloud computing. The more experience IT departments can obtain today, the better prepared they will be to implement more critical services taking full advantage of the cloud when the time is right for them.

*Photo used under Creative Commons License, courtesy of swisscan.

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By: Marvin Waschke
Marv Waschke is a senior principal architect at CA Technologies. He has represented CA Technologies in several standards groups including the Cloud Management Working Group and Configuration Management Database Federation working groups of the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF). He is also a member...
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Using Metrics to Better Discover, Manage and Measure Services

Published: November 11 2010, 08:35 AM | no comments
by Erik Hille

The increased focus on cloud computing and IT supply chain management has also driven a renewed interest in "services" for many companies.  At issue is how companies can understand the performance of their existing business and services so that these new delivery mechanisms can be incorporated as part of the overall delivery model. 

In October, I gave a presentation at the Arizona IT Service Management Forum Local Interest Group titled, "Using Metrics in your IT Environment to Better Discover, Manage and Measure your Services."  The speech focused on the many ways that organizations attempt to leverage measurements to make sense of the business.  Unfortunately, while the use of measurements is plentiful, few of them truly measure the "correct" things.  Instead, they are operationally focused, without goals and targets, and misaligned with the strategic objectives of the business.

Since the advent of the Deming Cycle, businesses have adapted the philosophy of continual improvement across the entire organization.  While the Deming Cycle, with plan-do-check-act steps (i.e., P-D-C-A steps), was originally the cornerstone of just-in-time manufacturing, we now - however loosely - apply the approach to measure almost every part of our business.  For instance:

  • Procurement groups often gather information relative to balanced scorecard or vendor performance metrics
  • Sales organizations track leads follow up pipeline and other sales performance metrics
  • Finance departments leverage ERP solutions to track key financial indicators that relate to cash, collections, AP and AR
  • Call centers measure performance metrics that relate to handling individual incidents
  • IT departments manage a deluge of information from networking monitoring systems, application monitoring systems and other infrastructure management systems
  • And of course, manufacturing has process controls, Six Sigma and so forth that are leveraged to maintain the production line. 

The bottom line is that there is no shortage of data leveraged within a company.

But how good are these measurements really?  Are we looking at the right things that are most critical to our business or are we simply measuring the things that are easiest to measure? Take the call center, for example.  There are a number of tools within this environment including, Automatic Call Distributors (ACDs), Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems, Web Self Service solutions, Email Response Management (ERMS) systems and Incident Management solutions.  Each measures a portion of the call center's operational environment (often mislabeled as service level agreements (SLAs)).  But these individual solutions cannot alone measure the two most important functions of the contact center:  how long did it take to resolve the customer's issue, are they happy with the interaction.

To move towards a more meaningful use of metrics, companies must embrace two key ITIL v3 concepts:  orientation of IT delivery in terms of "services" and a focus on improving processes. 

The former packages the various widgets that often become the focus of IT's day to day activities forces the organization to think more holistically about the cost and value that these services deliver.  In order to measure these services, the company is forced to combine information from disparate data sources and to create higher level, more meaningful measures of their performance.  For instance, to go back to our call center example, the organization might focus on "total time to resolve" rather than "time to answer," "cost per resolved incident" instead of "cost per call," and "impact on SLA" rather than "number of issues."

The latter issue (focus on improving processes) is, ironically, one that ITIL v3 addresses directly.  The processes are embedded as topics within the five ITIL books, and they include predefined measures of cost, risk, agility and availability.  By applying these measures to the overall process rather than each individual component, the company is able to apply the aforementioned Deming Cycle where it belongs:  to improving the business.

In addition, it is important to mention the role that the SLA plays in the measurement process.  Too often, operational measures are given the label SLA; however, the essential part of an SLA is, in fact, the agreement.  This contractual agreement  contains measurements that define the performance obligations for the company.  Customers, business units and even outsourcers leverage these as the primary way that services are understood and consumed.  In essence, this process provides a destination for the metrics environment that you are putting in place.

When viewed at a higher level, these contractual obligations are the essence of what runs your business.  They govern the relationships that your company has with its suppliers, its internal departments and subsidiaries, and its customers.  Without a means to measure (...and govern) these obligations, the metric environment will invariably trend back towards the operational and will lose business focus and meaning.

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By: Erik Hille
Erik Hille joins CA Technologies as part of the acquisition of Oblicore in January 2010. With Oblicore, he was the company’s Marketing Director since July 2006. As an authority in the area of ITIL’s Service Level Management, Service Portfolio Management and Service Catalog Management processes, Erik...
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It is the season of cloud events

Published: November 09 2010, 12:47 AM | no comments
by CA Community

It is the season of cloud events

This week, Gartner is holding their Symposium/ITxpo to Europe in Cannes .  For some reason the industry seems to be cramming all their events in the two short months that fall between the summer vacation period and Xmas. To name just a few, I've presented at: 

360IT in London

VM World Europe

Gitex in Dubai

Cloud Expo Silicon Valley  

Next week the part virtual reality, part physical reality UP2010 conference will also take place. 

Gartner wisely choose to not use the cloud word in this year's symposium title "Transitions: New Realities, Rules and Opportunities", but it is clear to most attendees that the majority of these transitions will be cloud related. Some may even argue (or fear) that the cloud will replace a large chunk of traditional IT. Having done the opening session of the cloud conference at Gitex, together with Gartner's Jim Murphy, where he gave a short preview of the Gartner Cloud keynote, I can tell you that ignoring the cloud (because insecure, immature or risky in general) is not recommended. Enterprises will need to formulate a cloud strategy -with public cloud taking a prominent role - just as much as they needed to develop enterprise strategies for PC's and end-user computing in the past.

At the event I will be talking, in conjunction with guest speakers from CA partners such as Accenture, salesforce.com and SAP, about "the cloud is the answer, it is also the question".  The reason we invited these partners to present together with CA Technologies is that we feel that there are many areas where the answer will not come from a single company. Today's IT is complex and - at least for the foreseeable future - developments like cloud and virtualization will add to this complexity. That is why we asked Keith Grayson of SAP how to address continuous and automated  governance, risk and compliance (GRC)  in this increasingly complex world. Steve Greene, leader of salesforce.com's agile development, will share salesforce.com's experience in moving from waterfall to agile development projects and Dr. Hauke Heier of Accenture will discuss the Investment Portfolio Management (IPM) Framework, a diagnostic model to help CIOs and top business executives align IT investments (cloud or non-cloud) with business needs (this session was overbooked 200% last year, so we moved it to a bigger room, but please register early).

From the above, it will be clear that both the questions and the answers around the cloud will, to a large extent, concern people and processes and not just technology.  This aligns nicely with the little informal pole I held among the attendees of my presentation sessions at the earlier mentioned cloud events. This year most came to do some 'tire kicking': seeing who else was there (apart from the numerous vendors), learn which end users have actually done something in the cloud and to decide what pilots to include in next year's plan.  Most attendees were more interested in approaches and experiences than in the shiny, cool and technological advanced tools that many of the vendors were showing.  Maybe an idea for the organizers of these events to include specific tracks around these softer aspects in next year's editions (which no doubt will take place in the same month. Old habits are hard to loose). In my sessions I already started to focus on these softer aspects (as I will do in Cannes) and focused on people and management, rather than on technology. People, Process and Technology ... somehow it has a familiar ring to it.

Follow CA Technologies at ITXpo on Twitter at #caitexpo2010

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By: CA Community
CA Community is the blog manager’s account used to post general updates and news items.
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Using cloud to test deployment scenarios you didn't think you could

Published: November 03 2010, 04:10 PM | no comments
by Jay Fry

Often, IT considers cloud computing for things you were doing anyway, with the hope of doing them much cheaper. Or, more likely from what I've heard, much faster. But last week a customer reminded me about one of the more important implications of cloud: you can do things you really wouldn't have done otherwise.

And what a big, positive benefit for your IT operations that can be.

A customer's real, live cloud computing experience at Gartner Symposium

The occasion was last week's Gartner's Symposium and ITXpo conference in Orlando. I sat in on the CA Technologies session that featured Adam Famularo, the general manager of our cloud business (and my boss), and David Guthrie, CTO of Premiere Global Services, Inc.(PGi). It probably isn't a surprise that Guthrie's real-world experiences with cloud computing provided some really interesting tidbits of advice.

Guthrie talked about how PGi, a $600 million real-time collaboration business that provides audio & web conferencing, has embraced cloud computing (you've used their service if you've ever heard "Welcome to Ready Conference" and other similar conferencing and collaboration system greetings).

What kicked off cloud computing for PGi? Frustration. Guthrie told the PGi story like this: a developer was frustrated with the way PGi previously went about deploying business services. From his point of view, it was way too time-consuming: each new service required a procurement process, the set-up of new servers at a co-location facility, and the like. That developer tracked down 3Tera AppLogic (end of sales pitch) and PGi began to put it to use as a deployment platform for cloud services.

What does PGi use cloud computing for? Well, everything that's customer facing. "All the services that we deliver for our customers are in the cloud," said Guthrie. That means they use a cloud infrastructure for their audio and web collaboration meeting services. They use it for their pgi.com web site, sales gateways, and customer-specific portals as well.

Guthrie stressed the benefits of speed that come from cloud computing. "It's all about getting technology to our customers faster," said Guthrie. "Ramp time is one of the biggest benefits. It's about delivering our services in a more effective way - not just from the cost perspective, but also from the time perspective."

Cloud computing changes application development and deployment. Cloud, Guthrie noted in his presentation, "really changed out entire app dev cycle. We now have developers closer to how things are being deployed." He said it helped fix consistency problems between applications across dev, QA, and production.

During his talk, Guthrie pointed to some more fundamental differences they've been seeing, too. He described how the cloud-based approach has been helping his team be more effective. "I've definitely saved money by getting things to market quicker," Guthrie said.

But, more importantly, said Guthrie, "it makes you make better applications." "I was also able to add redundancy where I previously wouldn't have considered it" thanks to both cost efficiencies and the ease with which cloud infrastructure (at least, in his CA 3Tera AppLogic-based environment) can be built up and torn down.

"You can test scenarios that in the past were really impractical," said Guthrie. He cited doing side-by-side testing of ideas and configurations that never would have been possible before to see what makes the most sense, rolling out the one that worked best, and discarding those that didn't. Except in this case, "discarding" doesn't mean tossing out dedicated silos of hardware (and hard-wired) infrastructure that you had to manually set up just for this purpose.

Practical advice, please: what apps are cloud-ready?

At the Gartner session, audience members were very curious about the practicalities of using cloud computing, asking Guthrie to make some generalizations from his experience on everything from what kind of applications work best in a cloud environment, to how he won over his IT operations staff. (I don't think last week's audience is unique in wanting to learn some of these things.)

"Some apps aren't ready for this kind of infrastructure," said Guthrie, while "some are perfectly set for this." And, unlike the assumption many in the room expressed, it's not generally true that packaged apps are more appropriate to bring to a cloud environment than home-grown applications.

Guthrie's take? You should decide which apps to take to the cloud not by whether they are packaged or custom, but with a different set of criteria. For example, stateless applications that live on the web are perfect for this kind of approach, he believes.

Dealing with skepticism about cloud computing from IT operations

One of the more interesting questions brought out what Guthrie learned about getting the buy-in and support of the operations team at PGi. "I don't want you to think I've deployed these without a lot of resistance. I don't want to act like this was just easy. There were people that really resisted it," he said.

Earning the buy-in of his IT operations people required training for the team, time, and even a quite a bit of evangelism, according to Guthrie. He also laid down an edict at one point: for everything new, he required that "you have to tell me why it shouldn't go on the cloud infrastructure." What seemed draconian at first, actually turned out to be the right strategic choice.

"As the ops team became familiar [with cloud computing], they began to embrace it," Guthrie said.

Have you had similar real-world experiences with the cloud? Or even contradictory ones? I'm eager to hear your thoughts on PGi's approach and advice (as you might guess, I much prefer real-world discussions to theoretical ones any day of the week). Leave comments here or contact me directly; I'll definitely continue this discussion in future posts.

 

This blog is cross-posted at Data Center Dialog.

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By: Jay Fry
Jay Fry is vice president of marketing, Cloud Computing, at CA Technologies. He has over 20 years of experience in marketing and management for innovative enterprise software companies. Prior to CA, Jay was vice president of marketing at cloud computing start-up Cassatt and founded the marketing department...
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