Cloud Storm Chasers : private cloud

Cloud Providers Must Commit to Innovation

Denise Dubie — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 14:38:00 GMT

CIOs and IT leaders across the board have been handed a challenge this year: to transform traditional IT organizations focused on maintaining operations into agile, incubators for innovation.

The evolution from focusing on ‘keeping the lights on' to enabling more innovative approaches for solving new and existing problems won't be easy, but IT leaders are not alone. According to industry watchers, the push toward innovation will also fall into the laps of cloud providers that will need an innovative edge to compete for IT budget dollars. While IT works to become the center of innovation within their organization - perhaps choosing cloud as part of a broader strategy - cloud providers should be demonstrating how they intend to stay ahead of competitors and customer demands with innovative approaches to delivering the best technology, says Sean Hackett, research director covering cloud computing at 451 Research, in a recent CA Technologies Cloud Luminaries video.

"The most compelling attributes for companies to look at when choosing a cloud platform is the company's commitment to innovation. We're still a ways away from a fully integrated, hybrid cloud platform so the commitment to innovation and the commitment to adding the right functionality and the right tool sets that will enable this fully-blown, multi-sourced environment to happen and the best execution-workload environment to happen is still a ways away," Hackett says. "So it's incumbent on users to link up with a company that they feel has a vested interest in the platform and will continue to innovate."

Despite what it may seem like considering its current popularity, Hackett says it is still a young market for cloud computing and while companies today commit to a cloud provider, the cloud provider must in turn commit to innovation. And while internal IT shops are striving to enable innovation, offloading some work to cloud providers could provide respite from day-to-day activities consuming too many valuable resources that would be better spent on innovative new projects. According to Hackett, the drivers for cloud adoption among customers and clients he encounters aren't always cost-related.

"Cost reduction is becoming less and less of an issue, although affordability is still an important factor in driving cloud adoption," Hackett says. "But I think it's the flexibility, the adaptability, the ability to meet the demands of the business, the ability to scale up or to scale down is becoming increasingly - at least we see in our interactions with enterprise customers - seems to be becoming more and more weighted in terms of importance."

Cloud providers must commit to this level of innovation to keep customers happy while they demonstrate their own level of commitment to innovation within their organizations. The demand on cloud providers make sense when you consider the demand on IT and the business it supports. The question is, "How can cloud vendors prove their commitment to innovation?"

Do you consider a commitment to innovation a critical factor when choosing a cloud vendor? Why should innovation become a standard requirement for cloud providers? Please leave a comment here, let me know via Twitter @DDubie or e-mail me directly at Denise.Dubie@ca.com.

The Cloud Market Is Wide Open for the Taking

Andi Mann — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 12:46:00 GMT

Recently I wrote about how public cloud is failing large enterprises. Despite the wild success of public cloud for consumer and SMB use cases, I noted, most research shows that enterprises are investing substantially more in private cloud than public cloud, because cloud service providers (CSPs) are failing to satisfy enterprise requirements for service assurance, security, compliance, billing, governance, etc.

Most people I spoke with agreed with this analysis, but some told me (and still others talked among themselves) that I could not be right. They have seen hundreds of enterprises that have adopted public cloud, they said. Relating their stories of such-and-such an enterprise they just did business with, or the hundreds of unnamed enterprises they recently sold to, they said that I must be wrong.

Of course, there are exceptions. At CA Technologies, we have many customers who have invested in public cloud in some fashion. There are several successful use cases, especially new web app development on cloud IaaS and PaaS. Many enterprises have some piecemeal adoption of AWS or Rackspace. SaaS adoption is strong, especially outside IT, with solutions like Salesforce.com successfully attracting enterprise customers.

Then there are CSPs that are addressing enterprise demands. I am personally familiar with our customers and partners like ViaWest, Rackspace, Logicalis, Fujitsu, DNS Europe, Bird Hosting, and many others that add value (and competitive differentiation) to their public cloud offerings with enterprise-grade service assurance, security, etc. Importantly, many or all of these CSPs also offer hosted private clouds - an attractive option for large enterprises that splits the difference between public and private options.

However, for every story of enterprise adoption of public cloud, I have one for private cloud adoption. For every anecdote about AWS adoption, I cannot even count how many enterprise leaders (both IT and business) tell me they want their systems to be *like* a public cloud service, but they do not want to *use* a public cloud service.

Then there are cloud-native businesses like Facebook and Zynga that are choosing to run on private clouds; while Netflix (a vocal proponent and user of AWS), still runs a data center for mission-critical systems like their billing backend.

This then brings us back to the data - which is not only quite clear already, but is getting clearer.

For example, CA Technologies has just announced new research data that confirms this landscape. This new study says most CSP customers are opting for private clouds, with less than a third choosing public cloud. It highlights the same reasons too - security concerns are the top issue, with other maturity issues like billing, customer satisfaction, and regulatory compliance not too far behind.

The news is not all bad for CSPs though. The research actually shows a positive outlook. Nearly two-thirds of the CSPs surveyed said they have been successful with their business to date, and they expect to grow that business by almost a third this year. Interestingly, while many intend to grow through better marketing, many others are planning to offer new enterprise-relevant initiatives and offerings, such as industry-specific clouds and virtual private data center services.

I am still open to contrary evidence and data, but anecdotes and stories will not convince me when reliable research data does not back them up. Private cloud is ramping up much faster than public cloud. This imbalance is growing, not shrinking. Predicted adoption rates have not been realized. Public cloud is failing to satisfy enterprise requirements.

All of which means, by the way, that the opportunity for CSPs has fantastic upside. The demand for cloud is clearly there, and enterprises are spending substantial budget for the benefits of cloud computing. For CSPs that provide public cloud offerings that address enterprise requirements for management and security, the cloud market is still wide open for the taking.

Investing in Private Cloud, Top Gun, and the New CA Process Automation 4.0 Release

CA Community — Tue, 15 May 2012 14:48:00 GMT

What do the movie Top Gun, surveys about why companies are investing in private clouds, and the new CA Process Automation 4.0 release all have in common?

All three insist on the need for speed!

If you have ever seen Top Gun, you will probably remember the scene where Tom Cruise's character Maverick says to his navigator, Goose, "I feel the need..." and then in unison they say, "the need for speed!"

And, if you read Tom Bittman's blog in February titled "Private Cloud and Hot Tubs," you'll recall his intriguing statistic that when attendees to the December 2011 Gartner Data Center Conference were asked, "What is your main driver in moving to private clouds?" 21% said "cost" and a whopping 59% said "agility".

And...CA Process Automation 4.0 with its new UI, its improved integration capabilities, its support for dynamic forms, and for a host of other reasons is really fast at getting enterprise grade automation into production and with less risk. And when I say, "really fast" I mean compare us with our competitors, because we are "really fast" at getting you time to value when it comes to designing and deploying enterprise grade processes.

Our customers have told us that speed is important, too. I talked with a customer a few months back who said CA Technologies delivered in days what our competitors were taking weeks to do. And, I will point out that our ability to manage risk seems several releases ahead of competitors.

So let's start with the new UI. The new UI makes process flows easier to author and edit and it makes them quicker to deploy. The new UI offers an advanced design environment, which, among other things, provides navigation support so you can zoom in on the activities (or steps) of a process you care about, without losing track of where you are in the overall process.

CA Technologies recognizes that the real value of IT Process Automation (ITPA) comes when you automate complete end-to-end IT processes. Because of this, we made sure that the new navigation support never lets you worry about missing the forest because you are too close to the trees, or having a hard time seeing the trees when you were trying to understand the scope of the forest.

Because we realize that IT Process Automation is becoming pervasive, we did something pretty cool to the architecture of the UI. We made it 100% browser-based and embeddable. This lets IT move beyond the legacy model of only letting a small subset of IT staff see the benefits of process automation. Now the actual UI of CA Process Automation can be embedded into other IT management tools or even an end user oriented tool such as a self-help portal - and we did it without losing the fine grain security features that have distinguished previous releases of CA Process Automation.

We're also excited about the new integration capabilities. They clearly add value because at the end of the day, if integration is hard and takes time, then that friction erodes the value of an IT orchestration tool. With the 4.0 release, we have improved the already strong integration capabilities that were part of the previous 3.1 release. For example, with 3.1 we supported SOAP-based Web services and with 4.0 we support RESTful Web services as well. In 3.1 it was easy to wrap your existing scripts into a custom operator so you could chain together scripts and use data to drive what scripts were executed when and with what parameters; now, with 4.0, we also support the ability to embed JAR files so you can use Java applications in much the same way.

It is also worth noting that while CA Process Automation is relatively inexpensive to maintain, we haven't rested on our laurels. With this release we have added a new operations dashboarding capability so operators can quickly visualize the status of their processes and then double click to obtain different views and more details.

Lastly, there is more out-of-the-box content than ever before to help IT staff jump start their process flow designs; the release also includes increased support for community development through Cloud Commons. For those of you unfamiliar with Cloud Commons it is a development community where self-organizing teams can come together in an open source model to build integrations or process flows that are important to them, as well as an online marketplace where companies can sell their proprietary solutions that run on CA Process Automation. I encourage you to visit and see what different community teams are developing as well as what products are available from CA Technologies and our partners.

There are many other capabilities added to CA Process Automation 4.0 and I encourage folks interested in learning more to check out the updated solution brief, ask your sales rep for information, and check out today's press release.

Is your private cloud "flat-lined"?

Mark Lukianchuk — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 13:21:00 GMT

I recently spoke with a CA Technologies partner and we both agreed that there seems to be too much focus on building out private clouds and not enough in actually filling them up. Why should anyone care?

First, the promise (and premise) of cloud computing is that an organization should be able to leverage a private cloud infrastructure as fully as possible, and through the magic of elasticity, burst out to public clouds as necessary. However, many organizations are still not comfortable with the idea of public cloud infrastructure, so everything remains in the private cloud. Therefore, the old adage of "buying big" applies just as it did with the traditional data center. As a result, a private cloud may have way too much capacity for day-to-day operations.

Second, many IT teams still can't seem to figure out what to put into a private cloud. In a previous blog entry I discussed the rationalization process, which should help determine what goes into a private cloud and what should remain in the traditional data center.

The combination of large capacity and low utilization end up with what I call a "flat-lined" private cloud - when you look at the utilization graphs and see they are very low (or zero). After a period of time of low utilization, the CIO tries to resuscitate the environment by forcibly moving applications in an urgent fashion to demonstrate value for money spent.

Assuming you haven't already procured the infrastructure, how can you avoid this?

Ideally, a good starting point is to better understand what your current applications and services are consuming in the traditional data center, as well as get an understanding of new products and services you may be launching in the short term. By "consumption" I mean everything from CPU cycles, memory, network bandwidth, storage, etc. Do this before you place the order for your hardware, but obviously you may have some target environment(s) in mind.

Once you have this data gathered and normalized, a capacity planning tool will be useful to assist in projecting private cloud capacity requirements, both today and based upon planned growth rates, and assuming similar levels of performance/user experience as the current state environment. This ideally should be an ongoing operational process, but as a starting point an initial "snapshot" will be useful to have in your back pocket when negotiating with vendors.

Assuming you've rationalized your portfolio, you'll know what applications and services to move to your private cloud, and if you are able to predict demand, you are going to be able to purchase the right amount of capacity (the "Goldilocks" amount - neither too much nor too little) from your vendors.

Net-net - with a little work up front, your private cloud will not end up clinically dead, but will be a healthy part of your organization.

10 Virtualization and Cloud Predictions for 2012

Andi Mann — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 17:25:00 GMT

Welcome to IT prediction season! Again, I am inspired to throw my exceedingly fallible hat into the ring with my predictions, specifically for virtualization and cloud. I seem to have had a decent run of predictions last year, but I claim more luck than credit. I still think predictions are a mug's game, and continue to eschew both the importance and reliability of predictions.

That said, here are my predictions for 2012:

1. Brands May Come and Go - But No Technology Will Die

Not only are we not living in a ‘post-PC' world, we are not even living in a ‘post-mainframe' world! Cloud will not kill data centers, virtual will not kill physical, tablets will not kill PCs, Mac will not kill Windows, Android will not kill iOS, streaming will not kill DVDs. The technology pie is growing, our choices are expanding, and almost every slice is getting bigger. So be prepared to manage an ever-increasing selection of technologies across public and private boundaries.

2. Hybrid IT Will Be ‘The Next Big Thing'

‘Hybrid cloud' was soooo 2011! In this new world of choices, business will expect hybrid IT: a combination of on-site and off-site; cloud and legacy; private and public; physical and virtual; social and secure; enterprise and consumer; desktop and server; mobile and static. Business will also expect IT to make them work together, whether IT owns the service or not. IT must act as a trusted advisor, as a service broker, and as quality assurance for this brave new world of complex Hybrid IT.

3. Service Quality Will Be IT's Responsibility Again

As hybrid IT proliferates, business owners will (again) realize they do not want to manage technology; they just want it to work. In 2012, end users will increasingly expect IT to take responsibility for service quality, regardless of who is buying, selling, or delivering that service. IT will need to eliminate the blind spots in hybrid IT, actively support an explosion of devices, deal with complex cross-boundary services, and find a way to deliver a 360-degree service assurance across all facets of end-user experience.

4. Public Cloud Adoption Will Slow

Given the results of this year's Longhaus research from Australia - an early adopter market and a bellwether for business technology - I suspect the rest of the world is in for a slowdown of public cloud adoption. Issues (perceived or real) with security, compliance, service quality, skills, staffing, complexity, and good old politics will all put the brakes on. Whether ‘cloud stall' will be as pronounced as ‘virtual stall' is unsure, but 2012 will see a marked slowdown in public cloud adoption.

5. Public Cloud ‘Gets' Security

Sad but true - many (most?) enterprise decision-makers still do not trust public cloud. In 2012, IT must do a better job of deploying and explaining cloud security - and I believe we will! In 2012, CIOs will see security as less of a barrier to cloud adoption as organizations adopt more and better cloud-oriented security solutions - including solutions designed for complex hybrid cloud services, as well as solutions that are delivered through the cloud with easily-consumed Security SaaS options.

6. Big Iron is Back - Part I

No, mainframe is still not dead. On the contrary, 2012 will see the rise of the mainframe as a *gasp* cloud platform. Massively scalable, hosting critical (and underutilized) ‘big data', capable of running complex cloud workloads on a variety of architectures (z/OS, Linux, UNIX, Windows), mainframe is really an obvious cloud platform. It will not replace commodity clouds, but large enterprises and governments especially will leverage their investments and bring big iron into their cloud mix.

7. Cloud Gets Heterogeneous

Not only will mainframe become part of the cloud landscape, but public cloud providers will also start to offer UNIX and maybe even other non-x86 platforms. I have recently seen this in action (CA did it internally years ago), and most large enterprises are heavily dependent on heterogeneous systems for their mission-critical applications. Despite the common myth that cloud == commodity servers, heterogeneous servers will start to become more available for large enterprise deployments.

8. Big Iron is Back - Part II

Big iron concepts of integrated compute, network, and storage are resurgent - but this is not your grandpa's mainframe. Deployment of integrated fabrics like Cisco UCS and VCE Vblock will accelerate rapidly in 2012 as IT changes the way it thinks about integrated infrastructure for virtualization and cloud - and realizes how amazing these integrated boxes are for diverse, dynamic, high-volume workloads like desktop virtualization, pop-up data centers, and cloudbursting.

9. ‘Grown-up' Cloud Service Management Comes To The Forefront

In 2011, the NIST Cloud Reference Architecture devoted a whole section to ‘Cloud Service Management', and IT started to talk about ‘grown-up' disciplines - planning, budgeting, performance, asset, inventory, service levels, audit, etc. In 2012, even ‘commodity' cloud vendors will finally take cloud management seriously, as enterprises and governments demand these disciplines - and smaller providers differentiate on service and security, not just price.

10. Virtualization Management Becomes Irrelevant

In January 2009 I predicted, "in 3-5 years ... niche [Virtual System Management] vendors will no longer survive, as virtualization becomes a core part of the enterprise compute fabric." Three years later this trend has definitely started, and will accelerate in 2012 as IT turns instead to hybrid IT management, recognizing that silos of standalone virtualization management is a costly and inefficient burden. Maybe 2012 is not the end of Virtualization Management, but it is going to be the start of the demise.

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So that is my punt on 2012. I have no idea whether they will come true, but they seem to make sense to me. Again, if you are reading this in December 2012, please feel free to e-mail me and let me know how I went. I won't be surprised either way. :)

This post was first published at VMblog.com.