Cloud Storm Chasers : virtualization, cloud

Getting to Market Faster, the Qualcomm Way

Robyn Herbert — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 18:40:00 GMT

As we often see, virtualization can be the stepping stone to cloud computing. And with virtualization, comes the opportunity for some true CAPEX savings. Not only do these savings help fund cloud computing initiatives, they also relieve some of the pressure to focus purely on cost-savings as the ultimate goal of the cloud. As I've said before, the main value of cloud computing is really around agility and time-to-market. And it's important to have realistic expectations when beginning the journey.

Over at Qualcomm, IT Senior Director Matthew Clark and his team recognized this from the onset:

Why is Qualcomm pursuing cloud computing?

"Qualcomm started virtualizing its infrastructure in 2002. We've already realized great savings in hardware costs from those efforts. That's why the decision to move to full-fledged cloud computing wasn't driven from an expectation of cost savings. We had already extracted those savings from virtualization. The move to cloud, instead, was because we knew that cloud computing would help us streamline our processes so we could get to market faster than the competition."

Now that Qualcomm is well underway with their cloud computing initiatives, they have been able to improve the agility of their business by significantly accelerating the delivery of their IT services.

"Now that we've implemented cloud computing, our application developers and our engineering teams can provision systems far more quickly. They don't have to call anybody or create a ticket. It's all done behind the scenes and it's more than four times faster than the manual processes we used to follow. We're able to reduce our development cycles by up to 60 days when you look at the time it would take to purchase, procure, and go through the approval cycles of getting hardware, and then finally install and configure it."

Watch this short video to learn more about Qualcomm and how the cloud helped them get to market faster than the competition. And visit the Cloud Luminaries site for more on their story and other organizations who are paving the way in cloud.

Challenges of Cloud Automation and Adoption

Keith Allen — Thu, 03 May 2012 13:09:00 GMT

One of the challenges with the private cloud and cloud automation is a definition and understanding of ‘what is' a private cloud and the scope of a cloud automation solution. This creates the ‘cloud hype' challenge, where everyone claims their solution is a cloud solution, creating business indecisiveness and delaying budget dollars for cloud implementations.

Cloud automation is a foundation for orchestration, but the two terms might be incorrectly interchanged - automation is processes programmed for repeatable tasks while orchestration joins dissimilar automated processes together using workflows. Customers are willing to wait for returns on their current virtualization investments before spending more on automation - even while many claim that automation is a top initiative for private cloud implementation.

Businesses already at an advanced level of maturity with virtualization don't need to be convinced of the benefits of either virtualization or private cloud. Conversely true, I've spoken with many businesses that admit they don't have a comprehensive cloud strategy, and while they consider it a top priority, it is mired in challenges:

Organizational Cloud IQ/Common Vision

Businesses considering cloud automation may struggle with the long-term vision for their cloud strategies. Most are convinced they want to expand their private cloud investments, but are unclear on how to proceed. Not having a vision leads to incremental investments (project-by-project), as opposed to large scale adoption of private clouds as a model for IT service delivery.

Common IT Service Delivery/Managed Service Delivery

So where do CIOs and CTOs go next with their virtualization and automation needs? While some early adopters have limited implementations of private clouds, many organizations are still in the formulation phase. Organizational thinking has evolved with the adoption of virtualization for common rapid change environments - such as simple development/testing, pre-production, and a desire to extend similar models to production -- forming the foundation of current private clouds/IaaS thinking.

Vendor Lock-in

While most organizations intend to avoid single vendor strategies, many are budgeting and implementing just that in the short term after initially dabbling with the complexities and additional OPEX of a multi-vendor strategy. Most organizations are currently committed to VMware as the hypervisor of choice for the time being as early cloud implementation projects drive adoption of private cloud within the organization.

Protecting and Maximizing Existing Investments

Loud and clear feedback from most companies is that rip and replace is not a choice they want their cloud vendors to present. Any offering, unless it offers very compelling reasons for a change in strategy or tools/solutions, must leverage the current investments in tools/software/solutions as well as the investments in people skills developed within the organization. It is therefore imperative that cloud automation decisions and investments present a path to build upon existing infrastructure.

Predictability of Implementations - The "let's try and see approach"

For businesses that are in the process of embarking on a new implementation of a private cloud, a key decision criterion for vendor and/or partner selection is predictability in terms of time and costs of implementation. Essentially, this means that businesses are looking for solutions and not willing to invest in a vendor strategy that involves ‘building it on site'.

Fast Time-to-Value

For businesses setting up new private cloud infrastructures, mainly related to self-service delivery of infrastructure and applications, the vendor selection process also includes a rapid and predictable implementation timeframe. Many companies that are cloud laggards (for any number of reasons) have compelling impetus to get an initial rollout of cloud on tight schedules.

While businesses continue to find ways to reduce costs and improve flexibility by adapting to virtualization strategies, holistic cloud automation solutions are required to fully realize the benefits of their cloud investments. As businesses sharpen their virtualization skillsets, they'll need to carefully rethink policies and procedures based on dynamic shifts happening with management, hosting, and infrastructures. Virtualization strategies developed using cloud automation will serve to maximize IT agility and protect the business, resulting in overall operational business efficiency.

Webcast: Tips for Managing Fabric-based Infrastructure

Christine Needles — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 13:16:00 GMT

Next week, Donna Scott, VP and Distinguished Analyst at lead analyst firm Gartner, and Stephen Elliot, VP of Product Management at CA Technologies, will be hosting a webcast to share recommendations for managing a fabric-based infrastructure. The complimentary hour-long session takes place on Thursday, May 3rd at 11 am EDT; you can register here.

The consumerization of IT, standardized hardware, cloud computing, virtualization and the global economic slowdown have all accelerated the adoption of converged fabrics. This transformation is driven by technologies, events and trends and supports a rising set of business outcomes among enterprises and service providers.

Click here to register!

Virtual business service optimisation is the holy grail of the cloud

Chris Rae — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 20:56:00 GMT

The adoption of cloud computing in whatever form has long promised to bring small, medium and large businesses benefits beyond their wildest dreams: lower costs, increased agility, capacity, etc. Those of us who've been in the industry for any length of time, knew enough to understand that this wouldn't be an overnight miracle and that cloud itself, just like many other ‘saviour' technologies, would have its own issues that would need to be ironed out - before mass adoption and deliverance of the hotly anticipated benefits.

If a business is looking at consuming services from the cloud rather than from its own data centre, they would need to define the business services, and the resources to support that service and move the service to the cloud provider of choice. This is what we call a virtualised business service, a containerised business service abstracted from the supporting cloud infrastructure.

However containerizing just the virtual business service itself is not enough; along with the business service there would be policies and procedures for the correct security, compliance and governance rules to be applied. All of this makes portability of the service itself very difficult. The entire virtual business service needs to be containerized itself, something CA Technologies calls virtual business service optimisation. This process would allow businesses to move business services around and consume them from different cloud providers - private, public or hybrid more easily without vendor lock in, compliance, security or governance issues arising. There may be other drivers for optimizing the virtual business service such as performance issues, resilience issues, and sound commercial reasons (for example, if one provider is simply more expensive than an alternative supplier).

Let's look at a really common scenario: the launching of a website, where the business service itself is being delivered from a public IaaS provider. If a business were to decide that the governance provided by that provider wasn't robust enough, they may wish to move that business service by defining it and moving it where they wish.

Whilst data security in the cloud has been and still is to some extent a concern for many IT decision makers, vendor lock-in has become one of the key barriers to cloud adoption. Portability is a key issue for businesses today, regardless of environment and infrastructure - agility is key to staying competitive and if that is compromised, the results could be catastrophic to the business. The true value and idea behind a virtual business service and optimizing it is that a business need not worry about the infrastructure. Once a business service policy is defined, it will be automated and then the virtual business service will move between clouds as appropriate according to the policy. This is policy-based virtual business service optimization, and it is one of the key ingredients that will help companies achieve the many benefits cloud computing has to offer.

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.