Published: May 24 2011, 01:40 PM | 2 Comment(s)
by Don Ferguson

Solving the problem of mapping and managing an IT Cloud Service  is similar to an supply chain management problem applied to IT resources as opposed to physical manufacturing. This model requires a completely new type of software system – cloud service optimizer (CSO), which is analogous to enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems for manufacturing. The CSO adds functions, specifically design time and execution time optimization, typically not part of an ERP system.

As shown in Figure 1 below, a CSO High Level Architecture introduces the five core systems in a Cloud Service Optimizer:

• Shared Information, which has two components: 1) A logical, federated database of IT services, resources, systems extended to include information about cloud services. 2) A federated knowledge management and collaboration system for public and private communities defining IT cloud services, consuming cloud services and providing cloud services.
• Insight discovers, analyzes, correlates, reconciles and normalizes information about IT services, resources, applications, transactions and policies. Insight extends traditional Monitor—Analyze with: 1) discovered and analyzed information about cloud services. 2) service level contracts between a provider a service/function and the IT service that embeds it in the supply chain.
• Compose provides support for modeling new or modified IT cloud service supply chains, including service level contracts.
• Optimize is a set of engines and disciplines for computing optimal realizations of the supply chain. Optimization occurs for deploying new or modified supply chains as well as dynamic optimization of deployed and executing supply chains.
• Orchestrate implements automation processes and rules to provision and modify a supply chain at the direction of optimization.

Figure 1: CSO High Level Architecture
Subsequent blog entries will describe each of these systems and CA Technologies product realization. A short, partial preview of products realizing the vision is:

1. Shared Information: Catalyst, Unified Service Model, CA Open Space
2. Insight: CA NetQoS, CA Oblicore Guarantee, CA Spectrum Service Assurance, CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager.
3. Optimize: CA Virtual Automation, CA 3Tera AppLogic and the workload automation/optimization products have basic optimization functions. 
4. Compose: AppLogic, service modeling in Spectrum Service Assurance and CA CMDB.
5. Orchestrate: Spectrum Automation Manager, CA Identity Manager.
Catalyst, blueprints and various prebuilt content (e.g. CMDB schema, ITPAM processing, Service Catalog Entries) integrate and simplify the technology to produce customizable solution as opposed to a collection of products.
 

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Published: May 11 2011, 02:02 PM | no comments
by Don Ferguson

Cloud computing for business applications applies the supply chain management model to composite IT service and applications, transforming from vertically integrated IT to an a cloud spanning application that is analogous to a traditional supply chain. The enterprise maps the IT service’s resource requirements to various cloud service providers, which may include: (see figure 1 below)

• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): Complete, cloud-delivered applications.
• Business-Service-as-a-Service (BSaaS): Webcallable APIs for performing specific business operations, such as FedEx APIs for shipping or Dun & Bradstreet APIs for credit ratings (see www.programmableweb.com for examples).
• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): Online application—enablement tools and runtimes for providing application components, e.g. Force.com, RedHat’s JBoss hosted Drupal, delivered via PaaS. An extremely important observation is that using PaaS typically involves little or no programming. Exploiting PaaS is primarily customizing the PaaS functions through customizing data models, policies, etc. 
• Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS): Low-level, usually hardware resources, for running the applications and software stack that the consumer supplies. Amazon EC2 is an example.           
   

Cloud computing currently focuses on IaaS and SaaS, but this will evolve over time to greater exploitation of PaaS and BSaaS. A platform or hardware server’s primary purpose is to support elements of a composite application. Almost all applications will exploit SaaS, but also need to integrate the SaaS application into a larger, business solution-specific composite application. The need for integration and customization will drive the exploitation of PaaS and BSaaS.

The motivations for cloud services evolving to the new model are:

• Cloud service providers specializing in:
• Surfacing business APIs through Web services and REST/HTTP RPC to complement web interfaces to the provider’s functions. For example, an enterprise can directly integrate FedEx capabilities into its applications and workflows, replacing manual interaction with the Web UI. This delivers greater efficiency and agility than implementing the corresponding function using development tools and platforms. The programmable web is simple the SOA assembly and choreography concepts applied to the cloud.
• Replacing low-level IaaS with higher value, integrated platforms (portal, business process management, etc. for executing elements of applications. This allows platform vendors to offer their products’ value to ride the “cloud computing wave” and the benefits of SaaS. Platforms optimized for application requirements reduce complexity of deploying an application relative to IaaS. Higher value allows a cloud provider to have higher margins.
• Enterprise selecting, deploying and managing the composite application by:
• Selecting the ideal provider for the various sub-elements of the larger application (Figure 2: Composite Application).
• Deploying the composite application into integration and application platforms running in the cloud.
• Managing and securing the cloud spanning application via infrastructure monitoring/management via SaaS, SaaS-enabled security systems (e.g. OpenID providers), etc.
  
  

An application/IT service following this model is an IT Cloud Service and cloud spanning application. The approach vastly reduces the cost and complexity by eliminating custom development of functional modules, acquiring and installing enabling software and hardware and exploiting greater cost and efficiency that cloud service providers can deliver.

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Published: May 09 2011, 11:10 AM | 1 Comment(s)
by Don Ferguson

I am writing a paper for an external conference and journal that defines the requirements and technology for effectively managing cloud-enabled/spanning applications. I wanted to share my observations of how businesses can fully exploit the benefits of cloud computing and gain the associated improvements in business performance while achieving sustainable competitive advantage.

This entry—the first of three on this topic—explains the role of composite applications in cloud computing. The second entry will cover the importance of providing and consuming cloud services to optimize composite applications and to achieve business agility through cloud spanning applications. The third will discuss a new type of software system for mapping and managing a cloud service.

Any non-trivial business application is a composite application (Figure 1). For example, a J2EE online ordering application might include plain-old-Java-objects (POJOs) implementing business logic, database stored procedures, portlets for the web UI, business rules to compute pricing and discounts, and a set of BPEL workflows for business processes (order processing, new product definition, etc). Slightly more complex composite applications typically include legacy applications (e.g. mainframe COBOL programs) and multiple technologies (e.g. ASP .NET, J2EE, CGI in C, PHP). Business transactions/end-to-end requests flows through the application components, for example, submit shopping cart.

Figure 1: Composite Application (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb220803.aspx)

A composite application requires a composite IT system (Figure 2: Composite IT System/IT Supply Chain). A composite IT system is an interconnected set of hardware and software resources that run and implement the composite application. The composite IT system may include:

• Middleware:
• Application servers: Tomcat, WebSphere, SAP NetWeaver, Microsoft Internet Information Services, JBoss, etc.
• Portal/Collaboration Servers: Liferay, Drupal, etc.
• Message Queuing, Event and Enterprise Service Buses: WebSphere/MQ, ActiveMQ, etc.
• Database Servers: Oracle, MySQL, etc.
• Operating Systems (e.g. Linux, Windows) and infrastructure software
  (e.g. Hypervisors, server daemons, Linux, Windows Server.)
• Physical Hardware, including network attached storage (NAS), storage area networks (SAN), router, rack mounted/blade server farms, etc.

 
Figure 2: Composite IT System/IT Supply Chain

The composite application and supporting composite IT system implement an IT service. The IT service partially realizes a business service, which includes non-IT resources (physical documents, trucks, branches, etc, people and non-automated processes and policies.

The current approach to delivering IT services deploys virtually all of the hardware and software resources “in the data center”—either run by the enterprise or provided by a hosting/outsourcing company. This approach to IT is similar to vertically integrated manufacturing with all resources (factories, warehouses, manufacturing devices, etc.) inside the enterprise, and often in a small number of large factories.

Cloud computing for business applications optimizes applications and agility for new applications by mapping application and system elements to cloud service providers, producing a cloud-spanning application. The next blog entry will discuss the concept in more detail.

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Published: April 01 2011, 09:56 AM | 3 Comment(s)
by Don Ferguson

I recently participated in a “fireside chat” on Big Data at Structure Big Data 2011. Gillian Munson, managing director at Allen & Co., moderated the chat. I found that Gillian’s insights and questions stimulated new ideas and insights. I want to share three major observations.

Some examples of Big Data from Wikipedia are “… meteorology, genomics, biological research, Internet search, finance and business informatics. Data sets also grow in size because they are increasingly being gathered by ubiquitous information-sensing mobile devices, software logs, cameras, microphones, RFID readers, wireless sensor networks ...” There is an annual conference devoted to research in the field – International Conference on Very Large Data Bases. 

Figure 1: MapReduce

MapReduce and Hadoop are fundamental technologies for processing big data. Other examples are HBase, Cassandra and Hypertable. These technologies demonstrate why Big Data is a killer application for cloud computing.  Concepts to keep in mind are:

1. Elastic Computing: The processing of Big Data is highly-parallelizable and can therefore exploit large numbers of commodity machines.  Also, the resource requirements for this processing vary greatly between computations runs, and processing is not continuous. So there are big surges and quiet intervals that lend themselves to the use of “elastic” resources.
2. Standards:  De facto standardization on Hadoop/MapReduce/etc. means that the processing of Big Data lends itself to   platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings.  PaaS solutions such as Amazon Elastic MapReduce make it easier to s exploit cloud computing to process Big Data. In addition, PaaS is much simpler than manually configuring virtual machines and software tools in an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) environment.
3. Public Clouds: The cost and complexity of the kind of massive private cloud necessary for processing Big Data are prohibitive for most enterprises.  This makes public clouds much more attractive for this purpose.  Also, enterprise customers should not have major security concerns when it comes to processing Big Data in a public cloud, because the massive scale of the data provides “security through obscurity.”  There are also techniques for obfuscating or subsetting the data but still producing meaningful results.

Increased Emphasis on IT Management Software  

Figure 2: Cloud Spaning Application

To work with Big Data, enterprises have historically had to employ a diverse set of tools--including development tools, application platforms, database servers, IT management software, and security software MapReduce and Hadoop replace most of these tools with simple, open source applications. The only thing they don’t replace are security and IT management. Also, as the processing of Big Data gets driven to PaaS and the programmable web-- e.g. www.programmableweb.com and Google’s PubSubHubbub protocols--- enterprises will focus more on: 

1) finding cloud services,
2) configuring service policies and providing data, and
3) managing resources across the cloud.

This further diminishes the role of application development tools and platforms.  This greater emphasis on management and security increases the value to customers of CA Technologies.

What Big Data Will CA Technologies Process?

CA Technologies is itself an enterprise that, like other large enterprises, has its own Big Data that it has to process. CA Technologies IT department  and business systems will exploit Big Data like any other enterprise. The more interesting question is,  “What types of Big Data will CA Technologies products process?”

CA Labs has done research that offers insight into possible product functions that will entail the processing of Big Data. Examples include:

1. Analyzing email, instant messaging logs, wikis and web sites, etc. to extract information about which people know what about IT. This enables the creation of a social network of people that can help each other solve various types of IT problems. Combined with CA Open Space and our service management products, these social networks will make both IT more productive and improve services to end users.

2. IT systems generate a huge number of alerts and log messages. Improved analysis of these logs and alerts can enable better discovery of root-cause problems, availability patterns, performance trends, etc. This analysis will become extremely valuable as we move to IT management via SaaS since 1). the data will already be in the SaaS environment, and 2.) analysis can be performed across large numbers of customers in a multi-tenant environment.

3. Security logs provide a rich source of information for identifying potential insider threats and better assigning security roles to staff.

All of these points underscore the fact that Big Data is an important driver for the rapidly evolving cloud market—and that CA Technologies is very well-positioned to deliver value to customers who make the move to processing Big Data in the cloud.

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Published: March 25 2011, 12:24 PM | 1 Comment(s)
by Don Ferguson

Platform and virtualization providers like VMware are providing increasingly more management and security capabilities. Other examples include Microsoft System Center Operations Manager's support for Hyper-V and Cisco UCS Manager. CA Technologies partners with VMware, Cisco, Microsoft and other virtual infrastructure providers, and we integrate with their management products. Our products provide significant value that complements the vendors' products.

The first benefit is obvious - cross-platform, multi-vendor environments. Many enterprise customers will have a mix of virtualization technology - Cisco UCS, Linux in mainframe virtual environments, Amazon EC2, etc. A CA Technologies core capability is managing, automating and securing heterogeneous environments. The capability also includes supporting a hybrid environment of physical and virtual infrastructure.

There are three additional, extremely significant capabilities our products provide relative to platform and infrastructure vendors' products. These are managing, automating and securing:

• 1. Application software inside the virtual infrastructure.
• 2. Composite IT systems that span multiple virtual systems, even if the systems use the same virtualization technology.
• 3. End-to-end transactions that flow through composite virtual systems.

Application awareness is the foundation for the value. Figure 1 is an overview of the Virtual Computing Environment's (VCE) representation of a virtual infrastructure package. VCE provides tremendous value and is a major advancement in virtualizations. In the figure, "Applications" look like frosting on a cake. There are two issues with the figures in this representation:

• 1. The complexity of the application layer is as great--or greater--than the complexity of the underlying hardware, operating system and hypervisor (Figure 2).
• 2. The value of the infrastructure comes from the applications. Enterprises deploy infrastructure to run applications.

There are hard problems in managing virtual environments beyond managing virtual images on a hardware grid. An important problem is managing and securing what is inside the virtual machines. Much of the value of management products derives from managing the applications inside the virtual machines to meet business objectives.

CA Technologies has a wealth of solutions and expertise for managing various software configurations/dependencies, problem resolution, performance management and automation and security associated with the delivery of business applications and services. Managing the software inside virtual machines is similar to managing software configurations on physical machines.

Examples of CA Technologies ability to manage the software stack are:

• 1. A library of agents and probes for monitoring application servers, database systems and packaged applications.
• 2. Application configuration management blueprints for discovering software configuration and dependencies, and managing compliance and change.
• 3. Security products supporting provisioning identity and managing access control for different types of software.

Building on application aware management and security is support for composite systems. Any non-trivial application is a composite application. A composite application requires a composite IT system. This is also true in virtual computing environments. Any non-trivial application is a set of interconnected, interdependent virtual systems (Figure 3). A significant issue with any environment is the behavior of the composite. CA Technologies has excellent technology for discovery, monitoring, problem/performance, automation, configuration and security management of composite IT systems. This technology and expertise applies directly to non-trivial composite IT environments. Examples include:

• 1. CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager's ability to analyze faults and events and determine the impact on composite IT systems implementing business services (applications).
• 2. CA Identity Manager's ability to implement automation workflows for provisioning identities into multiple security registries that the systems in the composite environment use.
• 3. CA Access Control's ability to segment privileged user capabilities across the virtualized environment and the hypervisors.
• 4. CA CMDB's ability to represent composite IT system representing services, and control and manage change.
• 5. CA Automation Suite for Data Centers' ability to automate the complex, multi-step workflow associated with the provisioning and reconfiguring the software in a composite system.
• 6. CA 3Tera AppLogic's functions for assembling composite IT systems and producing reusable templates. A previous blog entry explains the concepts. A common misperception is that AppLogic competes with VCE, UCS, etc. In fact, our strategy is to complement the platforms' management products

These capabilities become increasingly valuable when the composite IT system spans:

• 1. Multiple hypervisor platforms (VMware, Hyper-V, zLinux, etc.), network virtualization and storage virtualization.
• 2. A combination of physical and virtual systems.
• 3. Both on-premise and external cloud infrastructure. A simple example is an on-premise, multi-VM application that interacts with an application on Force.com.

Finally, applications exist to implement transactions or end-to-end operations. Examples include "account open," "submit shopping cart," and "change credit card." CA Technologies security and assurance products provide capabilities for managing these end-to-end transactions. Examples include:

• 1. The ability of CA Application Performance Management and CA NetQoS to track end-to-end transaction performance and impact of specific systems on performance.
• 2. CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager's ability to correlate and understand faults to determine the root cause of transaction errors.
• 3. CA Enterprise Log Manager's ability to collect access control events and analyze compliance.

These examples are just a partial list of the capabilities that CA Technologies provides IT organizations that need to resource-efficiently optimize service levels in heterogeneous virtualized computing environments. It is very challenging to get past the mere maintenance of particular infrastructure elements and actually manage the end-to-end delivery of composite applications. Our capabilities complement the offerings of VMware, VCE and other virtualization vendors.

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