GlassHouse--CIO`s Guide to Cloud Computing

The CIO’s Guide To Cloud Computing

1

GlassHouse Technologies White paper

Preparing Your Enterprise for IT-Managed Service Utilities Jason Goodman is an

independent consultant with over 15 years experience in networking, server, storage, and virtualization software, including: enterprise solution design, product and IP management, strategic marketing, and communications. He has worked with technology vendors such as Microsoft, PolyServe/HP, and Isilon, among others.

There’s been a thunderstorm of white noise surrounding cloud computing this year. Vendors, pundits, and analysts took center stage at industry events and in the news; everyone seems to have an opinion and definition on cloud computing. And with all the chatter came mixed messages, conflicting advice and, well, cloudiness. There is good news: it’s time to filter out the hype and confusion. While still evolving, cloud computing is here to stay. CIOs need to be ready. The fundamental promise of cloud is transformational: shifting from ad hoc, capital‐intensive, IT delivery methods to agile, pay‐per‐use service utilities, delivered over the network. A few forward‐thinking enterprises have been working on internal clouds. In the process of consolidating data centers, reducing servers and storage n‐fold, and squeezing every dollar out of purchased IT infrastructure, these companies have developed sophisticated cost analysis, tracking, and service delivery and support techniques. In effect, becoming less like traditional IT and more like service providers. But for most CIOs, cloud computing is relatively amorphous. For practical consideration, cloud needs to be addressed in the context of immediate issues and future opportunities for enterprise IT. One key challenge for IT executives is developing an enterprise‐wide strategy for cloud computing that’s proactive and drives the business. Creating and communicating this plan requires IT leadership, knowledge, and guidance around cloud initiatives. This paper reviews these challenges and benefits in five main sections:

• Overview on cloud computing: from GlassHouse’s perspective

• Cloud computing trends: analysis, delivery and deployment models

• Enterprise cloud readiness: guidelines for planning and evaluating enterprise cloud solutions, starting with private clouds—and internal cost assessments

• Service provider transformation: requirements and goals shifting from traditional IT to a service utility, like a service provider

• Cloud Infrastructure Services: an introduction to GlassHouse’s service offerings to help you get there

© Copyright 2009 GlassHouse Technologies, Inc. All rights reserved.

Cloud Computing Overview GlassHouse defines cloud computing as an IT service utility that gives IT the ability to deliver agile services, at the right cost and the right service level. The network (public or private) provides an ideal delivery medium for IT service utilities. The deployment model (internal, external, or some combination) follows the business: your applications, data sets, security policies and customers. In general, cloud services should provide the following key characteristics:

• Shared or ‘virtual dedicated’ computing infrastructures to deliver utility computing services

• On‐demand, fluid scalability of all computing resources—server, network, and storage

• Pay‐as‐you‐go cost models based on actual usage time of consumed resources

• Automated, self‐provisioning of services and resources, through a self‐service portal

• Ubiquitous network access: the service can be acquired over the network

• Location‐independence: the service can be acquired and accessed locally or remotely, independent of geography

• Integrated monitoring, metering, reporting, billing and chargeback systems

• Predictable cost assessment and management models

From an IT service delivery perspective, internal clouds leverage existing investments to provide demand forecasting, cost transparency, and automation. Maximizing the use of your existing assets helps reduce costs and improve efficiency. With true demand forecasting and planning capabilities, you can evolve from a just‐in‐case scenario to a just‐enough provisioning system for real‐time infrastructure allocation. Cost transparency allows you to develop meaningful business‐based metrics to make smarter, informed decisions for all aspects of your infrastructure—from facilities to staff. In addition, cost transparency provides the information to enable you to evaluate your capital versus operational costs and margins, and report on them. Finally, the automation aspect of an internal cloud provides a key building block for shifting from an up‐front capital to a modular, pay‐as‐you‐go operations model.

2© Copyright 2009 GlassHouse Technologies, Inc. All rights reserved.

Cloud Computing Trends There is significant innovation happening today in cloud computing and every CIO and their executive staff should understand the benefits and drawbacks of various trends, models, offerings—and their potential impact to the business. GlassHouse believes that decisions made today will impact an organization immediately, and influence your roadmap over the next two to five years. In a recent GlassHouse survey of enterprise IT executives, about 60‐percent of executives plan on implementing cloud initiatives within the year; the other 40‐percent have no plans yet. If your company is in the early stages of investigating cloud computing, you are not alone: nearly 60‐percent of all executives said they had not yet appointed an owner for cloud computing initiatives. Wherever you are in the planning phase, 2010 will be a major year for cloud computing. Gartner estimates the current market in 2009 for cloud services to be nearly $50 billion, and predicts this will grow to $150 billion in 2013.1 This represents an entire spectrum of cloud computing providers and ecosystem solutions. IT leaders can begin assessing and evaluating cloud computing trends by understanding:

• Potential benefits and applicability to the organization

• Delivery models to compare provider offerings

• Deployment models in support of your organization’s public and private clouds

Prospective Organization Profiles What types of companies will benefit from cloud computing? The short answer is that companies of all sizes and profiles will benefit, but there are a few key traits of firms that most benefit. These include but are not limited to:

• Innovative firms investing in research and development that need to remain focused on business and streamline IT in support of business objectives

• Businesses with rapidly expanding (or contracting) capacity requirements, requiring on‐demand, highly scalable capacity. Growth could be seasonal or punctuated by unpredictable spikes in usage

• Businesses needing to reduce capital expenses and the practices of funding over‐provisioned hardware resources, on a per‐project basis

• Businesses familiar with or requiring Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

• Any businesses needing to develop accurate demand‐forecasting capabilities

o Evolving from “just‐in‐case” to a “just enough” provisioning approach

o Ending the practice of over‐provisioning resources

1 Source: Gartner Group. Forecast: Sizing the Cloud; Understanding the Opportunities in Cloud Services. 18 March, 2009. Pg 1.


Delivery Models Cloud computing presents numerous technologies, terminologies, methodologies, issues, and deployment models. There are three main categories of offerings: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS).

Infrastructure as a Service Examples include many public cloud services such as Amazon EC2 and various service providers (Rackspace, Savvis, Go Daddy, for example) shifting from pure‐play co‐location and hosting to “virtual dedicated” and to shared, multi‐tenant cloud services. About 42‐percent of IT executives surveyed by GlassHouse consider Infrastructure as a Service as the cornerstone of their cloud computing strategy.

Platform as a Service Major platform vendors (VMware, Microsoft, Google Apps, Force.com) are now calling their products cloud platforms (or Platform as a Service). Any cloud‐enabled application development platform—often built on Web Services—can be thought of as PaaS. This is an amorphous category with many variations among vendor solutions.

Software as a Service Salesforce.com’s success has popularized SaaS (or Software as a Service) as an alterative to dedicated large chunks of IT infrastructure to customer applications. SaaS can be thought of as an application or service delivered directly as a service over the network, usually the internet or intranet.

Deployment models Deployment models are used to describe privacy (public and private), location, and ownership (internal, external, and hybrid).

Private vs. Public Clouds A central decision behind deploying cloud computing is the level of privacy required—and the profile of users serviced by the cloud.

• Private cloud: a private cloud is exposed only to IT users within an organization. A private cloud is a secure cloud and associated set of security services (authentication, administration, identity management) available to a specified user‐base

• Public cloud: a public cloud can mean many things. It could be an internal public area or collaboration zone (like an extranet) where some aspect of the internal network could be exposed to users outside the organization. The term can also refer to providers offering shared access to shared infrastructure resources, across a public network


Internal Clouds Among IT executives surveyed by GlassHouse, 72‐percent consider internal clouds their highest priority or first cloud computing initiative. An internal cloud is an inward‐facing IT service utility, managed locally by IT, designed to streamline hardware and software infrastructure operations and management. Internal clouds may be geared around a specific workload or service. The fundamental premise is that they are private, managed locally, and usually owned by the IT organization. While internal clouds are typically managed by IT, some innovative service providers such as Surgient are beginning to offer on‐premise, managed private clouds.

External Clouds An external cloud is deployed and managed on remote IT infrastructure, either directly by IT or a 3rd‐party vendor. External clouds come in various forms. Large, shared, multi‐tenant clouds such as Amazon and Google provide one example of a public external cloud. In this case, the service provider provides all resources—hardware, software, and in some cases management automation—remotely. For companies with minimal regulation, compliance, and security requirements, this type of external cloud offers no‐to‐low up‐front costs, true pay‐as‐you‐go usage models, and fluid scalability of resources. Some service providers (RackSpace and Savvis, for example) offer virtual dedicated, remotely hosted private clouds, where all computing hardware can be assigned to an individual customer—but is charged for on a monthly or per‐use basis. For customers with higher security, performance, or scalability requirements, this may be an option.


Hybrid (Federated) Cloud “Cloud readiness requires

viewing current offerings through the lens of a service provider. Cloud vendors offer services with certain defined commitments and associated costs for delivery. If you cannot express existing service capabilities in the same manner, how can a meaningful build vs. buy cost comparison be done?” ‐‐ Jim Damoulakis, CTO of GlassHouse

A combination of internal and external models is known as a hybrid or federated cloud. Platform vendors like VMware and Microsoft position hybrid or federated clouds as the building blocks for cloud computing, where the core evolution of IT functions gradually shifts from purely internal IT services to incorporating aspects of external or public clouds. As IT services evolve, aspects of an internal cloud could potentially shift or be outsourced to remote sites via VPNs and/or other techniques. Scenarios where hybrid clouds could be used today include but are not limited to: virtual labs for test, development, and staging; line‐of‐business application migration or hosting; and disaster recovery (DR), among others. Hybrid clouds will likely grow in popularity among medium‐ to large‐size IT organizations as more customers deploy virtualization technology on platforms such as VMware vCloud, Microsoft Azure, and Citrix Cloud Center (C3).

Enterprise Cloud Readiness While there’s still controversy about cloud computing and its applicability in the enterprise, the good news is that many IT departments have the foundation in place to begin assessing where cloud computing fits, today. Modern servers, storage, networks, and virtualization can often be leveraged in the design of internal private clouds. However, many IT departments do not yet have the expertise or methodologies in place to jumpstart cloud computing initiatives. Ultimately, each company must evaluate the business and technical impact of cloud computing on the organization. Enterprise cloud readiness defines the process an organization takes to get ready for cloud computing. The end goal may be transformational (shifting to pay‐per‐use services) but the means to obtain or integrate cloud services requires a framework and methodology for gathering and managing detailed cost information in support of services.

GlassHouse in the Clouds Many IT organization do not have the time, resources, or knowledge to assess, build, and deploy cloud strategies and services—much less analyze, plan, and integrate cloud services with existing IT infrastructure. GlassHouse offers a set of Cloud Infrastructure Services designed specifically for IT customers needing to:

• Determine the impact and opportunity to leverage cloud‐based services

• Develop an internal cloud IT services delivery capability

• Investigate the appropriateness and applicability of external service providers

• Optionally build and extend internal (often private) “hybrid” clouds to utilize federated, external resources, as aligned with business requirements.

What separates GlassHouse from other IT consulting groups? GlassHouse provides:

• An objective vendor‐independent approach to helping your IT organization define and execute the best cloud strategy for your environment, leveraging multi‐vendor solutions already deployed on‐premise

• Proven methodologies and expertise in cost analysis, monitoring, and metering to provide visibility and control for global IT enterprises

• IT transformation services to drive high‐performance and agility through cloud computing—reducing costs, improving efficiency, and managing service levels effectively.


Cost Transparency

“In the long run, an IT organization will have to function as a service provider. This is normally a major shift in IT governance, changing a significant number of policies, processes, and technologies within the organization.” ‐‐Rob Zylowski, Services Director, GlassHouse

Cost transparency provides the foundation for tracking costs and showing business value. To assess the capital and operational savings, companies need to gain visibility into their current cost structure—to ultimately compare against any new service offering, in‐house or externally procured. Cost transparency provides the basis for developing granular metrics around cost of capital, cost of operations, and profit margin. These costs include but may not be limited to:

• Hardware Infrastructure: networks, servers, storage, and components

• Software Infrastructure: software and application licenses, tools, and utilities, etc

• Operations Infrastructure: staff and team required to develop, test, deploy, operate, and support services

• Facilities Infrastructure: floor space, power and cooling, etc Companies may not need to immediately start charging directly for services, but IT can provide significant cost transparency—and hence chargeback—back to management and the user community. The costs should be associated with defined services and service levels so that clients and customers understand what they are getting and where the costs come from. As your organization matures, companies can refine and adapt services to internal clients. The reality is, IT may not have the time, resources, or knowledge to assess, build, and deploy internal cloud strategies and services—much less analyze, plan, and integrate new services with current IT infrastructure functions. GlassHouse provides a Cloud Impact Analysis, described later in the paper, which provides this framework tailored to your business.

Application and Data Portability A central tenant of the external and hybrid deployment models is application portability. Files (usually virtual machines, databases, or user data files) must be replicated in bulk, or partially, as changes are made in one location. This poses challenges for proprietary external clouds (and virtualization formats) such as Amazon and Google. Once an application is in a proprietary format, contains large amounts of data and is located in a remote data center, it will not easily be replicated across a WAN without significant cost. This will require you to assess both storage replicatechnologies to replace or compliment FTP and HTstandard virtualization software to maximize data

Security and Compliance Shifting from a dedicated to a shared hosting infraexternally—carries security implications. Each depchallenges and consequences. Each cloud provider

© Copyright 2009 GlassHouse Technologies, Inc. All rights reserved.

tion and new file transfer (import/export) TP, as well as ways to leverage industry‐ portability.

structure model—internally or loyment model poses different warrants deeper scrutiny, possibly

7

through security or accounting audits, to assess vulnerabilities. Fundamentally, the deployment model should align with your security and business goals. Business unit customers with high security and compliance requirements may require dedicating virtual private clouds. These are islands of hardware, networks, and software instances dedicated to a business unit and locked in a physical jail or cage. Legal departments, financial services companies, health care organizations and other highly confidential information may require these higher levels of security.

IT Transformation: Cloud Service Delivery While there is much focus on the public cloud, where the actual delivery of a cloud service is the responsibility of a service provider, many organizations are of a sufficient scale that they will prefer to build and offer internally‐owned cloud services first—often as a private cloud within the organization. The deployment and management of a private cloud also demands that IT adopt a similar mentality to a public cloud provider. IT transformation capabilities required include:

• Specific service offerings defined and made available in a Service Catalogue to advertise and track SLAs and various Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

• Co‐terminus service level agreements (SLAs) to guarantee various service levels.

• Demand‐forecasting in support of real‐time or rapid provisioning.

• Billing and chargeback automation.

The end‐product of cloud computing within an enterprise IT organization is the combination of actual services offered, guaranteed, operated, supported, and billed as well as the users’ ability to easily consume and pay for the services. Cloud Service Provider (Sample Functions) The enterprise cloud service provider must be able to perform the following functions:

• Provide a Service Catalogue of standard services and their units of consumption. The Service Catalogue provides a list and definition of services offered

• Provide stable reliable services with consistent service levels

• Report on service levels and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

• Provide the ability for customers to provision and self‐manage services

• Ensure that sufficient capacity is available to meet needs and accommodate usage spikes (or dips) in demand

• Provide non‐disruptive, rapid scalability and provisioning of additional infrastructure, as required

• Provide accurate reporting and usage tracking of consumed resources for billing and chargeback purposes


• Develop metrics such as cost‐per‐unit for various cloud services

• Ensure appropriate levels of security are maintained for all services

• Have process or reporting systems to demonstrate cost transparency information—i.e., cost of services obtained by clients

Cloud Service Consumer (Sample Functions) An enterprise cloud service customer (consumer) must be able to:

• Understand the services being offered and how they align to end‐users’ business requirements

• Manage request and approval processes for additional resources to control consumption

• Ensure maximum service utilization; meaning, provisioned services are fully utilized, and idle resources are released in a timely manner back to IT to avoid unnecessary charges

• Understand resource owners and billing so that cloud service costs can be charged back to individual business consumers or business units

• Understand if internal or outsourced services are providing appropriate levels of service and the most cost effective solution to the business

Service Level Agreements The end‐product to customers usually requires an SLA. SLAs can be written to support variable or fixed service levels around capabilities such as performance, availability, data integrity, and data recovery. For internal clouds, an IT organization may or may not have complete control over its SLAs, depending on the nature of the business. For SLAs to be enforced, a granular set of services and process will likely need to be tracked and clearly defined.

Automation Many service providers (from carriers to ISPs to external cloud providers) supporting large numbers of users, are likely to have rich automation processes in place. These processes are typically designed for automated provisioning, management, reporting, operations support, billing, and charge back. If your organization is not already employing automation, you should consider applying some of the techniques and methodologies of the service providers to your IT operations.


Conclusion While there has been much hype around cloud computing, it is critical for CIOs of competitive enterprises to understand and begin planning for internal cloud services. IT executives must own and drive enterprise‐wide cloud computing strategies. The cornerstone of an enterprise cloud computing strategy is based on obtaining accurate information and guidance, especially for internal cloud readiness. For enterprise IT to fully realize the efficiency and promise of cloud computing, IT must demonstrate cost transparency to drive a service‐oriented strategy, evaluate prospective external vendors, and deliver end‐customer‐consumable cloud services. GlassHouse provides objective, vendor‐independent cloud enablement services to help your IT organization determine and deploy the right cloud technologies and management practices, at the right cost. Through proven methodologies and expertise, GlassHouse enables IT to deliver internal, external, and hybrid clouds to reduce costs, improve efficiency, and manage service levels effectively. To learn more about GlassHouse’s Cloud Infrastructure Services, please email [email protected] or visit the GlassHouse web site to find an office near you.

About GlassHouse GlassHouse Technologies is a global provider of data center infrastructure consulting services. Focused on data center consolidations, virtualization, security, storage, data protection and managed services, GlassHouse consultants offer a vendor‐independent approach to architect, implement and operate IT environments that drive high performance and agility through cloud computing and a service provider model. GlassHouse transforms infrastructures to deliver high value services that align to business needs, enabling cloud computing and accelerated return on investments while mitigating operational inefficiencies and risk. This is provided through Transom, a unique delivery framework comprised of proprietary software tools, methodologies and domain expertise. Visit the GlassHouse blog for expert commentary on key data center issues facing today’s enterprises and follow us on twitter at #GlassHouse_Tech.


mailto:[email protected]

http://www.glasshouse.com/Contact-Us-145.do

http://www.glasshouse.com/

http://www.glasshouse.com/syndication.php?rss=aHR0cDovL2dsYXNzaG91c2UuY29tL2Jsb2cvZmVlZC8=

Appendix GlassHouse Cloud Infrastructure Services GlassHouse helps customers in all phases of the IT cloud services continuum: from a strategic offering determining how to best implement a cloud in the customer’s unique environment to integrating internal and external clouds. GlassHouse offers foundation services supported by their expertise in virtualization, security, data protection, and their tools for monitoring and metering IT environments. GlassHouse is an IT cloud services enabler providing:

• Services to help customers prepare their environment to work effectively with cloud technologies, usually starting with an internal cloud strategy

• Strategic direction, design and plan execution for customers establishing IT‐specific private/internal clouds, or shifting aspects of an environment to an external cloud, often as hybrid or subset of an internal cloud strategy

• Cost assessment and transparency services to help customers assess, monitor and meter, and visualize their cloud environments—internal and external

• Management automation: through fine‐grained monitoring, metering, and management infrastructure, provided through their Optics Suite, customers gain deeper visibility and control of their IT environment and cloud deployment

Strategic Services GlassHouse provides a Cloud Impact Analysis service to determine the strategy, business requirements, and compelling rationale for moving forward with an internal or external cloud (private or public). GlassHouse works closely with customers to build a business case and cost analysis based on ROI modeling for potential cloud solutions. GlassHouse also recommends solutions and provides a prioritized action plan for moving forward. For customers requiring modernization and automation, GlassHouse offers a Service Provider Model Modernization service. This is a transformational service that creates the foundation to operate infrastructure through standardized levels of service and cost. It includes the tools and processes necessary to automate and operate as a service provider. The package can be tailored to specific needs, exploring the potential for Cloud services (private or public) for an entire infrastructure area or discrete services within a larger portfolio. This model lays the foundation for demand‐planning and forecasting processes and cost transparency.

Infrastructure Integration Services Once a strategy and project plan have been put in place, GlassHouse offers a set of implementation services for designing, integrating, deploying, and managing cloud services as IT service utilities.

Accelerate Cloud

Accelerate Cloud focuses on designing, planning, integrating, and deploying cloud technology through IT. Often, this leverages core building block technologies, including virtualization, storage, networking, and other infrastructure components. Accelerate enables IT to rapidly go‐to‐market, reduce risk, and increase time to value—at a fixed cost.


Accelerate Cloud will provide clients the technical solution details associated with the latest cloud Platform as a Service products, such as VMware vSphere.

Managed Services

Optics Suite (Reporting & Monitoring) Optics is a subscription based suite of services to monitor and report on your infrastructure components, including storage, backup, databases, virtualized environments and security. Optics provides deep visibility into IT infrastructure processes, and operations, giving you control over your environment and demonstrating the business value of the deployed solution.


GlassHouse--CIO`s Guide to Cloud Computing

Documents

Transcript of GlassHouse--CIO`s Guide to Cloud Computing