E-PAPER SEPTEMBER 2016

What Makes a Private Cloud

a CLOUD?Creating an agile, manageable

private cloud environment

that enables efficiency and solves

business problems isn’t easy.

This paper examines what it takes

to make this happen.

SPONSORED BY:

1608064

Learn more about private clouds at www.dell.com/privatecloud

Organizations of every size can build a private cloud—and, frankly, they should. A private cloud makes the data center more

agile. That capability surely is appealing to the 77% of organizations that are currently deploying private-cloud-enabling virtualization technologies, according to InformationWeek’s Cloud 2016 Survey of nearly 300 business technology professionals involved in making cloud decisions.1

Agility isn’t the only way that companies benefit from private cloud adoption. Forrester Research, in its “Adoption Profile: Private Cloud in North America, Q1 2016” report, found that the top drivers for using a private cloud are improved manageability (80%), improved disaster recovery and business continuity (78%), and on-demand capacity and scalability (76%).2 (See Figure 1.)

Private clouds are the foundation for hybrid cloud and multicloud strategies, and they provide the means by which IT can add value to the business—enabling productivity, boosting competitive advantage, and enhancing customer service.

PUT VIRTUALIZATION’S POWER TO WORKEfficiency and other cloud benefits require a flexible, modular approach when you’re building the virtualization foundation needed for a private cloud that will let users self-provision computing resources, shift workloads

across machines on demand, automatically launch new servers, and more. There are multiple paths to constructing this sort of infrastructure.

Studies show a majority of organizations use a traditional approach of choosing the servers, storage, networking, and software required to

UBM •• WHAT MAKES A PRIVATE CLOUD A CLOUD?

2 3 4 5 7 81 6

Top North American Drivers and Concerns for Private Cloud in 2015How important were the following in your firm’s decision to adopt a hosted private cloud?

What are your firm’s concerns, if any, with a hosted private cloud?

TOP DRIVERS TOP CONCERNS

(4 or 5 on a scale from1 [not at all important] to 5 [very important])

(multiple responses accepted)

Improved IT infrastructuremanageability and flexibility

Improved disaster recoveryand business continuity

On-demand capacityand scalability

Security concerns regarding application and data protection

Privacy concerns regarding data breaches or theft

Meeting specific compliancerequirements

80%

78%

76%

27%

22%

20%

BASE: 294 North American infrastructure technology decision-makers whose firms are planning to or have implemented internal private cloud (1,000+ employees)

DATA: Forrester’s Global Business Technographics Infrastructure Survey, 2015®

Figure 1

Learn more about private clouds at www.dell.com/privatecloud

3

UBM •• WHAT MAKES A PRIVATE CLOUD A CLOUD?

4 5 7 81 2 6

meet specific goals. While this offers the most flexibility and choice, it also requires significant expertise for a successful cloud implementation. Reference architectures offer a way to acceler-ate deployments through the use of pretested, validated configurations. This eliminates some of the design work required in the do-it-yourself or custom route. A third method is leveraging a preintegrated turnkey system that looks a lot like a purpose-built appliance. This method sac-rifices some flexibility and choice in exchange for speed and simplicity of deployment.

What’s most important to understand is that each of these methods is valid depend-ing on your specific goals, budget, or level of available expertise, and all of them should be evaluated accordingly. It is essential to work with a partner that offers all three approaches, leverage existing investments, and support existing organizational processes to eliminate any bias toward one deployment approach.

Spending on private cloud IT infrastructure will grow 10.3% year over year to $13.8 billion in 2016 with more than 60% of this amount contributed by on-premises private cloud environments, according to IDC’s Q1 2016 “Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure

Tracker.”3 Private cloud expenditures are expected to lag behind those on public cloud IT infrastructure, which will increase by 18.8% in 2016 to $23.3 billion, IDC said. Many com-panies are looking for cost-effective ways to expand their private cloud virtual infrastruc-tures. Given that, IT must focus as much on leveraging industry-standard architectures that support advanced virtualization as on breaking down silos of complexity to aggregate pools of heterogeneous resources.

Interoperability is critical. Open network

strategies and the implementation of software-defined networks and storage that leverage open standards enable component interop-erability and agility in a virtualized network infrastructure. They’re key to comprehensive private cloud strategies for cost-savings and to enhance network functions for scalable services.

Of course, a business must plan its virtual infrastructure in the context of the virtual computing environment sized for its spe-cific needs, whether that’s a small, shared infrastructure platform or a huge, scalable,

12

3

4

Virtualization:Provides platform building blocks

Systems Management:Bridges IT capability and business need

Automation and Self-Service Options:Facilitates application agility

Management and Governance of Single and Multicloud Environments:Enables cloud-as-a-service

STAIRWAYto theCLOUD

6

Learn more about private clouds at www.dell.com/privatecloud

4

UBM •• WHAT MAKES A PRIVATE CLOUD A CLOUD?

5 7 81 2 3 6

enterprise-class computing environment. Dell PowerEdge VRTX, for instance, offers

streamlined shared infrastructure, enabling a virtual cluster-in-a-box solution that appeals to smaller businesses because of its capabilities, office-friendly design, and simplified manage-ment. However, it also meets the needs of large companies that want to run high-performance apps for departments, workgroups, or remote branches. It supports the same blade servers and management tools as the larger M1000e-based solutions and combines server, shared storage, and networking in a sleek form factor.

An even more scalable option, the Dell PowerEdge M1000e blade chassis, provides the broadest range of blade server options and the industry’s most efficient power and cooling. The PowerEdge M630 (13th genera-tion) has the highest SPEC Power scores, as did Dell’s two previous-generation servers in the same category. The PowerEdge R630 and R730 rack servers round out the top four SPEC Power scores, demonstrating Dell’s commitment to providing the most efficient computing platforms across form factors. The M1000e blade chassis also gives customers unmatched flexibility in configurations that

deliver 100% more computational nodes than other blade infrastructures to provide the density needed in massively scalable virtual environments. The M1000e provides a range of flexible networking and storage options to provide proper service levels for your cloud.

PowerEdge FX architecture provides modu-lar scaling of computing power and capacity for cloud infrastructure that reduce costs by provisioning just the right amount of resources. FX architecture can be deployed as four-, two-, and one-socket server and microserver modules, as well as several optional storage configurations. These various modules can be deployed in any combina-tion within the FX chassis, a compact 2U rack-based enclosure that shares cooling, power, networking, and PCI expansion slots. This allows you to quickly deploy the exact combination of compute, storage, and networking resources required.

Management of all PowerEdge servers is

streamlined and independent of form factor. There’s deep integration with virtualization hypervisors for rapid, seamless provisioning while automating day-to-day operations for a complete foundation for infrastructure-as-a-service. These flexible and powerful solutions, with innovative form factors, are important to consider when choosing your platform.

Dell supports increased adoption of software-defined storage with

a number of configurations, including Microsoft Storage

Spaces and VMware vSAN (Virtual SAN).

INTEGRATED SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT A well-planned virtual-

ized environment by itself doesn’t add up to a private

cloud. What makes a private cloud real is the combination

of technology function and business logic to give it purpose. Capabilities—such as resource provisioning, capacity on demand, and self-service—align the infrastructure with sys-tems management tools and set the stage for IT

When choosing

a platform for your organization, it’s important to consider flexible and powerful

solutions with innovative form factors.

6

Learn more about private clouds at www.dell.com/privatecloud

5

UBM •• WHAT MAKES A PRIVATE CLOUD A CLOUD?

7 81 2 3 4 6

to translate success from the data center to the business. Users give private clouds high ratings for meeting service-level agreements (SLAs), better IT alignment with business and organiza-tional needs, and improved quality control.

How do you create the ties that bind the private cloud infrastructure to what the business needs? How do you accelerate application and services delivery, and contain “happy” users within the internal IT envi-ronment? That is, how do you prevent users from looking to public clouds for the access and speed advantages they can’t get in-house, and keep them from moving to those platforms without the proper controls and prevent the result-ing IT fragmentation, compliance violations, and data exposure?

The first thing that’s needed to efficiently and effectively support users’ expectations is to apply the “service” part of IT service: Talk with all stakeholders to uncover problems and require-ments, and match appropriate technologies to desired business outcomes. IT teams must integrate business logic into their IT systems and

management frameworks. These frameworks and tools, such as VMware vRealize Suite and Microsoft System Center, include rules for auto-mation and approval processes.

Existing business logic and models can be integrated with any vRealize Automation server, for example, to develop complex automation

tasks. VRealize Automation lets users build workflows for automated server provi-

sioning to support IT-as-a-service models—though server and

storage array vendors must provide, as Dell does, a plug-in for VMware vCenter that bridges the hardware provi-sioning gap. Another option for custom-

ers is to leverage Microsoft System Center Suite as the primary

point of cloud management. Smooth integration of business logic and models can be accomplished with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, including its inte-gration with other components of the System Center 2012 suite to support automating the management of policies, processes, and best practices by discovering, capturing, and

aggregating knowledge related to their virtual infrastructure. Add Microsoft’s Application Man-ager, System Center Orchestrator, and Service Manager, and you have all the cloud capability you need to automate apps and services. You can also easily create a Microsoft hybrid cloud by using the Azure pack, which easily connects with the Azure cloud to enable use of services such as backup and disaster recovery. Dell OpenManage and hardware integrations with Microsoft System Center (most notably SCOM, SCCM, and VMM) enable discovery, updating, management, and visualization of Dell server, storage, and networking components of your cloud infrastructure—so you can control every-thing from the console you’re familiar with.

Other diverse tools that enable resource pooling and provisioning, as well as workload templating—such as Dell Active System Man-ager (ASM)—can also apply business logic to private cloud systems management. ASM provides a Dell and non-Dell HCL to integrate with customers’ existing systems and future purchases. It integrates with many hypervi-sor platforms, including Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere, offering a centralized approach to workload-specific configuration to

What makes

a private cloud real is the

combination of technology function

and business logic to give it

purpose.

UBM •• WHAT MAKES A PRIVATE CLOUD A CLOUD?

Learn more about private clouds at www.dell.com/privatecloud

automate IT service delivery. Think of it as packaging the entire application ecosystem—the application as well as the infrastructure resources that it runs on—in a self-contained envelope rather than requiring IT to work across multiple consoles and business users to suffer the resulting lag in deployment time. By capturing best practices into service templates, ASM ensures reliable and repeatable infrastructure and workload deployments.

Automating the business processes that handle the majority of IT workflows is all part of the push to customer-initiated IT service provisioning. Automation’s potential is huge: Web and database pro-visioning activities can be reduced from hundreds of steps and many weeks to deploy, to several steps and a few hours to deploy.

ENABLING APPLICATION AGILITY End users today want instant, on-demand services and applications. With a few clicks, they can easily acquire these services from the pub-lic cloud, creating the shadow IT challenge. The best way to prevent ungoverned, risky cloud use is to provide the on-demand capability that users want from your own IT portfolio.

IT can provide this instant, dynamic capability by implementing “service catalogs,” creating a suite of services that leverage automation and key business logic. Cloud computing begins when end users and customers can request applications and services from IT portfolios without manual intervention. Approval matrices, cost centers, and other aspects of the business units can peacefully co-exist with the IT resources they rely on, resulting in greater speed and higher productivity. This is an essential feature of enabling capacity on-demand in cloud environments.

ASM provides step-by-step guidelines that let users execute tasks

across the workload life cycle, from provisioning to decommissioning of virtualized infrastructure. This approach helps ensure that a coordinated set of components works to meet SLAs and avoid application degrada-tion and failure, giving users the perception of unlimited resources.

With Dell OpenManage integrations, customers can use their

7 81 2 3 4 65

Private Cloud HurdlesWhat challenges does your organization face relating to private cloud?

Application/system performance

Vendor lock-in

Integration of cloud data with our internal systems

Features and general maturity of technology

Monitoring and managing rogue or shadow IT

Ensuring business units are compliant

Detecting rogue or shadow IT cloud use

Other

56%

51%

51%

44%

40%

38%

33%

4%

NOTE: Multiple responses allowed.

DATA: UBM survey of 162 business technology professionals involved in making cloud computing-related decisions or managing cloud services and who use software-as-a-service, February 2016

Figure 2

6

Learn more about private clouds at www.dell.com/privatecloud

UBM •• WHAT MAKES A PRIVATE CLOUD A CLOUD?

7 8

console of choice to view, monitor, and manage infrastructure and applica-tions. This focus on open standards gives customers more options and flex-ibility. OpenManage helps drive operational effective-ness for physical and virtual machines, and it provides

critical features such as power metering and management for remote site cloud infrastructure administration, as well as instrumentation, asset management, server and workload profiles, and other essential capabilities that simplify operations and management of workloads and resources.

It’s important for companies to have access to cloud-savvy application delivery and management, as well as business-logic-infused systems management capabilities, in sophisticated yet accessible offerings. InformationWeek’s study revealed that cloud adoption concerns linger: 56% of respondents cited application and system perfor-mance challenges related to private cloud adoption; 51% noted challenges around vendor lock-in and integration of cloud data with internal systems; and 44% had concerns about features and the general maturity of the technology.4 (See Figure 2, p. 6.) Close to 20% of respondents to the InformationWeek survey said they are not actively monitoring the performance of their cloud-based applications.

Forrester Research also found that the top drivers for adopting cloud com-puting are improved manageability and flexibility of IT infrastructure, improved disaster recovery and business continuity, and on-demand capacity and scal-ability. (See Figure 1, p. 2.)

1 2 3 4 65

CLOUD ON YOUR TERMSAs IT leaders prepare for the future of cloud computing, many are considering a hybrid cloud strategy. Leveraging public clouds in tandem with an in-house cloud infrastructure offers a way to quickly and efficiently add scale, support a specific function (such as test and development), and rapidly meet changing business requirements. Equally if not more important, hybrid cloud computing lets a company have a cloud environment on its own terms, getting the scale and reliability of the public cloud, without having to hand over all its assets.

Any number of hybrid cloud options are available, but to capitalize on them, IT pros must build their private cloud environments using industry standards, flexible and modular approaches, and heterogeneous management platforms for best alignment with public cloud choices. That approach ensures seamless integration with external clouds—whether community clouds, vertical clouds, or SaaS options—without compromising systems and applications management setups, performance insight, and cross-cloud interoperability.

Today, technology must be built to accommodate the merging of the on- and off-premises cloud worlds. Dell’s support of open networking standards, software innovations, and the ability to offer a broad range of flexible modular infrastructure building blocks is an approach that will help move you into this new age of enterprise computing.

VISIBILITY AND EFFICIENCY FOR ALL YOUR CLOUDSTo run a truly efficient private cloud, the enterprise must have clear visibility into operations, applications, and costs, no matter how varied the underlying virtualized environment is. That sort of pervasive vis-ibility isn’t easy to achieve when functional silos do the administration using diverse tools, or when specific services don’t have much moni-toring in place, or when monitoring stops at the end user’s computing device.

Limited visibility takes a toll on the efficiency of private clouds and their users, contributing to resource mis-management and latency, and making it impossible for developers and application administrators to understand the impact of their configuration choices. And without insight into who is doing what, cloud administrators can’t determine where chargebacks should fall. Things have improved on the chargeback front from being used by 24% of adopters in 2013 to 52% in 2015, according to Forrester Research’s “Adoption Profile: Private Cloud in North America, Q1 2016“ report.5 But that percentage shows that there’s still room for improvement.

Dell Boomi supports hybrid and multicloud environments, enabling the migration and movement of data between on- and off-premises cloud sources and applications, and providing a range of capabilities, including event-based workloads, electronic data interchange, enter-prise workloads, and the Internet of Things. Dell Boomi is recognized by Gartner for its AtomSphere® solution in the “Leaders” quadrant of the Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service. It

enables customers to easily connect any combination of cloud and on-premises applications without software, appliances, or coding.6

Solidifying an on-premises cloud architecture with standards-based technology and open-source IT architectures is just a start. To attain true cloud capabilities, you must optimize application delivery and measured service, and ensure visibility and control. All of this adds up

to an efficient private cloud that gives IT the tools it requires to provide business users with the self-service and on-

demand capabilities they want and need. It’s time to take these very practical steps and boldly

march into the private cloud. Don’t get left behind. ■ Dell Inc. listens to customers and delivers the innovative

technology and services they trust and value. Commit-

ted to finding better ways for our customers to be more

efficient, more mobile, more informed, and more secure, Dell

is one of the world’s leading providers of technology to people

and organizations of all sizes. The company serves 98% of the global

Fortune 500, 10 million small businesses, students and teachers in 400,000

classrooms, every G20 government, and more than 200,000 physicians.

1. “2016 Cloud Myths and Reality.” InformationWeek. February 2016. 2. Lauren E. Nelson. “Adoption Profile: Private Cloud in North America, Q1 2016.” Forrester Research Inc. Feb. 16, 2016. 3. IDC Press Release. “Spending on IT Infrastructure for Cloud Environments in 2016 Will Be Strong Despite First Quarter Slowdown, According to IDC.” July 5, 2016. 4. “2016 Cloud Myths and Reality.” InformationWeek. February 2016. 5. Lauren E. Nelson. “Adoption Profile: Private Cloud in North America, Q1 2016.” Forrester Research Inc. Feb. 16, 2016. 6. “Gartner Recognizes Dell Boomi as a ‘Leader’ …” Dell press release. March 25, 2016.

UBM •• WHAT MAKES A PRIVATE CLOUD A CLOUD?

Learn more about private clouds at www.dell.com/privatecloud

1 2 3 4 65 7 8

The potential of automating

business processes is huge. Web and

database provisioning can be deployed in a

few hours instead of weeks.