If
you read Dave Hitz’s recent blog, Three
Ten-Year-Trends That Are Driving IT Change, he believes that in 10 years time many
medium-sized businesses and a few large ones will have cloud-outsourced pretty
much all of their IT infrastructure. I believe this too, and it may well
happen faster. So if you live in a corporate IT organization,
responsible for IT infrastructure, where does this leave you? How will your
role be changing and what will the infrastructure you still manage look like?
Let’s
start briefly with the drivers for cloud computing – the CFO and CIO get to
move capital expenses (capex) to operational expenses (opex) and “the business”
(and application owners) can bring products to market faster. The cloud computing model allows the end users
to ramp up or ramp down capacity in response to market demand and therefore pay
as they go. Let’s face it, they never really know how successful their
product or service is going to be – so today they over state the business case and
ask for hardware for next three years; the last thing they want is to be constrained by led times on for
additional capacity as their solution ramps up. This practice leads to inefficiencies in the data
center. On average, the utilization of physical resources (including servers, network and storage) is has been abysmally low. We frequently find customers with storage
utilization in 30-40% range and lower wasting power, floorspace and hardware..
What
are the smart corporate IT organizations doing? They understand that the
trend to cloud services is valid and requires i) governance for cloud-outsource
applications and ii) the creation of internal cloud services to drive down costs and time to market for in house applications. The latter is built on a pooled dynamic infrastructure with utilization levels in excess of 75%.
This is achieved through thin provisioning, deduplication, and cloning
technologies (which can raise utilization levels well in excess of 100%). The
bottom line is that this approach yields big cost savings.
Since
there are applications (CRM, ERP, messaging and collaboration) that are common
to every company, outsourcing to an external cloud provider that can do a
better job managing the application at a lower cost structure makes sense.
Governance plays a central role in deciding which applications can be safely
outsourced, and how to manage the processes. Where to begin? First, you will need to assess the
applications and build policies based upon the type of data. Factors to consider include: how it is accessed and by whom, security and
compliance aspects, and the strategic importance or competitive
advantage the application or data offers. Second, you need to assess the cloud service
provider’s service offerings. Look at their capabilities, security, SLAs
on availability and performance to see if they meet the levels required by the
applications before agreeing to cloud-outsource the application. Don’t
forget to get the corporate IT governance and security group involved to help
create policies that will protect corporate data and hence drive the decision on
what can and cannot be cloud-outsourced.
What
do we do with the rest of the applications that are not outsourced? We (as in corporate IT and IT
vendors) have a big opportunity, internal clouds will help the business launch
applications faster and at much lower cost. This is about building
IT-as-a-Service capabilities in house. Building shared infrastructure that
is offered as service to the business. We’ll need pooled infrastructure,
policy based automation to simplify provisioning, metrics and charge backs,
service assurance and conformance to SLAs, and capacity planning with a “just
in time” inventory for the enterprise’s infrastructure resources with 3-6
months of headroom for the pool. Add a self-service portal to your
internal cloud and now the applications teams are happy they can deploy faster
and lower cost and the corporate IT governance guys will be happy too.
Ok,
so this space is evolving fast, so start with the basics; pool the
infrastructure and use a vendor that offers dynamic virtualized infrastructure
to quickly activate applications, or repurpose capacity and performance as
loads from applications ramp up or down.
For this you need unified storage, network, and servers that can cater
for wide range of applications requirements and choose highly efficient infrastructure.
So
now you have an internal cloud based on efficiency pooled infrastructure with drastically
higher utilization level and big savings.
If clouds are politically sensitive then just call it IT-as-a-Service,
that’s what it’s all about after all.
There
are a few places to get started, one is to understand the technologies and the
integration required to building a cloud infrastructure – such as NetApp with VMware
vSphere cloud OS. The second piece is to understand the service
mentality that is required in transforming the data center and you can read about that journey and more on the dynamic data center here.
In
future blogs from the dynamic data center team and we’ll tell you more about how
NetApp is helping companies build internal cloud services.
Cheers,
Hamish
