How Can Central IT Use Cloud Technologies to Revolutionize Remote Store Operation?

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1 SOLUTION BRIEF CA APPLOGIC CLOUD PLATFORM FOR ENTERPRISE How Can Central IT Use Cloud Technologies to Revolutionize Remote Store Operation? agility made possible

2 CA AppLogic combines applications, virtual machines, network, storage, configuration, and policy into a single package, to create a virtual business service that streamlines application deployment to remote stores. 2

3 Executive Summary Challenge Many large organizations are dealing with the challenge of how to ensure the IT stack used by staff in remote stores can support the dynamic nature of today s business, while still maintaining control. Especially for companies with hundreds, or even thousands of remote sites, different hardware revisions and varying staff expertise make maintaining control of a widely distributed IT infrastructure difficult, slow, and expensive. Opportunity Cloud technologies were developed for remote operation, disparate hardware and easy application deployment. Central IT organizations can use cloud technologies to operate distributed IT infrastructure as a private cloud to help balance business agility with control. For example, a global retailer may use cloud to roll out the applications on which its remote stores rely for inventory, pricing, and promotion. A fast food giant rolls out pop-up stores on site of a major sporting event, and then tears down the stores, and the IT infrastructure, when the event is over. Benefits Done right, cloud allows central IT to deploy applications to remote sites faster, cutting down the time between application development, test, and production. A cloud solution can abstract away the differences in the underlying hardware implementations that may exist in remote locations. Cloud also helps achieve the goal of reducing the local IT expertise required to implement and maintain the application stack. 3

4 Section 1: Central Control of Remote Store is Expensive, Slow, and Subject to Local Technical Expertise The initial steps for developing and testing business applications for a large, distributed enterprise are similar to those of any organization. The central IT team obtains, installs and configures the hardware for the development and QA teams. The development team builds the application, writes the deployment and operation documents, and then ships the code and the documentation to QA. QA installs the application and runs their test suite. When they find errors, they document them and ship the code back to development for resolution. Development replicates the problems and fixes the code, which QA then makes ready for deployment. Unique challenges come into play when the code is ready for deployment to the remote sites. With remote stores widely distributed over geographic distances, there is significant variation among stores in the local implementation of the IT stack. For central IT, dealing with this variation is costly, not only on initial implementation, but also on an on-going basis, when dealing with routine troubleshooting and configuration issues. Central IT can reduce these problems by maintaining tight control of the IT stack, but doing so can require either the presence of local IT expertise in the various geographic locations, or a large central staff with hands-on access to the hardware and software, and the accompanying transportation costs and delay. Both cases can drive up costs and delay. Hardware and software variation at remote stores Remote stores can have disparate hardware and software configurations. In various countries, local vendors may be preferred, or even mandated by government regulation. Software patches get applied inconsistently by local IT teams which have different practices. Even when hardware is sourced centrally and physically shipped from central IT out to remote branches, over time, there is drift, as new chipsets, boards, components and patches get installed. Troubleshooting local problems with limited local IT expertise Once the IT stack is implemented in the remote stores, there is often no local IT expertise on site to trouble shoot or deal with configuration or security problems. Central IT is tasked with maintaining control over these sites, but needs the right tools to do so. The applications, middleware, and infrastructure on which local stores depend are often not designed for remote operations. Administration capabilities like the ability to remotely log-in to specific local components may not exist, leading to complexity and increased likelihood of problems. Expediting the delivery of code to remote stores The applications on which remote stores rely must change frequently to keep up with the business. Central IT is tasked with getting these new versions of code out to the stores in the shortest amount of time. Doing that quickly and economically is another challenge. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a potential solution to this problem, but incorporating key SaaS features, like operation at scale, multi-tenancy and security, into existing business applications is not so easy. Rebuilding code to incorporate these capabilities is costly and time consuming, and often requires skills the IT staff doesn t possess. 4

5 Section 2: Creating a Virtual Business Service with Abstraction Helps You Streamline Application Deployment to Remote Stores CA AppLogic, a turn-key cloud platform, uses abstraction to help enterprises address the challenges of dealing with local variations in hardware and software in order to operate traditional business applications. CA AppLogic takes all of the complex aspects of a data center or a remote store IT stack and moves them to the software layer, creating a fully flexible environment at the software level and a highly commoditized environment at the hardware level. With CA AppLogic, you can virtualize the entire application AND its supporting infrastructure, and create, deploy and manage it all as a virtual business aervice. The virtual business service virtualizes not just the server, but the other infrastructure needed to run a service, and the configuration of software, security, and policy, thereby enabling the wrapping of code, data, storage, networking, middleware and configuration all into a single manageable object. The virtual business service thus improves the IT supply chain with less hardware and more software, allowing you to streamline application deployment. Figure A. The Virtual Business Service. The virtual business service combines the application, the underlying infrastructure, and policy into a single manageable object. 5

6 It used to take upwards of 7 months to procure, install and test the infrastructure to deploy a new application. Now it takes 2 5 days from start to finish. David Guthrie, Chief Technology Officer, PGi, a leading provider of advanced meeting, conferencing and collaboration services operating in 24 countries and serving 90% of the Fortune 500 This built in capability eliminates the need for your operations and technical teams to become specialists in new technology and tools, allowing you to get your cloud services to market with the expertise you have now. Treating the entire service as an object allows you to radically simplify and accelerate application development, configuration, roll-out, and modification. Key capabilities such as scaling, multitenancy, security, and metering are built in to the virtual business service. No separate storage infrastructure or operations team is needed. CA AppLogic melds direct attached storage in the servers into a fully functional SAN, eliminating the need for a dedicated SAN and associated management. Drag and drop software defined networking CA AppLogic creates connections between VMs and to the Internet without the need to integrate network automation. Section 3: Centralize Control While Speeding Time-To-Market CA AppLogic is the turn-key cloud platform that helps you centralize control of remote store IT while speeding time to market of the business critical applications on which your remote stores depend. Streamline application development - Avoid the time and expense of configuring the hardware and software stacks for development and QA. Clone development, test, and production environments and solve a myriad of issues that cost time and money, and cause complexity and risk. Easier service rollout - Roll out applications to geographically dispersed stores stores in minutes, with a copy and paste, rather than having to deploy actual staff to configure and network together physical hardware and software. Lower hardware costs - Because CA AppLogic can run on any commodity x86 server, local branches can use their preferred vendors. CA AppLogic abstracts away the underlying nuances of different hardware configurations, and allows the applications that run on it independent of local configuration differences. Lower operations costs - Differences in hardware configuration become irrelevant to running applications, eliminating onerous, repetitive, time-consuming tasks for application design and deployment. 6

7 Section 4: The CA Technologies Advantage With CA AppLogic, central IT can maintain control while speeding deployment of the business critical applications on which remote stores depend. Through abstraction, CA AppLogic creates a virtual business service which enables the application and underlying infrastructure to be treated as a single object, speeding up development and deployment time, and reducing the need for external storage and automation solutions. The need for local IT expertise is reduced since CA AppLogic greatly reduces the manual effort of configuring network connections and software patches. Local stores have flexibility in their hardware and software choices since CA AppLogic can run on commodity x86 servers, without regard to differences in configurations. Unlike cloud providers with a hardware agenda, CA Technologies has always maintained a heterogeneous approach to technology, allowing customers the flexibility and choice they need. To learn more about CA AppLogic, visit ca.com/us/products/category/cloud/turnkey-cloud Agility Made Possible: The CA Technologies Advantage CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) provides IT management solutions that help customers manage and secure complex IT environments to support agile business services. Organizations leverage CA Technologies software and SaaS solutions to accelerate innovation, transform infrastructure and secure data and identities, from the data center to the cloud. CA Technologies is committed to ensuring our customers achieve their desired outcomes and expected business value through the use of our technology. To learn more about our customer success programs, visit ca.com/ customer-success. For more information about CA Technologies go to ca.com. Copyright 2013 CA. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. The information and results illustrated here are based upon the speaker s experiences with the referenced software product in a variety of environments, which may include production and nonproduction environments. Past performance of the software products in such environments is not necessarily indicative of the future performance of such software products in identical, similar or different environments. This document is for your informational purposes only and CA assumes no responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of the information contained herein. To the extent permitted by applicable law, CA provides this document as is without warranty of any kind, including, without limitation, any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. In no event will CA be liable for any loss or damage, direct or indirect, from the use of this document, including, without limitation, lost profits, business interruption, goodwill or lost data, even if CA is expressly advised in advance of the possibility of such damages. CS3940_0513