systems WHITE PAPER Building Self-Service Demo Clouds with CloudShell

Transcription

1 WHITE PAPER Building Self-Service Demo Clouds with CloudShell 9/2014

2 Introduction offers the CloudShell means to accelerate field sales processes, expand reach to markets, engage partners, build eco- and drive higher revenues Delays of demo's and PoCs on customers' site, are usually due to lack of: Space Power Cooling Maintenance Time Service providers, technology manufacturers, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and Systems Integrators are continuously striving to extend and accelerate their reach to customers and target markets. One of the most promising IT initiatives for sales acceleration is to create automated, software-driven technology demonstration clouds that offer an easy way for field engineering, partners and customers to interact with complex products and solutions. Demonstration clouds remove logistical obstacles and reduce capital costs when compared to performing field-based demonstrations and proof of concept tests. Maintaining a focus on end users need for simplicity and ease of use is a primary automation requirement for the success of demo clouds. At the same time, engineering teams responsible for building data centers that support these self-service environments must deploy an automation architecture with sufficient flexibility and power to meet a full range of use cases. CloudShell, the industry's leading agile infrastructure automation platform, offers a comprehensive solution for delivering easy to use, cloud-based self-service demonstration and Proof of Concept (PoCs). CloudShell delivers a robust, infrastructure automation framework that can sustainably deliver against sales organizations' expanding and evolving needs. CloudShell offers the means to accelerate field sales processes, expand reach to markets, engage partners, build eco- and drive higher revenues. The Business Drivers for Demo Clouds Enterprise IT and other technology purchasing organizations today employ a trust yet verify attitude towards integrating new technology into their mission-critical infrastructure environments. This means that prospective technology adopters typically insist on seeing technology demonstrations and running proof of concept (PoC) tests when evaluating networking, computing, storage and other equipment solutions. Credible demonstrations must show the applicability of the vendor s products to the prospect s vertical industry in representative use cases. PoCs must meet a much higher standard, since they need to showcase successful performance in a heterogeneous and multi-vendor environment, interoperating with the hardware models, modules and OS/software versions present in or at least representative of the customer network or data center. The challenge for technology and service providers is the time needed to execute these necessary sales processes. Demo s and PoCs on the customer site are often delayed due to unavailability of space, power, cooling, maintenance windows, or personnel time on the part of the prospective customer. These delays negatively impact sales cycles and revenues.

3 35% or more of demo equipment is wasted or unproductive Besides the top-line impact of on-premises demonstrations, demo equipment that circulates in the field tends to be inefficiently utilized, with 35% or more of field PoC equipment wasted or unproductive for the following reasons: Time spent in supply chain logistics cycles Time spent waiting for customers to ready their environments for testing Damaged and lost equipment resulting in significant write-downs Use of PoC equipment as long-term loaners to solve technical support issues CloudShell Automation Use IaaS demo environment So, there are both top and bottom-line reasons to improve on this process. Demo clouds provide an efficient answer to this problem. By offering commonly used demonstration environments to field sales organizations through an online infrastructure as a service (IaaS), sales organizations can dramatically speed customer familiarization and acceptance of products and solution. This leads to shorter sales cycles. Beyond customer engagements, demo clouds offer a cost-effective method for partner education and sales enablement. By helping channels ramp up more quickly on new products and by empowering them to offer demonstrations to their customers, demo clouds can expand market reach. Finally, demo and PoC clouds provide the means to engage technology partners and build a market eco-system. The net results of these benefits is better brand traction, healthier sales pipelines and higher revenues. Key Demo Cloud Automation Requirements Speed customer familiarization and acceptance For demo clouds to be effective sales acceleration tools, they must be based on an automation architecture that delivers on a significant set of requirements as follows: Ease of Use - The Self-Service Portal Shorten sales cycles From the end-user perspective, the most important aspect for engineering teams to keep in mind when building demo clouds for field sales, partners and customers, is ease of use. Engineers should assume that end-users will come with a range of technical expertise. In addition, ease of use and simplicity promotes end-user success and adoption, and reduces support burdens. Practically speaking, this means that end-users must be offered a web-based, self-service portal interface that helps them simply achieve key functions: Choose from a pre-defined catalogue of demonstration and PoC environments Options to provide power users with a way to customize their environments as needed Expand market reach Schedule and reserve access to demo environments to guarantee that there aren t conflicts and to maximize multi-tenant utilization and productivity Offer demo product, function, connectivity information and instructions Embed automation that standardizes as many operations as possible Perform user account administration Communicate with demo support personnel as needed

4 The Keys for Demo Cloud Automation Accessible Self-Service Portal Support for complex demo environments Dynamic provisioning High-Fidelity Proof of Concept Testing Automation Scalability and Maintainability Flexible Administration and Access Privileges Openness and Ease of Integration The self-service portal is the most visible aspect of demo cloud automation, but it is only the tip of the iceberg. A robust demo cloud automation architecture must meet many other requirements. Complex Demo Scenarios To paraphrase John Donne s famous poem, no product is an island in today s hyper connected world. Demonstration scenarios typically involve multiple products working together. However, to be effective in meeting customer expectations, demo cloud catalogues usually must evolve beyond software-only, simulated environments and minimalist solution configurations. Customers who are considering infrastructure products that will have a significant impact on their current operational networks typically wish to see demos of real-world environments which involve connecting multiple devices in a complex topology. For example, a storage area network demo might require a SAN or data center fabric switch connected to multiple blade servers running one or more hypervisors and demonstration applications, as well to logical storage units in a storage array device. Another example is an enterprise wide area network scenario that showcases multiple routers and switches configured to deliver multiple Layer 3 MPLS VPNs. Even software-only solutions from ISVs must often showcase their ability to interoperate with existing hardware. Delivering complex demo environments requires the supporting automation platform to enable engineers to easily design and publish complex topologies from a large pool of physical and virtual device resources and verify connectivity. Once published, the automation platform must then be able to orchestrate end-user reservation of these complex topologies including dynamic connectivity setup (such as VLANs) through the self-service portal. An important automation function that promotes capital efficiency and maximum demo availability is the ability to specify abstract rather than specific resources when designing demo topologies. Abstract resource-based design means that the topology only specifies the attributes of the resource, rather than the specific make, model, serial number, or IP address of a resource. For example, rather than specifying a port on a specific fabric switch in a topology design, designing with abstract resources means simply specifying any available 1Gbps fabric port that can provide connectivity to the other devices. By abstracting resources, user reservations make maximal use of available infrastructure resource in the demo data center. Dynamic Provisioning Reporting and Accounting Once the demo cloud has been in existence for some time and the demo catalogue grows, it is not uncommon for various demos to utilize common components, but with different OS versioning requirements. The reasons for this include: Interoperability - particularly with solutions comprised of multiple product lines, compatibility and interoperability guidelines may require devices to be loaded with different versions of OS

5 CloudShell CloudShell automation solutions bring years of deployment maturity from hundreds of customer environments across a wide range of use cases Data centers Manufacturing Sales Enablement Production Environments Test Labs Multi-generational demo requests while marketing teams may want to offer demo s of the latest version s features, sales teams may be focused on offering demo s of more established versions of products that customers are comfortable purchasing Aside from the need to dynamically provisioning OS versions, the more shared devices are present in a demo cloud data center, the more common it will be that device features will also need to be variably configured. The ability to allow a potentially broad range of user input to drive the dynamic orchestration and provisioning of demo/poc environments is a necessity. High-Fidelity Proof of Concept Testing A requirement that often emerges over time is to move beyond simply demonstrating features to running proof of concept (PoC) functional and performance tests in demo cloud environments. Proof of concept testing requires a higher degree of fidelity to real-world conditions in the demonstration environment, which means that customers may only trust them if components are truly isolated from other devices in their inter-connectivity. This may mean the need to incorporate control over physical connectivity in the demo data center through the use of Layer 1 switches that don t introduce latency in network connections. In addition, these environments usually are even more complex than typical demos, involve customization and may require the integration and automated use of test generator devices or benchmark testing frameworks. Real-time dashboards are also necessary to provide visibility to the results of performance tests. Automation Scalability and Maintainability One of the major issues with any automation project is its level of maintainability and scalability. Many automation projects that are based on extensive collections of scripts suffer from a lack of maintainability that can constrain the system from flexing and growing to meet new requirements. Script-based automation architectures are difficult to maintain because of the complexity of updating long, text-based script documents, and due to a common lack of systemization of knowledge. This can impede the demo cloud from flexing and growing to meet new requirements. A robust automation should support and enforce best practices, including: High levels of automation reusability. Any automation that is written should be of limited scope and well documented so that it is easy to find, update and modify by any programmer - not just the original creator. Automation reusability is the key to keeping the total cost of maintenance low for demo cloud data centers. Scalable, non-programmer enablement. While the creation and maintenance of core automation libraries may require programmers skills, the automation architecture should ideally enable non-programmers to easily design topologies and author provisioning and other workflows by leveraging the libraries rather than needing to code or script for themselves. By enabling non-programmers, a robust automation architecture can scale the automation project.

6 CloudShell Capabilities Inventory Management Flexible Administration and Access Privileges Sizeable demo cloud data center environments require varying levels of administrative access based on technology, geographical or other administrative domains. Global versus regional administrators, developers, architects and power users all need varying levels of visibility, administrative rights, and access to resources. Openness and Ease of Integration Demo Design and Publication The more products and solutions are added to the demo cloud, the more important it is that the automation architecture facilitate integration with a variety of management software platform APIs using any programming and scripting language. In addition, where APIs are not available, it should be straightforward to convert keyboard input and even GUI interactions into clearly documented automation building blocks that are parameterized for sharing, abstraction, templatizing and easy maintenance. Reporting and Accounting Connectivity Management Abstract Resources Management Web-Based Self-Service Portal WWW SEERVLICFE S Reservation System Even though demo cloud datacenters provide powerful savings compared to field demos and PoCs, they are still a major investment of capital and operating costs such as power and staff. A demo cloud automation platform should provide extensive reporting on device utilization rates provide other analyses such as demo reservations vs. activations. Reports should also be aggregated into management level dashboards that provide insight into how the demo cloud is performing against key performance indicators (KPIs). CloudShell Demo Cloud Solution CloudShell provides a comprehensive solution for building demo clouds, while providing the following capabilities: Inventory Management: CloudShell manages a demo cloud data center inventory including physical, virtual and software components, L1 and L2 switch connectivity equipment, and test generators in a live, searchable database. All assets can be tagged with testing attributes for easy searching. Complete visibility and reporting on inventory helps control capital costs by ensuring that devices and other resources are maximally utilized. Inventory-Aware Demo Design and Publication: CloudShell allows engineers to design demo topologies via the same web portal GUI used by end-users. Engineers have complete access to the visual inventory sytem and can create abstract resources and abstract templates to share with the whole team. These resources can be leveraged by engineers who model and edit demo environments on a live design canvass by dragging and dropping reosurces from the resource object library, drawing required connections between them, and creating validated connectivity. Once a demo is designed, it can be saved to a private folder or published to a public folder for sharing.

7 Customized Environments Connectivity Management: CloudShell automatically manages all connectivity between specified or abstract devices, whether via Layer 1 or Layer 2 switches. CloudShell is aware of routing across multiple switches and ensures that demo reservations will receive sufficient connectivity resources. Abstract Resources: CoudShell allows design based on abstract requirements, which allows the system to choose any available resource and maximizes utilization and demo availability. Power User Support Interfacing Capabilities Object-Based Architecture Non-Programmer Friendly Automation Authoring Automated Provisioning and Reclamation Web-Based Self-Service Portal: CloudShell provides a powerful web-based portal for offering a catalogue of pre-defined demos and the ability to schedule and reserve demos. In cases where there is already a demo portal in existence, CloudShell offers the flexibility to integrate with existing web portals. Reservation System: CloudShell offers a user-oriented reservation and scheduling system to promote maximum resource utilization. Scalable, User-Input Driven Environments: CloudShell allows engineers to design environments that can be extensively customized upon reservation through customized input forms that drive the orchestration and provisioning of environments. This provides a high degree of scalability and maintainability since one catalog offering can potentially meet hundreds of different use case permutations. Support for Power Users: CloudShell s web portal offers the ability to support power users, who can be allowed to do live environment customization or even create their own environments from scratch. Broad and Open Interfacing Capabilities: CloudShell provides embedded tools to develop new interfaces based on many different types of programming or scripting languages working against various APIs. This open driver development function provides the demo and cloud engineering team with a high degree of self-sufficiency. Object-Based Architecture: CloudShell utilizes an object-based approach that enables the capture of all automation elements as building block objects. This includes objects for interfacing with infrastructure resources, provisioning actions, and workflow automation tasks (such as running a traffic load test). The limited scope of automation objects means that they are easy to maintain, making the automation process more scalable and less costly. A shared library of resource, provisioning and testing objects can be maintained in a systematic fashion. Non-Programmer Friendly Automation Authoring: Non-programmers can easily use the object library and a drag and drop workflow authoring tool to create and maintain demo topology and workflow design. Robust Reporting Automated Provisioning and Reclamation: CloudShell environments can be equipped with auto-provisioning setup and teardown workflows to Robust Reporting: CloudShell provides integrated reporting so that managers can track device utilization rates, see the ratio of reservations vs. activations, and build custom dashboards.

8 With CloudShell s best in class automation architecture, technology providers can ensure a sustainable competitive advantage CloudShell Benefits CloudShell automation solutions bring years of deployment maturity from hundreds of customer environments across a wide range of use cases including data centers, test labs, manufacturing, pre-production environments and sales enablement clouds. With CloudShell s best in class automation architecture, technology providers can benefit from: A dramatic increase in the velocity of demo and PoC delivery, leading to a more robust sales pipeline, greater market reach and enhanced revenues. Significant CAPEX and OPEX savings. CloudShell not only drives faster sales cycles, it also provides significant savings due to its: Deep integration of resource management and workflow automation Easy to maintain object-based architecture High level of efficiency in driving resource utilization through abstract resource allocation and other capabilities Conclusion Demo clouds offer a significant boost to technology providers sales, marketing and channel engagement efforts. By leveraging the maturity, scalability, maintainability and ease of use capabilities offered by CloudShell, demo cloud engineering teams can ensure a sustainable competitive advantage. To learn more from the global leader in test and lab automation solutions, please visit : WP-SLA-2