SOLUTION WHITE PAPER. Building a flexible, intelligent cloud

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1 SOLUTION WHITE PAPER Building a flexible, intelligent cloud

2 Table of Contents Executive summary 1 Building a hybrid cloud 2 Provision complete cloud services 3 Service catalog 3 The user portal 4 Multi-tier cloud service provisioning 5 Place services intelligently in the hybrid cloud 5 Support infrastructure neutrality 6 Separate cloud services from one another 6 the BMC solution 6 learn more 6

3 Cooper turned to his computer with a sense of relief and pulled up his self-service portal. He needed to run custom analytics on his latest experimental data, and time was of the essence. In the past, it would have taken him a weekend to run on his desktop, or weeks to request an extra server, delaying his project and wasting money not to mention the hassle of filling out forms and tracking down status updates. However, his company built a cloud, allowing him to request a cloud service with a simple click. With his company s cloud, he can even request the complete application stack he needs, and weigh the costs and benefits of different configurations. Once he submits his request, the cloud service is automatically provisioned, and minutes later he is on his way. Executive summary The complete lifecycle of a cloud service includes self-service functionality automated provisioning, ongoing management, and decommissioning. This lifecycle is tailored to the needs of the business, with both the flexibility to deliver the full required software stacks and the management rigor to ensure the operational integrity of the cloud. In fact, with effective management of the complete cloud lifecycle, you can achieve the fundamental goals of the cloud: agility, cost savings, and a better optimized use of resources (whether personnel, servers, or capital). However, delivering against this goal is a multifaceted challenge. Even the most basic clouds, such as those supporting development efforts, have a diverse set of user requests for monitoring, instance size, service level agreements (SLAs), security, and compliance. Your users require specific cloud services to meet their needs and should be able to select from a variety of offerings to optimize individual configurability. The more robust, flexible, and role-based your service catalog is, the more likely your users needs will be met. Many organizations approaching cloud computing today have already had some experience implementing virtualization in their data centers. By extending the traditional virtualized environment, BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management delivers an operational model to build the lifecycle of cloud services and the utilization of public clouds into a hybrid cloud. Every resource in the environment goes through a lifecycle that, when defined and appropriately automated, provides a seamless and predictable cloud for both IT and the business. Building clouds with BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management provides the ability to: Provision complete cloud services Enable users to select their own cloud services through self-service requests with tiered, configurable services Ensure that your cloud is fulfilling all of your needs by supporting full-stack provisioning and reclaiming resources through de-provisioning Place services intelligently in the hybrid cloud Proactively optimize your usage of cloud resources by defining resource pooling, on-boarding local and external resources, and enabling secure multi-tenancy. Support infrastructure neutrality Manage a wide-ranging assortment of heterogeneous compute, network, and storage resources Utilize the right hardware and infrastructure software to deliver against business requirements. 1

4 Building a hybrid cloud Organizations are building clouds to accelerate provisioning, facilitate flexibility, and rapidly meet the needs of the business. By building and managing a cloud with BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management, your organization will deliver flexible, customizable cloud services, while also maintaining a structured, controlled, and dynamic IT environment. Initial decisions around cloud lifecycle management will help lay the foundation for the technology decisions going forward, so it s critical to design an environment that is flexible enough to address anticipated areas of future growth. Cloud computing management will help you: Meet business needs by providing flexible cloud service offerings Improve availability by delivering efficient single and multi-tier cloud services Optimize costs through intelligent, policy-driven placement of cloud services Improve availability by ensuring broad resource support for physical and virtual environments, as well as private and public clouds Users Portal Cloud Admins Custom Portal Service Catalog Service Governor Policies Service Blueprints Change Management Operations Management Resource Manager (Pool1... Pool n) Compute Network Public Cloud Storage Custom Figure 1. BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management KEY BENEFITS Deliver a range of business services on your cloud platform from infrastructure through to complete application stacks Provide an intuitive, business-friendly, self-service environment Leverage a broad set of underlying resources, both local and public Use policy to automate the operations of your cloud Prevent lock-in to underlying platforms with an infrastructure-neutral approach 2

5 The BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management solution supports the full lifecycle of cloud services from request to retirement. 1. The cloud lifecycle is started by a user requesting a service through a self-service portal that is driven by a service catalog that aggregates the service offerings available to that user (based on role). 2. Once that service request is initiated, an automated or manual approval workflow is invoked. 3. Once the request is approved, the service is automatically provisioned. The placement of the service is determined by a policy-based service governor, based on a host of considerations. 4. Once the service is provisioned, the user receives the cloud service, and the service enters its operational phase, where the normal day-to-day activities of performance, capacity, and compliance are managed. [For more information on cloud operations, please reference our companion white paper, Beyond Provisioning: Ongoing Operations of an Efficient Cloud Environment.] 5. Once a cloud service is no longer required, the user once again accesses the self-service portal to decommission that service. Provision complete cloud services To provision a complete cloud service, you need the ability to define the service in the service catalog, and then automate its provisioning and configuration. Service catalog A service catalog is essentially a repository of services through which a user can drive the provisioning process. An inherent challenge with any service catalog lies in the natural tension between users (who want to completely customize their offerings) and the IT group (which has to maintain tight controls on the services in the environment). The service catalog serves to bridge that gap. It enables IT to define the areas of configuration and choice that users can select, according to their role. As a result, users feel some measure of customizability of their cloud services. BMC uses Service Blueprints as the mechanism for capturing this translation. Cloud services might be multitier or single-tier application stacks. They might have differing deployment alternatives based on size and service tier. Finally, they might offer all the configuration options a user might require. These elements are defined as individual Service Blueprints within the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management solution. Once defined functionally, they are then characterized in business language as service offerings that users can select..figure 2. The three components of a Service Blueprint 3

6 The following attributes are often defined in the Service Blueprints: Resource configurations Operating systems Middleware stacks Application alternatives Networking options Compliance packages Monitoring tools Service levels Prices IT can choose which cloud services to offer to users and how customizable those services will be. At one extreme, users can be offered a choice between only two or three non-customizable full-stack configurations. On the other, users can be offered an extensive set of choices for each component, enabling them to fully customize their stack. A common middle-ground approach is for IT to determine: Which broad offerings should be presented Which elements should be optional and which should be required, such as compliance or monitoring Which users will be presented with which options In this way, Service Blueprints eliminate the management headache of the templates traditionally used in virtual environments. The user portal Users are exposed to the service catalog only through their self-service request and management portal. BMC s shopping cart interface, My Cloud Services portal, guides users through the service request process, showing them only those options available to them based on their roles. In addition to placing new requests, users can manage the services they ve requested from the cloud, turn them on or off, and request additional time or resources in the My Cloud Services portal. The portal is customizable to match the look and feel of your company, as well. Once a service is requested, the approval process is initiated according to policies defined by IT. This process may be fully automated or may require manual approval. The key is that this process is determined by IT, and can be different for each service type. 4

7 Multi-tier cloud service provisioning Figure 3. Types of offerings that can be provisioned by BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management In order to provide the most flexible service stacks for users, BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management supports a very flexible underlying provisioning capability. Traditional virtualization provisioning is image-based, requiring IT either to standardize on a very small set of images or, alternatively, manage a library of hundreds of unique images. The BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management approach is one of controlled customization, delivering flexibility for the user, within constraints designed by IT. This is accomplished by marrying the Service Blueprints with automated full-stack provisioning. Full-stack provisioning: Allocates physical or virtual resources and an operating system in the environment Provisions and configures network containers for multi-tenant support Layers middleware and applications into the cloud service BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management can even layer compliance rules and monitoring tools into each service delivered. What s more, by using BMC Atrium Orchestrator Adaptors, the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management solution supports the provisioning of Amazon Web Services and other public cloud resources. The provisioning behind the solution gives users precisely the stack they require, while also maintaining the tight controls necessary to manage a complex IT environment. In this way, IT is not burdened with maintaining an enormous template library. Place services intelligently in the hybrid cloud Each cloud service not only must be provisioned, but also, must be located somewhere in the shared resource pool. That location should be based on a number of factors, including: The identity of the requestor The nature of the workload The capacity of different elements in the environment The applicable compliance policies The required service levels Organization-specific policies In order to properly place a workload, therefore, the cloud management solution must take a policy-based approach to intelligent placement, weighing the different guidelines and making a decision. BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management accomplishes this through a Service Governor, which acts as the intelligent policy-engine for the cloud environment, making both initial placement decisions and performing ongoing management. 5

8 Support infrastructure neutrality Underneath the management of a cloud are the resources the vast pools of servers, storage, and networks that come together to deliver the cloud services. These resources must be on-boarded, managed for capacity and performance, and tracked appropriately in the environment. Initial clouds are often conceived with reasonably homogeneous x86 environments in mind. However, diversity in a cloud environment can come from many places over time. Multiple hypervisors are currently available on the market, and they are increasingly co-mingled in data centers. The dynamic and flexible cloud provisioning environment is also seen as beneficial to non-x86 architectures from Solaris to IBM AIX and even to the occasional mainframe. Finally, there may be instances when users will want to use the same mechanisms to provision the occasional physical resource alongside all the virtualized ones. BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management can manage a broad array of heterogeneous underlying resources, ensuring that you can make the most of your cloud environment, leveraging the right hardware and infrastructure software to deliver against business requirements. Through BMC Atrium Orchestrator adaptors, more and more workloads can be moved to public clouds, especially low-risk workloads. In fact, public clouds are not only getting more secure, but they are also providing more and more guarantees of their security and service levels. BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management is integrated to provide seamless provisioning of cloud resources from Amazon s Elastic Computing environment, as well as other public compute providers. Whether obscured or transparent to the end user, the provisioning of these resources occurs through the same My Cloud Services portal, and can be managed through the same administrative environment as the private cloud. Separate cloud services from one another A unique feature of the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management solution is the network container functionality, which creates isolated and secure virtualized network zones within the cloud. Network containers are often used by organizations to separate cloud services from one another, supporting co-mingled, multi-tenant environments. They create isolated networking environments that can include security zones, firewalls, and load balancers. Once created, cloud services can then be provisioned within them. The BMC solution BMC brings together the benefits of traditional IT management, including operational excellence, automation, and service delivery models, and merges them with the dynamic potential of cloud architectures. What s more, BMC helps you achieve tangible results while maintaining a structured, controlled yet still dynamic IT environment. One key role of cloud computing is to layer on top of virtualization an operational structure that is scalable, delivers consistent service, and addresses the needs of the business and the technology team. BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management delivers an operational model for the lifecycle of private cloud resources and utilization of public clouds in a hybrid model. It provides the foundation for a strong, flexible, and valuable cloud infrastructure that supports IT operations and delivers exceptional service quality to the business. Learn more To learn more, please visit 6

9 Business runs on IT. IT runs on BMC Software. Business runs better when IT runs its best. Tens of thousands of IT organizations around the world -- from small and mid-market businesses to the Global rely on BMC Software (NASDAQ: BMC) to manage their business services and applications across distributed, mainframe, virtual and cloud environments. BMC helps customers cut costs, reduce risk and achieve business objectives with the broadest choice of IT management solutions, including industry-leading Business Service Management and Cloud Management offerings. For the four fiscal quarters ended September 30, 2012, BMC revenue was approximately $2.2 billion. BMC, BMC Software, and the BMC Software logo are the exclusive properties of BMC Software, Inc., are registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and may be registered or pending registration in other countries. All other BMC trademarks, service marks, and logos may be registered or pending registration in the U.S. or in other countries. AIX and IBM are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. 2010, 2012 BMC Software, Inc. All rights reserved. *314608*