Reaching for the Clouds: Achieving the Business Benefits of Cloud Computing

Transcription

1 SOLUTION WHITE PAPER Reaching for the Clouds: Achieving the Business Benefits of Cloud Computing Increase flexibility, lower costs, and more effectively meet the needs of the business with BSM for Cloud Computing

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS EXECUTIVE SUMMARY DREAMING OF CLOUDS: THE SKY HIGH GOAL A LADDER TO THE CLOUD: CHALLENGES GETTING THERE BSM FOR CLOUD COMPUTING Cloud Planning BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management Cloud Operations and Optimization Cloud Governance LEARN MORE

3 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY By any measure, the hype around Cloud computing has reached nearly deafening levels. However, behind the wall of hype lies a fundamentally straightforward concept one that s been percolating for many years in the IT world. Cloud computing is an architecture that enables IT organizations to parcel out portions of a shared pool of hardware and software resources to users through an automated, self-service request system. This model for IT, internally managed and externally hosted, offers tremendous benefi ts in the areas of cost-savings, IT responsiveness, and improved flexibility. However, its successful implementation typically requires organizations to overcome some signifi cant organizational and technological hurdles. BMC Software delivers solutions and expertise to clear these barriers, from the planning stages to the optimization and governance of a working Cloud. The payoff, in the end, is a transformed infrastructure that is flexible, highly responsive to business needs, cost effective, and unifi ed. DREAMING OF CLOUDS: THE SKY HIGH GOAL Cloud computing is driving a great deal of IT investment. IT groups are seeking to give greater access to resources to their stakeholders, respond with agility to the needs and demands of the business, and at the same time, curtail costs. Clouds come in a variety of flavors, including: Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): Targeted at end users seeking to purchase applications, SaaS hosts those applications for the user and charges a subscription fee. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): Designed for developers, PaaS hosts all the building blocks of a development environment, speeding up the development process and encouraging support for a platform. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS): Comprised of the foundations of any IT environment, IaaS is the most fundamental type of Cloud, delivering operating systems and application stacks to internal or external customers. Fundamentally, a few core elements are required of an IaaS Cloud: A self-service portal, enabling users to request and receive confi gured resources rapidly An automated provisioning model, facilitating the creation of flexible, multi-tiered VMs to meet the specifi c needs of the user A service-model, extending the traditional model of Business Service Management to the Cloud, and bringing with it the best practices that ensure service quality A dynamic management environment that can actively monitor and respond to this ever-changing set of workloads in a way that optimizes service quality and cost This defi nition applies equally to private Clouds and public Clouds. Public Clouds are designed to sell capacity to companies with limited internal resources. Private Clouds mimic the same structure, but exist within the company s datacenters, delivering flexibility and some cost-savings without leaving the walls of the organization. Hybrid Clouds are an amalgam of both, in which companies reach out to public Clouds to extend their own infrastructures, but manage them seamlessly. Finally, the concept of a community Cloud has been developed to describe coalitions of organizations, typically governmental or of the same type, who build a shared, secure external Cloud together. The ultimate goals of all these environments are: More effi cient use of resources, whether fi nancial, physical, or human Improved agility and flexibility, removing the IT barrier from business effi ciency Expanded service orientation, aligning IT and business goals more directly Enterprises investing in private Clouds and/or using the public Cloud for overdraft or to build virtual private Clouds must invest in management technology to manage service quality and availability. Source: Gartner Cool Vendors in Cloud Management, 2010, 31 March

4 A LADDER TO THE CLOUD: CHALLENGES GETTING THERE While the concept of Cloud computing is reasonably straightforward, the execution does come with its challenges. Each component must work hand-in-glove with the rest to enable a dynamic, stable, cost-effective, and flexible environment. Without careful attention, the equilibrium of a Cloud could easily be threatened. Organizations face several challenges that must be addressed: First and foremost, Clouds must provide users with the ability to self-provision resources. Whether in internal private Clouds or third-party public Clouds, users must have a mechanism for selecting their preferences from a set of options and for initiating a workflow to generate this resource. In a process similar to that of ordering a laptop online, there are typically a variety of baseline options, capacity requirements, software options, and additional features all of which represent a tailored, if not custom, result. Identifying the options, creating the portal, defi ning the baseline requirements and approvals, and fi nally, provisioning the resources presents a complex orchestration challenge far beyond copy and paste. Specifi cally, organizations usually desire that the available service offerings be driven by user roles and constrained by security, organizational, or fi nancial policies. SUMMARY OF CASE STUDY Concur Technologies embraced BSM for Cloud Computing, and in one year: Increased server virtualization from 5 percent to 42 percent virtualized Reduced server confi guration mistakes by percent Has already saved $1.7 million According to Craig Baughn, vice president of Concur s hosting services, the BMC solution enabled us to re-allocate resources to other areas of the business because of the effi ciency offered. (source: One_Firm_s_Private_Cloud_Journey) Second is the dynamic management challenge. Once commissioned, Cloud resources have tremendous flexibility to grow, shrink, move, change confi gurations, and ultimately, be decommissioned. This process mirrors that of a traditional physical datacenter, infused with a host of additional degrees of freedom (and thus, complexity). As such, it requires much of the same management best practices augmented with Cloud awareness. Absent that, conditions will occur for which appropriate responses and controls are not well established, and the organization will experience increased costs, decreased availability, and reduced flexibility. In fact, organizations need to view Cloud as a catalyst for improving their IT maturity. Third is the challenge of scope. Born of the virtualization world, Cloud computing is often perceived as being uniformly based on x86 Microsoft Windows and Linux platforms; while, in fact, this is not at all reflective of the reality of the modern datacenter. Companies continue to be broadly multi-platform in their datacenters, running everything from blade servers to mainframes and leveraging a host of virtualization technologies, including hypervisors, Solaris zones and containers, and even LPARs. To limit the Cloud to a subset of the company s systems is to hamper its strength and curtail its eventual growth. Finally, a diverse group of public Clouds are being built by telecommunications fi rms and service providers the world over. Enterprises are increasingly seeking opportunities to leverage these external Clouds both for cost-savings and increased flexibility. However, the provisioning and management of those resources often represent a separate IT challenge one that, realistically, should be a seamless extension of the private Cloud, managed with consistent processes, policies, people, and tools. Thoughtful organizations, while embracing the benefi ts of public Cloud usage, are not willing to do so at the price of introducing new management silos. To implement and be successful developing a Cloud computing infrastructure, organizations should consider every stage of the environment from planning and provisioning to operations and decommissioning. By adopting a layered approach, the fundamentals of management can be implemented, and then improved upon, generating increasing effi ciencies and flexibility for the business. 2

5 KEY BENEFITS CLOUD PLANNING Discover and assess existing IT assets Establish technical and business plans for Cloud transition CLOUD LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT Effi ciently and accurately provision Cloud services through a self-service portal driven by a service catalog CLOUD OPERATIONS AND OPTIMIZATION Proactively monitor the Cloud by predicting and repairing performance issues before they impact users Actively manage capacity to ensure optimal use of resources CLOUD GOVERNANCE Run IT like a business, with visibility and predictability of fi nancial metrics View and manage asset usage for reduced costs SUMMARY OF CASE STUDY (BMC I.T. ORGANIZATION) BMC s own IT department utilized BSM for Cloud Computing and: Reduced physical servers by 25 percent, and achieved 70 percent CPU utilization Reduced power consumption by 23 percent Increased server admin productivity by 600 percent Reduced server provisioning time from two weeks to fi ve minutes The fi nancial payback of this investment in Cloud, which was approximately $2 million, was achieved in fewer than six months. BSM FOR CLOUD COMPUTING BMC applies the proven principles of Business Service Management to the Cloud, in the following ways: CLOUD PLANNING Cloud Planning lays the foundation of an effi cient, effective Cloud environment by leveraging a set of activities and solutions to ensure the private Cloud is tailored properly to meet the needs of the organization. These steps include: Developing and maintaining an accurate picture of the current IT environment from existing VMs and physical machines to the dependencies between these systems. BMC Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping, working in conjunction with the BMC Atrium CMDB, can create a current, accurate base from which the requirements of the Cloud can be created. With a baseline understanding of the types of workloads that will be utilizing the Cloud, BMC BladeLogic Server Automation Suite can come together with BMC Atrium Orchestrator and BMC Capacity Management to design the services that will be delivered via the Cloud. From the quantity of resources required to the desired service levels and costs to the application stacks, these solutions help organizations balance the flexibility desired by the business with the control required for successful operations. Once designed and built, the transition of existing workloads onto the Cloud requires a combination of automation and organizational change. The same tools that helped create the Cloud can now assist in this move, ensuring continuity from the physical or virtual environments into the Cloud environment. Maintaining the context, data, confi gurations, and histories on each workload is critical both to their ongoing operations and to measuring the success of the Cloud initiative. BMC CLOUD LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management ensures the full lifecycle of resources in the Cloud is well structured and flexible. As the most visible manifestation of the Cloud computing infrastructure, the provisioning experience must be easy, flexible, and rapid, while still ensuring that the operational integrity of the environment is maintained. A self-service portal is the only interaction most Cloud users will ever have with the infrastructure, and thus should be a positive experience. Rather than simply offering a limited, cookie-cutter set of VMs, cloned from static images, BMC BladeLogic Server Automation Suite, BMC BladeLogic Network Automation, and BMC Atrium Orchestrator work behind the scenes to provision and deploy custom services from OS to application stack to network confi guration. Exposed through a robust service catalog, this capability enables each Cloud resource to both conform to operational requirements (such as policy or cost constraints), while still meeting users individual needs. Once Cloud resources are no longer needed, they should be properly decommissioned, or else the detritus of prior workloads will continue to consume resources and clog the Cloud. BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management ensures that workloads with termination dates are appropriately handled, saving resources and greatly easing management. Cloud resources are fundamentally service offerings, and thus should be measured and managed as such. With integration into the BMC Remedy IT Service Management Suite, BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management ensures that the Cloud is not managed in a vacuum, but rather alongside traditional resources, ensuring continuity of service throughout. 3

6 Finally, when internal resources are not suffi cient, either long-term or during peak times, organizations are increasingly turning to public Clouds to augment their own infrastructure. In a so-called hybrid Cloud model, however, maintaining seamless management and provisioning, regardless of the physical location of the back-end resources, is critical to ensuring that these two environments transition smoothly and do not become separate entities. BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management integrates with external Cloud vendors, such as Amazon EC2, facilitating that developing use case. SOLUTION REQUIREMENTS Required capabilities for a complete Cloud solution include: Comprehensive accurate discovery ensuring a complete up-todate service picture of the IT infrastructure CLOUD OPERATIONS AND OPTIMIZATION Cloud Operations and Optimization ensures that once a Cloud environment is running, it runs well. To do so, attention needs to be paid to maintaining an accurate inventory of the VMs in the environment and their interconnectedness, as well as the health of the Cloud as a whole. Over time, capacity requirements change, and performance may fluctuate. Some elemental components of physical management, brought into the dynamic Cloud environment, can ensure that the Cloud continues to deliver business value. Dynamic environments need dynamic, ongoing discovery. Without an accurate picture of the Cloud, the services it delivers, and the dependencies between them, IT operations will always struggle to maintain service quality and identify the root cause of issues. Using BMC Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping on an ongoing basis automates this effort, and ensures that changes to the Cloud infrastructure are automatically captured. Self-service provisioning, marrying flexible full-stack layered provisioning with strong IT controls Process-driven, automated tools for managing provisioning workflows and resource decommissioning. Automated management of service levels to ensure consistent quality service on all Cloud resources. A single management infrastructure, across physical, virtual, and Cloud environments BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management works within the Cloud environment to ensure that every VM and service in the environment is performing to the level it should. In a Cloud environment, with the growth, motion of VMs, and changes in resource availability, performance can drastically improve or degrade as part of the regular ebbs and flows of the Cloud. With proper, proactive performance management in place, IT can ensure that service quality is maintained. Capacity management, like performance, is ever-changing in world of self-service provisioning and automated decommissioning. As sophistication increases, managing the capacity of the environment and the resources available to each VM will become critical not only to their service levels but also to forecasting additional investment needs. BMC Capacity Management can monitor, analyze, and forecast capacity needs in this new, dynamic environment. Capacity planning for optimal resource usage, balancing utilization with cost reduction Ongoing monitoring, ensuring environmental integrity A modular, complete solution that can be implemented in stages and customized to meet the Cloud needs of your enterprise CLOUD GOVERNANCE Cloud governance enables IT organizations to operate their Cloud environment like a business. Organizations need the ability not only to calculate the costs associated with delivering services, but also to optimize resource utilization in the environment and ensure that compliance requirements are consistently and effi ciently met. By linking an understanding of service costing with Cloud service level defi nitions, utilization, capacity investment, and public Cloud pricing, decisions can all be driven by and aligned to the priorities of the business. The Cloud environment, private or hybrid, must create the flexibility to address the needs of the business, while at the same time, optimize its own operations to ensure costs and investments support business goals. IT service costing marries detailed information about the workloads in the Cloud with costs associated with hardware, network, software, and other relevant resources. By combining BMC Service Cost Management data with service level metrics and BMC Capacity Management, a fi nancial strategy for the growth of the Cloud can be created to support the technological direction. 4

7 BMC Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping discovers and inventories the VMs and other elements of the service environment, including their interdependencies and relationships ensuring that each chunk of resource is appropriately allocated and tracked. BMC BladeLogic Server Automation Suite and BMC BladeLogic Network Automation ensure that the resources delivering the services meet the needs of the business, as well as the compliance requirements of the specifi c workload or service level. With detailed inventories and integration to asset and license management, these tools support both compliance and asset management priorities. LEARN MORE BMC can help you address your immediate and long-term Cloud computing goals effi ciently and effectively. To learn more, please visit 5

8 BUSINESS RUNS ON IT. IT RUNS ON BMC SOFTWARE. Business thrives when IT runs smarter, faster and stronger. That s why the most demanding IT organizations in the world rely on BMC Software across both distributed and mainframe environments. Recognized as the leader in Business Service Management, BMC offers a comprehensive approach and unifi ed platform that helps IT organizations cut cost, reduce risk and drive business profi t. For the four fi scal quarters ended March 31, 2010, BMC revenue was approximately $1.91 billion. *133328* 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 Offi ce, 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. Solaris is the trademark or registered trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc., in the U.S. and other countries. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners BMC Software, Inc. All rights reserved.