Managing Cloud Resources

Omar Nawaz is the founder and President at Rouge Group. Omar has over 20 years of experience in Product Management, Marketing and Strategy. His areas of expertise include Cloud Services (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS) and Enterprise Software. Omar has built and launched over 20 emerging technologies products and solutions at large companies and start-ups and he has successfully created new markets to build several $100+ million businesses. Copyright 2014 Rouge Group LLC. All rights reserved

CHALLENGES: Optimizing infrastructure utilization Controlling cost Capacity planning for future Managing the sprawl Troubleshooting How to optimize virtual infrastructure and cloud resources In the Cloud computing era, computing is a service and no longer discrete components of physical inventory. Resources, software and information are shared. To drive increased agility, lower cost, and higher service levels enterprises are transforming IT infrastructure into dynamic and virtual pool of resources and offering it as utility Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). IaaS is the infrastructure layer of the cloud, private or public, see figure 1. This new and shared infrastructure resources include virtualization, resource pooling, dynamic and logical workload allocation, reconfigurations and relocations, which introduces significant complexities to resource management and planning. Figure 1: Building blocks of a cloud (private and public)

1 2 IT administrators and managers need a comprehensive strategy to optimize and manage cloud. IT needs a comprehensive Infrastructure-as-a-Service Perspective (IaaS) Cloud Management Suite. Traditional IT management tools and approaches were never About Rouge Group designed for these new environments. There are tools and effectively managing the technology currently running the business. A comprehensive IaaS Cloud Management environment will enable IT administrators and managers to optimize their cloud infrastructure with advanced capacity planning and sophisticated resource Rouge Group is a top Management Consulting firm. We provide Product Management, Marketing and Strategy consulting services to top enterprises, service providers, and startups. We work with business executives and entrepreneurs to realize their ideas, make better decisions, and deliver sustainable success. techniques available that allow We achieve this by bringing deep industry knowledge and expert perspective from a wide range of industries to offer our client fresh perspectives and insights. virtual environments and deal with We are passionate about taking on challenges that are important to our clients, help realize their vision and achieve better results that are unique, pragmatic, holistic, and enduring. The implications of cloud go management, planning and beyond technology and process, investment. you to capture utilization data in a virtual and cloud infrastructure, but that alone is not sufficient for sophisticated resource management and capacity planning. To manage and control real-time changes you need a new approach. management capabilities. IT needs both quantitative and qualitative view on the entire environment. A combined view of configurations, operational event data, resource utilization and performance statistics will empower IT administrators and manager to make better decisions regarding infrastructure design, and into the core of every component of the IT environment. While the shift to cloud is happening and planning for future state is critical but it s important for organizations not to lose sight of Management environment should be able to capture utilization, health and performance metrics and correlate it with configuration and operational data both

"An Integrated and best of bread strategy will deliver better return on investment in a dynamic, diverse and heterogeneous virtual and cloud infrastructure environment. real-time and historical to provide a comprehensive view of the entire infrastructure. The information regarding configurations, applications versions, patches, hardware revisions needs to be maintained in a version control system, similar to source code. There are several open source and commercial tools that can do this quite effectively, for example, Git (www.git-scm.com), GitHub (www.github.com), SVN (www. subversion.apache.org), Mercurial (www.mercurial.selenic.com) etc. The historical perspective and analytics enables continuous visibility, deep insight and a clear picture of what is driving growth and change and how it is impacting performance, utilization, and service levels. CAPACITY PLANNING: Today s virtual infrastructure and cloud management and monitoring investment may significantly and negatively impact the organization s adoption of or transition to cloud. In order to effectively plan for future capacity, cloud management tool should be able to capture utilization and performance metrics and dynamically calculate capacity. A comprehensive view of virtual infrastructure requires correlated view of the above information with configuration and operation data. Configuration may include information like: classifications, applications, patches, virtual hardware, drift, VM events, relationship and dependency mapping, and changes in infrastructure. Visibility into virtual and cloud infrastructures will provide a clearer picture of what is driving growth and changes in utilization of resources. (continued) Consider management tools that can manage across cloud, noncloud, multi-hypervisor infrastructure. There is no perfect tool. Know where to compromise.

Develop a management, monitoring, and policy strategy for your virtual and cloud infrastructure. MANAGING SPRAWL: Once a clear picture of the capacity and utilization of the virtual infrastructure is available you need ability to define and enforce IT policies based on infrastructure events. This enables you to limit, detect unused (overreserved) resources (memory and CPU), automatically retire and free up valuable resources and track heavy traffic and storage utilization. THE RIGHT TOOL: There are several choices for cloud management platform (CMP). Research firm Gartner categorizes this market into five categories: Traditional large IT operations management (ITOM), software infrastructure stack vendors, emerging vendors, open-source software (OSS) and integrated systems cloud management platforms. There is a long list to consider between commercial and open source. Due to recent popularity of open-source many organizations are considering OSS. Caution should be exercised during evaluation. Some of the OSS offerings may not to ready for production deployment or have limited features or capabilities. When selecting OSS, consider the development skills within the organization and more importantly consider using CMP distribution supported by vendors that can provide support, extended functionality and possible a hardened version that can be deployed in product environments. Some of the popular OSS CMP tools include: OpenStack, Citrix CloudPlatform (CloudStack), Eucalyptus, OpenNebula. Rouge Group team focuses on cloud computing, PaaS, Big Data, Analytics, and DevOps. For more information, please visit: www.rougegrp.com. Rouge Group Contact us: www.rougegrp.com Phone: +1 (408) 471-9357 Email: info@rougegrp.com Pleasanton, CA 6 Rouge Group LLC. www.rougegrp.com