TRANSFORMING I.T. WITH AN OPEN HYBRID CLOUD

Whitepaper TRANSFORMING I.T. WITH AN OPEN HYBRID CLOUD Gordon Haff EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Information technology is increasingly at the core of how organizations service their customers and differentiate themselves from their competitors. And IT is transforming as a result. IT organizations will have to change the way they view their roles as they transition from a maintainer of servers to a broker of services. With this transformation, IT organizations need to take existing systems and processes into account, while managing across the inevitable hybrid infrastructure in ways that not only avoid creating new silos but also consider compliance, risk management, and data protection. Finally, this transformation must prompt a new focus on enabling the creation of new services that best fit the organization s changing needs. The only way to achieve this transformation is through a cloud that embraces open and hybrid principles: Hybrid because that s simply the way things are and will increasingly be in the heterogeneous world of IT, and open because that s the only way to achieve true hybrid to provide access to the greatest pool of innovation and avoid lock-in. INTRODUCTION Cloud computing s initial adoption didn t follow the typical pattern; it was largely led by the buyers and users of technology rather than vendors. That s because those buyers and users had a problem. They faced an innovation gap between what their businesses needed to thrive and what traditional IT could deliver. Technology was becoming increasingly central to more and more organizations across industries and markets. That meant more and more applications and services: proliferating mobile and social applications, data analytics, and rapidly changing systems for interacting with customers and partners. Just staying competitive much less taking advantage of technology to uniquely differentiate required developing and supporting thousands of new services. facebook.com/redhatinc @redhatnews linkedin.com/company/red-hat

business demands drive I.T. Transformations BUSINESS DEMANDS I.T. TRANSFORMATION BUSINESS DEMAND FOR INNOVATION Business wants agility, lower cost, new capabilities I.T. INNOVATION GAP IT struggling with existing legacy infrastructure architecture and cost model Cloud providers are using next-generation IT built on open source technologies CAPABILITY FOR INNOVATION ON TRADITIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE IT needs to adapt cloud architecture and technologies to close innovation gap IT budgets and resources weren t growing apace and traditional datacenters and architectures weren t flexible enough to deliver against these requirements. But cloud computing whatever a OHC0001 given organization understood the term to mean offered answers. Certainly, words associated with cloud computing like self-service, flexibility, and on-demand seemed to be the salve for the pains at hand. However, many early cloud projects didn t really fulfill their promise. Some of this was related to the relative immaturity of both technologies and their related ecosystems. But another contributing factor was how many of these projects were implemented as quick fixes without enough forethought for their role as part of an overall IT strategy that embraced both existing investments and looked to the future. Thus, some early projects adopted a public cloud provider for applications in isolation. Others added a few features to an existing virtualization platform. The result was often another IT silo and not a very effective one at that. Today, many organizations are taking a broader and more strategic view. Doing so involves transforming IT from a traditional infrastructure provider to a provider and broker of services. And it s a hybrid set of services. As John R. Rymer and James Staten of Forrester advise, Management in the future of cloud shifts to providing, measuring, and using portfolios of services. Focus on building enterprise libraries of reusable application images and workloads for public clouds and hybrid consumption. 1 1 Forrester Cloud Keys An Era Of New IT Responsiveness And Efficiency, John R. Rymer and James Staten, December 19, 2012 2

This paper discusses three key challenges that organizations are tackling with cloud computing and why planning for a hybrid future matters in each case. It considers why openness is a key enabler of hybrid, both to avoid lock-in and to enable access to innovation wherever it happens. Finally, it outlines Red Hat s strategy for enabling a hybrid future using a fully open approach that provides portability and choice across a heterogeneous infrastructure, whether existing or new. THREE CHALLENGES Cloud computing, in its various forms, addresses different pains in different organizations (or parts of organizations). For some, its appeal is the ability to pay an external provider only for the compute capacity they use. But public cloud utility pricing isn t what s driving cloud adoption at most enterprises we re speaking with. Rather, most of them are trying to deal with one or more of the following three challenges: Transform IT into a broker of services Adopt new cloud capabilities while embracing existing investments Rapidly deliver new capabilities for the business Transition from servers to services Historically, the concern of IT operations has been acquiring servers, connecting them, provisioning them, and then tending them over time. The details changed over time as server architectures increasingly scaled out, not up, and as open source and open standards came into the mainstream. However, the focus still remained on the box and the operating system running on the box. This remained the case even with the rise of virtualization; the only real difference was a virtual box rather than a physical one. But the key to cloud success is not just speeding up delivery of servers, network, storage, and other computing resources, but also changing the form of what IT offers. A service-design approach includes understanding business objectives, detailing specific user needs, defining services that meet those needs, and defining the functional and technical specifications needed to deliver those services. It also includes creating an IT factory to build and deploy workloads in simple or complex cloud environments, both at internal and external resource locations. This includes having clearly defined policies that specify what, how, where, and when workloads are deployed, and whether to deploy in public or private clouds, static virtual environments, or even physical dedicated servers. In its new role, IT still needs to provide and manage an agile and efficient infrastructure, but the mindset is a new one. Rather than sticking to a bottoms-up infrastructure perspective, IT now becomes a partner with the business that can proactively work to deliver what s needed for the organization to be successful. In with the new alongside the old Public cloud providers effectively set a new benchmark for IT departments. We ve seen what that benchmark looks like from the perspective of IT service consumers within an organization: self-service, on-demand resources, and access to the latest tools. However, IT organizations also have to look to public clouds as they consider the cost, scalability, flexibility, and adaptability of their supporting infrastructure. For most organizations, perfectly mimicking public clouds is not practical. They have to take into account existing infrastructure, much of which is very important to their business. They have to accommodate unique business processes and other requirements that are specific to them. They 3

have to meet whatever compliance, regulatory, and data privacy requirements apply to their applications and the data they store. As a result, it s more accurate to think about this evolution as public cloud-inspired modernization as opposed to greenfield replacement. There is a great deal to be learned from the way public cloud infrastructure is built and operated. It makes extensive use of Linux and open source. It adopts architectural patterns suited for modern scale-out systems, flexible networks, software-based storage, and high scale. It automates wherever possible. It practices operational excellence. However, enterprises need to work in the context of deploying and managing services across hybrid cloud environments with intelligent workload placement and true workload and data portability, which enables services to be easily relocated and elastically scaled up or down. To reduce complexity and cost, enterprises need to unify management of this environment by providing monitoring, metering, and capacity planning across the entire infrastructure and not just individual silos. Finally, they need to ensure governance with automated policy enforcement and application tagging that keeps them in control and in compliance across a hybrid, heterogeneous infrastructure. Enable the business Developers have been among the most enthusiastic adopters of public clouds because they re the ones tasked with writing thousands of applications, and traditional IT processes that could take weeks or months to deliver a server weren t cutting it. Furthermore, even once developers were provisioned with that server or virtual machine, they often still needed to configure it for their needs. Contrast that with public cloud self-service and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) environments that were largely ready to use with just a few clicks. What s more, these public clouds tended to focus on the latest and coolest in languages, frameworks, and tooling. No wonder the old way of doing things seemed increasingly unattractive. But this shadow IT created problems. It often wasn t consistent with the organization s production deployment environment. It didn t necessarily follow rules for the placement and safeguarding of customer data. And it could be locked into a specific cloud provider. However, an IT organization that rethinks its role as a service broker can deliver the same type of services to its consumers in a self-service fashion. Some of these services may even be provided directly by a public cloud provider. The decision about where a given service is hosted becomes an IT sourcing and risk mitigation exercise not a philosophical one. (Note, however, that IT has to offer services that legitimately meet the needs of users, not pale shadows of what can be sourced from a public cloud.) PaaS in particular, is all about bringing greater agility and giving developers a greater degree of selfservice, removing IT as the bottleneck of getting things done. 4

Developers can quickly begin deploying applications. They can choose from a variety of languages, frameworks, and other services (e.g., databases). And really, what that means is that they can focus on what matters most to them their application code. They can iterate on their designs and really see the applications up and running without having to worry about how to manage what s running underneath. At the same time, the organization can use a PaaS to standardize developer workflows and ensure whatever level of language and tool consistency they require. This makes a PaaS a very adaptable abstraction layer that s useful to both those writing the applications and those responsible for the supporting infrastructure of those applications. WHY OPEN AND HYBRID An open hybrid approach brings benefits throughout the software stack, from infrastructure up through the development and deployment platform and, ultimately, to cloud applications. These benefits accrue for IT operations, developers, and the business as a whole although the specific concerns differ depending upon the role. Thus, operations is most concerned with meeting goals such as overall efficiency and resource utilization, together with the reliability, security, and compliance of the infrastructure as a whole. Developers, meanwhile, are most concerned with their own productivity and ability to test new features and update applications faster using the most appropriate tools. The line-of-business wants faster time-to-market and flexibility without lock-in with a choice of paying for capacity in a way that best fits their revenue and capital model. Let s now consider how an open hybrid cloud plays out across the layers of the stack. For Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) IT organizations needs to provide users self-service, on-demand access to governed IT resources, and automated provisioning that lets users access the infrastructure they need in minutes instead of weeks or months. At the same time, they need to maintain control over and access to these resources based on policy. This includes, for example, metering resource use and establishing quotas as needed. It also includes managing the life cycle of applications running within both virtual and physical resources for consistency, compliance, and other reasons. A hybrid infrastructure can span both existing and new resources whether on a physical server, virtualization platforms, private IaaS clouds, or public clouds. And it has to be hybrid beyond a single vendor s technology that s just a recipe for a new silo. Many organizations today are getting started by building private clouds that build upon an existing virtualization project. However, many are then adding new open source-based virtualization or public clouds. A true hybrid approach allows IT organizations to deploy to heterogeneous infrastructure today and leave choices open for the future, while maintaining application and data portability across their future choice of infrastructure as well. 5

An open hybrid cloud gives IT organizations strategic flexibility and choice by providing the ability to quickly adopt and embrace new infrastructure components, new service providers, and new tools, all without disrupting the ongoing business operations or having to port or re-write applications. For Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) PaaS is fundamentally about standardizing and accelerating developer workflows to increase the velocity of IT service delivery. It does so by enabling developers with the widest range of languages, frameworks, and tools to increase their productivity within the appropriate environment for the job at hand. At the same time, PaaS abstracts away lower level infrastructure and operational concerns, such as installing databases or deploying applications, that are just necessary plumbing from the perspective of writing a web application. First-generation PaaS deployments were the definition of not hybrid. They only ran in one provider s environment and they supported only a limited monolingual development environment. They also saw limited use. Enterprises and their developers want choice. They want externally hosted PaaS for some workloads and to try things out. But many are also looking to optionally host and operate their own PaaS for their software development environment. Open source? They want that too. They want the option to use a wide gamut of languages, frameworks, and tools. And they want to be able to define their own environments to package up the specific middleware and other platform infrastructure they use. For cloud applications For cloud applications, IT wants access to the widest range of open source tools and languages. This gives you access to the same latest technologies used by public cloud providers and innovative companies around the world. Businesses also need to rapidly build, integrate, and deliver a wide range of services for cloud applications to quickly deliver business value. To do so, they use current and emerging integration methodologies to dramatically improve business process execution speed and quality. Integration of enterprise applications is increasingly about integrating a far-flung, hybrid set of applications and services. Integration is still about tying together applications running in the corporate datacenter, whether traditional systems of record such as those that operate with production databases but also newer systems of engagement connecting with customers and partners. However, integration today also means reaching beyond the datacenter to connect with everything from fleets of delivery trucks to external data sources. 6

THE RED HAT APPROACH At Red Hat, we think it s critical to look strategically at your potential cloud solutions to avoid silos of compute resources, fragmented architectures, and additional management complexities. By looking for technologies that only meet a point need, you may architect for one cloud but won t be portable to other clouds. That would create a strategic business problem. next generation IT infrastructures BUSINESS / CONSUMER APPLICATIONS AND WORKLOADS WITH RED HAT Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat JBoss Middleware, Red Hat Storage I.T. MANAGEMENT / PROVIDER Red Hat CloudForms, Red Hat Satellite PLATFORM-AS-A-SERVICE WITH RED HAT OpenShift by Red Hat PaaS SERVICE MANAGEMENT MONITORING AND EVENT MANAGEMENT INFRASTRUCTURE-AS-A-SERVICE WITH RED HAT Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure, Red Hat Storage AUTOMATION IaaS CLOUD BROKERING VIRTUAL RESOURCES LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT PUBLIC CLOUD RESOURCES PUBLIC CLOUD RESOURCES PUBLIC CLOUD RESOURCES PRIVATE CLOUD PHYSICAL RESOURCES RED HAT CERTIFIED CLOUD PROVIDER CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT OHC0026 Red Hat frees you from lock-in and provides a fully open solution on which to build. Furthermore, it s a comprehensive, 100% open portfolio spanning the entire cloud stack. Red Hat delivers a completely open cloud approach under IT s control. With Red Hat, you can use and adopt new cloud technologies built for enterprise IT and backed by a full ecosystem with more than 5,000 certified apps, ready to go today. Because Red Hat has done the hard work, no matter where you start, you can get up and running with enterprise-class capabilities in days and weeks, not months and years. Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure offers your choice of infrastructure for your choice of workload type running on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization or Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. Manage those workloads with Red Hat CloudForms, which gives you a single view across your heterogeneous and hybrid infrastructure and provides the monitoring, metering, and automation to put you in control of your diverse IT resources. 7

OpenShift by Red Hat lets you streamline your development workflows with your choice of languages, frameworks, and tools, whether online or on-premise PaaS. JBoss Enterprise Middleware integrates your existing applications and business processes with the applications and business services you need, developed with Java, Python, Ruby or whatever other tools you prefer. Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides you with a proven, reliable, consistent environment to run your workloads across your choice of infrastructure and gives you access to certified applications from thousands of ISV partners. Red Hat Storage enables the seamless movement of data across a hybrid environment and the extension of converged server and storage infrastructure from on-premise to a public cloud and back. CONCLUSION A truly open solution gives you the ability to run your applications and workloads on a variety of infrastructure platforms and develop applications with the tools that are appropriate for your business. A truly open solution is the only path to achieving true hybrid IT. Open gives you interoperability that allows you to develop and run a diverse set of applications and business services across infrastructures based on a variety of technologies, billing models, and operational approaches. Open gives you portability to move applications and data to the in-house or external provider that makes the most sense for reasons of cost, control, compliance, or operational preference. Open gives you access to the greatest pool of innovation, wherever that innovation is happening. Open gives you the agility to respond to the ever-accelerating needs of modern business and the demand for more dynamic approaches to IT and applications Open gives you choice and won t lock you into any single vendor s technology stack and business model. ABOUT RED HAT Red Hat is the world s leading provider of open source solutions, using a community-powered approach to provide reliable and high-performing cloud, virtualization, storage, Linux, and middleware technologies. Red Hat also offers award-winning support, training, and consulting services. Red Hat is an S&P company with more than 70 offices spanning the globe, empowering its customers businesses. facebook.com/redhatinc @redhatnews linkedin.com/company/red-hat NORTH AMERICA 1 888 REDHAT1 EUROPE, MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA 00800 7334 2835 europe@ ASIA PACIFIC +65 6490 4200 apac@ LATIN AMERICA +54 11 4329 7300 latammktg@ #11344127_V1_0813 Copyright 2013 Red Hat, Inc. Red Hat, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the Shadowman logo, and JBoss are trademarks of Red Hat, Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. Linux is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries.