MANAGED SERVICES cloud
SLAs, that the industry has focussed on helping customers to consolidate, rather than provide lifecycle solutions and services that can increase operational effectiveness and realise increased business value. By looking at virtualisation as a single entity, as opposed to disparate technology platforms, organisations can better ensure optimum performance and efficiency throughout the lifecycle of virtualised infrastructure; consolidate multiple support contracts; improve business service levels; reduce hosting space and simplify overall management of the virtualised network, ultimately driving down costs.
Support: Consider the financial and operational benefits of one agreement, one contract, and one service partner taking care of your multi-vendor virtual data centre. Contract consolidation can reduce the cost of support by as much as 10-15%. Optimise: Most IT service providers provide tuning services that assess and optimise capacity in disk, disk I/O, network, memory and
CPU resources. This helps reduce the costs of running excess virtual servers, eliminates capacity bottlenecks and mitigates hypervisor sprawl, to ensure maximum performance and efficiency. Manage: Implement a framework for managing all elements of your virtual architecture, not just the hypervisor. This will enable self-service provisioning, automation and orchestration services, and provide a single view of end-to-end services – both virtual and physical, turning brochure-ware promises of a ‘simple to operate’ virtual architecture into a reality.
Ahead in the clouds
The great thing about your virtual infrastructure is that it means you’re already on your way to a cloud computing architecture.
In fact, chances are you’re probably already in the process of moving some of your ICT infrastructure to something that resembles a private cloud. Private cloud is more than simply putting a hypervisor on your Intel estate, though; it’s about linking infrastructure components, virtualised servers, storage, network, security and management tools. Turning these into a pool of resource is what the term ‘private cloud’ really means. The adoption of private cloud is a sensible first step towards cloud computing. It allows you the time to realise and demonstrate the benefits of cloud, whilst adapting to a service- oriented IT architecture.
Viewing virtualisation of entire services as a single entity - the lifecycle approach – will help you adapt to the changes in service management required from cloud computing. Taking a VM centric approach limits your ability to address the business requirements of IT services. The most fundamental difference will be ‘containerisation’ - the compartmentalising of IT services into logical containers. These ‘containers’ enable you to shift workloads or services between platforms, such as private to public cloud, or between data centres, without physically moving anything. Looking at your infrastructure through the lens of containerisation allows you to align your technology to IT services, and thus your business, whilst also unlocking your potential to exploit cloud.
A process of segmentation will help to define commoditised (e.g., email) and critical services or workloads (e.g., ERP), and subsequently identify where best, operationally and financially, these reside. It forces you to structure your business’ needs service down, rather than infrastructure up, and help you to realise the business’ future requirements, whether that’s private, public and/or hybrid cloud support.
No turkeys here
Optimising your virtual estate will help prepare your organisation for private cloud, as well as enhance performance and ROI in the short term. In turn, this will support the development of in-house skills and enable data centre teams to better consult on the design, migration and implementation of a cloud computing strategy that’s right for the organisation.
In the longer term, bear in mind that driving smaller higher density data centres (private cloud) requires many of the same skills – from power and cooling to provisioning, management, and cabling – further validating the opportunity for skilled data centre engineers. The data centre is pivotal to a successful cloud computing strategy – embrace the opportunity to demonstrate vision and adaptability. Take the initiative, be a cloud champion. Turkeys need not apply.
February 2012 I
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