Virtual cloud cover
Una Du Noyer Vice President - Head of Architecture and Infrastructure, Capgemini explains how virtualisation and cloud computing can improve the IT infrastructure.
8 December 2009
Publication
[This article appears in full at Conspectus.com - registration may be required]
Infrastructure technologies are evolving at a faster rate than ever before. Among them, cloud computing and virtualisation are two key developments that are radically changing the way IT services are delivered, how they are managed, and the security and billing models that underpin them. Most senior IT people face the same challenges today: how to provide a massive increase in capacity for X, Y or Z service at very short notice? How to keep a diverse and heterogeneous infrastructure from running out of control? How to address the backlog of urgent priorities? How to address skills shortages and security issues? How to cope with the new budget pressures generated by the credit crunch?
Cloud computing may be the answer to these questions for some organisations and for some services. Gartner defines cloud computing as: “A style of computing where massively scalable (and elastic) IT-related capabilities are provided as a service to external customers using internet technologies.”
It is easy to see the attractions of this concept. Cloud computing, in most cases, means that you are using infrastructure that exists outside of your organisational boundaries. It is someone else’s investment, and keeping it efficient and updated is someone else’s problem.
Cloud services vary. There are the Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings exemplified by Salesforce.com. There are platform services such as Google’s Apps Engine, a self-contained environment to both build and deploy web-based services. There are the infrastructure environments such as Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) that allow use of computational power and storage on a pay-per-use basis.
What they all have in common is they offer computer and storage systems that are accessible yet exist in the supplier’s data centres, not yours.
Most organisations will use a mix of new cloud-based services and traditional inhouse IT. It is therefore worth assessing how you should progress towards the point where you can exploit the best of both.
Perhaps the first concern should be how crucial a particular service or application is to the organisation. Is it something that makes you unique (or at least differentiates you from your competitors) or genuinely gives you significant competitive advantage? Or is it, at the other extreme, simply a standard office application such as email or a routine, non-distinctive accounting application?
In the latter case, there could be a strong argument for taking a close look at the cloud as a means of providing the level of service your organisation needs but at reduced cost. After all, the potential advantages of cloud-based services are essentially cost reduction – the ability to flex and shrink with demand without having to size for peak capacity; or enhanced collaboration with partners and even customers, done in a neutral environment.
Since organisations may exploit both cloud and inhouse services, you should evolve your corporate infrastructure with this in mind. In this, there is a well-understood progression in data centre efficiency:
- Firstly, consolidate and standardise the server and storage estate.
- Where possible, virtualise, to decouple the applications from the physical infrastructure components so they can be dynamically assigned to run on any available platform.
- In parallel, automate the management and optimisation of the services based on well-defined policies.
By taking these steps, you should create an infrastructure that will ultimately be able to support a combined inhouse/ cloud estate. If an application is peaking beyond the capacity of the inhouse estate, it should be able to grab additional compute power off the cloud, from a trusted and secure supplier – for example, IBM’s Cloudburst.
You will need to overcome some obstacles to make this a reality – for example, cloud interoperability is still problematic due to proprietary APIs, image and data storage formats.
But this is the ultimate goal of cloud computing: a seamless and secure elasticity, providing flexible computational power to cope with unpredictable demand, in the same way that the National Grid copes with varying demand for electricity. Business flexibility is no longer constrained by the lack of IT flexibility. It can expand and contract in near real time.
In summary, your organisation should consider the business services you need;
assess whether they are best served inhouse or permanently off the cloud; establish
a virtualised inhouse estate where applications are not hard-wired to the server
and storage systems that support them; and partner strategically with suppliers
who will be able to provide flexible on-demand capacity in real time, so that
ultimately even the inhouse services can flex with the demands of the business.
