Reports Reports.Informationweek.Com February 2012 $99 Understanding Private Cloud Stacks Private Clouds Are More Than a Trendy Buzzword
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Next reports Reports.InformationWeek.com February 2012 $99 Understanding Private Cloud Stacks Private clouds are more than a trendy buzzword. They represent Virtualization 2.0, ushering in a new wave of software designed to turn a rack of commodity servers into an adaptive, scalable platform that further blurs the link between applications and the runtime operating system. For IT organizations willing to dispense with traditional application hosting models, a plethora of pure cloud software options beckons. By Kurt Marko Report ID: S4240212 Previous Next reports Private Cloud Stacks S 3 Author’s Bio ABOUT US 4 Executive Summary T 5 Private Cloud Stacks: Time to Face the InformationWeek Reports’ analysts arm Reality of Virtualization business technology decision-makers with 5 Figure 1: Planned Virtualization real-world perspective based on qualita - 6 Virtualization 2.0 tive and quantitative research, business N 6 Figure 2: Servers Hosting VMs in Production and technology assessment 7 Clouds and Hypervisors and planning tools, and adoption best 7 Figure 3: Implementation of a Private Cloud practices gleaned from experience. To con - E Strategy tact us, write to managing director Art 8 Cloud From the Start Wittmann at [email protected], T 9 Figure 4: Interest in Combined Manufacturer content director Lorna Garey at Complete Systems [email protected], editor-at-large 10 Compute, Storage, Network Integration Andrew Conry-Murray at 10 Figure 5: Private Cloud Application Use Cases [email protected], and research N 11 Clouds and Storage managing editor Heather Vallis at 12 Multifaceted Automation [email protected]. Find all of our TABLE OF 13 Applications and Usage Scenarios reports at reports.informationweek.com 14 Figure 6: Deployed Technologies O 15 Stacks Are Just the Start 16 Related Reports C reports.informationweek.com February 2012 2 Previous Next Table of Contents reports Private Cloud Stacks Kurt Marko is a technology writer and IT industry veteran, now focused on IT analysis and reporting after a varied career that has spanned virtually the entire high-tech food chain from chips to systems. Upon graduating from Stanford Kurt Marko University with a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering, Kurt spent several years as InformationWeek Reports a semiconductor device physicist, doing process design, modeling and testing. He then joined AT&T Bell Laboratories as a memory chip designer and CAD and simulation developer. Moving to Hewlett-Packard, Kurt started in the company’s laser printer R&D lab doing electrophotography research, for which he earned a patent, but his love of computers eventually led him to join the nascent technical IT group. He spent 15 years as an IT engineer and was a lead architect for several enterprise- wide infrastructure projects at HP, including its Windows domain infrastructure, remote access service, Exchange email infrastructure and managed Web serv - ices. For the past five years, Kurt has been a frequent contributor to several IT trade and consumer technology publications and industry conferences. He is now a regular contributor to InformationWeek and Network Computing . reports.informationweek.com © 2012 InformationWeek, Reproduction Prohibited February 2012 3 Previous Next Table of Contents reports Private Cloud Stacks Private clouds represent the next stage of data center evolution—virtualization 2.0. They unify server, storage and network resources into a common resource pool, and are con - Y trolled by software that automatically allocates workloads, assimilates new hardware and meters usage. By incorporating self-service portals and automated provisioning, private clouds offer the promise of both improved IT efficiency and customer satisfaction. R The exemplars of dedicated private cloud stacks are still small research projects and start - ups like OpenStack, Eucalyptus and Nimbula. Meanwhile, incumbent data center virtualiza - tion and infrastructure management software vendors are scurrying to add cloud-like fea - A tures to existing products. However, by adding onto systems designed around the notion of traditional servers, their strategy resembles putting a fresh coat of paint on an aging car. Dedicated private cloud software stacks start with a blank sheet of paper. They are designed M to provide a true resource utility, not discrete virtual servers, and offer features and flexibility that are more like Amazon Web Services than is possible with the incumbents’ hypervisor- centric approach. We’ll examine the trends fueling the cloud software market, review the major features and M technologies, describe how cloud software integrates servers and storage, review the major products and vendors, and outline some advantageous private cloud usage scenarios. EXECUTIVE U S reports.informationweek.com February 2012 4 Previous Next Table of Contents reports Private Cloud Stacks Private Cloud Stacks: Time to Face the Reality of Virtualization Figure 1 Talk of the cloud is everywhere, so much so that “the cloud” has been abused as an IT Planned Virtualization term because its definition is as malleable as What percentage of your organization’s production servers do you expect to have virtualized by the end of next year? those puffy cotton balls used to depict it in 2011 2010 network diagrams. In fact, abuse of the term 0% has garnered its own verb, “cloud washing,” 1% and sarcastic booby prize, “the cloud washies.” 4% Fortunately, the voices of engineers and de - Less than 10% 7% velopers are gradually rising above the din of 11% marketing and sales, spawning a number of 10% to 24% innovative private cloud software projects 12% 20% and startups that have led to actual commer - 25% to 49% cial products and services. These efforts are 17% yielding tangible, production-ready architec - 23% tures and accompanying software stacks— 50% to 74% 24% software that promises to not just abstract in - 19% dividual servers into various virtual slices, but 75% to 90% turn entire equipment racks into a dynamic 25% utility of compute, network and storage re - 13% Greater than 90% source pools. 14% In this report, we’ll examine the state of 10% cloud software stacks, starting with a tech - Base: 396 respondents in August 2011 and 203 in August 2010 Data: InformationWeek Virtualization Management Survey of business technology professionals nology overview, and then taking a deeper R3391011/5 reports.informationweek.com February 2012 5 Previous Next Table of Contents reports Private Cloud Stacks dive to distinguish them from conventional Figure 2 virtualization products. We’ll also survey the product landscape, which is still a hodge - Servers Hosting VMs in Production On average, how many VMs run on each virtualization host server in your production environment(s)? podge of open source projects, commercial software startups and at least one hardware 2011 2010 appliance. 1 2% 9% Virtualization 2.0 2 to 5 Virtualized servers are rapidly supplanting 22% 31% standalone systems for most enterprise appli - FAST FACT 6 to 9 cation workloads as evidenced by Informa - 25% tionWeek ’s 2011 virtualization management 25% 30% survey, which found that 63% of respondents 10 to 20 30% Respondents who have expect half or more of their organization’s 15% 10 to 20 VMs running production servers to be virtualized by the 21 to 40 on each of their end of this year, an increase of 21% since the 13% 13% virtualization host servers. previous year’s survey. More than 40 Unfortunately, the usage model for virtual 8% systems is little changed from the age of 7% standalone servers—it merely replaces phys - Base: 396 respondents in August 2011 and 203 in August 2010 Data: InformationWeek Virtualization Management Survey of business technology professionals ical machines for virtual ones, but still dedi - R3391011/1 cates one application per server. Furthermore, the physical servers themselves are typically solidation ratio of VMs per physical server Yet t he whole notion of a server and its carved into standard units. For example, our among our nearly 400 respondents was still dedicated OS, whether physical or virtual, ex - virtualization survey found the median con - just 10 to one. poses a key conceptual difference between reports.informationweek.com February 2012 6 Previous Next Table of Contents reports Private Cloud Stacks data center virtualization and clouds Figure 3 (whether public or private): resource granu - Implementation of a Private Cloud Strategy larity and scalability. It’s like the difference Has your organization embarked on a private cloud strategy? between watering a garden with buckets 2012 2010 versus a hose. With traditional data center Yes virtualization, you must estimate how much 25% water you’ll need (the total application work - 25% load) and how best to apply it using the Not yet, but we plan to 36% available set of buckets—large, medium or 41% FAST FACT small, or in IT parlance, standardized VM con - No, and no plans figurations. Do you take two 30-gallon drums 39% 34% or a dozen 5-gallon pails? In contrast, with Base: 241 respondents in October 2011 and 355 in August 2010 at organizations with data center convergence plans R3701111/21 25% the cloud, you just turn on the faucet, as fast Data: InformationWeek Data Center Convergence Survey of business technology professionals Organizations that have or slow as you’d like, until you’ve applied the embarked on a private right amount. Because the faucet is metered, Clouds and Hypervisors cloud stack replaces most of the manage - cloud strategy. you (and the water company) know how Yet the hypervisor is still a useful construct, ment software that’s the value-add for a hy - much has been used. so cloud stacks don’t ditch it entirely. Instead, pervisor vendor like VMware. In fact, cloud Two other distinctions between cloud these stacks build upon it, making it transpar - stacks emanating from research labs, like Eu - stacks and data center virtualization environ - ent and largely irrelevant to end users via a calyptus and OpenStack, use the native Linux ments are resource consolidation, with layer of self service and automation.