The Virtualization Practice White Paper: Next Generation Cloud Management: A CloudBolt C2 Analysis Bernd Harzog Analyst – Cloud Management The Virtualization Practice June 2013 © 2013 The Virtualization Practice. All Rights Reserved. All other marks are property of their respective owners. Abstract Data center virtualization (the virtualization of servers) has provided dramatic benefits to IT organizations through improved economics driven by server consolidation, and by allowing many servers of many different types to be abstracted into virtual machines which can then be managed more efficiently and with greater IT agility. However, the virtualization of servers and the associated benefits is just the first step on a journey towards a more fundamentally agile, efficient, dynamic, and responsive IT organization – one that is a true asset to the business, and one that is a source of true business agility and competitive advantage to the business. Realizing these benefits means that IT organizations will need to combine existing server virtualization efforts, the virtualization of complex multi-tier business critical applications, the self-service aspects of IT delivery commonly associated with public clouds, and highly automated IT operations and service delivery into one IT Operations model. Running IT with the agility and cycle times associated with a public cloud while addressing the business critical enterprise class workloads that IT is counted on to be able to support will require an entirely new stack of management software than what has prevailed in the legacy physical and static data center. Next Generation Cloud Management: A CloudBolt C2 Analysis Table of Contents I. IT in a Business Context ............................................................................................. 1 II. Next-Generation Cloud Management ........................................................................ 1 III. Required Capabilities of Next Gen Cloud Managers .............................................. 2 Unbiased Multi-cloud management .................................................................................... 2 Easily modified self-service portal (No dev required) .......................................................... 2 Integrates with anything ...................................................................................................... 3 Configuration Management integration ............................................................................... 3 Network virtualization integration ........................................................................................ 4 IV. Benefits of Next Generation Cloud Management .................................................... 4 Increased business agility ................................................................................................... 4 Increased IT relevance ....................................................................................................... 5 Rapidly enable private cloud ............................................................................................... 5 Enable the path to Hybrid cloud .......................................................................................... 5 Increase value of existing investment ................................................................................. 5 Control shadow IT ............................................................................................................... 6 Reduced provisioning times ................................................................................................ 6 Fully automated self-service ............................................................................................... 6 Transparent reporting ......................................................................................................... 6 V. IT in a Business Context and CloudBolt C2 ............................................................. 7 VI. About CloudBolt Software .......................................................................................... 7 VII. About The Virtualization Practice .............................................................................. 7 © 2013 The Virtualization Practice, All Rights Reserved. All other marks are property of their respective owners. ii Next Generation Cloud Management: A CloudBolt C2 Analysis I. IT in a Business Context What exactly does the business want from IT? This is often very hard for the business to articulate ahead of time as the business usually does not understand enough about IT to be able to articulate its needs to IT in terms that IT can act on. Part of the problem is that IT organizations are more than just virtualization. Enterprises consist of numerous technologies and resources including multiple storage environments, configuration management tools, public and private cloud technologies, different data center environments, networks, applications, and software licenses. Add to those convoluted and variable organizational structures, that require proper tracking and usage reporting, and you see how a simple Cloud Management solution cannot meet the needs of the business. Therefore it usually falls upon the shoulders of IT to react as quickly as possible to the demands of the business once those demands are known with enough certainty to be actionable. However the history of IT’s ability to react to the demands of the business has been a far from compelling story with it often taking months or sometimes years to roll out new services. Virtualization is a game changing technology for the IT department, as it allows IT to react to new and or different requirements very quickly. Virtualization makes it trivially easy for IT to deploy a new server since in many cases that simply means cloning an existing server and starting the new server image, but at the same time, Virtualization alone does not solve the complexities of network, storage and software management. But improving IT responsiveness alone does not really solve the business problem at hand. Letting IT rapidly create new resources is a completely different thing than empowering the business to meet its own needs. Therefore translating IT agility into business agility requires an additional layer of software on top of the virtualization or cloud platform. That is the Cloud Management layer that allows IT to define resources to the business that the business can then order up as needed, and then have those services provisioned in a completely automated manner by the Cloud Management layer. Included in the Cloud Management layer is the ability to provision all of the resources (CPU, memory, networking, storage, and applications) that are needed for a business service. And if the need for the service is transient, automatically retire the service and the resource when the need for them expires. Nevertheless, Cloud Management is the crucial layer of software that must exist in order for IT services to be available to the business on the cycle times demanded by the business. Absent the Cloud Management layer, the manner in which IT operates is simply disconnected from the realities of the rate of change at which a modern business operates. II. Next-Generation Cloud Management Simple Cloud Management solutions have existed for quite some time. They got their start as managers of test environments (typified by the now retired VMware Lab Manager product). However in order for Cloud Management solutions to allow for IT Operations to become synchronized with and relevant to the business Cloud Management solutions must deliver dramatically enhanced functionality over what was present in first generation offerings. © 2013 The Virtualization Practice, All Rights Reserved. All other marks are property of their respective owners. 1 Next Generation Cloud Management: A CloudBolt C2 Analysis The key attribute of a next-generation Cloud Management solution is that it must let the business order and use IT resources in a manner that works for the business. That means that the provisioning of all resources needs to be automated, including deployment and maintenance of applications, that the process for order resources needs to fit the workstyle of each department in the business, and that the business is not constrained with respect to where their workloads run, or its ability to report on all aspects of the use and consumption of those environments. III. Required Capabilities of Next Gen Cloud Managers Unbiased Multi-cloud management Cloud Management solutions are offered by many types of vendors. Some are offered by virtualization platform vendors (like VMware with vCloud Automation Center). Some are offered by converged infrastructure vendors like Cisco, HP and Dell. Yet still others are offered by enterprise management framework vendors of enterprise like BMC. Every vendor of a Cloud Management offering offers some sort of cross-platform support in their product. But every vendor whose primary business is something else besides Cloud Management biases the support for platforms in their Cloud Management offering towards the other products in their product line. The support for vSphere in vCloud Automation Center is superior to the support for other virtualization platforms. Converged infrastructure vendors feature support for their converged hardware stack at the expense of other converged hardware stacks. And enterprise management software vendors feature superior integration with their frameworks at the expense