Reading the acres of coverage dedicated to cloud computing published over the last 18 months, the average observer could be forgiven for thinking that the cloud offers a silver bullet for an IT sector dogged by the worst recession in decades.
At a time when budgets are tight and demands on the average IT department are growing, here’s a technology that offers low access costs, offers a pay as you go pricing model, grows and shrinks as you need it to and, together with virtualisation technology, offers epic levels of versatility.
There’s just one problem, unless you’re building an IT department from scratch, the odds are you’ve already invested heavily in IT and no sensible chief financial officer (CFO) is going to walk away from that investment, no matter what advantages a new technology offers.
For the majority of Irish companies, embracing the cloud means embracing a hybrid environment with all the complexities that come with that. Analysts have argued that virtualisation vendors are more than capable of managing these hybrid environments, but critics respond that such vendors lack the kind of in-depth knowledge that traditional application management companies have built up.
So, just who should you trust with your IT environment?
Management metrics
"Virtualisation vendors offer substantial management metrics within their solutions but in most cases there are also substantial gaps between what they can offer and what is available from the traditional vendors in terms of application performance monitoring," said Brendan McPhillips, a director with data management solutions provider Asystec.
"Virtualisation vendor management metrics tend to be server, network and storage resource-focused and while metrics on resources being used within the virtualised environment can give a good understanding of the performance of an application, they do not provide a full picture."
McPhillips suggests that traditional vendors also tend to offer performance metrics on applications from front-end query through to the back-end database and can traverse both virtual and physical environments in that stack. By contrast, an obvious shortcoming of the kind of metrics offered in a virtualised environment is that they are typically limited to that of the physical footprint which is still prevalent in most organisations.
"As companies move closer towards 100% virtualisation then the necessity of having a separate, and in most cases, substantially more expensive management solution will be diminished. Until that happens, it is likely the traditional vendors will still be needed to provide the single view of application management within an organisation."
"The traditional vendors certainly are feeling under pressure as companies are looking to drive cost out of the organisation but until companies are close to 100% virtualised, they’ll still have a role to play."
Cost factor
According to Wayne Byrne, senior solutions architect with Datapac, cost is a driving factor in this question, as it is in most others when it comes to making changes to the way the IT department operates right now.
"Our experience of talking to clients and to providers out there is telling us that a lot of the movement being seen in the market is being driven by cost savings. The idea is get it off premises, bring it back to being a managed service and get the cost into a per-month or per usage format," he said.
"From the operations perspective, what isn’t really taken into account is ‘how do I manage that service, secure it and federate it, how do I guarantee that a service that I no longer have ultimate control over is available? How do I create the same level of accessibility and control as if it was on-premise?’"
"Those conversations are being had, but really movement is being driven by cost savings," said Byrne.
"That’s what driving the cloud in this country-utility computing and the ability to shift the cost from capital expenditure to operating expenditure. You can argue that getting a defined SLA in place is part of the picture too-in order to get comparable SLA yourself, you’d have to invest extremely heavily in your back end platform."
When it comes to advising clients on which route to go in terms of managing hybrid systems, with a virtualisation vendor or a traditional application management service company, Datapac says the answer depends very much on the needs of the company.
"There are many cloud offerings out there, back up, security, storage, infrastructure, so a definitive answer depends on what exactly you’re trying to do," said Byrne.
"For applications designed natively for the cloud, it might be difficult because you don’t control the platform but for things like infrastructure services and spinning up virtual machines, that’s more straight forward because you can still use your native management tools to do application level management, if not necessarily platform-level."
"What we’re saying to people depends on what the cloud service offering is you can go out and get infrastructure as a service where you can spin up X number of virtual machines, provision them as Windows servers or whatever and then use traditional tools such as System Centre to do your monitoring-that’s fine as an infrastructural service cloud offering," said Byrne.
"However, if you’re talking about cloud applications like Azure or Amazon, it’s very difficult to manage those using a tool that isn’t fit for purpose. Cloud management tools generally revolve around availability, they don’t necessarily revolve around performance, transactions-per-second or whatever. They tend to worry more about if the server being monitored is on or off."
"The trick is to address the business needs that virtualisation can help with, cost savings, availability of service, etc, but at the same time keeping the operations guys happy in terms of answering questions like how do we manage this?" he said.
Maximum value
Mark Cawley, managed IT principal for Eircom, thinks that in the immediate and near future, embracing a hybrid environment is the best way to derive the maximum value from cash already spent on IT and the benefits new technology can bring.
"Virtualisation vendors are obviously going to attempt to make the best case for what they do, but ultimately my personal opinion is that the best environments are going to be hybrid-there are some things you want to have a dedicated team on and there are some you’ll want to have on your own private cloud and then there are those things you are going to be want to move out to the public cloud."
"We come up against Amazon with people looking for hosting opportunities, and it’s a very good solution for people who have varied workloads, but it’s not a persistent service-its model is based on the idea of over-subscription, on the idea that it’s not all going to be in use at the same time."
"The toolsets we’ve gone for are vendor agnostic, so we can manage Bare Metal, VMware, Hyper-V or in theory we could manage things off Azure or Amazon cloud. The point is that the hybrid world hasn’t moved to the point that it probably will in future. You’ll always have to have the vendor’s own element managers to get down to the nuts and bolts, whether that’s an Oracle tool or VMware tool or whatever, but at the infrastructure layer, the technology isn’t there to move machines from VMware to, for example, the Amazon cloud-from private to public cloud."
Cawley points out that whatever the benefits cloud and virtualisation offer, in reality companies almost never adopt new technologies wholesale.
"It would be great if they did, life would be a lot simpler, but that’s not practical. These things are typically delivered in support of a new service which typically has one or two support applications, and you make a judgement about what’s the best platform for those applications to run on."
"As a managed service provider, we need to be able to cope with the widest possible target systems. If you are an enterprise or SME that uses just Microsoft, then System Centre will meet the majority of your requirements. It will do your servers, storage, virtualisation and it will do a lot of your core Microsoft applications and that is a subset of the market."
"There are other organisations that are totally immersed in Oracle technology. Our requirements aren’t going to be typical-we don’t get to dictate what our customer’s vendor choices are going to be. In order for us to do well, we have to be able to work with whatever choices our customers make."
System centre
Microsoft is due to release System Centre 2012, the latest version of its widely used management tool in early 2012, pitching it as a new way for businesses to make the shift from traditional IT systems to private and public cloud computing services. It’s betting that users will adopt the tool in response to a perceived need to gain more application level accountability from virtualised services.
"Ultimately, the reason why anyone would want a private cloud is to do with application services, which is where the core business value resides," said Ronan Geraghty, server business group lead for Microsoft Ireland.
"From our point of view, it’s all about ensuring that IT can deliver predictable application services levels, because that’s ultimately what the business expects-it wants business critical applications to be available at the required level of performance, security and so on. That requires very deep application monitoring and we have a service-centric approach so companies can meet their SLAs back to the business. That’s how you measure success."
"A key part of that is how, from an infrastructure perspective, you can deliver flexible yet cost effective infrastructure, and when everyone has heterogeneous environments it’s important that you can deliver that flexible yet cost effective infrastructure with what you already know and own."
Management concerns
VMware is undoubtedly one of the biggest players when it comes to virtualisation but until recently it didn’t concern itself with much other than managing infrastructure. However according to Richard O’Brien, IT director with VMware vendor Triangle, that is changing.
"Companies like VMware have been focused on managing infrastructure until now but because they have control over the resources that applications use within the infrastructure, they’re also very much getting into the business’s perception of how the application performs."
"This is being done by wrapping an SLA around the application. Be that the process, memory, network or storage bandwidth."
The reason for this, suggests O’Brien, is that while traditional application management tools are good at looking at the database and the availability of the application server, they’re not so good at tying together the storage, processor and memory functionality unless the user goes to the trouble of purchasing a very large stack of software.
"Virtualisation vendors have the advantage in that they are in complete control of how the application runs on the hardware, they have all the metrics, all the information on availability, all the SLA stats, and dynamic control over how that application behaves in that environment. They can collate all that info, and can be very reactive to stresses in the application as a result of peaks in the business in an automated way. Traditional vendors haven’t really been able to match that."
100% virtualised
Meanwhile, O’Brien says that Triangle is dealing with a growing customer base of companies operating purely virtualised environments, companies that have left hybrid behind.
"In the Irish market, there’s less and less hybrid, and more and more just virtual. We’ve been providing virtualisation to customers for around ten years and we have examples of lots of customers who are 100% virtualised-all of their X86 infrastructure is running on a virtual hardware platform."
"Obviously there are still applications sitting on iSeries, Solaris, pSeries etc, but I think over time, most of those types of applications will move towards new application models, be that private or public cloud."
O’Brien isn’t convinced that virtualisation vendors are that concerned about managing legacy infrastructure.
"What we haven’t seen is legacy management and monitoring providers stepping up to the mark and really taking advantage of the opportunities that virtualisation provides. They’re resting on their laurels a little, whereas VMware and other vendors have the opportunity of building an application set that’s appropriate for today’s virtualised infrastructures and tomorrow’s cloud infrastructures."
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