Technology Solution Provider Creates Roadmap of 14
Technologies Needed to Implement a Fully Functional Private
Cloud
Farmington Hills, MI, July 24,
2012 – Private clouds are quickly gaining in
popularity. In fact, according to a Gartner Data Center
Conference Poll* (December 2011), 78 percent of enterprises
responded “yes” when asked, “Will your enterprise be pursuing a
private cloud computing strategy by 2014?” The first step
when pursuing a private cloud strategy is to develop a foundation
of understanding that combines the business objectives with a
realistic evaluation of where IT’s capabilities are today, and then
to implement a strategy that methodically and incrementally matches
those objectives. To help, Logicalis, an international IT
solutions and managed services provider (http://www.us.logicalis.com/),
today unveiled a “Private Cloud Foundation Checklist” outlining 14
key technology areas CIOs should address before delivering on the
promise of a private cloud.
“Transitioning an IT infrastructure to take
advantage of cloud computing – public or private – is a long
journey that passes through a lot of uncharted territory in most IT
departments,” says Mike Martin, vice president, Cloud Solutions,
for Logicalis. “The key to success is developing a strategy
that aligns short-term needs with long-term goals.”
The challenge is upgrading, revising, and in
some cases creating the variety of systems that need to work
together to realize a company’s private cloud ambitions. IT
managers must examine the business’ existing IT infrastructure and
policies to determine where they fall along the spectrum of
cloud-readiness capabilities.
Private Cloud Foundation
Checklist
1. Server Hardware: Certain types of server
platforms contribute to the dynamic provisioning capabilities
required to implement cloud services in an IT environment.
Blade-based servers and scalable servers that lend themselves to
large virtualized workloads are good choices.
2. Storage: SAN-based storage that provides the
ability to implement advanced features such as remote copy
services, snapshots and cloning are ideal. Appropriate connectivity
methods for the size and scope of the workloads—such as Fiber
Channel or FCOE—are also critical.
3. Networking: A flexible structured network
environment which supports converged networking, 10 Gbps Ethernet,
flexible security, and load balancing functionality is important
for cloud-based architectures.
4. Data Backup Systems: A dynamic cloud
environment can place additional requirements on enterprise backup
solutions. Integration with virtualization platforms and advanced
scheduling capabilities are highly desirable to prevent performance
and scaling issues.
5. Virtualization: Virtualization is not a
requirement for cloud-based environments, but a mature virtualized
infrastructure can significantly reduce the time to implement cloud
functionality.
6. System Management/Monitoring: A mature
system management infrastructure is the key to smooth operation as
well as troubleshooting and objective measurements of
performance.
7. Service Orchestration: Service orchestration
– the ability to centrally control the tasks required to deploy,
document, and retire systems in a cloud environment – is critical
to reduce deployment time, and to drive higher levels of
consistency and efficiencies into a cloud environment.
8. Configuration Management: Configuration
management tools can illustrate the interactions and dependencies
between servers and applications and help ensure compliance with
corporate and industry governance rules and regulations.
9. Chargeback/Showback:
Chargeback/Showback assigns costs to the consumption of IT
resources (i.e., hardware, floor space, power/cooling, licensing,
and IT personnel), ensuring that users don’t take “self
provisioning” to mean “instant gratification.”
10. Performance/Capacity Planning Tools: These
tools are used to predict growth patterns and to run simulated
growth scenarios to proactively determine when capital investments
are needed.
11. Service Catalog: A service catalog is
a list of IT services that an organization provides to its
employees or customers; the catalog describes each service, the
SLAs associated with the service, who is entitled to the service,
and the costs associated with the service.
12. Change Management/CMDB: The configuration
management database (CMDB) – a fundamental component of the ITIL
framework’s configuration management process – maps key component
relationships and tracks their configuration.
13. Adoption of SaaS: The appeal of Software as
a Service (SaaS) – hosted applications – has resulted in business
units subscribing to SaaS applications outside of IT. Extending
governance to include renegade SaaS needs to be addressed in a
private cloud strategy.
14. PaaS Management of Key Applications:
Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions liberate the deployment of
applications from the underlying hardware, software and
provisioning capabilities, supporting the complete lifecycle of
building and delivering web applications and services in the cloud
and simplifying the deployment, scaling and management of
multi-tier applications and multi-tenant environments.
All of these systems are mutually dependent
and must interact smoothly to produce a fully functional private
cloud environment. The good news is that they don’t have to be
tackled all at once. The goal is to address each one when it
makes both technological and financial sense to do so.
*(n = 150); Source: Gartner, Inc.,Top Five
Trends for Private Cloud Computing, Thomas J. Bittman, February 14,
2012.
About Logicalis
Logicalis is an international IT solutions and
managed services provider with a breadth of knowledge and expertise
in communications and collaboration; data center and cloud
services; and managed services.
Logicalis employs almost 3,000 people
worldwide, including highly trained service specialists who design,
specify, deploy and manage complex ICT infrastructures to meet the
needs of over 6,000 corporate and public sector customers. To
achieve this, Logicalis maintains strong partnerships with
technology leaders such as Cisco, HP, IBM, CA Technologies, NetApp,
VMware and ServiceNow.
The Logicalis Group has annualized revenues of
over $1.2 billion, from operations in the UK, US, Germany, South
America and Asia Pacific, and is fast establishing itself as one of
the leading IT and Communications solution integrators,
specializing in the areas of advanced technologies and
services.
The Logicalis Group is a division of Datatec
Limited, listed on the Johannesburg and London AIM Stock Exchanges,
with revenues of over $5 billion.
For more information, visit http://www.us.logicalis.com/.