Latest News from Andrew Hillier

If Only Your Internal Cloud Had a Brain

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 08:45:00 EDT

Internal clouds are gaining momentum in large organizations, both as a means to drive agility and efficiency and as a stepping stone to hybrid and external cloud models. Although establishing and managing an internal cloud seems simple and elegant in principle, in practice they rarely resemble the simple, fluffy white cartoons seen in presentations. More often than not, today’s cloud strategy involves piecing together hypervisor management layers with self-service portals, orchestration solutions, provisioning tools, and other base components. While this will yield a functioning cloud, it tends to operate at a relatively basic level, with little intelligence powering its action. This is a lot like having a body with no brain: if you tap its knee it might kick, but it is only capable of basic, reactive behavior. Some might argue that this is no different from traditional IT physical environments, where disjoint tools and processes can be effectively used to handle specific aspects of operations and management. But the difference in these new environments is that there is a much tighter inter-relationship between all of the physical and virtual components. Physical complexity is replaced by virtual complexity, and characteristics like multi-tenancy and resource overcommit add a new twist. All of these factors combine to create an interesting challenge in the management of these environments, taking it beyond the realm of what intuition, spreadsheets and simple load-balancers can effectively handle.

Building a Cloud Factory

Sun, 14 Aug 2011 05:45:00 EDT

Few areas of human endeavor can match the pace of change in IT. Even by IT standards, the change being driven by cloud computing sometimes seems surprising. To refer to a virtual environment that has only recently been deployed as “legacy,” as some organizations are now doing, underscores the fact that the only thing constant in the data center is change. To deal with change of this magnitude, which can involve transforming the workload hosting model of an entire organization, some industrial-strength thinking is required. In order to tackle this challenge, it’s important to properly frame the cloud transformation problem. Many associate cloud with agility, flexibility, cost transparency and other end-user-oriented benefits. But many of these attributes are primarily associated with new infrastructure requests, and specifically, the use of self-service portals to “spin up” infrastructure to host new applications or host transient processing demands. When it comes to migrating hundreds or thousands of existing workloads into cloud infrastructure, agility is not a benefit that is typically experienced. In fact the opposite is often the case: because clouds require a higher degree of standardization (i.e., a finite catalog of sizes and software options), migrating existing physical and virtual servers into cloud models can actually be quite difficult. In other words, the very features that make clouds agile for new workload deployments can actually make them less agile from a transformation perspective.

Three Ways to Keep Internal Cloud Computing Infrastructure Costs in Check

Wed, 04 May 2011 10:15:00 EDT

Many organizations are building internal clouds to capitalize on the agility cloud models offer and avoid the risk of putting mission-critical infrastructure outside of the enterprise’s firewalls. The goal is to reap the benefits offered by public clouds, but with much higher levels of control, security, and availability. Building a private internal cloud, however, can come with a hefty price tag. The Private Cloud’s Critical Cost Drivers The promise of increased agility and standardization in the supply of IT capacity is extremely compelling. Unfortunately, these benefits come at a cost, not only in terms of the technical challenges, but also in terms of the behavioral changes that can arise when users are given “self-service” access to capacity. A combination of low perceived cost of cloud capacity, lowered barriers to access, and a lack of visibility into new application requirements (requiring users to err on the side of caution) can combine to create a situation where too much capacity is deployed. Like an all-you-can-eat buffet, plates are piled a lot higher when you help yourself than when portions are decided by the chef. In addition, unlike virtual environments that allow for customized sizing and growth, capacity requirements in the internal cloud will always be rounded up to the next available standardized container. As a result, organizations will deploy more hardware to avoid exceeding over-commit policies.

Virtualization Economics: Balancing Efficiency and Risk

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 20:45:00 EDT

The fact that virtualization can have a positive impact on total cost of ownership is not new to those familiar with designing and managing IT environments. Many of the contributors to these cost savings, such as reduction in physical hardware and the corresponding savings in power and cooling, are key drivers for virtualization initiatives, and feature prominently in many ROI models.

Virtualizing onto Mainframes

Fri, 30 May 2008 01:00:00 EDT

The flexibility, efficiency, and reduced cost of ownership virtualization provides makes it extremely compelling to large and small organizations alike. Increasingly IT organizations are contemplating virtualization across all platforms. As this trend makes its way deeper and deeper into the data center, organizations are starting to leverage the fact that virtualization also lifts many of the constraints that govern which platform an application needs to run on.