A Research Note by Wikibon, 2010
Work in Progress – hit EDIT to make changes
IT organizations have always been faced with the directive to do more, faster and cheaper. There is no shortage of options for the practitioner looking to change their environment, from outsourcing to a variety of cloud-based solutions. The one thing that is certain is that today’s best practices are tomorrow’s inefficiencies. This report will look at some of the key drivers that act as a forcing function to IT, some definitions of the types of cloud and an examination of the cloud infrastructure landscape.
Contents |
Key Drivers for Data Centers
Consumerization of IT
Volume production of chips and platters for the consumer market (direct and indirect) will dominate what is used in the enterprise market. Bottom line – if a technology is not useful to consumers, it will die. Choose long-term partners and technologies through the contribution to consumerization filter. See more in the note...
Flexibility of IT
There will be a rapid growth of services providers offering every variety of service. Organizations needs to be able to take advantage of this market. To do that they need to:
- Understand their own costs compared with outside services
- Understand the technical and business reasons (e.g. risk) for insourcing and outsourcing of infrastructure and application external services
- Provide cost effective services for insourcing
- Provide best-of-breed advice for utilization of outsourcing services
Growth rates have always been difficult to predict, but in an uncertain economic environment, companies are looking even more at pay-as-you-go solutions. Additionally, infrastructure has become much more dynamic... Automation is key
Different Types of Clouds
The definition of what makes up a cloud is an ongoing contentious debate. The current NIST definition states:
- ‘’ Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.’
While not synonymous with cloud computing, virtualization is an enabling technology for Infrastructure 2.0 which increases utilization of components, allows for flexible provision of resources (increase and decrease), and flexible deployment of resources (location and ownership).
Firms essentially have three options for deployments of cloud computing (NIST lists “community cloud” as a fourth option). According to the August 2010 Gartner Hype cycle, Public Cloud is now past the Peak of Inflated Expectations and is the area of negative press while Private Cloud is still working up the curve at the phase where mass media hype is highest (see slide 10 of the PDF). All of these cloud offerings require significant organizational changes and therefore are expected to take at least 2-5 years before they are adopted in the mainstream.
Private Cloud Infrastructure:
IT organizations create their own cloud by aggressively consolidating their environments through heavily adopting virtualization and pay-as-you-go or on-demand models that provide transparent pricing of services. This option moves internal IT in the right direction towards being more competitive with cloud service provider models. Private clouds can be federated between internal and external data centers. Private clouds are a newer creation than public clouds and many still argue that an infrastructure that must be purchased and managed by an internal IT organization does not fit the cloud model.
Public Cloud Infrastructure or Application Services:
Infrastructure:Outsource everything and replace the vast majority of internal IT infrastructure with external services, essentially aligning demand with supply. Public cloud offerings were the first to be on the market (as an extension of Internet-based solutions), so have the most adoption and are the furthest along the adoption curve. Application Services: A model that outsources specific applications, especially newer application initiatives using software-as-a-service (SaaS) models like Salesforce.com. This lowers capital expenses, reduces new headcount demands and shares IT risks with service providers. From an infrastructure and strategy point of view, one aspect of this model is that the data associated with the application is held by the service provider, both physically and legally.
- From a physical point of view this makes the data much harder to integrate with other applications.
- From a legal point of view, if there is a discovery process, service provider is very likely to provide more data without protest to both parties at the same time.
Hybrid Cloud:
placeholder - mix of public and private
Data Center Infrastructure
Many layers of infrastructure can now be “virtualized” or treated as a pool inside a data center. We will look at the different layers and the impact of virtualization and cloud.
Compute
The compute layer includes servers, operating systems and hypervisors. The key customer challenge for compute is performance and service levels. The compute layer of infrastructure is furthest along in the transformation with both heavy adoption of virtualization and cloud solutions. Server hardware has seen the proliferation of bladed and multi-core architecture, which can support dense virtual environments. Server efficiency was typically at 10-20% utilization prior to the adoption of server virtualization and at 80-90+% utilization after. Operating systems and hypervisors … HP is the market leader in servers. Their focus is on automation and commoditization of hardware. Dell IBM competes best at the high-end of the server market with their blade servers that are focused on enterprise performance applications. VMware is the market leader in Hypervisors Microsoft is the market leader in Operating Systems and looking to challenge VMware in the hypervisor space. Intel the technology behind all of the server vendors listed…
Networking
The networking layer includes local area networks (LANs) – typically Ethernet based, storage area networks (SANs) – typically Fibre Channel (FC) based, and also includes wide area networks (WANs). Virtualization and cloud has a strong impact on all of these networks including convergence of the LAN and SAN to a single Ethernet-based (NAS/iSCSI/FCoE) converged network. The key priority for customers in the networking space is flexibility and cost. For LANs, virtualization is driving a transition from under-utilized, over-provisioned networks to virtualized networks which can support the higher network bandwidth and mobility requirements of virtual server and storage. Server virtualization has increased the usage of networked storage since it is required for advanced features such as mobility and load balancing (VMware’s vMotion and DRS). Data center servers were only networked 10-20% of the time before server virtualization, but with virtualized servers using networking > 80% of the time, this is now over 30% in all data centers. Brocade is the market leader in SANs and through their acquisition of Foundry, looks to compete in the converged network space. It is looking to create an end-to-end solution made up of switches and network adapters, but faces tough competition in all areas. Cisco is the dominant player in the network space; with more market share in the Ethernet switch market than all competitors combined, plus they are closing on Brocade in the SAN switch market. HP gained the clear #2 networking position with the acquisition of 3COM. HP has the most complete server/network/storage stack. Other vendors such as Juniper, Arista and Blade Networks (BNT) are looking to use the changing landscape to break Cisco’s grip.
Storage
Key concerns are efficiency, cost and availability placeholder
Backup
Virtualization causes challenges for backup. Since servers are utilized more in a virtualized environment, they have less free cycles for backup. In addition, there are challenges with backing up either a physical machine or individual VMs (see Backup Roadmap to meet Virtualization Infrastructure Milestones for more). Cloud opportunities
Security
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CIO recommendations and questions to ask
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