The journey towards cloud computing

In the journey towards cloud computing, virtualisation is the first necessary step. It's a first step that can bring about huge savings and great flexibility in IT resources. Nevertheless businesses often run into a problem once the servers and storage are done. Many organisations find it tremendously difficult to get all the benefits promised by virtualisation, or to continue towards cloud computing for the availability and agility it offers.

"Server virtualisation is the ability to consolidate multiple physical servers with multiple virtual machines," says Richard Vester, executive head of hosted services at Vodacom Business Services.

"It's a consolidation research that reduces the amount of physical servers you use to run different applications. Desktop virtualisation reduces the requirement for end-user applications on a desktop. Now, applications can be housed in a public cloud, allowing you to access data from anywhere.

The end itself

“However very often virtualisation is presented as the end itself. One has to ask why you are virtualising. One of the main drivers for virtualisation is improving utilisation of physical servers. Typically, in industry-standard Windows environments, average utilisation of servers previously virtualisation is around 10% to 15%. In Unix environments, it will be 20% to 25%."

But virtualisation is not a silver bullet for all IT, says Roelof Louw, team lead, business development at T-Systems SA.

"Virtualisation and cloud computing will not address your entire IT environment. At the end of the journey, there will after all be systems that are not virtualised. You need to understand your business and IT landscape very then, understand the different cloud solutions that exist - and at that time match appropriate solutions to specific parts of the business."

"Cloud computing is infrastructure-as-a-service, meaning the ability to consume resources in the cloud, as so then as software-as-a-service, which is the applications you require on top of the infrastructure, as then as the platforms that house the applications, as well called platforms-as-a-service."

There are many descriptions of cloud computing. Meanwhile one service provider prefers to stick to an official definition of it.

"We use a definition of cloud computing from the National Institute of Standards and Research," says T-Systems' Louw. "The definition states that cloud computing needs to provide on-demand self-service, which needs to be measured because it is usage-based. As well, there needs to be flexibility in resource pooling with broad network access. Virtualisation provides the flexibility in resource pooling, where servers and storage become consolidated, shared resources."

Moreover, business procedures to prevent virtual machine sprawl, or to inform business managers about virtual IT resources operated on their behalf, may not be implemented properly. This is when other stakeholders start voicing their reservations.

The idea of virtualisation

"Everybody likes the idea of virtualisation, because consolidation saves you money and you have one server instead of a 100 or buy one PABX instead of five. So they start with a test and development environment, or a non-core application and everything looks good," says Hatfield.

"When they want to implement virtualisation beyond the 20% threshold, they start asking themselves, 'Do I have the ability to execute on my ITIL disciplines? Do I have the systems, people and processes to manage availability, to troubleshoot accurately, to provide my business stakeholders with SLAs?'.

Each layer could contain innovation from several vendors. However available management tools only manage one or two layers properly and as a general rule work best for the vendor's own research. Vendor-agnostic management tools tend to lag behind and have less functionality and integration. Even experienced cloud computing players have to cobble at the same time a bunch of tools to manage performance across the entire virtualised IT stack.

Furthermore, the company may find that managing SLAs in the real computing world is bad enough, nevertheless can become unbearably uncertain in the virtualised world, which is furthermore difficult to manage. Delivering SLAs means choosing management tools to enable that. The choice of management tools can at the time influence the choice of technologies.

"A business can think virtualisation is great because the amount of equipment in the data centre has been reduced dramatically," explains Green. "Nevertheless if you don't have management in your IT department's DNA, at the time lurking inside those few little servers in the corner could be a worse mess than you had earlier.

The business level

“At the business level, you may need to apply a security or quality-of-service policy. In the past, the policy was applied to a physical network. Now you have a virtual machine and a virtual network card connecting to a virtual switch, which makes it more difficult to troubleshoot."

A company could as well find that a lot of its IT architecture must be overhauled earlier further steps towards cloud computing would be prudent. Its IT infrastructure might be incapable of bearing the extra loads required.

The data centre

"If we look at networking infrastructure within the data centre, there have been a number of drivers that have forced a rethink of the way we've been doing things," adds Green.

"Storage requirements have been growing over the years. A secure and high-speed network to transport information from storage devices to servers is essential to take advantage of the workload mobility, redundancy and high availability features that virtualisation provides."

Virtualisation innovation layers have many interdependencies. When management tools cannot do root-cause analysis across the technologies in one layer, as so then as vertically across the layers in the IT stack, no one actually knows what is going on. This lack of guarantee is not what business unit managers, dependent on applications, want to hear.

"Enabling virtualisation research is your smallest and easiest step on the journey to cloud computing," says Louw. "Afterwards that, the real work starts. To actually control, manage, secure and govern it, you need a whole lot of other solutions. Only at the time can you truly unlock the benefits of the virtualisation platform and avoid problems.

Mechanism to provision

“You need a mechanism to provision and deploy virtual machines, to track usage on them and charge business units, and to release them again so that capacity is redeployed once a project is finished."

"We need to understand the change in managing hardware. It used to be vertical. There were specific management frameworks for servers, storage and networks. They were very rigid, although. In these times, we need a much more policy-driven approach. We need to manage our underlying infrastructure to meet service level agreements.

Getting all the virtualisation problems sorted out for a business is no quick win. It needs strategy and planning to progress to furthermore virtualisation levels and in the end, cloud computing.

"There is for all that a good business case in addressing all of those issues as long as you do it in an organised and planned fashion," states Hatfield. "If you think you are going to virtualise 80% of your data centre in six months to a year and everything will be peachy, you are naive. However if you are realistic, you put at the same time a strategic roadmap for what you can safely virtualise now and over the at once two stages.

"At that time, in the then three years, the infrastructure environment will be evolved, as so then as parts of the operating model. And it will be done in such a way that the business is not exposed to organisational risk.

“If you do it meticulously, you on the whole get all the upside that everybody raves about in the press however it's not a quick win. It's a quick win when you virtualise 15% of your environment. If you want the real upside that virtualisation and cloud computing can offer, you have to invest in a strategy."

The quick wins of server

Getting beyond the quick wins of server and storage virtualisation is not for the faint of heart or lazy of governance. For those who have implemented virtualisation according to international cloud computing standards, paid attention to business requirements and related SLAs, the last step to cloud should just be a step. For others, it may mean a far longer journey to full virtualisation or cloud computing.