Reaching for the Clouds: Achieving the Business Benefits of Cloud Computing

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SOLUTION WHITE PAPER

Reaching for the Clouds: Achieving the

Business Beneﬁ ts of Cloud Computing

Increase ﬂ exibility, lower costs, and more eﬀ ectively meet the needs

of the business with BSM for Cloud Computing

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

By any measure, the hype around Cloud computing has reached nearly deafening levels. However, behind the wall of hype lies a fundamentally straightforward concept — one that’s been percolating for many years in the IT world. Cloud computing is an architecture that enables IT organizations to parcel out portions of a shared pool of hardware and so ware resources to users through an automated, self-service request system.

This model for IT, internally managed and externally hosted, oﬀ ers tremendous beneﬁ ts in the areas of cost-savings, IT

responsiveness, and improved ﬂ exibility. However, its successful implementation typically requires organizations to overcome some signiﬁ cant organizational and technological hurdles.

BMC So ware delivers solutions and expertise to clear these barriers, from the planning stages to the optimization and governance of a working Cloud. The payoff , in the end, is a transformed infrastructure that is fl exible, highly responsive to business needs, cost eff ective, and unifi ed.

DREAMING OF CLOUDS: THE SKYHIGH GOAL

Cloud computing is driving a great deal of IT investment. IT groups are seeking to give greater access to resources to their

stakeholders, respond with agility to the needs and demands of the business, and at the same time, curtail costs. Clouds come in a variety of ﬂ avors, including:

So ware-as-a-Service (SaaS):

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Targeted at end users seeking to purchase applications, SaaS hosts those applications for the user and charges a subscription fee.

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS):

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Designed for developers, PaaS hosts all the building blocks of a development environment, speeding up the development process and encouraging support for a platform.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS):

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Comprised of the foundations of any IT environment, IaaS is the most fundamental type of Cloud, delivering operating systems and application stacks to internal or external customers.

Fundamentally, a few core elements are required of an IaaS Cloud:

A self-service portal, enabling users to request and receive conﬁ gured resources rapidly

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An automated provisioning model, facilitating the creation of ﬂ exible, multi-tiered VMs to meet the speciﬁ c needs of the user

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A service-model, extending the traditional model of Business Service Management to the Cloud, and bringing with it the best

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practices that ensure service quality

A dynamic management environment that can actively monitor and respond to this ever-changing set of workloads in a way that

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optimizes service quality and cost

This deﬁ nition applies equally to private Clouds and public Clouds. Public Clouds are designed to sell capacity to companies with limited internal resources. Private Clouds mimic the same structure, but exist within the company’s datacenters, delivering ﬂ exibility and some cost-savings without leaving the walls of the organization. Hybrid Clouds are an amalgam of both, in which companies reach out to public Clouds to extend their own infrastructures, but manage them seamlessly. Finally, the concept of a community Cloud has been developed to describe coalitions of organizations, typically governmental or of the same type, who build a shared, secure external Cloud together.

The ultimate goals of all these environments are:

More eﬃ cient use of resources, whether ﬁ nancial, physical, or human

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Improved agility and ﬂ exibility, removing the IT barrier from business eﬃ ciency

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Expanded service orientation, aligning IT and business goals more directly

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Enterprises investing in private Clouds and/or using the public Cloud for overdra or to build virtual

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_{private Clouds must invest in management technology to manage service quality and availability.}

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A LADDER TO THE CLOUD: CHALLENGES GETTING THERE

While the concept of Cloud computing is reasonably straightforward, the execution does come with its challenges. Each component must work hand-in-glove with the rest to enable a dynamic, stable, cost-eﬀ ective, and ﬂ exible environment. Without careful attention, the equilibrium of a Cloud could easily be threatened.

Organizations face several challenges that must be addressed:

First and foremost, Clouds must provide users with the ability to self-provision resources.

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Whether in internal private Clouds or third-party public Clouds, users must have a mechanism for selecting their preferences from a set of options and for initiating a workfl ow to generate this resource. In a process similar to that of ordering a laptop online, there are typically a variety of baseline options, capacity requirements, so ware options, and additional features — all of which represent a tailored, if not custom, result. Identifying the options, creating the portal, defi ning the baseline requirements and approvals, and fi nally, provisioning the resources presents a complex orchestration challenge far beyond “copy and paste.” Specifi cally, organizations usually desire that the available service off erings be driven by user roles and constrained by security, organizational, or fi nancial policies.

Second is the dynamic management challenge. Once commissioned, Cloud resources

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have tremendous fl exibility to grow, shrink, move, change confi gurations, and ultimately, be decommissioned. This process mirrors that of a traditional physical datacenter, infused with a host of additional degrees of freedom (and thus, complexity). As such, it requires much of the same management best practices — augmented with Cloud awareness. Absent that, conditions will occur for which appropriate responses and controls are not well established, and the organization will experience increased costs, decreased availability, and reduced fl exibility. In fact, organizations need to view Cloud as a catalyst for improving their IT maturity.

Third is the challenge of scope. Born of the virtualization world, Cloud computing is o en

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perceived as being uniformly based on x86 Microso Windows and Linux platforms; while, in fact, this is not at all reﬂ ective of the reality of the modern datacenter. Companies continue to be broadly multi-platform in their datacenters, running everything from blade servers to mainframes and leveraging a host of virtualization technologies, including hypervisors, Solaris™ zones and containers, and even LPARs. To limit the Cloud to a subset of the company’s systems is to hamper its strength and curtail its eventual growth. Finally, a diverse group of public Clouds are being built by telecommunications ﬁ rms and

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service providers the world over. Enterprises are increasingly seeking opportunities to leverage these external Clouds both for cost-savings and increased ﬂ exibility. However, the provisioning and management of those resources o en represent a separate IT challenge —one that, realistically, should be a seamless extension of the private Cloud, managed with consistent processes, policies, people, and tools. Thoughtful organizations, while embracing the beneﬁ ts of public Cloud usage, are not willing to do so at the price of introducing new management silos.

To implement and be successful developing a Cloud computing infrastructure, organizations should consider every stage of the environment — from planning and provisioning to operations and decommissioning. By adopting a layered approach, the fundamentals of management can be implemented, and then improved upon, generating increasing eﬃ ciencies and ﬂ exibility for the business.

SUMMARY OF CASE STUDY

Concur Technologies embraced BSM for Cloud Computing, and in one year: Increased server virtualization from »

5 percent to 42 percent virtualized Reduced server conﬁ guration »

mistakes by 85-95 percent Has already saved $1.7 million »

According to Craig Baughn, vice president of Concur’s hosting services, the BMC solution “enabled us to re-allocate resources to other areas of the business because of the eﬃ ciency oﬀ ered.”

(source: www.cio.com/article/506114/Inside_ One_Firm_s_Private_Cloud_Journey)

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BSM FOR CLOUD COMPUTING

BMC applies the proven principles of Business Service Management to the Cloud, in the following ways:

CLOUD PLANNING

Cloud Planning lays the foundation of an eﬃ cient, eﬀ ective Cloud environment by leveraging a set of activities and solutions to ensure the private Cloud is tailored properly to meet the needs of the organization. These steps include:

Developing and maintaining an accurate picture of the current IT environment — from

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existing VMs and physical machines to the dependencies between these systems. BMC Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping, working in conjunction with the BMC Atrium CMDB, can create a current, accurate base from which the requirements of the Cloud can be created.

With a baseline understanding of the types of workloads that will be utilizing the

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Cloud, BMC BladeLogic Server Automation Suite can come together with BMC Atrium Orchestrator and BMC Capacity Management to design the services that will be delivered via the Cloud. From the quantity of resources required to the desired service levels and costs to the application stacks, these solutions help organizations balance the ﬂ exibility desired by the business with the control required for successful operations.

Once designed and built, the transition of existing workloads onto the Cloud requires a

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combination of automation and organizational change. The same tools that helped create the Cloud can now assist in this move, ensuring continuity from the physical or virtual environments into the Cloud environment. Maintaining the context, data, conﬁ gurations, and histories on each workload is critical both to their ongoing operations and to measuring the success of the Cloud initiative.

BMC CLOUD LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT

BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management ensures the full lifecycle of resources in the Cloud is well structured and ﬂ exible. As the most visible manifestation of the Cloud computing infrastructure, the provisioning experience must be easy, ﬂ exible, and rapid, while still ensuring that the operational integrity of the environment is maintained.

A self-service portal is the only interaction most Cloud users will ever have with the

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infrastructure, and thus should be a positive experience. Rather than simply oﬀ ering a limited, cookie-cutter set of VMs, cloned from static images, BMC BladeLogic Server Automation Suite, BMC BladeLogic Network Automation, and BMC Atrium Orchestrator work behind the scenes to provision and deploy custom services — from OS to application stack to network conﬁ guration. Exposed through a robust service catalog, this capability enables each Cloud resource to both conform to operational requirements (such as policy or cost constraints), while still meeting users’ individual needs.

Once Cloud resources are no longer needed, they should be properly decommissioned,

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or else the detritus of prior workloads will continue to consume resources and clog the Cloud. BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management ensures that workloads with termination dates are appropriately handled, saving resources and greatly easing management.

Cloud resources are fundamentally service oﬀ erings, and thus should be measured and

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managed as such. With integration into the BMC Remedy IT Service Management Suite, BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management ensures that the Cloud is not managed in a vacuum, but rather alongside traditional resources, ensuring continuity of service throughout.

KEY BENEFITS

CLOUD PLANNING

Discover and assess existing »

IT assets

Establish technical and business »

plans for Cloud transition

CLOUD LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT

Eﬃ ciently and accurately »

provision Cloud services through a self-service portal driven by a service catalog

CLOUD OPERATIONS AND OPTIMIZATION

Proactively monitor the Cloud »

by predicting and repairing performance issues before they impact users

Actively manage capacity to ensure »

optimal use of resources

CLOUD GOVERNANCE

Run IT like a business, with »

visibility and predictability of ﬁ nancial metrics

View and manage asset usage for »

reduced costs

SUMMARY OF CASE STUDY

(BMC I.T. ORGANIZATION) BMC’s own IT department utilized BSM for Cloud Computing and:

Reduced physical servers by 25 »

percent, and achieved 70 percent CPU utilization

Reduced power consumption by »

23 percent

Increased server admin »

productivity by 600 percent Reduced server provisioning time »

from two weeks to ﬁ ve minutes The ﬁ nancial payback of this investment in Cloud, which was approximately $2 million, was achieved in fewer than six months.

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Finally, when internal resources are not suﬃ cient, either long-term or during peak

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times, organizations are increasingly turning to public Clouds to augment their own infrastructure. In a so-called hybrid Cloud model, however, maintaining seamless management and provisioning, regardless of the physical location of the back-end resources, is critical to ensuring that these two environments transition smoothly and do not become separate entities. BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management integrates with external Cloud vendors, such as Amazon EC2, facilitating that developing use case.

CLOUD OPERATIONS AND OPTIMIZATION

Cloud Operations and Optimization ensures that once a Cloud environment is running, it runs well. To do so, attention needs to be paid to maintaining an accurate inventory of the VMs in the environment and their interconnectedness, as well as the health of the Cloud as a whole. Over time, capacity requirements change, and performance may ﬂ uctuate. Some elemental components of physical management, brought into the dynamic Cloud environment, can ensure that the Cloud continues to deliver business value.

Dynamic environments need dynamic, ongoing discovery. Without an accurate picture of

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the Cloud, the services it delivers, and the dependencies between them, IT operations will always struggle to maintain service quality and identify the root cause of issues. Using BMC Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping on an ongoing basis automates this eﬀ ort, and ensures that changes to the Cloud infrastructure are automatically captured. BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management works within the Cloud environment to

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ensure that every VM and service in the environment is performing to the level it should. In a Cloud environment, with the growth, motion of VMs, and changes in resource availability, performance can drastically improve or degrade as part of the regular ebbs and ﬂ ows of the Cloud. With proper, proactive performance management in place, IT can ensure that service quality is maintained.

Capacity management, like performance, is ever-changing in world of self-service

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provisioning and automated decommissioning. As sophistication increases, managing the capacity of the environment and the resources available to each VM will become critical not only to their service levels but also to forecasting additional investment needs. BMC Capacity Management can monitor, analyze, and forecast capacity needs in this new, dynamic environment.

CLOUD GOVERNANCE

Cloud governance enables IT organizations to operate their Cloud environment like a business. Organizations need the ability not only to calculate the costs associated with delivering services, but also to optimize resource utilization in the environment and ensure that compliance requirements are consistently and effi ciently met. By linking an understanding of service costing with Cloud service level defi nitions, utilization, capacity investment, and public Cloud pricing, decisions can all be driven by — and aligned to — the priorities of the business. The Cloud environment, private or hybrid, must create the fl exibility to address the needs of the business, while at the same time, optimize its own operations to ensure costs and investments support business goals.

IT service costing marries detailed information about the workloads in the Cloud with

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costs associated with hardware, network, so ware, and other relevant resources. By combining BMC Service Cost Management data with service level metrics and BMC Capacity Management, a ﬁ nancial strategy for the growth of the Cloud can be created to support the technological direction.

SOLUTION REQUIREMENTS

Required capabilities for a complete Cloud solution include:

Comprehensive accurate discovery »

— ensuring a complete up-to-date service picture of the IT infrastructure

Self-service provisioning, marrying »

ﬂ exible full-stack layered

provisioning with strong IT controls Process-driven, automated »

tools for managing provisioning workﬂ ows and resource decommissioning.

Automated management of service »

levels to ensure consistent quality service on all Cloud resources. A single management »

infrastructure, across physical, virtual, and Cloud environments Capacity planning for optimal »

resource usage, balancing utilization with cost reduction Ongoing monitoring, ensuring »

environmental integrity

A modular, complete solution that »

can be implemented in stages and customized to meet the Cloud needs of your enterprise

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BMC Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping discovers and inventories the VMs and other elements of the service environment,

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including their interdependencies and relationships — ensuring that each chunk of resource is appropriately allocated and tracked. BMC BladeLogic Server Automation Suite and BMC BladeLogic Network Automation ensure that the resources delivering the

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services meet the needs of the business, as well as the compliance requirements of the speciﬁ c workload or service level. With detailed inventories and integration to asset and license management, these tools support both compliance and asset management priorities.

LEARN MORE

BMC can help you address your immediate and long-term Cloud computing goals eﬃ ciently and eﬀ ectively. To learn more, please visit www.bmc.com/Cloud.

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BUSINESS RUNS ON IT. IT RUNS ON BMC SOFTWARE.

Business thrives when IT runs smarter, faster and stronger. That’s why the most demanding IT organizations in the world rely on BMC So ware across both distributed and mainframe environments. Recognized as the leader in Business Service Management, BMC off ers a comprehensive approach and unifi ed platform that helps IT organizations cut cost, reduce risk and drive business profi t. For the four fi scal quarters ended March 31, 2010, BMC revenue was approximately $1.91 billion.

Reaching for the Clouds: Achieving the Business Benefits of Cloud Computing