I D C T E C H N O L O G Y S P O T L I G H T
P r i v a t e C l o u d s : E a s i n g D e p l o y m e n t a n d
M a n a g e m e n t
July 2013
Adapted from Worldwide Private Cloud IT Infrastructure 2013–2017 Forecast by Mary Johnston Turner, Richard L. Villars, Jed Scaramella, et al., IDC #240624 and Worldwide IT Infrastructure Hardware for Public and
Private Cloud 2012–2016 Forecast: Convergence, Hybrid Datacenters, and Open Computing Strategies Shaping Market by Richard L. Villars, Jed Scaramella, Dan Iacono, and Rohit Mehra, IDC #238428
Sponsored by IBM
Deployment of IT assets within private cloud architectures is becoming increasingly popular with IT decision makers who want to improve datacenter operational efficiency, launch new strategic application platforms, or reduce IT operational costs. While many companies implement private clouds in their own in-house datacenter, a growing number also plan to deploy private clouds within a service provider's datacenter to speed time to deployment. In either case, the resources of the private cloud are dedicated to the needs of a single customer and its approved customers, contractors, and employees on a noncommercial basis.
IDC estimates that spending by end customers and hosted private cloud service providers for private cloud–enabling IT infrastructure hardware and software totaled $9.8 billion in 2012, an
increase of 31.2% over 2011. IDC expects total market revenue will grow from $12.3 billion in 2013 to $22.2 billion in 2017, representing a CAGR of 17.6% for 2012–2017.
This Technology Spotlight discusses the trends driving the deployment of private clouds and explores the role that IBM's System x portfolio of cloud technologies plays in this important market.
Introduction
Cloud computing is fast becoming one of the most widely discussed concepts in IT, for both
businesses and consumers. Companies are exploring a variety of deployment models for IT to deliver services to the business units. Cloud environments enable the self-service provisioning, dynamic pooling, and elastic scaling of IT resources across diverse workloads and user groups leveraging virtualization, automation, and analytics as well as advanced server, storage, and network architectures. These environments also enable monitoring and chargeback based on resource utilization and provide end users and IT staff with a services-oriented approach to IT governance and optimization of end-to-end processes and applications.
In addition, private clouds are instrumental in deploying a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), a model of computing that centralizes client management and moves client processing and storage to a datacenter, thereby improving security and easing management.
Key Business Drivers of Private Cloud
IDC sees private cloud as the continuing evolution of virtualization. Private cloud is a journey that corporate datacenters are undertaking — the first stage was hardware consolidation via virtualization, then automation/management, and eventually private cloud with self-provisioning. Initial adoption of virtualization is often driven by capex savings, consolidation of hardware, and floor space reduction. Business drivers evolve with mature adopters; while capital costs are still relevant, primary drivers center on IT agility, quicker provisioning, and operational efficiency.
The second stage of virtualization involves software-defined solutions that will roll out in the next five years and will rapidly turn physical compute resources into a highly liquid asset. Compute won't be free, but it will increasingly be seen as a fungible and liquid resource that developers are starting to incorporate into their design and implementation strategies.
Major adopters of private cloud environments will rely heavily on suppliers to provide the server, storage, and network hardware necessary to build out efficient, scalable, and manageable cloud environments. The motivations for adoption of private cloud include faster time to service/market, increased cost advantage and improved IT efficiency, and greater infrastructure and operational improvements.
Adoption will be driven by key advantages, including ease/speed to deploy/run, flexible/efficient pricing models, reduction of in-house support costs, and forced standardization. Another rising driver is the continued investment by traditional trusted-brand IT vendors into the private cloud IT
infrastructure market. The emergence of technologies that amplify the value of the cloud model — including affordable wireless broadband Internet access; lower-cost, rich-function mobile devices (e.g., smartphones and mobile tablets); and the growth of Big Data and cloud-based analytics — will also drive cloud adoption. And digitization/transformation of key industries (e.g., media/entertainment, healthcare, life sciences, energy, government, education, and retail) will accelerate demand for cloud. The growing desire among organizations to deploy their own private clouds for application, compute, and content emerged as another major driver of new IT infrastructure hardware consumption. Some of these private cloud deployments (e.g., large government and research sites) had ambitions to be comparable in scope and complexity to public cloud environments, but others are more limited in scope. According to IDC research, spending on IT infrastructure hardware for private cloud deployments reached $6.4 billion in 2012, an increase of 23.1% over 2011 spending.
As a result, use cases and ROI models for private clouds will evolve from emphasizing rapid dev/ops deployment to focusing on runtime production application scalability, end-user productivity, and competitive business advantage. Computing and analytics applications that benefit from highly liquid IT architectures can be expected to help lead the transformation of datacenters and IT management strategies, while content and information storage, management, and distribution volumes will challenge IT decision makers to consider the best mix of resources to maintain service levels while keeping costs manageable.
Requirements for Effective Deployment of Private Clouds
Considering IBM
The IBM System x cloud portfolio includes a spectrum of offerings — from a fully bundled system to a flexible reference configuration and from complete, new ready-to-deploy systems to solutions that leverage a customer's existing infrastructure. IBM offers an entry point for each individual customer, whether the customer is new to cloud computing and is interested in the flexibility and efficiency a private cloud delivers or the customer is a sophisticated user seeking higher-level capabilities such as orchestration and life-cycle management.
IBM cloud solutions are built on industry-proven IBM x86 server technology featuring Intel Xeon processors and easily scale in size and feature capability with the growth and maturity of the customer. IBM cloud offerings are available on a variety of IBM System x platforms; customers are not locked into a particular form factor and are able to select the system that best suits their individual environment. System x hardware includes:
System x servers — Intelligent systems that leverage industry-standard CPU architectures
designed to reduce costs and complexity in the datacenter
eX5 enterprise servers — Enhanced systems, utilizing MAX5 memory expansion and eXFlash
I/O to deliver greater performance, scalability, and storage density
IBM BladeCenter — Consolidated servers in one easy-to-manage platform; shared I/O and
centralized management simplifies IT and increases flexibility
IBM Flex System — A modular blade system with server, storage, and network; simplified with
unified management
Depending on their needs and environments, customers can select from software-only cloud solutions, integrated software and hardware solutions, or flexible hardware and software reference architectures.
Successful cloud implementations require strong performance and security, and the Intel Xeon processors are ideal for these workloads. The latest Intel Xeon E5 series processors feature data protection through pervasive encryption without loss of performance and create trusted pools of virtual resources, establishing a hardware "root of trust" to ensure systems and software have not been tampered with during or prior to launch.
Entry Cloud Offerings
IBM SmartCloud Entry offers customers a first step to transforming their IT environment to a private cloud. This software is designed for organizations that are making their first foray into the cloud and intend to proceed gradually; typically these organizations have limited in-house skills. For customers seeking to scale their IT without adding physical servers, manage the peaks in demand activity, and reduce software licensing costs, IBM SmartCloud Entry is a cost-effective solution. Customers are able to control expenses and increase IT agility with the following features:
Self-service portal and provisioning to speed IT application delivery
Image management and basic metering to gain increased visibility into the environment Support of many hypervisor environments — VMware, KVM, and Hyper-V for openness and
For many companies, IBM SmartCloud Entry provides all the cloud capability that they will likely ever need. In addition, as customers grow and increase their competency with cloud, IBM SmartCloud Entry is able to add capacity with upgrades and even scales to more sophisticated solutions, such as IBM SmartCloud Provisioning and Orchestrator. IBM SmartCloud Entry is available in reference configurations and as a bundled solution.
IBM ReadyPack for Cloud is an IBM-tested and -validated entry reference configuration to
optimize the utilization of IT assets and provide reliable on-demand access to IT applications. The offering includes IBM x3650 M4 rack servers, IBM DS3524 storage system, Juniper EX2200 Ethernet Switch, and the VMware vSphere 5.0 Essentials Plus.
IBM BladeCenter Foundation for Cloud is a preintegrated platform that includes BladeCenter H
chassis and server blades, BLADE Network Technologies 10Gb Virtual Fabric Switch, and IBM Storwize or IBM System Storage DS3524. Suitable for virtualized and cloud environments, the modular design can scale easily and offers a single point of management. SmartCloud Entry may also be installed at client request.
IBM System x Integrated Solution for Cloud is an integrated offering of IBM servers, storage,
networking, and platform management, optimized for setting up an internal private cloud. The solution provides customers with everything required to deploy a private cloud in their datacenter. This one-stop virtualization platform can initially support more than 50 virtual machines, with the option to scale as needs expand. Unlike a traditional distributed system, IBM's preintegrated system with cloud computing capabilities enables IT to respond quickly to the changing needs of the business and speed time to delivery.
Advanced Cloud Offerings
For organizations that have more sophisticated needs as well as internal skills, IBM offers advanced offerings in cloud technologies. Customers have the option of upgrading from the entry-level IBM offerings or deploying these advanced technologies from the start. Building on the basic cloud features, customers are able to expand into advanced provisioning, orchestration and automation, and advanced management. With these offerings, customers have the option to leverage existing hardware to realize greater return on investment (ROI), improve their time to value by speeding provisioning times, and improve availability by reducing downtime and manual interventions.
IBM SmartCloud Provisioning delivers a workload-optimized cloud environment with image
life-cycle management and resilient high-scale provisioning across heterogeneous platforms. Infrastructure and platform capabilities increase business agility by accelerating application deployment.
IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator is a unified cloud management platform that provides end-to-end
automation of cloud service delivery. IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator integrates provisioning, monitoring, metering, chargeback, and capacity management and enables the automation of application deployment and life-cycle management for compute, storage, and network resources.
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
IBM System x rack servers are optimized for VDI and are designed to deliver the compute
Security and compliance Improved manageability Lower IT costs
IBM PureSystems
IDC research indicates that IT organizations are using integrated systems as core platforms to enable private cloud service delivery environments. The IBM PureSystems family is a portfolio of expert integrated systems built from the ground up to deliver an optimized hardware and software platform. IBM PureSystems provide a broad range of infrastructure and platform systems with built-in expertise around specific workloads and use cases.
For cloud environments, IBM PureFlex System is a preconfigured fully integrated system with unified management of compute, storage, networking, and virtualization resources that support a range of general-purpose datacenter requirements. IBM PureApplication Systems are highly optimized integrated systems with built-in Patterns of Expertise that are deployed and managed by the systems according to a set of policies. IBM PureData Systems are integrated systems optimized for delivering data services and analytics including big data.
Challenges
A company's ability to fully realize the benefits of cloud computing depends on the IT organization being willing and able to adapt to changes in not only technologies but also processes. Within the IT department, the separate infrastructure teams (server, storage, and networking) must be able to collaborate with each other and also with the application development teams. Beyond coordination, the IT team should also be working with the business stakeholders to build consensus on standard configurations and SLAs. To run an internal cloud, IT organizations will require a shift from the traditional decision making and ROI methodology used in the legacy technology silos to a mindset that focuses on end-to-end shared service delivery. Perhaps the greatest obstacle is the fact that not all customers are fully ready to adopt this change within their organization.
A cloud infrastructure can help many organizations transform their datacenters and improve
operational efficiency if they can overcome the obstacles on this journey. As described in this paper, IBM has a range of products in its portfolio to assist customers on their evolution to cloud —— from a flexible offering that is easily integrated and will not disrupt the existing environment or IT staff to more complete solutions for customers that are ready for a full transformation.
Conclusion
A B O U T T H I S P U B L I C A T I O N
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