Build open,
flexible cloud
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Cloud computing has emerged
as a major driving force behind
other significant innovations
currently affecting the world
of IT, such as developments in
big data, security, and mobility,
to name a few. To harness
these new capabilities and the
potential offered by cloud,
however, IT’s role within the
business will need to undergo
a radical shift, particularly
with regard to managing hybrid
service delivery environments.
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Executive summary
Cloud computing is forcing many organizations to adapt to a new style of IT, one in which IT departments, in addition to acting as the architects and custodians of traditional IT environments, are expected to serve as builders of in-house cloud delivery systems as well as brokers of third-party cloud services. Driving this transformation is the need for businesses to become more agile, reduce costs, accelerate the pace of innovation, and ensure the highest levels of quality, security, and compliance. To meet these challenges, IT needs to master large-scale hybrid service delivery environments that encompass private cloud, public cloud, and traditional IT. This white paper explores some of the challenges of provisioning and maintaining cloud-based services in a complex IT environment, and describes how HP Cloud Service Automation can help organizations adopt the new style of IT and deliver on the promise of cloud.
Major industry trends
Rarely before in the technology industry have so many major trends and developments converged at once on the IT world. Today, mobility, big data, security, and cloud computing are all having a felt (and profound) impact on how customers access and digest information and services, and how those services are being delivered. By far, however, the biggest trend among them is cloud computing—and it’s the one that’s attracting the most attention from business leaders. And for good reason. Cloud computing has the greatest potential to enhance business agility, accelerate innovation, and reduce costs by delivering on-demand, pay-per-use services that are highly elastic, quickly provisioned, and easily scalable—all with minimal service provider interaction. To exploit these new capabilities and benefits, however, IT’s role will have to expand beyond building internal infrastructure and services exclusively, and into brokering third-party and external cloud services. The key to success here, of course, lies in understanding the unique requirements of each service—such as availability, cost, performance, and regulatory needs— and then addressing them in the most efficient and cost-effective way possible. This can only be accomplished by creating the right mix of on-premises and off-premises services that leverage the best of traditional IT, private cloud, and public cloud—and then learning how to effectively manage this new hybrid delivery environment.
Business drivers translate into these goals for IT:
• Improve agility by reducing response time to new business service requests.
• Speed innovation by accelerating application development and service delivery times. • Reduce costs by standardizing and automating manual tasks and processes.
• Capitalize on opportunities by accelerating time to market of new services.
• Deliver enterprise-grade services that are secure, high-quality, and compliant.
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New technology, new challenges
Every 10 to 15 years, technology delivery undergoes a radical shift that changes the consumption of technology and the value it can bring to both businesses and consumers. Typically, a shift of this nature saddles IT with two new sets of challenges: one, on the technical side, how to implement and deploy this new technology to achieve optimum results; and two, from a business perspective, how to leverage this new technology to enable the business to better meet its ongoing strategic, cost management, and revenue growth goals. Cloud computing certainly provides no exception to this two-part rule.
First, the technical side. Without the right tools and training in place, the complexities of managing a hybrid service delivery environment will only multiply exponentially, essentially negating any benefits or advantages gained by moving to cloud. In this instance, the importance of a management solution that utilizes standardized best practices and automation cannot be emphasized enough—especially when you consider that upgrading and managing applications in the future will be an ongoing and time-intensive task.
Second, the business side of the equation. Technology is only valuable insofar as it enables the business to solve its most pressing challenges—namely, accelerating innovation, exploiting marketplace opportunities, enhancing agility, and improving financial management. Ideally, an effective cloud management solution will be able to address all of these challenges at once— but then that raises the broader question: What, exactly, constitutes an “effective” solution?
Designing the optimal cloud management solution
Booming demand for IT services has led many companies to embrace cloud computing, augmenting their own private infrastructures with the on-demand resources of a public cloud. When it comes to managing the resulting hybrid environment, however, these same companies have simply fallen back on using different tools to manage different services. Unfortunately, this sort of siloed approach to management can create enormous drag on IT, stifle innovation and compromise agility—essentially handicapping the company at a time when ever-changing business requirements demand precisely the opposite. In the face of unprecedented IT
complexity and external pressures such as increased competition and marketplace uncertainty, a new approach is needed, one that is specifically designed to meet the unique needs of cloud computing. HP has identified what we feel are the key features of the optimal cloud management solution:
Integral part of the cloud journey
Cloud is a journey, not an overnight transformation. As such, it can be divided into several distinct steps: consolidating and standardizing IT resources to free up both staff and funding for your cloud initiative; automation of manual tasks and processes, which is a prerequisite for moving to cloud; self-service requesting by line-of-business users; operating and managing the complete lifecycle of these cloud services, from service creation to retirement; and finally, brokering internally created and externally sourced services.
Support for heterogeneous environments
In the real world, no large-scale cloud service delivery environment is going to be purely one type or the other, but rather, a mix of multiple elements. Thus, the most effective management solution is a single, comprehensive tool that lets you build, operate, and manage services in a heterogeneous environment with multi-vendor hardware, multi-OS, and multiple hypervisors.
“We chose to work with HP
for two reasons. Firstly,
HP is well known and well
established in the IT market,
so it would bring credibility
to our new service. Secondly,
the HP solution was mature,
very well designed, and
complete with good
technology; in fact, it included
everything we needed to
develop, manage, monitor,
and provision the platform.”
—Managed services marketing director of a major telecommunications operator
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Open and extensible architecture
Your cloud environment should be capable of accommodating and adapting to your business needs as they change over time—thus it is important to avoid getting locked into a single-vendor solution by keeping your environment open and flexible. The optimal cloud management platform would help retain this sort of flexibility by supporting publicly exposed APIs to facilitate integration with other third-party products. When building cloud services, it is critical to design for workload portability across public and private cloud. A cloud management platform that supports open source cloud computing such as OpenStack®, and open cloud
standards such as TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications), can help you design for portable and interoperable services and avoid vendor lock-in.
Support for the entire stack
A solution that limits your management capabilities to the infrastructure only also limits your ability to fully exploit the potential of cloud computing. The most effective solution will allow you to manage the entire stack—infrastructure (IaaS), platform (PaaS), and applications (SaaS)—not just infrastructure services.
Enterprise-grade capabilities
Cloud computing is a key cornerstone of your overall IT strategy, and the tools you use to manage that environment should reflect that importance. To support your mission-critical applications, your cloud solution should be secure, compliant, and built on a highly available architecture, with the ability to scale infinitely and support large-scale enterprise applications.
Simplified, seamless user experience
In recent years, simple design and a seamless user experience have become the hallmark of many new consumer-facing applications, masking the complexity of the application underneath a modern and simple user interface. Today, line-of-business users expect this same simplicity, ease of use, and aesthetic appeal with their own IT applications. Gone are the days when IT applications were skinned in visually unimpressive monotones—today’s user interfaces are colorful, playful, and eye-catching, rendering perfectly on any device regardless of screen size or device type.
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The HP solution
For businesses that want to harness the power and potential of cloud, HP offers an open, enterprise-class service lifecycle management solution called HP Cloud Service Automation. HP Cloud Service Automation helps your organization increase agility by reducing service deployment time from months to minutes, deliver greater value to customers by improving responsiveness, and reduce costs by automating service provisioning. HP Cloud Service Automation features an open, extensible architecture that supports HP and third-party management tools, enabling you to quickly adapt to changing business requirements while supporting heterogeneous IT environments. Additionally, because HP Cloud Service Automation offers support for HP Cloud OS, multiple hypervisors, multi-vendor hardware, and multiple public cloud service providers, you get a flexible platform for building and managing hybrid cloud services that frees you from the constraints of vendor lock-in. As a core element of HP Converged Cloud portfolio, HP Cloud Service Automation offers:
* KVM supported through HP Cloud OS integration.
“HP stands out from the
crowd by providing a clean
and navigable interface that
wraps substantial breadth and
depth of capabilities into the
fewest number of interfaces.”
—The Forrester Wave: Private Cloud Solutions, Q4 2013
• Support for open cloud standards
– Native integration with OpenStack-based HP Cloud OS – Designs with TOSCA support
– Topology-based graphical service designer for designing services for HP Cloud OS configurations • Support for heterogeneous environments
– Application and infrastructure service brokering for hybrid cloud
– Multi-hypervisor support including VMware®, Microsoft® Hyper-V® and KVM*
– Multi-vendor hardware support
– Multi-vendor public cloud services support including HP Public Cloud, Amazon EC2, and Microsoft Azure
– Integration with HP and third-party products • Support for complex, multi-tier application services
– Automated provisioning and management of the entire stack (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS), not just the infrastructure services
– Graphical service designer for infrastructure and application services – Integration with HP database and middleware automation
• Modern, simplified user interface
– Highly customizable self-service portal supporting custom themes
– Mash-up capabilities to embed non-HP Cloud Service Automation services into the self-service portal
– Responsive, auto-adjusting user interface for multiple device types and screen sizes Figure 1. Forrester Research rates HP as the sole leader in private cloud provider evaluation
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Open standards for unlocking potential
Moving to cloud should open up possibilities, not shut down your choices. Unfortunately, many cloud services have varying levels of openness when it comes to integration, security, and lifecycle management, often times forcing you to adopt new tools and processes that are incompatible with core competencies and best practices of enterprise IT. This sort of limitation leaves you with two less-than-ideal choices: either commit to a single proprietary cloud environment and integrate deeply, or use only basic services.
Neither choice, obviously, is acceptable—that’s why HP is committed to supporting OpenStack standards for cloud computing and TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications) standards for cloud service portability, as well as actively participating in the OpenStack project. HP’s commitment to both sets of standards means that HP will be at the forefront of cloud development and advancement as these initiatives continue evolving to deliver massively scalable and highly portable services.
HP Cloud Service Automation benefits
HP Cloud Service Automation is a complete service management platform for managing multiple cloud environments, bringing you:
• Increased agility for faster time to value by reducing application and infrastructure
provisioning time from months to minutes—delivering new services faster and accelerating time to revenue
• Investment protection by building cloud services on a flexible platform that lets you add capabilities and easily adapt to changing business requirements and integrate with other management tools
• Reduced costs by increasing server utilization and improving IT administrator efficiency • Reliable, high-quality service delivery by providing an automated environment that
incorporates best practices and knowledge capture, reducing outages and security incidents • Freedom of choice by supporting heterogeneous environments, allowing you to leverage
best-of-breed software and hardware
• Simplified management leveraging the same tools to manage private cloud, public cloud, and traditional IT resources
• Scalability and elasticity to scale up and down as the business grows and demand for IT services fluctuates
• Multi-tenancy and role-based access providing secure services to multiple organizations • Service assurance and control for monitoring and managing the entire cloud service lifecycle
across request, ordering, provisioning, usage, and retirement—in alignment with business policies, cost targets, and performance goals
“The basics of IT are by now
commoditized. The business
value in IT is to become more
of a trusted advisor. We must
be in a position to advise
customers on new strategies
and services. With HP Cloud
Service Automation, we have
a strong provisioning suite, a
strong automation suite—and
this is what cloud is all about.
And with HP it was just one
company, one phone number.”
—Jens Maagøe, Senior Architect, NNIT, a large European IT services provider
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Build an open and flexible cloud with HP Cloud
Service Management
HP Cloud Service Automation is the only end-to-end cloud management solution available on the market today, including advanced provisioning for composite applications as well as infrastructure, support for heterogeneous environments, and a flexible, extensible platform for complete management. HP offers a mature, proven, and integrated set of management solutions and services to improve service quality, availability, governance, and compliance, while supporting the entire lifecycle of your cloud initiative. HP also offers professional services, training, and support to help your organization develop the skills necessary to maintain and grow your cloud solution.
Learn more
If you’re ready to build an open and flexible cloud and say no to vendor lock-in, contact your HP sales representative today to begin defining and developing your cloud strategy.
For more information about HP Cloud Service Automation, visit
hp.com/go/CSA
.
© Copyright 2012–2013 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein. The OpenStack Word Mark and OpenStack Logo are either registered trademarks/service marks or trademarks/service marks of the OpenStack Foundation, in the United States and other countries and are used with the OpenStack Foundation’s permission. We are not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by the OpenStack Foundation, or the OpenStack community.
VMware is a trademark or registered trademark of VMware, Inc. or its affiliates. Microsoft and Hyper-V are U.S. registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. 4AA4-0507ENW, December 2013, Rev. 3
