Accelerate your move to the cloud with a Configuration Management System

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Accelerate your move to the

cloud with a Configuration

Management System

Your path to cloud success with end-to-end visibility

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The ability to lower costs while improving agility and speed of service delivery was once something a CIO could only dream of. But the advent of cloud computing is making it a reality. However, along with the benefits have come drawbacks. Virtualization and cloud computing (private, public, and hybrid) add a much higher level of complexity, and this is exacerbated by a lack of visibility.

This white paper provides an overview of cloud computing, including a standard definition, the evolution of cloud models, and the driving factors behind cloud adoption. It also explores the challenges that cloud computing have introduced. Next, it defines the configuration management system (CMS), looks at the way the CMS and the cloud are related, and discusses the belief that many share: cloud deployments depend on a CMS to be successful. And finally, it explains how discovery and dependency mapping is a key contributor to successfully enabling end-to-end visibility into the cloud, necessary to make the right decisions for IT and the business.

What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing is a delivery model for technology enabled services that provides on-demand access to an elastic pool of shared computing assets. These assets include applications, servers, storage, and networks—all of which can be rapidly provisioned with minimal service provider interaction. The entire pool can be scaled up or down as needed on a pay-per-use basis. In other words, these assets can now be consumed “as a service.”

Independent research firm, Forrester Research, Inc defines cloud computing as: A standardized IT capability (services, software, or infrastructure) delivered via Internet technologies in a pay-per-use, self-service way, and breaks down this definition to better understand its implications to infrastructure and operations as follows:

• “Standardized capability” means highly repeatable, consistent service delivery. A cloud service is an easily consumable service, application, software component, or infrastructure element that is delivered the same way every single time. It’s not customized or configured uniquely for each client— that breaks the economics of the model.

• “Pay-per-use” means paying for resources only if you use them. A second core tenet of the cloud computing business model is that you pay for the service based only on your consumption pattern, not on the number of capital assets you will be

dedicating to this service. Nearly all cloud services leverage this model to provide cost elasticity as your consumption changes.

• “Self-service” means highly automated. The third major differentiation is in how these solutions are provisioned. It’s easy to set up a webpage through which consumers can request services from you. However, that’s not how cloud computing works. With cloud, services require provisioning upon request—usually within five to 15 minutes. This means that to operate a cloud service you have to automate the provisioning operations so that they happen like clockwork, following highly standardized procedures to ensure that deployment is predictable and done cost-effectively.1

The evolution of cloud models

To achieve success in today’s fast-paced and

constantly changing IT environments, companies must keep pace. CIOs grapple with driving IT efficiencies to enhance service delivery and performance, while simultaneously controlling costs.

While virtualization has enabled IT to maximize resource allocation and application agility through the consolidation of applications onto a single physical server, it has also added a new layer of complexity. As virtualization has matured, it has necessitated the development of virtualized network architectures— known as “clouds”—in which physical resources are leveraged to provide on-demand access to various IT resources. Virtualization software automatically manages dynamic server provisioning across networks to manage fluctuations in demand for IT resources. Cloud models or architectures today are most often categorized based on the way they are used, based on ownership:

• External/Public clouds: Cloud assets are shared, and service is provided on a pay-per-use basis to multiple entities. All assets are owned and operated by the provider. Typically hosting of pay-per-use, virtualized servers by third-party cloud vendors and/or service providers. This model shifts the capital expenditure (CAPEX) of infrastructure expansion into scalable operating expenditure (OPEX) managed by a third party.

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• Internal/Private clouds: Cloud assets are operated solely for single entity and may be located on or off premises. They may be owned and managed by that entity or by a third party. A virtualized IT infrastructure that hosts services for employees and is managed by an organization’s IT staff, shifting the IT department’s primary role from service and maintenance to service provider. In a private cloud, all data remains under the full control of the host organization, mitigating many potential risks intrinsic to public cloud deployments. For many enterprises, internal clouds are the most cost effective approach to cloud computing adoption.

• Hybrid clouds: The hybrid cloud is a blended solution that utilizes parts of both the public and private clouds. The integration of on-premises IT infrastructures and internal cloud applications with applications and information deployed to a service provider either on a temporary or permanent basis. This model enables an enterprise to serve as its own cloud provider and to leverage an external cloud provider simultaneously.

Factors driving cloud adoption

There are many factors driving cloud adoption but most industry experts agree that it’s all about service delivery. You need to provide technology-enabled services to your people whenever and wherever they need them—and you need to do it cost-effectively, securely, and quickly. This is one of the driving forces behind the rise in cloud computing.

Cloud computing can provide new levels of collaboration, agility, speed, and cost savings for enterprises of any size and type. There is the desire to find alignment between decreasing or flat IT budgets and the increasing demand for business-critical IT services. From a business perspective, the ability to scale infrastructure resources to support rapid growth without compromising business efficiency is critical.

Ease of maintenance is another attractive characteristic. Because cloud models require less hardware than comparable distributed computing deployments, fewer dedicated IT staff members are necessary to maintain the integrity of the cloud’s infrastructure—particularly during peak hours.

A 2010 research report from Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) examined both the benefits and challenges of cloud computing, drawing from more than 150 global respondents, 65 percent of whom already had cloud computing deployments, and 35 percent of whom had defined and committed plans for cloud adoption within 12 months.2_In general, the survey respondents were strongly positive about cloud-computing related benefits, with 76 percent of those in deployment claiming real or measurable financial benefits from cloud. Figure 1 highlights the most critical drivers for cloud computing adoption.

From an IT perspective, support for rapid provisioning and deployment is another attractive characteristic that appeals to growing enterprises. Because cloud computing architectures offer nearly infinite on-demand capacity, new applications can be deployed immediately without extensive provisioning, speeding time-to-market.

Industry analysts agree cloud adoption will continue to grow. Recent IDC cloud research shows that worldwide revenue from public IT cloud services exceeded $16 billion USD in 2009 and is forecast to reach $55.5 billion USD in 2014, representing a compound annual growth rate of 27.4%. This rapid growth rate is over five times the projected growth for traditional IT products (5%).3

2_{The Responsible Cloud, Enterprise Management Associates, Jan 2010} 3_{DC, Worldwide and Regional Public IT Cloud Services 2010–2014}

Forecast, Doc #223549, June 2010

Figure 1:

List of the most critical drivers for cloud computing adoption.

0% 10% 52% 46% 42% 36% 30% 27% 22% 21% 11% 10% 1% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% Reduce the operational costs of IT management

Improve IT service quality Reduce the capital costs of IT management Increase flexibility and agility Reduce complexity of IT management Enable disaster recovery/business continuity Improve security or risk management outcomes Free up resources for strategic projects Improve regulatory compliance Expand revenue channels by reselling cloud services Other (Please specify)

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5 Challenges introduced by the cloud

Typical challenges that enterprises face when moving to cloud solutions. In working with enterprises like yours to design and deploy cloud solutions, we’ve learned quite a bit about the challenges that can hinder the success of cloud delivery. Typical challenges that you may encounter include the following:

• Limitations of a virtual infrastructure: A defining characteristic of a cloud platform is the ability to deliver applications and all the resources required to support them. Many businesses have applications running on virtual machines, but these are typically backed by a database running on a physical server. Today’s virtual-only environments, which automate virtual machine provisioning and monitoring, address only a fraction of what’s needed to provision a complete application. They are a stepping-stone to the next phase—evolving to the cloud. Virtual infrastructure investments must be extended to automate provisioning and monitoring of application and physical infrastructure, providing end-to-end lifecycle service management and security across applications—both virtual and physical.

• Closed environments: Other approaches

proclaimed as “cloud-in-a-box” are siloed solutions that are isolated and simply can’t scale beyond the box. They limit your choice of applications, operating systems, databases, and hypervisors. In this “proprietary cloud” approach, clients are locked into one vendor solution from top to bottom. Once capacity limits are reached, such an approach lacks the flexibility to scale up and down or to incorporate additional services and resources beyond the data center. Because of this, you lose one of the biggest advantages of cloud computing: elasticity. Enterprises require a unified architecture that brings legacy investments forward, is open to any application, and can scale resources elastically from the best source—inside or outside the data center. • Cloud sprawl: With multiple types of internal and

external cloud platforms supporting the enterprise, CIOs face “cloud sprawl”—with no way to unify control of services, monitor service levels, or achieve compliance. Multiple cloud types, each with different (siloed) management tools and processes, introduce risks to the business and can quickly consume resources needed for innovation. CIOs need a standard way to guarantee security, governance, and compliance to protect data, reduce risk, and ensure service quality at the right levels for various business functions.

These challenges underscore the fact that the tried and true disciplines of IT management are more important given the level of complexity the cloud introduces. The services users access shouldn’t be different when organizations move to the cloud. Although the cloud may change how services are delivered to users it shouldn’t change what is being delivered to users.

Cloud implications for the

Configuration Management System

As organizations continue to migrate to the cloud, the level of usage of automated activities will continue to increase. Once a service is deployed to the cloud, its management within the cloud must be automatic. Beneath every cloud there is infrastructure that consists of physical servers, network, and storage equipment that have been the responsibility of the operations team and will continue to be. If a cloud is private then the operations team has the responsibility for managing its underlying infrastructure and if a cloud is public then the responsibility will fall to the managed service provider (MSP). In any case, both virtual and physical servers, networks and storage still have to be mapped and managed and the expected rate of response makes standardized service delivery and automation a must. At the end of the day, when such large and volatile environments are involved, operations teams must be able to make quick decisions based on the most updated data. For those teams, the cloud means more virtualization and volatility in the environments they manage. In addition, tools that accompany the Configuration Management System (CMS) should be autonomous, as much as is possible. Consistency of services is also an extremely important factor for successfully operating in cloud environments. Organizations will need to establish configuration standards and policies for their environment and have the ability to manage those standards in an automated fashion to ensure services are consistently delivered.

Defining a CMS

Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) v3 defines the CMS as tools for collecting, storing, managing, updating, and presenting data about all configuration items and their relationships. (See Figure 2: CMS defined.) The definition can be simplified into collecting, managing, and presenting data about configuration items. A key function of a CMS is simply about collecting configuration data from data “providers” to supply configuration information to data “consumers.” Federation works behind the scenes to connect many different data sources.

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Collecting configuration data is an important part of the CMS because there are many potential providers of configuration data across an enterprise. Companies need to ensure that they leverage reliable sources of configuration data within their CMS. Effective discovery tools can help by automating the discovery of configuration item data and their dependencies to help build a service dependency map. Organizations need to ensure automated discovery and dependency mapping approaches are capable of discovering a diverse set of configuration types and relationships including network, server, application, and storage related. A CMS also supports the configuration management process by providing configuration validation as part of the configuration management lifecycle. Finally, a CMS lets you use both service and element configurations to navigate the IT “data swamp” in order to find the right data you need, in the right service context, to solve most IT problems.

Will cloud success ultimately depend

on the CMS?

According to a recent Gartner report: “Configuration management is a key process for any IT endeavor— including legacy IT systems, as well as private and public clouds or any combination thereof. Without visibility to the configuration of the relevant IT service, IT will not be able to manage the multisourced cloud infrastructure and software.”4 In the short term, the majority of organizations’ environments will likely continue to be hybrid, or a combination of private and public cloud. When operating in hybrid environments, there will be a tendency toward multiple management stacks. True visibility into the cloud depends on a CMS, especially as organizations move to and operate within hybrid cloud environments and multiple stacks. The key to this visibility will be integration to service

providers’ configuration management databases (CMDBs). Different IT management stacks for the private cloud may exist and the cloud CMDB must integrate with the integrated or “Master” CMDB as depicted in figure 2. The CMS becomes crucial in the cloud for complete visibility.

According to a recent blog based on data collected from research from Enterprise Management

Associates vice president Dennis Drogseth, ”cloud computing seems to be surprisingly good for service management—both in terms of technology adoption and in terms of political and process-related transformation. This includes technologies like

CMDB/CMS, IT process automation, user experience management and Service Level Management (SLM), as well as integrated service desk and chargeback accounting—among other “bellwether technologies”— or technologies that reflect more advanced

organizational and process readiness.” As evidenced by figure 3, research data shows that two thirds of survey respondents believe that a CMS inspires confidence when investing in a cloud provider.

The CMS provides end-to-end

visibility into the cloud: Discovery

and dependency mapping,

integrations and federation are

key success factors

Gartner recommends that “IT organizations that are beginning private, public or hybrid cloud projects should understand the tools capability (and limitations) for discovering and tracking changes of application and IT service configurations.”5

4_{Top Seven Considerations for Configuration Management for Virtual and}

Cloud Infrastructures (ID Number: G00208328), Gartner, October 2010

5_{IT Service Dependency Mapping Tools: Market Dynamics Update (ID}

Number: G00208932), Gartner, November 2010

Figure 2:

CMS defined.

Presentation

Knowledge processing

Information integration

Data and information

Service desk view

CMDB MDR Other

Knowledge processing services

Integrated CMDB Integration services Business service management view Asset management view Cloud Automation

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Automated discovery and dependency mapping, integration and data federation are all critical to providing this visibility. The CMS provides the information foundation that enables IT to make better decisions as an information broker between providers and consumers of data, and imparts a service context to the information so that all decisions are made with a business service in perspective. Integration is a critical aspect especially as organizations begin to integrate to their cloud service provider CMDB(s). Integrations and federation are both integral components of the CMS.

Whether the goal is to virtualize a legacy data center, build a private or hybrid cloud, or consolidate multiple data centers, the key to success is to have a rich understanding of all the infrastructure components involved and to be able to use this knowledge to create “move groups” that support the effective execution of the transformation. Move groups are discrete groupings of infrastructure that can be moved independently without introducing network latency or other issues that will impact ongoing data center operations.

This understanding of the environment must be comprehensive, timely, and should take into account the complex web of interdependencies that make up today’s multi-tiered infrastructures. Historically, Data Center Transformation (DCT) projects have relied on manual processes to create “maps” that reflect the transformation target infrastructure and its interdependencies. This approach has proven to be insufficient given the size, complexity, and high frequency of change associated with today’s modern, distributed, and multi-tiered infrastructures.

This requires a discovery and dependency mapping solution that works in complex physical environments, and is compatible with leading virtualization software that provides real-time visibility into the dynamic relationships between applications and the virtual and physical infrastructure. It automatically maintains

an up-to-date topology map that enables you to understand the business service context of virtual components and to quickly identify IT issues that will affect the business.

Dynamic virtualized IT environments need automated discovery and dependency mapping solutions that discover virtualization hypervisors and their environments, can track and control configurations, understand the risks posed by proposed changes, and—when problems occur—know which business processes are affected.

HP offers a comprehensive discovery and dependency mapping solution, proven in complex, real-world environments that:

• Delivers a broad and deep, fine-grained view of your virtual environment

• Reveals the dependencies among applications and components

• Can be customized to meet your unique requirements

• Forms the foundation for a bridge to your physical environment, so that you can manage your IT environment holistically

• Is part of a suite of virtualization management solutions from HP

HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping (DDMA) functions with virtualization software from leading vendors. For instance, with VMware, HP DDMA works across the ESX/ESXi, vSphere, vCenter, and vMotion product lines. It gives IT teams visibility into the architecture of these products so that they can understand VMs by location and by hypervisor, and tell whether hypervisors are managed or unmanaged (See figure 4). It can also discover license server features and dependencies, virtual resources utilized by VMs, and shared virtual resource pools by hypervisor and virtual cluster.

Figure 3:

0% No Yes

10% 20% 30%

65%

40% 50% 60% 70%

Two thirds see a shared CMDB or CMS as brining greater confidence into investing in a cloud provider

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HP DDMA delivers this insight in various ways. It communicates directly with the operating system running on a VM, or it indirectly discovers the existence of VMs through direct communication with the hypervisor—in near real time. It can also communicate with the VMware vCenter (formerly Virtual Center) management platform to discover details unknown to infrastructure components: data center groups, cluster configurations, and license server dependencies.

Event driven discovery functionality in DDMA software allows events, for example, movement of applications from one virtual machine to another, to trigger new discovery paths and population of UCMDB allowing almost real-time visibility into the virtualized environment.

Conclusion

Two facts are indisputable. Cloud adoption is growing exponentially; and visibility into your environment is at least as, but probably more important when utilizing the cloud. When utilizing a cloud model, you are making more automated and faster decisions on configurations within your environment than ever before and that means you need to understand it even more completely and fully. This requires visibility into the cloud.

HP is embracing the cloud and is responding to the challenges and opportunities the cloud introduces

with existing solutions today and solutions planned for tomorrow. In fact, HP CMS, comprised of HP Universal CMDB and HP DDMA addresses many of these issues today.

As discussed in the What is cloud computing? section above, highly repeatable, consistent service delivery is inherent to the cloud. When consuming the cloud as an abstraction, controlling the timing for when operations take place is essential. Change windows and SLA’s are very relevant and potential disruptions are a risk. Every cloud has an infrastructure and it must be managed either internally for private clouds or by the MSP for public clouds. The move to event driven discovery and the discovery of virtualized environments is critical to a successful cloud implementation.

HP CMS is addressing each of these issues. Make no mistake—the importance and role of the CMS will not be diminished with the proliferation of the move to the cloud, it will only become more crucial to its success.

© Copyright 2011 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. 4AA0-7336ENW, Created June 2011

Figure 4: HP DDMA architecture. ESX Server Hardware App OS Apppp App OS Apppp App OS Apppp App OS O Apppppp OSS Apppp App OS App OS App OS VMotion Technology ESX Server Hardware Host/

Network Software BusinessApps. Storage

HP DDMA

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6 HP Universal CMDB

VMware vCenter

HP DDMA offers broad and deep visibility into your IT environment that includes application components, middleware, operating systems, system hardware, and virtualization environments. To learn more, visit

Accelerate your move to the cloud with a Configuration Management System