Managing Cloud Resources

Perspective

How to optimize your Infrastructure as a Service for your private cloud

By Omar Nawaz

Copyright © 2014 Rouge Group LLC. All rights reserved

Omar Nawaz is the founder and President at Rouge Group. Omar has over 20 years of experience in Product Management, Marketing and Strategy. His areas of expertise include Cloud Services (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS) and Enterprise Software. Omar has built and launched over 20 emerging technologies products and solutions at large companies and start-ups and he has successfully created new markets to build several $100+ million businesses.

Copyright © 2014 Rouge Group LLC. All rights reserved

In the Cloud computing era, computing is a service and no longer discrete

components of physical inventory. Resources, software and information are

shared. To drive increased agility, lower cost, and higher service levels

enterprises are transforming IT infrastructure into dynamic and virtual pool of

resources and offering it as utility – Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). IaaS is

the infrastructure layer of the cloud, private or public, see figure 1. This new

and shared infrastructure resources include virtualization, resource pooling,

dynamic and logical workload allocation, reconfigurations and relocations,

which introduces significant complexities to resource management and

planning.

How to optimize virtual infrastructure and cloud resources

• Optimizing infrastructure utilization

• Controlling cost

• Capacity planning for future

• Managing the sprawl

• Troubleshooting

CHALLENGES:

Figure 1: Building blocks of a cloud (private and public)

Perspective

IT administrators and managers need a

comprehensive strategy to optimize and manage

cloud.

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IT needs a comprehensive

Infrastructure-as-a-Service

(IaaS) Cloud

Management Suite.

Traditional IT management tools

and approaches were never

designed for these new

environments. There are tools and

techniques available that allow

you to capture utilization data in a

virtual and cloud infrastructure, but

that alone is not sufficient for

sophisticated resource

management and capacity

planning. To manage and control

virtual environments and deal with

real-time changes you need a new

approach.

The implications of cloud go

beyond technology and process,

and into the core of every

component of the IT environment.

While the shift to cloud is

happening and planning for future

state is critical but it’s important for

organizations not to lose sight of

About Rouge Group Rouge Group is a top Management Consulting firm. We provide Product Management, Marketing and Strategy consulting services to top enterprises, service providers, and startups. We work with business executives and entrepreneurs to realize their ideas, make better decisions, and deliver sustainable success. We achieve this by bringing deep industry knowledge and expert perspective from a wide range of industries to offer our client fresh perspectives and insights. We are passionate about taking on challenges that are important to our clients, help realize their vision and achieve better results that are unique, pragmatic, holistic, and enduring.

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effectively managing the

technology currently running the

business.

A comprehensive IaaS Cloud

Management environment will

enable IT administrators and

managers to optimize their cloud

infrastructure with advanced

capacity planning and

sophisticated resource

management capabilities. IT needs

both quantitative and qualitative

view on the entire environment. A

combined view of configurations,

operational event data, resource

utilization and performance

statistics will empower IT

administrators and manager to

make better decisions regarding

infrastructure design,

management, planning and

investment.

Management environment should

be able to capture utilization,

health and performance metrics

and correlate it with configuration

and operational data both

Today’s virtual infrastructure and cloud

management and monitoring investment may significantly and

negatively impact the organization’s adoption of or transition to cloud.

real-time and historical to provide a comprehensive view of the entire

infrastructure. The information regarding configurations, applications

versions, patches, hardware revisions needs to be maintained in a version

control system, similar to source code. There are several open source and

commercial tools that can do this quite effectively, for example, Git

(www.git-scm.com), GitHub (www.github.com), SVN (www.

subversion.apache.org), Mercurial (www.mercurial.selenic.com) etc.

The historical perspective and analytics enables continuous visibility,

deep insight and a clear picture of what is driving growth and change

and how it is impacting performance, utilization, and service levels.

CAPACITY PLANNING: In order to effectively plan for future capacity, cloud management tool

should be able to capture utilization and performance metrics and

dynamically calculate capacity. A comprehensive view of virtual

infrastructure requires correlated view of the above information with

configuration and operation data. Configuration may include

information like: classifications, applications, patches, virtual hardware,

drift, VM events, relationship and dependency mapping, and changes in

infrastructure.

Visibility into virtual and cloud infrastructures will provide a clearer picture

of what is driving growth and changes in utilization of resources.

"An Integrated and best

of bread strategy will deliver better return on

investment in a dynamic, diverse and heterogeneous virtual

and cloud infrastructure environment.”

(continued)

Consider management tools that can manage across cloud, non-

cloud, multi-hypervisor infrastructure.

There is no perfect tool. Know

where to compromise.

6 Rouge Group LLC. www.RougeGrp.com

Develop a management, monitoring, and policy

strategy for your virtual and cloud infrastructure.

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MANAGING SPRAWL: Once a clear picture of the

capacity and utilization of the

virtual infrastructure is available

you need ability to define and

enforce IT policies based on

infrastructure events. This enables

you to limit, detect unused (over-

reserved) resources (memory and

CPU), automatically retire and free

up valuable resources and track

heavy traffic and storage

utilization.

THE RIGHT TOOL: There are several choices for cloud

management platform (CMP).

Research firm Gartner categorizes

this market into five categories:

Traditional large IT operations

management (ITOM), software

infrastructure stack vendors,

emerging vendors, open-source

software (OSS) and integrated

systems cloud management

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platforms.

There is a long list to consider

between commercial and open

source. Due to recent popularity of

open-source many organizations

are considering OSS. Caution

should be exercised during

evaluation. Some of the OSS

offerings may not to ready for

production deployment or have

limited features or capabilities.

When selecting OSS, consider the

development skills within the

organization and more importantly

consider using CMP distribution

supported by vendors that can

provide support, extended

functionality and possible a

hardened version that can be

deployed in product environments.

Some of the popular OSS CMP

tools include: OpenStack, Citrix

CloudPlatform (CloudStack),

Eucalyptus, OpenNebula.

Rouge Group

Contact us: www.RougeGrp.com Phone: +1 (408) 471-9357 Email: info@rougegrp.com Pleasanton, CA

Rouge Group team focuses on cloud computing, PaaS, Big Data, Analytics, and DevOps.

For more information, please visit: www.RougeGrp.com.