Tag Archives: infrastructure

Guest Post, hybrid cloud, Information technology management, VCloud, VMware

The Rise in Popularity of Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

May 29, 2013 Guest Author

Guest Post by Paul Vian of Internap

Organizations are increasingly choosing to outsource business-critical applications and content to third-party providers. But, with it comes a long list of questions in order to determine the right mix of IT infrastructure services to meet specific scalability, control, performance and cost requirements. Although a shared public cloud can offer the convenience of easily scaling infrastructure up and down on-demand, many organizations are still hesitant due to concerns around privacy and security within a shared tenancy arrangement. Another complication is that the virtualization layer typically takes around 10 per cent of the resources. Accordingly, dedicated, physical infrastructure is often ideal just for performance purposes.

Which cloud environments are businesses considering?

If a business has a fluctuating workload that has ever-changing demands and requires more resources in the short term, a cloud environment is often still the preferred choice, but this does tend to become more expensive for applications that are always on, such as databases or other highly resource-intensive applications. The reality is that organizations often require something in between, which is driving demand for flexible, hybrid cloud infrastructure solutions that can easily adapt and scale to meet a wide range of use cases and application needs.

What are the benefits of a hybrid cloud infrastructure?

Taking a tailored approach can enable businesses to scale their infrastructures ‘on demand’. It is also now possible for companies utilising physical servers to gain the flexibility and benefits they have been enjoying within a highly virtualized cloud environment in recent years. We are in an age where physical servers can be instantly spun up or down as global demand dictates, so there is no reason why organizations can’t gain the convenience and agility of the cloud with the reliability and performance of physical servers.

How can companies achieve a hybrid cloud infrastructure tailored to their specific needs?

Ideally, companies should look to work with a third-party provider that can provide access to a broader mix of services to meet these emerging demands around scalability in particular. Through working with a provider that takes a consultative sales approach, businesses can benefit from a tailored service that allows them to seamlessly mix, provision and manage both their virtual cloud and physical IT infrastructure – whether this is legacy hardware or back-up equipment. With this approach, businesses can not only meet their diverse application requirements, but also easily address changing global business needs.
We are now seeing things coming full circle; from physical networks, through to virtualization and the cloud, to today’s move towards a hybrid approach. This is in response to the ever-growing sophistication of automation and self-service capabilities, and is the way forward for any forward-thinking organization with a complex list of requirements.

Paul_Side

Paul Vian is Internap’s director of business development for Europe, Middle East, and Africa

Data center

Cloud Isn’t Social, It’s Business

September 1, 2012 Latest News from Cloud Computing Journal

Adopting a cloud-oriented business model for IT is imperative to successfully transforming the data center to realize ITaaS.

Much like devops is more about a culture shift than the technology enabling it, cloud is as much or more about shifts in business models as it is technology. Even as service providers (that includes cloud providers) need to look toward a business model based on revenue per application (as opposed to revenue per user) enterprise organizations need to look hard at their business model as they begin to move toward a more cloud-oriented deployment model.

While many IT organizations have long since adopted a “service oriented” approach, this approach has focused on the customer, i.e. a department, a business unit, a project. This approach is not wholly compatible with a cloud-based approach, as the “tenant” of most enterprise (private) cloud implementations is an application, not a business entity. As a “provider of services”, IT should consider adopting a more service provider business model view, with subscribers mapping to applications and services mapping to infrastructure services such as rate shaping, caching, access control, and optimization.

By segmenting IT into services, IT can not only more effectively transition toward the goal of ITaaS, but realize additional benefits for both business and operations.

A service subscription business model:

Makes it easier to project costs across entire infrastructure
Because functionality is provisioned as services, it can more easily be charged for on a pay-per-use model. Business stakeholders can clearly estimate the costs based on usage for not just application infrastructure, but network infrastructure, as well, providing management and executives with a clearer view of what actual operating costs are for given projects, and enabling them to essentially line item veto services based on projected value added to the business by the project.
Easier to justify cost of infrastructure
Having a detailed set of usage metrics over time makes it easier to justify investment in upgrades or new infrastructure, as it clearly shows how cost is shared across operations and the business. Being able to project usage by applications means being able to tie services to projects in earlier phases and clearly show value added to management. Such metrics also make it easier to calculate the cost per transaction (the overhead, which ultimately reduces profit margins) so that business can understand what’s working and what’s not.
Enables business to manage costs over time
Instituting a “fee per hour” enables business customers greater flexibility in costing, as some applications may only use services during business hours and only require them to be active during that time. IT that adopts such a business model will not only encourage business stakeholders to take advantage of such functionality, but will offer more awareness of the costs associated with infrastructure services and enable stakeholders to be more critical of what’s really needed versus what’s not.
Easier to start up a project/application and ramp up over time as associated revenue increases
Projects assigned limited budgets that project revenue gains over time can ramp up services that enhance performance or delivery options as revenue increases, more in line with how green field start-up projects manage growth. If IT operations is service-based, then projects can rely on IT for service deployment in an agile fashion, added new services rapidly to keep up with demand or, if predictions fail to come to fruition, removing services to keep the project in-line with budgets.
Enables consistent comparison with off-premise cloud computing
A service-subscription model also provides a more compatible business model for migrating workloads to off-premise cloud environments – and vice-versa. By tying applications to services – not solutions – the end result is a better view of the financial costs (or savings) of migrating outward or inward, as costs can be more accurately determined based on services required.

The concept remains the same as it did in 2009: infrastructure as a service gives business and application stakeholders the ability to provision and eliminate services rapidly in response to budgetary constraints as well as demand.

That’s cloud, in a nutshell, from a technological point of view. While IT has grasped the advantages of such technology and its promised benefits in terms of efficiency it hasn’t necessarily taken the next step and realized the business model has a great deal to offer IT as well.

One of the more common complaints about IT is its inability to prove its value to the business. Taking a service-oriented approach to the business and tying those services to applications allows IT to prove its value and costs very clearly through usage metrics. Whether actual charges are incurred or not is not necessarily the point, it’s the ability to clearly associate specific costs with delivering specific applications that makes the model a boon for IT.