Cloud Computing & Virtualization

Author

Marcia Kaufman, COO and Principal Analyst

Sponsored by IBM

As IT organizations work to increase the flexibility, efficiency, and cost effectiveness of their data centers, many have focused on server virtualization. These companies are also leveraging server virtualization as an important starting point for their journey to adopt cloud computing. However, server virtualization alone is not sufficient to help companies realize the full compliment of cloud computing benefits. In essence, to achieve a wellmanaged data center requires a more application centric approach. One way to ensure that the end user is supported as part of the virtualization strategy is to make the resource allocation process application aware.

Why is this issue so important? The use of applications is not static. It is common that during certain business cycles, the demands on a particular application will increase and therefore require additional unanticipated computing resources. When this happens in a heavily virtualized environment, the virtual machines that are supporting the application may not be able to handle the changing workload.

Companies need a way to prioritize applications not only based on infrastructure requirements and policies, but with an understanding of the business context of the applications in question. In order for companies to ensure that the most business critical applications are given top priority, its service polices must reflect the relative business impact of each application. Server virtualization allows the addition of entirely new virtual machines to an application, but this takes time, and the spike could be gone before the new resources are ready. Furthermore, the action of adding a new virtual machine is only useful if the system knows when to use it. Server virtualization products can look at system metrics such as memory and CPU usage, but this gives only a very high level view of what’s really going on, and completely ignores any difference in the priority of different workloads in periods of resource contention. As such, with server virtualization alone these additional applications may suffer poor performance even if they have a higher priority to the business.

Author

Marcia Kaufman, COO and Principal Analyst

Sponsored by CloudTran

In highly competitive markets, companies are increasingly turning to cloud computing as a way to improve their ability to react to market changes. Whether we are looking at financial services, healthcare, or retail, cloud computing is becoming a strategic approach. Many industries are grappling with the complexities of ensuring that online transaction applications can be effectively and safely managed in highly distributed cloud environments. Processes and technologies designed for lower transaction volumes operating in siloed environments cannot easily support unbounded transaction volumes operating in cloud and service oriented environments. Organizations with a requirement to run mission-critical online transaction processing (OLTP) applications need to manage these extreme volumes effectively in order to provider optimal service to customers.

In this paper, we present an overview of the requirements for running OLTP applications in multi-processing and cloud environments using a retail ecommerce example. In addition, we provide insight into evolving technology requirements for overcoming scalability challenges in nonmainframe distributed environments. We also will provide a perspective on managing near real-time access to data required to support OLTP transactions in non-mainframe distributed environments.

Authors

Judith Hurwitz, CEO
Marcia Kaufman, COO and Principal Analyst

Sponsored by Red Hat

Cloud computing is a technology deployment approach that has the potential to help organizations better use IT resources to increase flexibility and performance. The underlying automation of cloud-based technology helps organizations access the right computing resource at the right time for an economical price. In addition, cloud-based services can be packaged so that specific workloads can be more easily provisioned through the use of sophisticated automation software. Users of these cloud services are experiencing dramatic improvements in productivity as a result of having consistent access to the right mix of technology to solve business problems. While these productivity improvements result from cloud computing’s ability to lift complexity away from the individual user, the cost and productivity benefits of the cloud depend on a highly sophisticated underlying infrastructure.

One of the most important ways to support the underlying complexity of well-managed cloud computing resources is through the operating system. Operating systems such as Linux are designed to support these requirements so that cloud services and application services do not have to recreate underlying technologies tailored for each specific deployment.

Authors

Judith Hurwitz, President
Marcia Kaufman, COO and Principal Analyst

Insight into the journey to enterprise cloud computing from a quality of service perspective. Many companies have initially looked to virtualization to drive higher utilization of IT resources, lower capital expenses, and enable the scalability required to support business growth. These companies have also focused on standardizing and automating IT environments to reduce costs and improve the quality of service to customers. However, as organizations move from experimental cloud implementations to using the cloud for mission critical workloads, quality of service requirements take on a new dimension. Service issues that may have been overlooked with less critical workloads may become magnified, exposing the company to significant risk. To protect against higher levels of risk it becomes increasingly important to translate existing internal data center policies into policies that make sense in the cloud. Therefore, we will provide insights into the key elements that these organizations need to focus on to ensure that policies for security, governance, and scalability are maintained as mission critical workloads are moved to the cloud.

In addition, we provide an overview of what capabilities IBM Power Systems™ cloud solutions offer to support customers.

Author

Judith Hurwitz, CEO

Sponsored by IBM

The cloud in cloud computing provides the  means through which everything from computing power to computing infrastructure, applications, business processes to personal collaboration can be delivered to the user as a service.

Cloud computing has become one of the most important technical and business trends in decades. Increasingly, companies are turning toward cloud computing as a way of increasing the agility of their computing environment.  Management understands that IT is a business asset that should be able to expand and contract based upon need. They are looking for methods of having the best possible resources at the optimal price without increasing capital expenditures.

The movement toward this increasingly optimized cloud model is part of the movement towards the industrialization of computing. Therefore, cloud computing is helping to transform the way we think about using technology as a business asset and as an agent of change.