Whitepaper Forrester market overview private cloud solutions

May 17, 2011

Market Overview: Private Cloud
Solutions, Q2 2011
by James Staten and Lauren E Nelson
for Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Making Leaders Successful Every Day

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

May 17, 2011
Market Overview: Private Cloud Solutions, Q2 2011
Five Solution types to Choose From For advancing virtualization Maturity
by James Staten and Lauren E Nelson
with robert Whiteley, Glenn O’donnell, and Nicholas M. Hayes

ExECut I v E S u M Ma ry
Over the past year, client inquiry questions have evolved from “What is cloud?” to “What vendors
should I consider?” This market overview examines the landscape of vendors providing solutions
designed to accelerate the implementation of an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud in a customer’s
data center. Several standard criteria and a selection of differentiating factors are examined. All the
solutions evaluated provide the core IaaS functions: self-service, standardization, automation, and
pay-per-use. In this market we found five solution types emerging: 1) enterprise systems management
vendors; 2) OS/hypervisor vendors; 3) converged infrastructure solutions; 4) pure-play cloud solutions;
and 5) grid-derived solutions. Each brings the core IaaS features as well as unique differentiating value.

tabL E O F CO N tE N tS N Ot E S & rE S O u rCE S
2 Everyone Wants A Cloud, But Few I&O Teams Forrester interviewed abiquo, bMC Software, Ca,
Are Ready Cloud.com, dell, Enomaly, Eucalyptus Systems,
4 A Mix Of 10 Key Criteria Make Up The Private Hexagrid Computing, HP, IbM, Microsoft,
Cloud Solutions Landscape newScale, Platform Computing, red Hat, tibco
7 We’re Early In This Market — Lots Of Room For Software, and vMware. Special thanks to
Improvement HyperStratus and Kovarus for their assistance
with the methodology and approach for this
10 More Vendors Coming
research.
rECOMMENdatIONS
14 Define What You Want First, Then Match The Related Research Documents
Right Solution “Ignoring Cloud risks a Growing Gap between
16 Supplemental Material I&O and the business”
March 24, 2011
“2011 top 10 IaaS Cloud Predictions For I&O
Leaders”
February 14, 2011
“you’re Not ready For Internal Cloud”
July 26, 2010

© 2011 Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Forrester, Forrester Wave, RoleView, Technographics, TechRankings, and Total Economic
Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Reproduction or sharing of this
content in any form without prior written permission is strictly prohibited. To purchase reprints of this document, please email clientsupport@
forrester.com. For additional reproduction and usage information, see Forrester’s Citation Policy located at www.forrester.com. Information is
based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change.

2 Market Overview: Private Cloud Solutions, Q2 2011

EVERYONE WANTS A CLOUD, BUT FEW I&O TEAMS ARE READY
Today’s business executives are becoming more IT savvy, and most are demanding to have a “cloud
strategy” for delivering more-efficient IT services. So it’s no surprise that there’s a rush by I&O
professionals to get to “yes” on cloud computing, with a particularly strong desire to build a private
cloud. Forrester surveyed enterprise hardware decision-makers in Q3 2010 and found that 6% stated
that they have a private environment today, while another 25% stated that it was a high or critical
priority for 2011 (see Figure 1).1 What does all of this mean for I&O?

· There’s increased pressure on I&O to go faster. This sense of urgency is driven by two major
trends: 1) executive pressure on IT to provide a private cloud solution to meet these demands
that meets corporate security requirements and avoids lock-in fears, and 2) the perception
that developers are circumventing IT and going straight to public IaaS clouds to meet their
compute needs.2

· But few I&O teams have a firm grasp on cloud . . . Private IaaS cloud environments are highly
standardized, automated virtual pools accessed via self-service by developers themselves, shared
across business units and metered for pay-per-use chargeback or at least use-based accounting.
This type of sophisticated environment is a highly evolved virtual infrastructure, making it a bit
of a mismatch for most enterprises.

· . . . and I&O must first mature their virtualization capabilities. Forrester found that most
enterprises haven’t matured their existing virtual environment management practices to
the point of being ready to operate a highly standardized, automated, and thus autonomous
cloud environment. In fact, the same survey shows that the larger priority for 2011 was still
consolidation and virtualization (reported as a high or critical priority by 80% of respondents).3
According to our Q3 2010 Hardware Survey, less than half (45%) of the x86 servers within
enterprises are virtualized today, making it imperative for I&O professionals to continue
focusing more on virtualization maturity before looking to the cloud.4 In fact, those with mature
virtual environments aren’t interested in pay-per-use billing, failing to actually establish a cloud
or set up the right incentives to make their cloud successful.

But I Need A Cloud Now!
This logical assessment of today’s world falls on deaf ears compared with the demands to get to “yes”
on private cloud. In light of this situation, what’s an I&O pro to do? The answer is to:

· Work on virtualization and cloud needs in parallel. Continue to evolve the management of
your core virtualization environment, and build a private cloud to sit beside it. Since a cloud is
evolved beyond your current virtualization maturity, it must be a separate environment that you
learn from and operate differently.

May 17, 2011 © 2011, Forrester research, Inc. reproduction Prohibited

Market Overview: Private Cloud Solutions, Q2 2011 3

· Merge management practices, not infrastructures. Over time you’ll want to merge
management practices as they align, but don’t try to force this too soon. And don’t expect your
traditional virtualized environment and your cloud to merge into one. They shouldn’t. They
serve different purposes and carry different economics.5

· Select from among five private cloud solution types as your fastest path. The fastest way to
meet demands and build out a parallel cloud infrastructure is to buy purpose-built private cloud
solutions. There are five types of vendors that offer this: 1) enterprise systems management
vendors; 2) OS/hypervisor vendors; 3) converged infrastructure solutions; 4) pure-play cloud
solutions; and 5) grid-derived solutions. Each brings the core IaaS features along with unique
differentiating value.

Figure 1 One-Quarter Of Firms Prioritize building an Internal Private Cloud Environment In 2011

“Which of the following initiatives are likely to be your firm’s/organization’s top hardware/IT
infrastructure priorities over the next 12 months?”
(Percentage of respondents who answered “critical priority” or “high priority”)

Consolidate IT infrastructure via server consolidation, 80%
data center consolidation, or server virtualization 79%

Maintain or implement broad use of server virtualization 80%
as the standard server deployment model 77%

Automate the management of virtualized servers 60%
to gain flexibility and resiliency 61%

Build an internal private cloud operated by IT 29%
(not a service provider) 23%
2010 (N = 1,037)
2009* (N = 1,020)
Use cloud service offerings for storage-as-a-service 28%
or virtual-server-as-a-service at a service provider 18%

Base: North American and European enterprise IT infrastructure decision-makers
Source: Forrsights Hardware Survey, Q3 2010
*Source: Enterprise And SMB Hardware Survey, North America And Europe, Q3 2009
58924 Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

© 2011, Forrester research, Inc. reproduction Prohibited May 17, 2011


A MIx OF 10 KEY CRITERIA MAKE UP ThE PRIVATE CLOUD SOLUTIONS LANDSCAPE
For a solution to qualify as a true private cloud, it first needs to meet Forrester’s definition of cloud
computing, which has three rather simple and specific criteria:

A standardized IT capability (services, software, or infrastructure) delivered in a pay-per-use, self-
service way.

Breaking down each piece we see that private clouds must be:

· Standardized: provided the same way every time it’s requested. This doesn’t preclude choice
or variance in configuration but standard operating procedures for at least the provisioning and
life-cycle management functions.

· Pay-per-use: provides chargeback or showback. Private clouds must track the use of virtual
resources so that central accounting can be used to either: 1) charge back for their consumption,
or, as we have found most enterprises prefer today, 2) show back, which is to report on this
consumption.

· Self-service: provides a client-facing portal or service catalog. Specifically, end customers —
developers in most cases — can self-request resources and have those requests automatically
acted on. Since the solutions reviewed are for internal use, these solutions should also provide
an automated approval workflow for requests.

Five Established Criteria Are Common Across All Private Cloud Solutions . . .
All private cloud solutions today, at their heart, are IaaS solutions. They add further criteria to the
evaluation, such as the ability to vend virtual machines in an automated fashion. Forrester examined
private cloud solutions by first starting with five established criteria (see Figure 2):6

· Self-service portal or service catalog. This software presents an interface for separate
authenticated end users — via role-based access controls (RBAC) — to select options for
deployment. It must have unique policy controls per tenant and user role and the ability to present
unique catalogs per user or group. In most cases this portal presents a web interface but may also
be accessible in other ways, such as through a mobile client or command line interface (CLI).

· Dynamic workload management. This is automation and orchestration software that
coordinates workflow requests from the service catalog or self-service portal for provisioning
workloads and virtual machines. It must enable life-cycle management capabilities such as
change and patch management, clone management, deployment expiration, and event-based
configuration change or provisioning. In our analysis, we found that some of the solutions rely
on the virtualization management layer beneath their offering for some of these capabilities. For
example, newScale relied on VMware vCenter for these capabilities in its demo.



· Resource management. Private cloud solutions need the ability to validate configuration
requests, resource availability, and commitments across virtual compute, storage, and network
resources. This software establishes secure multitenancy, isolates virtual resources, and helps
prevent contention. It too should act automatically as much as possible.

· Service accounting. Building on the outputs of resource management, this software accounts
for IaaS service consumption and serves as a metering and billing system. It should let
customers set prices for the services they wish to offer and account for resources that make
up these services if desired by the customer. In nearly all cases it should provide use reports
to all customers or at least tenant administrators and the cloud administrator. Very few of the
solutions reviewed served as a billing system.

· Integration and control APIs. The IaaS software stack must provide a unified application
programming interface for third-party product integration and programmatic control. As
the most common users of private clouds are developers, it’s often their preference to request
resources and subsequently control those resources via CLI. Many cloud administrators may
prefer this interface as well.

. . . But I&O Can Focus On Five Additional Differentiating Categories
Beyond the core capabilities, private cloud solutions are more valuable to a wider set of enterprise
and public sector I&O teams when they provide a collection of core enterprise management
capabilities. By including these capabilities, the solutions can be set up and made operational more
quickly and be applied to a broader set of workloads and use cases. The key differentiating features
we reviewed were:

· Image library. It’s helpful when the private cloud provides its own repository for virtual images
like ISOs and VM templates to be managed and selected from the catalog. This isn’t a core
requirement, and some private cloud solutions simply connected to the image library provided
by the core virtualization manager (VMware vCenter in many of the demos) or third-party
solutions, such as rPath X6.

· RBAC administration. To support tenant administrators as well as tenant users, it’s helpful
for a solution to provide separate rights and privileges based on role. It’s also helpful if these
capabilities integrate cleanly with Microsoft Active Directory, LDAP, or other authentication
and identity mechanisms. Such features can be crucial to providing secure multitenancy, which
is highly desired by I&O teams at many enterprises and government agencies.

· Virtualization layer. All IaaS implementations require access to the virtualization layer but
don’t need to provide it in the package. I&O teams value this capability so as not to have a
dependency on a specific hypervisor but instead support multiple hypervisors. Some solutions
in this review supported heterogeneous hypervisors in the same private cloud and within
individual tenants.



· Integrated hardware and software solution. The fastest way to get a private cloud up and
running is to buy a solution that has everything you need integrated at the factory and shipped
in a single box. The value: simply rack it, power it up, and start using it. A few of the solutions
reviewed here were such a system including servers, networking equipment, and storage. Nearly
all of these were based on a converged infrastructure with all components coming from the
same vendor. While nearly all were self-proclaimed “open systems,” the meaning of this and
exactly what types of alternative hardware could be added to these systems varies.7

· Application services. We found that some private cloud solutions provide a variety of
application services, including load balancing, performance management, preconfigured
middleware services, and high availability (HA). Some were core components of the solution,
included to distinguish the offering, while others were add-on options for a fee.

Figure 2 Select a Private Cloud Solution based On Five Established and Five differentiating Criteria

Criteria Business problem solved

Self-service portal or service catalog Agility to satisfy compute needs

Dynamic workload management Automates highly repeatable tasks,
saving IT time
Resource management Security and accountability of users
while maximizing utilization rates
Established
Service accounting Metering enables pay-per-use pricing,
incenting eﬃcient use
Integration and control APIs Interoperability between existing
infrastructure and platform
Image library Serves as a reference, and pre-set
basics improve ease of use
RBAC administration Enables multitenancy and removes
Diﬀerentiating manual approval process per request
Virtualization layer Provides necessary component
needed for cloud within platform
Physical compute and storage Ensures interoperability between
devices and platform
Application services Additional services that improve
functionality of basic platform and
tie into existing infrastructure and
software at greater ease




WE’RE EARLY IN ThIS MARKET — LOTS OF ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT
We’re just in the infancy of private cloud solutions. Many of the products now on the market are less
than two years old, which means they have a ways to go on completeness, level of integration, and
polish, which can affect your time-to-market and the degree of integration and customization work
you will face (see Figure 3).

Figure 3 Solution Completeness Can affect time-to-Market

Software
only

Fully integrated solution

Hardware
only
(i.e., converged
infrastructure)

Time-to-market/integration eﬀort
Longer 0 Longer

But most enterprises aren’t really ready for the full capabilities of a private cloud, since their
virtualization management isn’t mature enough. Forrester recommends that I&O teams achieve
stage 4 of Forrester’s Virtualization Maturity Model to fully embrace cloud computing.8 Through
the client interviews conducted for this report we found very few customers of these solutions that
were providing a full IaaS cloud environment to their constituents. Nearly all were leveraging the
multitenancy capabilities, some of the automation features, and, where available, tracking resource
consumption. Many customers were not fully enabling the self-service portal and few, if any, were
charging back to departments or business units. Thus the majority of the deployments were merely
at stage 2 or 3 maturity, with aspirations of a cloud. So there’s time for this market to mature and
harden its features and their integration.

We also found that many of the solutions evaluated don’t have any reference customers who are
actually using the solution as a cloud. In one case, the vendor’s clients were only leveraging their
run-book automation features atop a traditional virtualized environment — they didn’t exhibit
multitenancy, self-service, or resource consumption tracking.



As this market matures we expect to see a variety of enhancements that fulfill the private cloud
promise as well as integration efforts in three specific areas:

· Integration with enterprise management systems. No cloud should be an island, at least not
for long. As a consequence we expect to see universal efforts to integrate these cloud solutions
with the leading enterprise management suites and hypervisor management tools used in the
majority of virtual environment deployments. This is a lay-up for the enterprise management
vendors themselves — IBM, CA, BMC, and HP — but they haven’t always played well with each
other. As core IaaS capabilities become commodity, standards will emerge to make this easier;
the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) and most recently the IEEE are working on
such standards.9

· Integration with public clouds. Many I&O execs express a desire for their private clouds
to integrate with public cloud environments for either the purposes of cloud bursting — the
moving of a workload to the public cloud when it demands massive scale or fits the economic
and security model of the public cloud — or centralized management of customer requests for
either resource type. Most public cloud solutions reviewed integrate with Amazon Web Services’
EC2, the de facto standard public cloud environment today. Many support the vCloud API and
Xen and KVM workloads, which are the dominant public cloud hypervisors, but these solutions
don’t have standard public cloud APIs.10

· Integration with noncloud virtual server environments. Not all workloads are suitable for a
multitenant, metered IaaS environment and thus will stay, long term, in traditional fixed virtual
environments. In many cases these workloads will be integrated with workloads in a cloud
environment as part of a singular service that needs to be managed as a whole. Thus private
cloud solutions will need to broker these connections as well. Since most of the customers
Forrester spoke with for this report were using the cloud solutions to manage noncloud
environments, this is an area of maturity needed by both the customer and the vendor solutions.

There Are Five Types Of Solutions Emerging
For those trying to keep this all straight, the good news is that most of the solutions reviewed are
at least covering the basics and differentiating among each other in compelling ways. Sadly, there
are nearly countless vendors marketing products as private cloud solutions, making for a confusing
landscape. We’ve included a selection of vendors from each category who met our base criteria for
inclusion in this report (see Figure 4). One key difference that came out was that the vendors with a
service automation background have a greater ability to deploy multi-VM applications in a single step.
We looked at 16 vendors that I&O teams should focus on; they fall into five categories (see Figure 5):

· Enterprise systems management vendors: BMC, CA, IBM and newScale. For the most part,
these vendors entered this market with their existing cloud-appropriate management tools
repackaged into a private cloud suite. From here they’ve refined their offerings with tighter
integration between the components and the ability to control cloud environments including



VMware vCloud Director and Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud. At the heart
of BMC’s Cloud Lifecycle Manager is its BladeLogic automation tool, which is widely used
by enterprises and public cloud and traditional hosting providers. Similarly, CA starts with
its service automation technology, building a full solution from its suite of service assurance
and virtualization management products. IBM packs a series of Tivoli systems management
tools together in this offering, which is also integrated with its converged infrastructure, IBM
Cloudburst, for a hardware-software solution.11 Recently acquired by Cisco Systems, newScale
is mainly a provider of a robust enterprise service catalog.12 It has evolved this offering into a
more complete automation offering, although it has strong dependencies on the automation
capabilities of the virtualization platform beneath it.

· OS/hypervisor vendors: Microsoft and VMware. Each of the leading hypervisor providers
has built a private cloud solution atop the hypervisor layer. VMware’s vCloud Director is the
most advanced of these offerings, providing full virtual infrastructure control and strong
multitenancy, but it only supports the vSphere Hypervisor platform. Microsoft’s Hyper-V
Cloud is a heterogeneous solution managing vSphere, Xen, and Hyper-V environments. This
solution is built around Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager. At present it’s more
virtualization manager and less full private cloud solution, as it lacks a robust self-service portal.

· Converged infrastructure solutions: Dell and HP. These solutions combine hardware and
software into a fast-to-deploy private cloud solution. HP CloudSystem is a single-vendor
solution with a series of integrated software components from the company’s enterprise service
and device management software portfolios. Its management software can also be purchased
separately from the hardware; this product is sold as HP Cloud Service Automation (CSA).
Dell’s solution is built with in-house and partner software, including Creator, its workload
automation tool from DynamicOps.

· Pure-play cloud solutions: Abiquo, Cloud.com, Enomaly, and Eucalyptus. The players in this
category don’t have an enterprise systems management legacy and thus have built private cloud
solutions specifically for this purpose. As a result, their offerings are in general more tightly
integrated but are not by any means equal. Each vendor has taken a different approach and thus
excels in unique ways. Abiquo combines virtual resource pools of any origin — such as different
hypervisors or private/public — into tenants and provides a robust administration interface to
the tenant manager. Cloud.com focuses on delivering a clean and simple cloud solution with
an integrated user interface and high scalability. Enomaly and Eucalyptus are more bare-bones
solutions aimed at more advanced administrators and developers. Both have strong public cloud
connectivity.

· Grid-derived solutions: Hexagrid, Platform Computing, and Tibco. These vendors all have
a heritage in grid computing that served as the foundation for their solutions. Platform’s ISF is
built on its workload management and provisioning solution and uses its history of managing



multiple grid projects at once as the basis of its multitenancy and self-service portal. Tibco’s
Silver Fabric is based on FabricServer, a solution built to allow nongrid applications to leverage
grid infrastructures. Hexagrid debuted with its VxDatacenter product, which didn’t originate
as a grid management solution, but its founders leveraged their experience in this market when
building the product. Its key differentiator is its user interface, which was the most intuitive in
our comparison.

MORE VENDORS COMINg
In this market overview we only invited vendors that: 1) had production-ready solutions that
provided all the core capabilities of a private IaaS environment, and 2) felt they could provide solid
enterprise customer references that were using the solution as a private cloud inside their enterprise.
Sadly, even some of those that stepped up to our requests failed in this last category. Thus, the short
list of vendors evaluated here is more a reflection of the maturity of this market than the extent of
the participating vendor landscape. Nearly twice as many vendors have announced private cloud
solutions, and we expect twice more again to enter the category in 2011. Some of the vendors
that have announced solutions for your consideration include: Cisco Systems, Citrix Systems,
Enomaly, Fujitsu, Gale Technologies, Intalio, Nimbula, NRE Alliance (a joint venture of Eucalptus,
MomentumSI, newScale, and rPath), Parallels, Quest Software, Red Hat, ThinkGrid, Unisys, VCE (a
joint venture of Cisco, EMC, and VMware), and Zimory.

There’s also a growing contingent of vendors providing remote cloud environment management
services so you don’t have to build up the in-house expertise in managing a cloud environment.
An additional option is to use a hosted private cloud solution that’s deployed at and managed by
a service provider on your behalf. We will examine these solutions specifically in a forthcoming
market overview.



Figure 4 Scoring Criteria

Criteria Scale explanation
4 = Vendor’s self-service portal and admin interface offer an intuitive UI, making core
management functions easy (i.e., provisioning requests, configuration, health stats,
and alerts are available on a central dashboard). A workload deployment approval
mechanism is included. The UI is easily customized, and all functions are accessible
through the CLI. The UI is browser-based; its functionality and intuitiveness are
verified by a satisfied customer reference.
Self-service portal 3 = Vendor’s service catalog offers an intuitive user interface that’s easy to navigate.
or service catalog The UI is easily customized, and all functions are accessible through the CLI. The
UI is browser-based.
2 = Vendor’s service catalog offers a user interface for service manipulation that’s
customizable.
1 = Vendor has basic self-service functions.
0 = Vendor does not offer a self-service portal.
4 = Vendor has core automated provisioning (i.e., stop, restart, modify) plus the ability to
characterize and automate the deployment of complex multi-VM templates with
resource requirement enforcement. The solution also has IT process automation
(ITPA), workload automation (evolved from traditional job scheduling), or run book
automation [RBA] capabilities, and supports user-defined process models and
integration with basic task execution technologies (e.g., software distribution,
configuration changes, monitoring). Can configure the virtual network and physical
network equipment, and can configure load-balancing and apply scaling policies.
Dynamic workload These automation capabilities are highly recommended by their customer reference.
management 3 = Vendor has automated provisioning plus the ability to characterize and automate
the deployment of complex multi-VM templates with resource requirement
enforcement. Can configure the virtual network and physical network equipment
and can configure load-balancing and apply scaling policies.
2 = Vendor has basic provisioning functions for creating and deploying single VM
templates (using tool available in the standard offering).
1 = Vendor has basic functionality.
0 = Vendor does not offer dynamic workload management.
4 = Vendor supports automated adaptation of resource capacity capabilities based on
monitoring and analytics (i.e., auto-scaling of cloud infrastructure resources based
on ongoing capacity analysis) that trigger such adaptation both for internal cloud
and public cloud resources. Vendor enables advanced automated life-cycle
management capabilities (i.e., automatically pause deployments for resource
reallocation, simplified patch and change management, or ability to change
Resource configurations and ensure standards compliance).
management 3 = Vendor has some life-cycle management capabilities. Vendor supports automated
adaptation of resource capacity capabilities based on monitoring and analytics (i.e.,
auto-scaling of cloud infrastructure resources based on ongoing capacity analysis)
that trigger such adaptation.
2 = Vendor supports some automated adaptation of resource capacity capabilities.
1 = Vendor has basic resource management capabilities.
0 = Vendor does not offer resource management.




Figure 4 Scoring Criteria (Cont.)

4 = Provisioning and configuration change actions are integrated with service fulfill-
ment processes and accounting for resource consumption. The solution provides
full resource accounting granularity and a customizable reporting/billing engine.
3 = Provisioning and configuration change actions are integrated with service
fulfillment processes and accounting for resource consumption. The solution
provides some resource accounting granularity and a reporting/billing engine.
Service accounting 2 = Most provisioning and configuration change actions are integrated with service
fulfillment processes and accounting for resource consumption. The solution
provides basic resource accounting granularity and reporting.
1 = Some provisioning and configuration change actions are integrated with service
fulfillment processes. The solution provides basic resource consumption reporting.
0 = Vendor does not offer service accounting.
4 = Vendor has northbound (programmatic control of the private cloud solution) APIs
that incorporate the vCloud, OpenStack, and/or Amazon EC2 APIs; southbound APIs
or integration with third-party products (including public cloud platforms); and the
ability to control these environments through the private cloud solution.
3 = Vendor has northbound APIs that incorporate vCloud, OpenStack, or Amazon
EC2 and integration with third-party products (including public cloud platforms)
Integration and allowing programmatic control.
control APIs 2 = Vendor has northbound APIs and southbound APIs that integrate with key on-
premises third-party products (including vSphere or Amazon EC2) allowing
programmatic control.
1 = Vendor has a northbound API and southbound APIs that integrate with some
third-party products allowing programmatic control.
0 = Vendor does not integrate with third-party tools and doesn’t offer control APIs.

4 = Vendor provides a robust image library that can contain complex multi-VM
workloads plus tenant and role segmentation of the library; built-in image creation
tool and image import (VMDK, VHD, OVF, and from other library types) plus export
and conversion features.
3 = Vendor provides a robust image library that can contain complex multi-VM
workloads plus tenant and role segmentation of the library; and some image
Image library import (VMDK, VHD, OVF, and from other library types) plus export and conversion
features.
2 = Vendor provides an image library with some tenant and role segmentation of the
library and some image import (VMDK, VHD, OVF, and from other library types)
features.
1 = Vendor has basic functionality: repository of virtual images (ISO, VM templates, etc.).
0 = Vendor does not offer an image library.
4 = Vendor provides granular policy controls with at least three unique preconfigured
levels of users and admins and detailed customization options for each level.
3 = Vendor provides granular policy controls with at least three unique preconfigured
levels of users/admins with limited customization options for each level.
RBAC 2 = Vendor provides policy controls with at least three unique levels of users/admins
administration with limited customization .
1 = Vendor has basic functionality with at least one unique policy control for the cloud
admin and one unique policy control for group admin.
0 = Vendor does not offer a unique policy controls per tenant/role.
* Subtract 1 from score (unless 0) if it doesn’t integrate with LDAP and Active Directory.




Figure 4 Scoring Criteria (Cont.)

4 = Vendor solution supports multiple x86 hypervisors and non-x86 virtualization
platforms.
3 = Vendor supports three x86 hypervisors.
Virtualization layer
2 = Vendor supports two x86 hypervisors.
1 = Vendor supports a single x86 hypervisor.
0 = Solution does not directly work with any hypervisors.
4 = Solution is a factory-built and tightly integrated converged solution of IaaS software
and physical infrastructure resources (server, network, and storage). The IaaS
software can integrate with a wide variety of third-party infrastructure components,
and customer reference spoke highly of its integration.
3 = Solution is a factory-built and tightly integrated converged solution of IaaS
software and physical infrastructure resources (server, network, and storage). The
Physical compute IaaS software can integrate with some third-party infrastructure components.
and storage
2 = Solution is a bundle (or loose integration) of IaaS software and physical
included infrastructure resources (server, network, and storage). The IaaS software can
integrate with some third-party infrastructure components.
1 = Vendor integrates some physical resources into its solution or is part of a certified
integrated solution specific, certified, and sold through partners.
0 = Vendor offers only a software-based solution.
4 = Vendor solution can deploy and configure (and received positive feedback from a
customer reference about this) the following services: load-balancing and high
availability, DR/security features (firewalls, virtual private networks [VPNs], etc.),
performance-monitoring, and diverse preconfigured middleware services.
3 = Vendor solution can deploy and configure the following services: load-balancing and
high availability, DR/security features (firewalls, virtual private networks [VPNs], etc.),
Application performance-monitoring, and diverse preconfigured middleware services.
services 2 = Vendor supports load-balancing and high availability, DR/ security features
(firewalls, virtual private networks [VPNs], etc.), and performance-monitoring.
1 = Vendor supports load-balancing, high availability, and firewalls.
0 = Vendor does not support load-balancing or high availability services.




Figure 5 today’s Private Cloud Solutions Market Offers a Wide variety Of Solutions

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VMware

0 1 2 3 4
Note: Please refer to Figure 4 for the scoring criteria.

r E C O M M E N d at I O N S

DEFINE WhAT YOU WANT FIRST, ThEN MATCh ThE RIghT SOLUTION
Since the private cloud market is just at its beginning, there are a variety of solutions to choose
from with a wide range of capabilities. Some are best for greenfield deployments where you’ll
operate them standalone. Here you can learn from the solution and then tune it to your current
level of maturity. Others are more malleable and help you get to cloud at your own pace, but
provide a few best practices to make this path easier. So what should I&O execs do? the best way
to determine which is right for you is to first:



· Determine where your I&O team is in its virtual environment maturity. Is your
organization barreling down the path of standardization and automation, or are you still
struggling to do something the same way twice? Private cloud solutions only work when
standards can be defined and these operations done without human intervention. If your
organization has a ways to go, that doesn’t mean you can’t create a private cloud, just that
you should target a greenfield deployment, such as starting with test and development
resources or a new business project where you can learn from the solution.
· Set your short-term goals for the private cloud. What will it be used for and by whom?
If the initial target is test and development, consider comparing test automation solutions
such as vMware vCenter Lab Manager or Soasta Cloudtest against some of the private cloud
solutions. If you will be sharing the cloud among several departments, determine how varied
their needs and requirements will be. For example, you may need to prioritize strong rbaC
capabilities.
· have a long-range vision for your private cloud. While the starting point may be easy
to define, you certainly don’t want to pick a solution that can’t grow with your needs. do
you plan over time to support hybrid deployment with services composed of applications
running in the public cloud, traditional virtual environment, and even on their own physical
hosts? What tools do you envision using to manage this environment? Several solutions
profiled here work best with or only support a single hypervisor, for example.
· Be prepared for islands of hypervisors. While the majority of your virtual environment today
may be leveraging vMware, a growing number of I&O execs we speak with are planning to
break from this model and are demanding solutions that support Microsoft Hyper-v, xen (and
its variants such as Oracle vM), or KvM resources. If your solution will integrate with public
clouds, determine if heterogeneous hypervisor support will apply here as well.
· Try before you buy. Focus your evaluations on specific criteria, especially the user interface.
In our review we found wide swings in user interface and workflow models that will make
one solution very comfortable for one administrator and completely foreign to another.
Customers who love the CLI (and know their developers do, too) will put little credence in a
cloud solution with a gorgeous, interactive administration portal.
· Include your target users in the selection process. be sure your target users are in on the
demo as well, as what you like may be very different from what they want. Several Forrester
client inquiries about private cloud vendor selection have been crafted without any target
customer involvement. While you may think you know your customers well enough to
represent them, we’ve found this rarely to be a safe assumption.



SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL
Methodology
All participating vendors in this report were required to:

· Respond to a questionnaire. The questionnaire asked them to describe their key features
and capabilities, their architecture, and their future plans. It was developed based on our
interactions with clients and cloud computing consultancies, including HyperStratus.

· Provide one enterprise customer reference. Vendors were asked to provide contact
information for a confidential enterprise customer using the evaluated version of the solution,
preferably as a private cloud.

· Conduct a product demonstration. Forrester provided participants with a compulsory script,
which specified actions they were to follow to demonstrate the capabilities of their solution. The
first 20 minutes of the demo were allotted for the compulsory script, leaving participants 10
minutes to demonstrate any additional, unique features that differentiated their solution from
the competition. The following details the demo script given to all participating vendors:

Demo actions: These actions are compulsory and should be conducted in this order. Variations
in this flow should be discussed with and approved by Forrester prior to the actual demo. In each
step, please highlight any unique actions you take which you feel differentiate your solution either
verbally during the demo or in writing prior to the demo.

1. Describe the physical and virtual configuration used in this demo. What hardware is used?
What hypervisor? What networking and storage equipment? Any software or other elements in
this configuration outside of your private cloud solution?

2. From the cloud administrator interface, allocate physical and/or virtual resources to the
IaaS pool.

3. From the cloud administrator interface, create two secure tenant environments inside the IaaS
pool and assign them to “Marketing” and “Engineering.” Assign users and administrators (if
applicable) to these tenant groups.

4. Populate the self-service portal (or service catalog) with two workloads that can be assigned to
the tenant pools. Please describe or provide a written description of how you create workloads
for the self-service portal (import VMDK, ISO, VHD files, assemble on the fly using a separate
tool [name the tool], create multi-VM services, etc.). Assign attributes to these workloads
(such as VM size options, network constraints, load balancer options, SLA options or
requirements, prices, etc.).



5. From the self-service portal, logged in as a Marketing user, select and deploy a workload into
the Marketing tenant created in step two. Please describe or provide a written description
of what actions are taken based upon this request, naming all separate executables that are
invoked to complete this action. If approval workflows are incorporated into your solution
please demonstrate them or describe them.

6. From the self-service portal, log in as an Engineering user and deploy a workload to this
tenant environment.

7. As the Engineering user, move to the tenant administration interface and demonstrate user
administration rights (add instances to a running workload, clone a workload, change/derive
a workload, change resource allocations, etc. Use this step to demonstrate functions you feel
should be standard user admin actions and those that you feel differentiate your solution).

8. As the Engineering user, demonstrate your reporting functions. What reports can be provided
to this user? Use this step to show reports you feel should be standard user admin views
and those that you feel differentiate your solution. At a minimum a resource allocation and
consumption report and an environment health report must be shown.

9. As the Engineering user, demonstrate actions this user can take in response to reported
activities (stop, restart, move, clone workloads, for example).

10. As the cloud administrator, demonstrate your reporting functions. What reports can be
provided to the administrator? Use this step to show reports you feel should be standard user
admin views and those that you feel differentiate your solution.

11. As the cloud administrator, demonstrate actions this user can take in response to reported
activities (delineate admin rights of the cloud administrator from those of the user).

12. As the cloud administrator, add a physical server resource to the IaaS environment and assign
additional resources to the Engineering tenant.

13. End of compulsory steps.

Companies Interviewed For This Document
Abiquo Enomaly
BMC Software Eucalyptus Systems
CA Hexagrid Computing
Cloud.com HP
Dell IBM



Microsoft RedHat
newScale Tibco Software
Platform Computing VMware

ENDNOTES
1
Most firms are in the early stages of Forrester’s infrastructure virtualization maturity model. We used
seven questions to probe where firms are on the journey to virtualization maturity and the ideal of internal
cloud. (see endnote 11) Only 7% have implemented a self-service portal or usage chargeback today,
two key markers for reaching stage four of virtualization maturity. When we look at how many firms
report implementing all seven capabilities, not just some of them, only 6% will do so by 2011. For more
information, see the March 24, 2011, “Navigating The Shifts In Computing Infrastructure Markets” report.
2
Over the past several years, we’ve seen two key cloud trends in the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS)
space: 1) Public cloud adoption rates are highest among “informal buyers” (non-IT employees), and 2)
infrastructure and operations professionals, the “formal buyers” of these types of technologies, prefer
to build private internal solutions. Informal buyers are drawn to the fast and easy access to low-priced
compute power that public clouds offer, slipping these purchases under the I&O radar. But I&O teams fear
the public cloud for its immaturity and insecurity and seek to provide an in-house alternative delivering
similar values but with proper controls. But for this to succeed, I&O pros must get informal buyers onboard
to work with them. Unaddressed, as our survey data shows, these two groups will remain unaligned,
threatening the IT-to-BT (business technology) progression for your organization. See the March 24, 2011,
“Ignoring Cloud Risks A Growing Gap Between I&O And The Business” report.
3
In 2009 and 2010, about 80% of enterprise IT infrastructure decision-makers reported that consolidation
and broad use of server virtualization were high or critical priorities — compared with just under 30% for
internal cloud or public cloud in 2010. For more information, see the March 24, 2011, “Navigating The
Shifts In Computing Infrastructure Markets” report.
4
Source: Forrsights Hardware Survey, Q3 2010.
5
It’s one thing to say infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals need to invest in infrastructure-
as-a-service (IaaS) cloud computing for their high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. It’s quite
another to justify the financial and resource commitments. This requires a business case that validates the
investment on grounds of business empowerment, cost savings, or faster time-to-market. Positive return
on investment (ROI) from HPC cloud computing can’t be achieved as a blanket business case because the
benefits vary based on application design and use case. Cloud economics now makes HPC attainable for
firms that couldn’t afford such efforts before, and less costly, more expandable, and with a faster time-to-
value for those that already could. See the December 22, 2010, “Justifying Your Cloud Investment: High-
Performance Computing (HPC)” report.
6
These five established criteria were used as a baseline for inclusion in the report. Vendors were required
to first indicate in an email that they offered these capabilities and then asked to prove their capabilities
through a questionnaire and demo as well as provide us with one enterprise customer reference that
implemented and had experience with their private cloud solution.



7
Vendors like Cisco, Dell, EMC, HP, and IBM know you need packaged solutions that just work, but until
recently they left too much of the burden on their customers. Recent integrated solutions take a big step
toward delivering complete virtual infrastructures in a box, but to effectively use them, you must assess your
own virtualization maturity, start small with development and test workloads, and consider whether you
really need to run it yourself. See the May 17, 2010, “Are Converged Infrastructures Good For IT?” report.
8
Through more than 200 enterprise interviews, correlated with survey data, Forrester has identified four
clear stages of infrastructure virtualization maturity that dictate readiness for various management and
automation technologies, process improvements that must be made, and standardizations that have to be
realized to achieve greater gains. Organizations progress from gaining acclimation with the technology, to
strategically standardizing on it, through a period of chaotic VM sprawl that leads to process improvements,
on to the point of pooling and policy-based automation. See the July 10, 2009, “Assess Your Infrastructure
Virtualization Maturity” report.
9
There is a plethora of emerging standards attempting to capture the mindshare of IT organizations, but still
too many exist with no clear frontrunners emerging. The IEEE hopes to set standards through its newly
launched cloud initiative. Charles Babcock has written about the emerging standards situation. Source:
Charles Babcock, “IEEE Targets Cloud Interoperability Standards,” InformationWeek, April 5, 2011 (http://
www.informationweek.com/news/cloud-computing/infrastructure/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229400890
&cid=RSSfeed_IWK_All).
10
Red Hat offers its Deltacloud cloud management API, which is purported to be the standard KVM cloud
API but doesn’t have an enforcement mechanism in place to ensure that this is universally exposed by
service providers. VMware has a standard vCloud API that it strongly recommends service providers
expose and a superset API presented through its vCloud Director product. Service providers are
encouraged by both companies to expose these APIs to qualify for certain partner program status levels.
11
IT pros have most of the basic ingredients to cook up their own cloud-like infrastructure — but there’s
no recipe, and many ingredients just don’t combine well. Complicating the story are the traditional
infrastructure silos around servers, networks, and storage that must work together in a new, truly integrated
way. Vendors like Cisco, Dell, EMC, HP, and IBM know you need packaged solutions that just work, but
until recently they left too much of the burden on their customers. Recent integrated solutions take a big
step toward delivering complete virtual infrastructures in a box, but to effectively use them, you must assess
your own virtualization maturity, start small with development and test workloads, and consider whether
you really need to run it yourself. See the May 17, 2010, “Are Converged Infrastructures Good for IT?”
report.
12
We reviewed newScale before it was acquired by Cisco. For more information on its acquisition, read Cisco’s
press release: http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2011/corp_032911.html.


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