1. Information TechnologyPaper
ManageIQ White Solutions
The Agility Gap in Today’s Private Clouds
Many First Generation Private Clouds Don’t Deliver Expected Agility
Due to Ineffective Management - Resulting in Higher Costs, User Dissatisfaction
Executive Summary
Signs You May Have a
Cloud Agility Gap: If you’re like most organizations, your users and even your CEO are demanding “a
cloud like Amazon” where they can instantly spin up servers through a self-service
 You can quickly provision new portal. And you may have given them something that looks like that.
servers, but have trouble provid-
ing enough IP addresses for
However, just delivering a portal with scripted provisioning in a first-generation
them.
“cloud” isn’t going to deliver the agility, service levels and satisfaction that users
 You cannot quickly find unused are really looking for. They may be initially requesting self-service provisioning but
VMs, much less automatically what they really want are self-managed systems to increase their agility. There is a
remove them to free up re- very strong implicit assumption by users that their self-provisioned systems will be
sources for other applications. highly available, reliable and perform as required within the underlying cloud infra-
structure.
 You can quickly provision (or de-
provision) servers as demand Providing only initial self-service provisioning without continuous monitoring and
changes, but cannot easily or management of those systems, as well as the supporting infrastructure will signifi-
automatically do the same for cantly constrain the service levels that your cloud can achieve. Limited or
the associated storage or net-
“cloudwashed” implementations run a very real risk of user dissatisfaction, in-
works.
creased costs and fosters perceptions that IT cannot really deliver the agility they
 You cannot automatically reallo- need.
cate compute, storage and net-
work resources for the best Management of the underlying cloud(s) must also be agile to handle fluctuations in
combination of agility, perfor- user demand, to meet variable workload needs and to continuously optimize re-
mance and price as needs source allocation and utilization. Without back-end capabilities such as service visi-
change. bility, monitoring, life-cycle management and dynamic resource allocation, deploy-
ing a front-end portal or service catalog will actually result in the rapid proliferation
 You are still using time- of unmanaged systems and increase resource and management costs.
consuming, brittle configuration
scripts that fail if one part of
To determine if your private cloud is truly agile, ask yourself if it can:
your infrastructure changes.
 Provide visibility into the active configuration, processing and performance of
your cloud’s infrastructure and the applications that run on it.
 Offer your cloud users maximum autonomy in selecting and ordering systems
and applications for their business needs?
 Automate not just the ordering of servers, but the orchestration required to
provision servers, and the storage and network resources they require, while
complying with security and regulatory policies?
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2. ManageIQ White Paper
The Agility Gap in Today’s Private Clouds
 Warn you beforehand when a cloud-based application hits a threshold, indicating that it is running out of a resource
such as storage, and apply an automated, policy-based fix?
 Automatically manage cloud workloads and performance to meet customer SLAs, while giving users and their man-
agers real-time visibility into the resources they’re consuming?
 Accurately meter your cloud’s systems utilization, and reflect the corresponding cloud service for chargeback and
showback?
If you can’t answer “yes” to all these questions then
your private cloud is not helping your users meet their
business challenges as quickly and efficiently as they
need to. The time to fix this is now, while you have
enough time to plan the correct control and govern-
ance to deliver these agile services in a reliable and
predictable manner.
Are You Truly Agile?
The dictionary defines agile as “marked by ready ability
to move with quick easy grace” or “having a quick, re-
sourceful and adaptable character.” Its what organiza-
tions want when they create private clouds, making
2012 “the year that private cloud moves from market
hype to many pilot and mainstream deployments,” says
market analyst Gartner. “Successful deployments,” it
said, will be those “where agility and speed help busi-
ness grow.”
But it is also the year, says IDC, in which “reality has settled in (and) IT decision makers are coming to terms with the limi-
tations of their first-generation private cloud management strategies. Most are not getting the full benefits of their pri-
vate clouds, the market researcher says, because they’ve created on-demand infrastructure provisioning, but not “the
more sophisticated application-aware automation, workload balancing and performance optimization tools” needed to
optimize the cloud over time as business needs change.
This change may come from within the business. It might involve adding or dropping production applications from the
environment, the need for test environments for new applications or to allow access to corporate systems from devices
such as iPads. Change might come in the form of hardware or software failures, seasonal or business-related spikes in
demand or the opportunity to enter new markets or to deliver new, transformational products or services.
ManageIQ
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3. ManageIQ White Paper
The Agility Gap in Today’s Private Clouds
Such changes may also come from outside the business. They include dramatic and sudden shifts in demand for applica-
tions driven by the launch of a new online gaming site or the end of a promotion that drove traffic to a site. Regulatory or
legal action may force new safeguards on servers or data, or audits and tracking of those safeguards. Customer adoption
of new devices such as iPads may drive new volumes of traffic to the infrastructure, or demand the specialized presenta-
tion of data.
Technology or market changes such as the rise of mobile and social computing can create entire new markets, and infra-
structure demands, overnight. As companies move from producing physical objects to services, they need increased
management capabilities to manage the risk (either business- or regulatory-related) of service outages or their inability
to recover from an outage.
In looking for “agility” to cope with such changes users
often cite the example of public clouds such as Amazon
Web Services. What that usually implies, though it is not
always articulated, is simplicity, self-service (and the ac-
companying independence from IT-imposed delays,) elas-
ticity and low cost along with the scalability, reliability and
security and regulatory controls of a traditional, in-house
IT infrastructure.
It ignores, however, the fact that such providers achieve
extraordinary levels of staff productivity because they
manage highly homogenous, standardized and automated
environments with tightly defined service menus and
clearly articulated cost, usage metering and SLA models. In
order to deliver the same level of agility, internal “private”
clouds must match at least some of these capabilities.
Private Cloud Deployment Models
Customers typically choose one of three private cloud deployment models.
1) The most common is a standalone project meant to support a limited number of applications. This involves a lower
level of risk than an attempt to “transform” the entire infrastructure, and is often aimed at newer, Web-facing appli-
cations. However, it still requires the ability to scale over time, especially if these new applications succeed in driving
business growth.
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4. ManageIQ White Paper
The Agility Gap in Today’s Private Clouds
2) Another common option is purchase of a “cloud in a box” solution that combines pre-configured and pre-tested com-
binations of hardware and basic management software. While this proven architecture significantly reduces the de-
lay and cost of testing and configuration, it involves higher up-front cost and still requires integration into a federat-
ed management infrastructure.
3) A third, more aggressive scenario attempts to transform parts or all of the enterprise IT infrastructure to a self-
service, dynamic environment in search of quantum leaps in cost savings and agility. The downside is its high cost
and risk, as this often requires significant process and corporate change, as well as a high level of ongoing profession-
al services from a vendor. In some cases, the organization has successfully virtualized parts of its infrastructure, and
is being pushed by the business to provide self-service capabilities for that infrastructure.
Any technologies that enable you to manage all three
of these scenarios, or any combination of them, will
be extremely valuable, especially in cases where cur-
rent virtualization consolidation efforts need to
evolve to provide the full benefits of a private cloud.
While the scope of deployment and the underlying
technology may differ, each scenario requires a true
“enterprise cloud management” solution to deliver
true agility. However, a 2011 IDC survey shows that
most organizations have not invested significantly in
products to support consumption-based capacity
planning and change, nor in policy-based perfor-
mance monitoring and management tools to drive
real-time resource optimization and application per-
formance improvements.
Percent of respondents
They are instead attempting to reuse siloed, legacy Source: IDC, US 2011 Private Cloud Management Survey:
tools for IT provisioning, monitoring, planning, analy- The Journey Continues, Sept 2011 IDC# 230188
sis and reporting that are unable to discover, much
less optimize, the new cloud environment. Such splintered efforts, IDC noted, “may speed up resource provisioning but
do nothing to streamline and automate the full lifecycle of service management, configuration and change control, ap-
proval workflows and ongoing resource optimization.”
Achieving true agility requires disciplines and capabilities that go beyond what most people refer to as a “private cloud.”
It requires fully enabled IT Cloud Management ™ .
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5. ManageIQ White Paper
The Agility Gap in Today’s Private Clouds
IT Cloud Management™
IT Cloud Management™ provides automatic, policy-based management of the entire life cycle of all cloud components
(compute, storage and network) in a coordinated way that continuously adapts to meet enterprise requirements for se-
curity, efficiency and agility. Among the cloud management capabilities platforms must provide are:
 A self-service portal or service catalog supported by features
such as automated, policy-based provisioning and life-cycle An Effective Cloud Management Solution Must Provide:
management.
 Highly scalable, fine grain, real time visibility across
configuration, monitoring, provisioning, patching,
 A continuous unified holistic view of all cloud resources to policy, compliance, and problem management sys-
proactively assure efficiency and performance, troubleshoot tems.
problems and assure security and compliance. This includes  An analytics engine that can quickly factor current
the operational environmental state as well as configuration policy, performance, and resource availability infor-
and performance data; contextual awareness of all cloud mation into decision making.
elements infrastructure, services, workloads, resources and  Role-based, model-driven automation for Day 1 provi-
users, and automated, real-time classification or “tagging” of sioning and Day 2 workload optimization, workload
shutdown, resource reclamation and redeployment.
cloud elements based on policies to eliminate manual classifi-
 Integration with wide range of existing management
cation effort, latency and error.
systems, CMDBs, service catalogs, and APIs.
 High availability and failover.
 Automated policy enforcement/control for managed sys-
tems. This reduces the delay, effort, cost and potential for Source: IDC
Beyond Self Service: Getting the Most Out of Your Investments in Cloud
errors involved in manually enforcing policies and changing and Virtualization Management
Mary Johnston Turner Research Vice President, IDC June 2012
system configurations or allocation of resources, while help-
ing to assure security and compliance.
 Intelligent workload management to ensure resources are automatically and optimally utilized to ensure service
availability and performance. This includes policy-based orchestration of workloads and resources, the ability to sim-
ulate allocation of resources for “what/if” planning and continuous insights into granular workload and consumption
levels to allow chargeback, showback and proactive planning and policy creation.
 Capacity Planning to anticipate and plan for future resource needs based on capacity, trending, data and analytics.
This includes the abilities to classify resources based on configuration, performance, capacity, cost, acceptable use
and locations.
 Capacity Management to dynamically and automatically assure the most efficient use of resources. This includes the
ability to discover and track resource changes, provision and de- provision resources based on policies and demand,
and identify the current condition of resources and the “best fit” for new workloads across compute, storage and
network resources.
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6. ManageIQ White Paper
The Agility Gap in Today’s Private Clouds
 Highly available and scalable service management to enable the publication and consumption of IT Cloud services
with provisioning, ongoing tracking, lifecycle management, auto-scaling and retirement. This includes a service cata-
log with role-based control over what various users and groups can request, automated service provisioning, recon-
figuration and de-provisioning, and performance and utilization monitoring.
All of this results in intelligent orchestration of all IT resources (compute, network and storage) so their allocation and
configuration are adjusted in real time to maximize performance, security and efficiency as business needs change. By
providing intelligent and automated responses to unpredictable events, this provides the agility and cost savings that
cannot be achieved by merely automating linear, pre-determined and siloed processes.
Wanted: True Agility
Enterprise IT organizations have
made impressive strides in reduc-
Effective cloud
ing initial provisioning costs by vir- management is more
tualizing servers, networks and than
storage. However, they are finding
these “first generation” private Self-Service
clouds cannot deliver true agility Provisioning
and cost savings over time because
they lack enterprise levels of it is also:
adaptability visibility, security and
management throughout the cloud
Lifecycle Management
life cycle.
Self Management
True agility from a private cloud Workload Automation
requires –Enterprise Cloud Man- Operational Visibility
agement that provides intelligent, Optimization
automated, policy-based manage- Automation
ment of the entire cloud infra- Integration
structure. Even those organiza- Compliance
tions that have not yet faced the
limits of their private clouds will do
so soon, as customers respond to new business initiatives, users develop new applica-
tions, enterprises enter new markets and governments and corporations impose new
security rules. The sooner an organization understands today’s private clouds represent only the tip of the management
iceberg, the sooner they can deliver the true agility benefits of the private cloud.
About ManageIQ
ManageIQ™ is a leading provider of enterprise cloud management and automation solutions that enable organi-
zations to deploy, manage and optimize clouds, virtualized infrastructures and virtual desktops. Our solutions, ManageIQ
built on a common Adaptive Management Platform™, deliver unified monitoring, management and automation 1 International Blvd
across enterprise clouds and globally distributed datacenters. Mahwah, NJ 07495
Phone 201.962.3388
8/16/2012