I recently participated in a Ziff Davis Enterprise eSeminar on cloud
computing strategies, which you can listen to online and download the slides at
eseminarslive.com. Based on the
audience questions and the fact that nearly 100 percent of attendees stayed to the
end, I'd say the topic was of interest, so I'm continuing the discussion here.
Much of what I talked about was culled from listening with a keen ear to
both the case study presentations and audience questions at technical
conferences. An emerging area of interest that IT managers should pay attention
to is chargeback. Virtualization platforms in the enterprise are catching up
with public cloud offerings in being able to track compute, network and storage
usage. To paraphrase my favorite Spider-Man aphorism, "With great billing
comes great accountability." In other words, as business units start
getting a bill for unused or underutilized virtual systems, life cycle
management—especially the termination part of that life cycle—will assert
itself.
It's also become clear to me that virtualization projects—in particular
those intended to create a cloudlike environment in a private data center—benefit
from being rolled out in phases and are in fact hurt by an all-or-nothing
approach. One example from VMworld: A major grocery retailer rolled out a successful
server virtualization project by starting with just a few stores in a region.
As the deployment lessons were learned (some applications ran only on guest
systems for which the vendor had to do development work to support) and
operational kinks were worked out (some management system timing delays over
great distance interfered with reports), the grocer's IT staff gained the
experience necessary to make the investment pay off.
I worked with Aaron Goldberg, a Ziff Davis market expert, on the presentation.
During the course of our online discussion, I realized what was so important
about all the resource pooling upon which virtualization and cloud computing is
based. In essence, well-crafted resource pools should lower the technical
ability of the person requesting an IT resource to accomplish a business task.
Further, the hard, expensive work of creating compute, network and storage
pools and ensuring that applications can work with these pooled resources
requires that IT functional groups work together at an almost unprecedented
level. IT managers should explore every option to work with peer experts in
adjacent technical fields. Without internal cooperation, internal cloud
platforms are almost certain to be stunted instead of stunning.
As we progressed through the eSeminar, I returned to a theme I've sounded
for some time: Virtualization in and of itself is losing its edge as a way for
IT to stand out as a "good guy" in the organization. Increased server
utilization, workload mobility and effective HA/DR (high availability/disaster
recovery) are becoming standard operating procedure. Effective and efficient
management of virtual resources is what will distinguish IT managers in the
current phase of data center operations. And effective resource management will
only gain in importance as cloud services continue to advance.
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