ast 0064445 privcloud-teradata-cw

2. Cloud CIO: 3 Private Cloud Use Case Scenarios Organizations looking to deploy private clouds must un-derstand where they’re headed. A development cloud is an appropriate start, but consider these three scenarios for how use of your cloud will evolve—for better or for worse, says CIO.com’s Bernard Golden

6. Is Your Private Cloud Defensive or Responsive? Companies building private clouds mainly to keep devel-opers from going to public clouds are too focused on the physical aspects of cloud—and missing the point about the operational requirements, says Forrester Research’s James Staten. Here, he shares five pieces of advice for private cloud success

8. What the ‘Private Cloud’ Really Means The definition of the private cloud may be fuzzy, but it’s all part of the age-old quest for greater efficiency in IT

10. Private Cloud Build the data center of your dreams

11. Financial IT Spotlight Turbulence pushing banks into the cloud

13. New Job for Mainframes: Hosting Private Clouds Big iron could be perfect for hosting a private cloud, but where’s the user provisioning?

17. Private Cloud Resources

Today, enterprises in a variety of industries are trying to determine the best use of cloud options in their organizations. The benefits – reduced cost, greater hardware utilization, scalability, and faster time to productivity, just to name a few – are enticing. However, there are concerns about the known drawbacks to cloud-computing models, specifically security and control, that are making private cloud models the best choice for many organizations today. Private clouds are emerging as a way for enterprises to take advantage of many of the benefits of the cloud model, but with less risk.

In this eGuide, Computerworld and sister publications CIO and InfoWorld bring you a collection of articles with news, advice, and opinions on moving to private clouds. Read on to gain insight about some of the effective uses for private cloud architectures, new ways of deploying them, and best practices for getting the most out of these computing models.

THE PRIVATE CLOUD

interactive eGuideAn

Private Cloud Use Case Scenarios

Defensive or Responsive?

What ‘Private Cloud’ Really Means Private Cloud

Financial IT Spotlight

Mainframes Hosting Private Clouds Resources

Custom publishing from

COMPUTERWORLD

COMPUTERWORLD

Sponsored by

1 of 17

http://www.computerworld.com


http://www.teradata.com

2 of 17

THE PRIVATE CLOUD An interactive eGuide

Sponsored by

COMPUTERWORLD Private Cloud Use Case Scenarios





IT IS BY NOW a truism that most IT organizations are planning an IT infrastructure strategy that in-cludes cloud computing and that an internal cloud (aka private cloud) is a fundamental part of that strategy.

While trying to avoid getting sucked into the vortex that is de-fining cloud computing, I think it’s safe to say that a cloud comput-

ing environment includes the ability for IT resource consumers like ap-plication developers to self-service resource requests, along with au-tomated provisioning (aka orches-tration) of computing resources like virtual servers, network connectiv-ity, and storage. The mere deploy-ment of virtualization enabling sup-port of multiple virtual servers on a single physical server, while ad-

mirable and useful in itself, is not cloud computing.

In talking to a number of in-formed people, it’s clear that pri-vate cloud implementations are moving forward in many organiza-tions, with RFPs to vendors out with an aim of contract award in 2011 and implementation in 2012.

The question is, how will that private cloud be used, and what

are the downstream effects of moving to a private cloud? In our work, we run across a num-ber of scenarios, some of which make sense, some of which don’t make sense, and some of which are incomprehensible. I thought it might be useful to share what we see and what we predict are some of the ways private clouds will be used by those organiza-tions implementing them.

A planning assumption that we bring to the table is that no orga-nization is going to insert a full-blown cloud infrastructure into their existing production applica-tion environment. The reasons for this assumption are the following:

1. A key principle of CIOs every-where is don’t mess with some-thing that’s in and working. Change

introduces the potential for disrup-tion and failure. So why insert an entire new infrastructure into one in which applications are quite hap-pily humming along? Note: This does not imply that existing envi-ronments will not have virtualiza-tion brought in. One of the most felicitous aspects of virtualization is that it provides great benefit—cost reduction via server consolidation—without introducing much change at the application level.

2. Most existing applications won’t benefit from being placed into a cloud computing environ-ment. Most production applica-tions are written with static topol-ogy and manual administration assumed, so they can’t take ad-vantage of self-service and au-tomated elasticity. Therefore,

Cloud CIO: 3 Private Cloud Use Case ScenariosOrganizations looking to deploy private clouds must understand where they’re headed. A development cloud is an appropriate start, but consider these three scenarios for how use of your cloud will evolve -- for better or for worse. By Bernard Golden, CIO

Point of View



3 of 17


Sponsored by






Point of Viewinserting a cloud computing in-frastructure into the production environment is going to provide little improvement for these ap-plications. In any case, the lei-surely march of virtualization into production environments should call into question the belief that IT organizations are going to, over-night, disperse cloud computing capabilities throughout their pro-duction infrastructure.

3. Cloud computing is expensive and disruptive to IT organizations. We constantly see organizations that underestimate the cost and change of moving to cloud com-puting. Just the fact that a new term — devops — needed to be created to describe how IT has to operate in a cloud environment should provide a clue about this.

So, to summarize: putting cloud computing into an existing pro-duction environment is disruptive and expensive, and doesn’t pro-vide many benefits. This should explain our assumption that most IT organizations will not retrofit cloud computing into their pro-duction computing environments.

Given this, many IT organiza-tions are directing their initial private cloud initiatives at serv-ing developers, which makes a lot of sense. Developers are typi-cally underserved by existing pro-cesses, and offering them a self-service option helps productivity and, crucially, avoids many issues associated with production pri-vate clouds, like how to integrate existing heavyweight processes like ITIL with agile self-service re-source assignment. Moreover, de-

velopers are pretty expensive em-ployees, and avoiding long waits for resources reduces costs.

The question is, if an organiza-tion’s initial foray into a private cloud is aimed at developers, what are the subsequent use sce-narios? In other words, once de-velopers begin using the private cloud for development (and, of course, testing) purposes, what happens? Here are common use scenarios and their implications:

Scenario One: Agile Development, Static OperationsIn this scenario, software and QA engineers are provided a private cloud for development purposes, but when it comes time for pro-duction deployment, the applica-tion is operated according to the

existing processes (which were, remember, created to manage static topology, inelastic applica-tions in an often-process heavy ITIL-like environment).

We believe the satisfaction lev-el to this strategy depends upon what proportion of newly-devel-oped applications assume and use the elastic automation associ-ated with cloud computing. Select-ing this approach might depend upon organization-specific projec-tions of future application elastic-ity requirements. If the proportion of applications requiring elasticity is rather low, this scenario might be perfectly acceptable. For the majority of newly-developed ap-plications, static operation tech-niques would be appropriate. For the minority of applications that require elasticity, an exception to

provide a more agile operations environment could be made and pertinent measures taken.

The challenge with this scenar-io is that it is in conflict with what we see as the increasingly com-mon nature of future applications; that is, the nature of applications is changing, with more highly vari-able workloads, much larger scale, and more complex deployment to-pologies that are more difficult to manage in a manual fashion. In a phrase, there is an impedance mis-match between the future of ap-plications and the operational as-sumptions of this scenario.

Scenario Two: Agile Development, Semi-Agile OperationsIn this scenario, new applications are placed into production in an



4 of 17


Sponsored by






Point of Viewoperations infrastructure that can support elasticity, complex topolo-gies, and automated administra-tion, while the existing applica-tions continue to operate in the older, static operations environ-ment. One might think of this as building an add-on to the existing data center environment, which operates by new rules.

In a way, this scenario is con-sistent with the history of com-puting. New computing platforms don’t displace what already exists; the platforms accrete to what’s in place. What commonly happens is that most new applications are deployed on the new platform, while existing platforms are lim-ited to minor upgrades to existing applications. And, of course, over time the new platform represents the vast preponderance of the to-

tal number of applications.This is an attractive scenario, in

that it reduces overall disruption and provides a good deployment option for cloud-developed and -based applications. It avoids the challenges associated with the impedance mismatch of the previ-ous scenario.

Two things to watch out for in this scenario:

First, the disconcerting way in which applications edge from “de-velopment” to “production” with-out an official recognition or ac-knowledgement. IT operations may find itself responsible for applica-tions that it had no idea were go-ing to move into production, re-quiring agile, elastic infrastructure. That is to say, IT operations may find themselves challenged to pro-

vide a production cloud environ-ment well before planning to do so. This “premature” productiza-tion will inevitably cause problems and accelerated catch up.

Second, it’s easy to underestimate the change necessary to operate an agile infrastructure. End-to-end au-tomation carries implications well beyond installing a cloud software stack and declaring “open for cloud business.” Just as it’s traditional that new platforms accrete around old ones, it’s also traditional for IT orga-nizations to overemphasize technol-ogy and underrate people and pro-cess. The outcome of this situation is that the cloud application will suf-fer many problems when put into production as the operations group learns on the fly how to manage an automated, elastic application.

Scenario Three: Agile Development, Bypassed OperationsThis scenario presents an existen-tial challenge to the mainstream in-frastructure operations organization and, indirectly, a threat to the finan-cial underpinnings of the entire IT or-ganization. In this scenario, develop-ers attempt to use the private cloud but, for various reasons, find some element of the environment unsatis-factory and choose to develop or de-ploy in a public cloud environment.

An example of why this might come to pass can be illustrated by a scenario we ran into recently. In discussing cloud computing with an infrastructure manager, we de-scribed the need for resource user self service. The manager was fine with greater agility, he allowed, but the request for resources had

to be forwarded to an operation administrator who would evaluate the request and, should it be ap-propriate, would provision the re-sources himself and then forward information back to the devel-oper sufficient to begin using the resource. He really didn’t under-stand the difference between true self-service and email-enabled re-source requests. I wouldn’t care to hear his response to the need for self-provisioning elastic applica-tions directly provisioning resourc-es in response to system load.

This response is typical of orga-nizations responding to innovative developments. When confronting a disruptive innovation, organizations commonly attempt to force-fit it into existing processes and assump-tions—usually unsuccessfully.

In this scenario, developers quite



5 of 17


Sponsored by






Point of Viewhappily begin to use the private cloud, but, when confronted with unwillingness on the part of opera-tions to support self-service, ap-plication elasticity, etc., become dissatisfied with the offering and choose to either: (1) deploy the application outside of the internal data center; or (2) more worryingly, turn their back on the private cloud and choose to develop and deploy in a public cloud environment.

This kind of situation can be blunt or subtle, but, in the end, falls short of what developers want. One of the main points that we emphasize with our clients is that cloud computing reduces the friction in obtaining and using computing resources — discard-ing the endless requests, meet-ings, telephone calls, emails, escalations, not to mention the often heavy-handed rationing of

resources that expects developers to justify why they want a server (or storage or whatever).

Putting an unresponsive produc-tion infrastructure behind an ag-ile development environment may end up investing in a development cloud that ends up unused. Even worse, this scenario can hold the potential for stranded investment, as expensive production environ-ments lie fallow while applications

are deployed into public clouds that support low friction interaction.

Overall, organizations looking to deploy private clouds should thor-oughly understand what they’re signing up for. A development cloud is an appropriate start, but is not sufficient for a long-term plan. It’s inevitable that a development cloud will be the first step toward imple-menting a larger production environ-ment capable of supporting self-ser-

vice, elastic provisioning, and agile operations fully committed to cloud computing characteristics. Anything less will, in the end, fall short.

Bernard Golden is CEO of consult-ing firm HyperStratus, which specializes in virtualization, cloud computing and related issues. He is also the author of “Virtualization for Dummies,” the best-selling book on virtualization to date.



6 of 17


Sponsored by






A STRONG MINORITY of enter-prise IT shops are prioritizing the development of a private cloud, but Forrester surveys suggest these moves will fail. The reason lies in the motivation behind these efforts and the focus. Most are building private clouds to keep their developers from going to the public cloud and are focused on the physical aspects of the cloud,

not the operations — and it’s the operations that make the cloud.

“The Cloud” is no longer an elu-sive term that is just entering the market. Today, enterprises of all sizes and across all verticals are talking about, and deciding how to implement cloud strategies. That’s because the promise of in-stant access to a technology ser-vice at a fraction of the cost of

traditional IT deployments means faster time-to-market and higher productivity for the business. But, consuming public cloud services still poses major concerns for IT security and operations managers. Security remains the number one concern among senior IT decision-makers—cited almost twice as of-ten as the next highest concern, maturity. As a result, for many en-

terprises their favored way of de-livering cloud value without these risks is to set up a private cloud.

The prioritization of building a private cloud grew in 2010 for 24% of IT decision makers who view building an internal cloud as a high or critical priority. In exam-ining these decision makers, we found that the desire to adopt an internal private cloud crosses in-

dustries and geographies. Yet two characteristics are strong indica-tors of the likelihood of building a private cloud: company size and growth of the virtualized environ-ment. It’s no surprise that 60% of those prioritizing private clouds are at companies with more than 1,000 employees. These large en-terprises sink more investment into their own data centers, opera-tions personnel, and IT processes, so they have more to lose if the business goes to the public cloud.

Although the prioritization of private clouds is affecting a wide range of organizations, invest-ments in several key areas differ for those who are prioritizing ver-sus those who are not. Specifi-cally, increased investments are being made in four infrastructure categories to accommodate the

Is Your Private Cloud Defensive or Responsive?

Expert AdviceCompanies building private clouds mainly to keep developers from going to public clouds are too focused on the physical aspects of cloud -- and missing the point about the operational requirements, says Forrester Research’s James Staten. Here, he shares five pieces of advice for private cloud success. By James Staten, CIO



7 of 17


Sponsored by






private cloud option, including the overall data center budget and consulting and outsourcing ser-vices. But, these same organiza-tions are still not investing enough in key operational requirements that are essential to guarantee-ing the success of a private cloud. For example, automation and self-service portals are two major fac-tors contributing to a well-oiled private cloud. Yet, 44% of those prioritizing private clouds have no plans to invest in automation software for their virtualized envi-ronment. And only 11% of cloud builders have a self-service por-tal implemented today, while 62% are interested, but holding off. It’s going to be very difficult to lure developers away from the public cloud without these core features.

If you’re one of the 24% priori-

tizing a private cloud, but just do not have the operational maturity to pull it off, here are a few rec-ommendations to get ahead of the problem:

1. Set the right expecta-tions with your executives. If the company is expecting a pri-vate cloud to be up and running in the next year, the infrastructure and operations team may have been sold up the river. Implement-ing a private cloud isn’t as simple as the vendors say, and simply saying the virtual server environ-ment is a private cloud probably won’t fit the bill either.

2. Standardize and auto-mate the virtual environ-ment. Without aggressively pur-suing these steps, the bottom line

is private cloud desires simply won’t be met. It’s time to find out whos holding back this effort and why. We’ve found that virtual en-vironment administrators are of-ten trying to protect their jobs and consequently don’t share their knowledge. These workers need to be shown a path of career ad-vancement as they move to a higher value role in private cloud operations. For example, they can improve the use of the virtu-al environment and managing the pool, not the individual VMs.

3. Realize a self-service portal doesn’t mean loss of control. There should be an approval workflow between the re-quest and the deployment. But, once the approval has been re-ceived, the deployment should

just happen if capacity is avail-able. This may not provide the 15 minute timelines that developers are accustomed to with public clouds solutions, but it greatly im-proves the experience with I&O.

4. Seek a hosted cloud provider if it’s too soon to automate and empower. If it’s a struggle to standardize and automate virtualized infra-structure, or there’s reluctance to empower developers, you sim-ply aren’t ready to build or oper-ate a private cloud yourself. If this is the case, refocus efforts on a service provider who can offer a hosted private cloud solution.

5. Map workloads to the appropriate private and public cloud options. It’s im-

portant not to think that build-ing a private cloud will suddenly squash a company’s interest in public clouds. That’s because the elasticity, scale, and economics are superior in public cloud offer-ings. My advice: don’t fight it. Em-brace public clouds as part of the strategy and draw lines of distinc-tion between what is best for the public cloud and what should re-main in-house. Force-fitting every workload into a private cloud, no matter how capable the solution is, will ultimately be a disservice.

James Staten is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, serving infrastructure and operations professionals.

Expert Advice



8 of 17


Sponsored by






CLOUD COMPUTING has two distinctly different meanings. The first is simple: The use of any commercial service delivered over the Internet in real time, from Am-azon’s EC2 to software as a ser-vice offered by the likes of Sales-force or Google.

The second meaning of cloud computing describes the archi-tecture and technologies neces-sary to provide cloud services. The hot trend of the moment is the so-called private cloud, where companies in effect “try cloud computing at home” instead of

turning to an Internet-based ser-vice. The idea is that you get all the scalability, metering, and time-to-market benefits of a pub-lic cloud service without ceding control, security, and recurring costs to a service provider.

I’ve ridiculed the private cloud in the past, for two reasons. First, because all kinds of existing tech-nologies and approaches can be grandfathered into the definition. And second, because it smacks of the mythical “lights out” data center, where you roll out a bunch of automation, lay off your ad-

mins, and live happily ever af-ter with vastly reduced costs. Not even the goofiest know-nothing believes that one anymore.

Yet, despite natural skepticism, the private cloud appears to be taking shape. The technologies underlying it are pretty obvious, beginning with virtualization (for easy scalability, flexible resource management, and maximum hardware utilization) and data center automation (mainly for au-to-provisioning of physical hosts). Chargeback metering keeps busi-ness management happy (look,

we can see the real cost of IT!), and identity-based security helps ensure only authorized people get access to the infrastructure and application resources they need.

Predictably, no early private cloud adopters (none that I’ve heard of, anyway) have made the quixotic attempt to turn their en-tire infrastructure into a private cloud. Instead, they have identi-fied certain areas where the cloud model makes sense, such as dev and test, a low-risk use case we’ve heard about for awhile. IBM ventured into this area over a year

ago with its WebSphere Cloud-Burst Appliance , which is basi-cally a blade server preconfigured for Java dev and test that lets de-velopers self-provision resources through a Web interface, with me-tering of those resources built in.

HP jumped into the private cloud feet first with its CloudStart solution, which combines hard-ware (HP BladeSystem Matrix), software (HP Cloud Service Auto-mation), and professional servic-es (HP Cloud Consulting) to yield private cloud deployments with-in 30 days. Rather than dev and test, HP is focusing on delivering business applications as private cloud “services,” from Microsoft Exchange to Oracle PeopleSoft to

What the ‘Private Cloud’ Really MeansThe definition of the private cloud may be fuzzy, but it’s all part of the age-old quest for greater efficiency in IT By Eric Knorr, InfoWorld

Opinion



9 of 17


Sponsored by






SAP Business Objects.You can argue, of course, that

this is just another prepackaged deal of the type consultancies have been offering for years. The main difference is that so much cloudy stuff comes in the big honking blade server package—virtual machine management, auto-provisioning, virtualization-based disaster recovery, charge-

back, and so on. A multipurpose appliance is one

way to skin the private cloud. But if you ask me, the most interesting emerging use case for the private cloud is what you might call the “partner cloud.” Just as a decade ago companies began offering Web portals for their customers and partners, with Web forms for man-aging accounts and ordering new

goods or services, partner clouds actually deliver services.

So on the one hand, the pri-vate cloud is just another step to-ward the commodification of IT, where internal customers pick from a menu of metered services across a virtualized infrastructure, rather than specifying the nth re-quirement for custom deploy-ments that tie up resources forev-

er. On the other hand, one of the most exciting use cases for the private cloud is the ability for en-terprises to establish quasi-pub-lic clouds for partners, which may accelerate business-to-business e-commerce in unanticipated ways.

Without question, the private cloud comes with a large dose of hogwash. Nonetheless, the model of providing commodity services

on top of pooled, well-managed virtual resources has legs, be-cause it has the potential to take a big chunk of cost and menial labor out of the IT equation. The lights in the data center will never go out. The drive for greater effi-ciency, though, has had a dozen names in the history of IT, and the private cloud just happens to be the latest one. •

Opinion



10 of 17


Sponsored by






IF YOU BUILD IT, they will come” may be a line from a baseball fantasy, but it describes what re-ally happened in the world of cloud computing. One late sum-mer day in 2006, online book-seller Amazon.com quietly made a portion of its excess data cen-ter capacity available to curious developers over the Web. Within

hours, hundreds of developers had jumped at the chance to spin up some servers simply by open-ing their browsers and typing in their credit card numbers. Today, Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud is the foundation for countless tech startups, and Amazon counts its business customers in the hun-dreds of thousands.

If you’re a CIO with a data center to run, that has to make you think. Assuming you’re not ready to en-trust your company’s crown jewels to the public cloud, couldn’t you satisfy IT requests faster internal-ly by borrowing from the Amazon playbook? Standardize on com-modity servers and storage. Con-nect them using a converged IP network infrastructure. Layer on virtualization to support resource pooling, isolated multitenancy, au-tomated provisioning, and dynam-ic scaling and contraction. Provide a Web front end and workflow en-gine that allows your “customers” to serve themselves, and bill them each month for what they use.

Unlike Amazon, you don’t need to develop your own cloud man-

agement software. VMware, Microsoft, the OpenStack open source project, and many others are building cloud-oriented au-tomation and controls on top of today’s virtualization platforms. Depending on the number and sophistication of your users, you may not need or want elabo-rate self-service and chargeback mechanisms. Your on-demand re-source pool might exist only to serve other IT groups within the company, as a shared platform for batch processing or short-term projects or to allow your develop-ment and test teams to do their thing without burdening server, storage, and network admins.

Ultimately, “private cloud” is just a new name for the same

old goals: Consolidate workloads on a shared infrastructure to in-crease utilization and lower costs, while taking increasing advan-tage of virtualization to respond more quickly to business needs. Someday, either through propri-etary links or open APIs, your pri-vate cloud may integrate with one or more public clouds, allowing you to migrate or extend work-loads in ways that make business sense. In the meantime, building a fast and flexible private cloud may be the only way to discour-age the people you serve—be they developers, marketing managers, or entire business units -- from taking their projects to Amazon EC2 or some other cloud they can open in their browsers.•

Private CloudBuild the data center of your dreams By Doug Dineley, InfoWorld

Opinion



11 of 17


Sponsored by






Financial IT SpotlightTurbulence pushing banks into the cloud By Dan Morris, Computerworld

WE ALL KNOW that the old busi-ness model for investment bank-ing technology doesn’t work and this is driving bank technology departments everywhere to cut costs. However I was struck by a recent special report in The Econ-omist which outlines that, while investment banks are shrinking, their retail arms (Citibank, HSBC, Santander, etc.) are growing due to changes in technology. The key trends they found were:

• Improved services through standardized technology

• Data mining which allows

better tailoring of products to customer needs

• Mobile banking

So how can an IT manager re-duce shared costs in 2011 but en-able business expansion in 2012? And what will the new trend be in 2013? Unless you are better at predicting the future than I am, this is an impossible task. If outright cutting services is not an option, then in these challenging times the best option is to build flexibility into your operating budget, which is why banks and financial institu-tions are moving to the cloud.

Virtualized Computing v. Cloud ComputingEfforts to reduce costs in the ar-eas of data center leases, power, support, hardware procurement and IT operations have typically focused on the virtualization of server infrastructure. The result has been to reduce both variable and fixed costs, however the vir-tualized computing model is still based upon long term fixed costs. These costs don’t decrease if the business model changes.

An external cloud solution can offer expansion and contraction of variable costs whereas a tradi-

tional IT model and even the vir-tualized model both lock in ad-ditional fixed costs (data center space, server infrastructure, and permanent staff). IT needs to give the company CFO flexibility—this is essentially a lever to adjust IT costs as part of the arsenal of protecting the business over the long term.

Give the CFO a LeverThe CFO would much rather have flexibility built into the business which is what cloud computing of-fers. The cloud shifts the mix of costs from fixed to variable which provides him that control. Specifi-cally, he is looking for agility from IT—the ability to quickly scale up

or scale down and then allocate costs appropriately.

Every server installation into a data centre, whether it is a tradi-tional physical design or it sup-ports a virtual environment, com-mits the bank to power costs, additional data centre floor space—this is in addition to the capital outlay costs from purchas-ing the server itself. Since cloud computing solutions are based on cpu cycle or per-user consump-tion, they can be scaled based upon the business demand—users can be added or removed as the business grows or shrinks; and the same goes for CPU usage.

There are three primary risks with this approach. The first is

Industry Perspective



12 of 17


Sponsored by






that variable costs can be more expensive than fixed costs in the long term. This comes down to a case-by-case analysis. However in the current dynamic environment, banks are typically willing to pay a bit more for that added flexibility.

The second risk is vendor lock-in which drives banks to cloud so-lutions that are open. An alterna-tive solution is for banks to build private clouds which are more capital cost intensive than a pub-

lic cloud solution, however with a good cross-charging model it is still possible to assign variable costs to the respective business.

Third, regulatory concerns regard-ing data security in the cloud re-mains. This drives many organiza-tions to build private. Although this is arguably a lesser cousin of the public cloud in terms of cost man-agement, it is a good solution that is superior to the conventional fixed cost, single IT cost centre approach.

Moving Forward• Look at the current IT oper-

ations to assess and iden-tify systems that would be excellent candidates to be migrated over to the cloud. Systems that are deemed non-sensitive and non-transactional are low risk candidates.

• Understand the risks of cloud computing. Despite the significant advantages

of cloud computing, organi-zations need to appreciate data security risks and un-derstand regulatory trends. This impacts your system choice that could be allowed to reside in the cloud.

• Develop your IT team to think and embrace a cloud strategy for your organiza-tion ranging from private to public clouds. Most criti-cally, work out an effective

charge back model to sup-port the strategy.

In summary, banking technol-ogy organizations need to think more like a bank—our internal customers and the CFO will ap-preciate the benefits.

Dan Morris is a Principal Consultant and head of the Project Manage-ment Practice for ITPM Consulting. Dan lives in Singapore.

Industry Perspective



13 of 17


Sponsored by






MENTION CLOUD COMPUTING to a mainframe professional, and he’s likely to roll his eyes. Cloud is just a much-hyped new name for what mainframes have done for years, he’ll say. “A mainframe is a cloud,” con-tends Jon Toigo, CEO of Toigo Part-ners International, a data manage-ment consultancy in Dunedin, Fla.

If you, like Toigo, define a cloud as a resource that can be dy-namically provisioned and made available within a company with security and good management controls, “then all of that exists al-ready in a mainframe,” he says.

Of course, Toigo’s isn’t the only definition of what constitutes a cloud. Most experts say that a key attribute of the cloud is that the dy-namic provisioning is self-service—that is, at the user’s demand.

But the controlled environment of the mainframe, which is the basis for much of its security, tra-ditionally requires an administra-tor to provision computing power for specific tasks. That’s why the mainframe has a reputation as old technology that operates un-der an outdated IT paradigm of command and control.

It’s also one of the reasons why most cloud computing today runs on x86-based distributed archi-tectures, not mainframes. Other reasons: Mainframe hardware is expensive, licensing and software costs tend to be high, and there is a shortage of mainframe skills.

Nevertheless, mainframe ven-dors contend that many compa-nies want to use their big iron for cloud computing. In a CA Tech-nologies-sponsored survey of 200 U.S. mainframe executives last fall, 73% of the respondents said that their mainframes were a part

of their future cloud plans. And IBM has been promoting

mainframes as cloud platforms for several years. The compa-ny’s introduction last year of the zEnterprise, which gives organi-zations the option of combining mainframe and distributed com-puting platforms under an umbrel-la of common management, is a key part of IBM’s strategy to make mainframes a part of the cloud, say analysts.

The company set the stage 10 years ago when it gave all of its mainframes, starting with zSeries S/390, the ability to run Linux. While mainframes had been vir-tualizing since the introduction of the VM operating system 30 years

earlier, once IBM added Linux, you could run virtual x86 servers on a mainframe.

Over the past several years, some organizations have done just that, consolidating and vir-tualizing x86 servers using Linux on the mainframe. Once you start doing that, you have the basis for a private cloud.

“You have this incredibly scal-able server that’s very strong in transaction management,” says Ju-dith Hurwitz, president and CEO of Hurwitz & Associates, an IT consul-tancy in Needham, Mass. “Here’s this platform that has scalability and partitioning built in at its core.”

Plus, the mainframe’s stron-gest assets—reliability, availability,

Big iron could be perfect for hosting a private cloud, but where’s the user provisioning? Tam Harbert, Computerworld

News Analysis New Job for Mainframes: Hosting Private Clouds



14 of 17


Sponsored by






manageability and security—are the very characteristics that com-panies are most concerned about as they consider rolling out ma-jor business applications in the cloud, she says.

The Sticking Point: Provisioning But that lack of support for self-pro-visioning is glaring. “The mainframe is very well controlled in most orga-nizations, often to the point where it’s locked in a room and people can’t access it,” says Julie Craig, an analyst at Enterprise Manage-ment Associates. “[Mainframe ven-dors] are going to have to do some developing to allow the self-service features of the cloud.”

Reed Mullen, IBM’s System z cloud computing leader, says that the lack of self-provisioning is cul-

tural, not technological. Compa-nies could enable self-provision-

ing in mainframes either by using IBM’s Tivoli Service Automation Manager or through custom devel-opment, he says.

And yet he acknowledges that such implementations would still depend on the IT department—us-ers wouldn’t have full self-service autonomy. Specifically, mainframe systems with self-provisioning options would require a user to submit a request by email, and IT would have to approve the re-quest before the resources were provisioned, Mullen explains. This reflects the “old habits” of the mainframe world, he says. But he also notes that any kind of cloud implementation, including those on distributed systems, would in-clude an approval process.

“I know the perception is that the user doesn’t have to bother

anybody in IT -- that I just have to point and click to get my service,” Mullen says. But in every cloud scenario, he adds, there’s some kind of approval process—a way to prioritize the requests—even though that process may not “re-quire human eyes.”

As for the licensing costs, Mul-len says that IBM’s current gener-ation, System z, has a little-used “on-off” feature, whereby main-frame administrators can turn a processor core on for a limited time, paying short-term day rates for IBM software rather than buy-ing an expensive annual license based on the number of proces-sor cores. “We are looking at tak-ing advantage of this infrastruc-ture to make it even more suitable for a cloud environment where there is a lot of unpredictable us-

age,” says Mullen. But it’s hard to find an organi-

zation that’s using a mainframe in a self-provisioned cloud com-puting system. Some analysts say the talk of the mainframe as cloud is just hype. The technology may indeed exist, but the ques-tion is whether companies are ac-tually using it, says Bill Claybrook, president of New River Marketing Research in Concord, Mass. “If they are not automating things, if they don’t have a self-service por-tal, then it’s not a cloud architec-ture; it’s just a virtualized environ-ment,” he says.

One reason why it’s hard to find a self-provisioned mainframe-based cloud may be because we’re still in the early days of cloud computing. “There is incon-gruity between what’s out there in

News Analysis The five characteristics of a private cloud:

1. Scalable: High levels of utilization (e.g., through vir-tualization), with large, ma-ture data centers.

2. Accessible: Users can pro-vision resources on their own.

3. Elastic: Appearance of infinite capacity on demand.

4. Shared: Workloads are mul-tiplexed; capacity is pooled.

5. Metered consumption: Ability to pay for use with no commitment.

Cloud Nirvana

Source: Corporate Executive Board’s Infrastructure Executive Council, Arlington, Va.



15 of 17


Sponsored by






cloud today and what these big mainframes do,” says Phil Murphy, an analyst at Forrester Research.

Business units might use a credit card to buy some extra compute cycles for a one-time project, for example, but most companies wouldn’t run mission-critical transaction-processing ap-plications in the cloud.

The one cloud scenario that in-cludes self-provisioning is the mod-el used by global outsourcing com-panies, where far-flung developers have the ability to automatically set up their own testing and de-velopment platforms. Those aren’t all mainframe-based, but Murphy thinks some of them must be.

Mullen agrees that the offshoring model is a good example. A plat-form-as-a-service setup like that “is perhaps the dominant usage of a

cloud infrastructure in mainframe environments today,” he says.

But as cloud computing ma-tures and as new models of main-frames begin to offer more com-puting power at lower costs than they do today, more companies will experiment with the main-frame-based cloud. Hurwitz, for one, says many of her clients are looking into it, although none are ready to talk about it publicly. “It’s something we’re going to see a lot more of,” she predicts.

The Very Early Adopter Marist College is a poster child for IBM mainframes. The college is right down the road from an IBM mainframe manufacturing plant in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. Marist has had a research-and-development part-nership with IBM for more than 20

years, and it helped IBM develop and roll out System z Linux.

Marist has rewritten many x86-based applications to run on Linux on its two System z main-frames. The college runs 80 Linux servers, mostly handling adminis-trative tasks, on one mainframe, and it has more than 600 Linux servers running academic appli-cations on the other.

The college runs other applica-tions on an IBM System p mid-range computer and IBM blades as well. But the mainframes are “the real engine,” says Bill Thirsk, Marist’s CIO.

Marist is getting big cost ben-efits from virtualizing on the main-frame. The college avoids purchas-ing extra server hardware, plus it saves on space, power and IT staff to manage the data center. It

not only avoids having to pay extra for each application it adds to the mainframe, but also benefits from increased utilization of the main-frame, resulting in a very good re-turn on assets, says Thirsk. He calls Marist’s setup a cloud.

Skeptics would say it’s not a cloud, because it has no user pro-visioning. But there is some provi-sioning going on: When students enroll to study computer science, for example, they are automatical-ly provisioned with a mainframe partition, Thirsk says. And when they leave the school, he adds, “that’s sucked back into the fold and re-allocated automatically.”

Though critics might disagree, Thirsk says the lack of user provi-sioning isn’t important.

“The fact is that if you wanted to change the policy [to] where

the student could just order it, it would come down to the same auto-provisioning routine,” he says. “We do it more explicitly be-cause it’s an academic institution. The faculty decide what resources get used by students, depending on their courses.”

Marist has advantages that make building a mainframe-based cloud easier. It gets an academ-ic discount on the mainframes, although the price breaks aren’t any larger than those available to other universities, says Thirsk. And thanks to an IBM-sponsored mainframe academic program at the college, Marist has a built-in, cheap source of IT labor with main-frame and System z Linux skills.

“Where one CIO might have to hire very expensive professionals to run their data center, I have an

News Analysis



16 of 17


Sponsored by






entire internship program, and my labor’s fairly inexpensive,” Thirsk notes. “I only have three profes-sionals to supervise.”

Marist’s cloud is starting to get some attention. “Four years ago, when I started talking about this, everybody looked at me like I was crazy,” Thirsk says. But as the years have passed, others have taken

an interest in Marist’s comput-ing environment. He notes that he has hosted lots of visitors eager to learn what the college is doing, in-cluding representatives from 21 companies and several universi-ties last year. “We’re talking to a college in the Middle East that has over 200,000 students,” Thirsk says. “There’s only one way to

meet that load: with a mainframe.” Along with several concurrent

developments, zEnterprise could make the mainframe into a true cloud platform, says Susan Eus-tis, president of WinterGreen Re-search in Lexington, Mass. Just in the past several months, she says, IBM has improved Web-Sphere, improved z/VM and ad-

justed its pricing structure -- all moves to make the mainframe more cloud-friendly, she says. Eustis thinks that IBM now has all the pieces in place to enable business units to self-provision a mainframe-based cloud.

At the very least, zEnterprise could change the traditional think-ing about mainframes. “I think

you’ll start seeing the mainframe viewed in a different way,” says Hurwitz. As mainframes begin to run more of the same software as other high-end servers and gain expanded service-management capabilities, “people are going to see it as the high end of the serv-er market as opposed to a world unto itself.”•

News Analysis



17 of 17


Sponsored by






Resources

Teradata Active Data Warehouse Private Cloud

Teradata ADW Private Cloud Infographic

Teradata Database 14 Datasheet

Stretch Your System

Cloud Computing Models for Data Warehousing

VIDEO DIAGRAM DATA SHEET WHITE PAPER WHITE PAPER

Instantly and efficiently gain insights. Benefit from the best resource utili-zation. Migrate underutilized servers and storage onto a single Teradata ADW Private Cloud, reducing costs—while increasing utilization of IT resources. Gain efficiencies, reduce software licenses and save sacred IT dollars.

See all the benefits the Teradata Active Data Warehouse Private Cloud can provide.

As the high performing analytical engine that powers all of Teradata’s purpose-built platform components, Teradata Database 14 helps you create a consol-idated data environment that gives you a single source for enterprise-wide decision making. Learn why Teradata Database is the right data warehouse appliance and enterprise data ware-house choice.

Paul Barsch explains how corpora-tions can mitigate risk and meet dynamic business needs with Teradata Active Data Warehouse Private Cloud.

Get the best resource utilization now. Analyst Mark Madsen explores cloud computing concepts and how database workloads fit within cloud infrastructures.

Watch now

Read now

Read now

Read now Read now



http://resources.computerworld.com/show/200010953/00497280064182CTWMTHH6IOBNA/

http://resources.computerworld.com/show/200010954/00497280064181CTWK7J10XZJYX/

http://resources.computerworld.com/show/200010955/00497280064180CTWN5P9YQOLE2/

http://resources.computerworld.com/show/200010956/00497280064179CTWOKD8CL8MQR/

http://resources.computerworld.com/show/200010957/00497280064178CTWFNCAO0PSSI/

ast 0064445 privcloud-teradata-cw

Documents