Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Case Study: T-Mobile's massive data center transformation journey wins award using HP ALM tools

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

Welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you from the HP Discover 2011 conference June 8 in Las Vegas. We explored some some major enterprise IT solutions, trends and innovations making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers.

This enterprise case study discussion from the show floor focuses on an award-winning applications migration and transformation -- and a grand-scale data center transition, too -- for T-Mobile. I was really impressed with the scope and size -- and the amount of time, in terms of being short -- for this award-winning project set.

We're here with two IT executives to learn more about what T-Mobile has done to set up two data centers, and how in the process they have improved their application quality and the processes using advanced application lifecycle management (ALM): Michael Cooper, Senior Director of Enterprise IT Quality Assurance at T-Mobile, and Kirthy Chennaian, Director Enterprise IT Quality Management at T-Mobile. The interview was moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: People don’t just do these sorts of massive, hundred million dollar-plus activities because it's nice to have.

Cooper: Absolutely. There are some definite business drivers behind setting up a world-class, green data center and then a separate disaster-recovery data center.

Gardner: Why did you decide to undertake both an application transformation as well as a data center transformation -- almost simultaneously?

Chennaian: Given the scope and complexity of the initiative, ensuring system availability was primarily the major driver behind this. Quality assurance (QA) plays a significant role in ensuring that both data centers were migrated simultaneously, that the applications were available in real-time, and that from a quality assurance and testing standpoint we had to meet time-frames and timelines.

Gardner: Let's get a sense of the scope. Tell me about T-Mobile and its stature nowadays.

Cooper: T-Mobile is a national provider of voice, data, and messaging services. Right now, we're the fourth largest carrier in the US and have about 33 million customers and $21 billion in revenue, actually a little bit more than that. So, it's a significant company.

We're a company that’s really focused on our customers, and we've gone through an IT modernization. The data center efforts were a big part of that IT modernization, in addition to modernizing our application platform.

Gardner: Let's also talk about the scope of your movement to a new data center.

Chennaian: Two world-class data centers, one in Wenatchee, Washington, and the other one is Tempe, Arizona. The primary data center is the one in Wenatchee, and the failover disaster-recovery data center is in Tempe, Arizona.

Cooper: What we were doing was migrating more than 175 Tier 1 applications and Tier 0, and some Tier 2 as well. It was a significant effort requiring quite a bit of planning, and the HP tools had a big part in that, especially in the QA realm.

Gardner: Now, were these customer-facing apps, internal apps, logistics? Are we talking about retail? Give me a sense of the scope here on the breadth and depth of your apps?

Chennaian: Significant. We're talking critical applications that are customer-facing. We're talking enterprise applications that span across the entire organization. And, we're also talking about applications that support these critical front-end applications. So, as Michael pointed out, 175 applications needed to be migrated across both of the data centers.

For example, moving T-Mobile.com, which is a customer-facing critical application, ensuring that it was transitioned seamlessly and was available to the customer in real-time was probably one of the key examples of the criticality behind ensuring QA for this effort.

Gardner: IT is critical for almost all companies nowadays, but I can't imagine a company where technology is more essential and critical than T-Mobile, as a data and services carrier.

What's the case with the customer response? Do you have any business metrics, now that you’ve gone through this, that demonstrate not just that you're able to get better efficiency and your employees are getting better response times from their apps and data, but is there like a tangible business benefit, Michael?

Near-perfect availability

Cooper: I can't give you the exact specifics, but we've had significant increases in our system up-time and almost near-perfect availability in most areas. That’s been the biggest thing.

Kirthy mentioned T-Mobile.com. That’s an example where, instead of the primary and the backup, we actually have an active-active situation in the data center. So, if one goes down the other one is there, and this is significant.

A significant part of the way that we used HP tools in this process was not only the functional testing with Quick Test Professional and Quality Center, but we also did the performance testing with Performance Center and found some very significant issues that would have gone on to production.

This is a unique situation, because we actually got to do the performance testing live in the performance environments. We had to scale up to real performance types of loads and found some real issues that -- instead of the customers facing them, they didn’t have to face them.

The other thing that we did that was unique was high-availability testing. We tested each server to make sure that if one went down, the other ones were stable and could support our customers.

We were able to deliver application availability, ensure a timeframe for the migration and leverage the ability to use automation tools.



Gardner: This was literally changing the wings on the airplane when it was still flying. Tell me why doing it all at once was a good thing.

Chennaian: It was the fact that we were able to leverage the additional functionality that the HP suite of products provide. We were able to deliver application availability, ensure a time-frame for the migration and leverage the ability to use automation tools that HP provides. With Quick Test Professional, for example, we migrated from version 9.5 to 10.0, and we were able to leverage the functionality with business process testing from a Quality Center standpoint.

As a whole, from an application lifecycle management and from an enterprise-wide QA and testing standpoint, it allowed us to ensure system availability and QA on a timely basis. So, it made sense to upgrade as we were undergoing this transformation.

Cooper: Good point, Kirthy. In addition to upgrading our tools and so forth, we also upgraded many of the servers to some of the latest Itanium technology. We also implemented a lot of the state-of-the-art virtualization services offered by HP, and some of the other partners as well.

Streamlined process

Using HP tools, we were able to create a regression test set for each of our Tier 1 applications in a standard way and a performance test for each one of the applications. So, we were able to streamline our whole QA process as a side-benefit of the data migration, building out these state-of-the-art data centers, and IT modernization.

Gardner: So, this really affected operations. You changed some platforms, you adopted the higher levels of virtualization, you're injecting quality into your apps, and you're moving them into an entirely new facility. That's very impressive, but it's not just me being impressed. You've won a People's Choice Award, voted by peers of the HP software community and their Customer Advisory Board. That must have felt pretty good.

Cooper: It feels excellent. In 2009, we won the IT Transformation Award. So, this isn't our first time to the party. That was for a different project. I think that in the community people know who we are and what we're capable of. It's really an honor that the people who are our peers, who read over the different submissions, decided that we were the ones that were at the top.

We've won lots of awards, but that's not what we do it for. The reason why we do the awards is for the team. It's a big morale builder for the team. Everybody is working hard. Some of these project people work night and day to get them done, and the proof of the pudding is the recognition by the industry.

Our CIO has a high belief in quality and really supports us in doing this. It's nice that we've got the industry recognition as well.



Honestly, we also couldn't do without great executive support. Our CIO has a high belief in quality and really supports us in doing this. It's nice that we've got the industry recognition as well.

Gardner: Of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. You've got some metrics here. They were pretty impressive in turns of availability, cost savings, reduction in execution time, performance and stability improvements, and higher systems availability.

Cooper: The metrics I can speak to are from the QA perspective. We were able to do the testing and we never missed one of the testing deadlines. We cut our testing time using HP tools by about 50 percent through automation, and we can pretty accurately measure that. We probably have about 30 percent savings in the testing, but the best part of it is the availability. But, because of the sensitive nature and competitive marketplace, we're not going to talk exactly about what our availability is.

Gardner: And how about your particular point of pride on this one, Kirthy?

Chennaian: For one, being able to get recognized is an acknowledgement of all the work you do, and for your organization as a whole. Mike rightly pointed out that it boosts the morale of the organization. It also enables you to perform at a higher level. So, it's definitely a significant acknowledgment, and I'm very excited that we actually won the People's Choice Award.

Gardner: A number of other organizations and other series of industries are going to be facing the same kind of a situation, where it's not just going to be a slow, iterative improvement process,. They're going to have to go catalytic, and make wholesale changes in the data center, looking for that efficiency benefit.

You've done that. You've improved on your QA and applications lifecycle benefits at the same time. With that 20-20 hindsight, what would you have done differently?

Planning and strategy

Chennaian: If I were to do this again, I think there is definitely a significant opportunity with respect to planning and investing in the overall strategy of QA and testing for such a significant transformation. There has to be a standard methodology. You have to have the right toolsets in place. You have to plan for the entire transformation as a whole. Those are significant elements in successful transformation.

Cooper: We did a lot of things right. One of the things that we did right was to augment our team. We didn’t try to do the ongoing work with the exact same team. We brought in some extra specialists to work with us or to back-fill in some places. Other groups didn’t and paid the price, but that part worked out for us.

Also, it helped to have a seat at the table and say, "It's great to do a technology upgrade, but unless we really have the customer point of view and focus on the quality, you're not going to have success."

We were lucky enough to have that executive support and the seat at the table, to really have the go/no-go decisions. I don't think we really missed one in terms of ones that we said, "We shouldn't do it this time. Let's do it next time." Or, ones where we said, "Let's go." I can't remember even one application we had to roll back. Overall, it was very good. The other thing is, work with the right tools and the right partners.

Gardner: With data center transformation, after all, it's all about the apps. You were able to maintain that focus. You didn’t lose focus of the apps?

It's great to do a technology upgrade, but unless we really have the customer point of view and focus on the quality, you're not going to have success.



Cooper: Definitely.The applications do a couple of things. One, the ones that support the customers directly. Those have to have really high availability, and we're able to speed them up quite a bit with the newest and the latest hardware.

The other part are the apps that people don't think about that much, which are the ones that support the front lines, the ones that support retail and customer care and so forth. I would say that our business customers or internal customers have also really benefited from this project.
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Thursday, June 30, 2011

Discover Case Study: How Cardinal Health uses SaaS tools to improve ALM, quality, development productivity

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

Welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you from the HP Discover 2011 conference June 8 in Las Vegas. We explored some some major enterprise IT solutions, trends and innovations making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers.

This enterprise case study discussion from the show floor focuses on how software as a service (SaaS) is impacting the application lifecycle through the experience of Cardinal Health. We interview Don Jackson, a Senior Engineer in the Testing Center of Excellence within the Performance Engineering Group at Cardinal Health, in Dublin, Ohio. The interview was moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: Why is SaaS appealing to you?

Jackson: SaaS is a service offering, not just for testing and for development, but as a simple service offering, that allows us to focus on our primary core competencies and on what our clients and customers need, rather than focusing on trying to learn how to handle this particular application that we may have purchased from a vendor like HP. So, we can really focus on those core competencies. [View the slides from Don's HP Discover presentation on Fundamentals of Testing.]

Gardner: And you haven't had any complaints about things like security, performance, or latency. It all it seems work for you?

Jackson: There are some trade-offs, obviously, that you're going to have from a security standpoint, and the HP guys can tell you about this as well. They can go through all the details, but we did go through their security documentation to make sure that it was adequate for what we needed.

If there are compliance issues that you have to take into account, they’ll work with you. It's a very secure environment. So, we were pleasantly surprised when we started looking at that.

At Cardinal Health, our slogan is "Essential to Healthcare." We want to be a healthcare industry leader providing a diverse, inclusive work environment that reflects the marketplace and communities where we do business, while maximizing our competitive advantage through innovation, profit, and adaptability.

Some facts about Cardinal Health: we’ve got 32,000-plus employees. We are number 17 on the Fortune 500 list. So, we're a very large company. The latest estimate that I saw on our public website cardinalhealth.com was that we'll do about $100 billion in revenue this fiscal year. Our fiscal year ends in June, so we're pretty confident at this point that we're going to hit that number. We deliver to 60,000 different healthcare sites each day.

Think about the healthcare industry. If you go into a hospital say, all the different products that you might consume or use or may be used upon you, whether you're having a procedure done or whatever, that could have been manufactured, developed, or just distributed with some of our suppliers through Cardinal Health.

For example, half of all surgeries in the United States last year, used at least one product of ours. We deliver more than 25 percent of all medications prescribed in the US each day. That’s just to give you a rough example.

Gardner: I certainly can appreciate that the need for scale is there. Tell me about the IT support now and your role in making sure these applications are performing and are safe and reliable. What kind of scale are you dealing with?

Half of all surgeries in the United States last year used at least one product of ours. We deliver more than 25 percent of all medications prescribed in the US each day.



Jackson: We work very tightly with our business analyst community. Our group specifically doesn’t actually interface directly with our customers, but we interface very closely with our business analysts to generate requirements both from the functional and non-functional.

Our group specifically, focuses on non-functional in the performance engineer realm to establish good service level agreements (SLAs) beforehand. On the HP website, there is a webinar that I did for them a year ago, where we talk about back to basics for performance engineering and focusing on planning.

If you don't plan right, your chances of success are very minimal even in a performance realm, and you end up not meeting what the customer or your client needs. Whereas, when you work with them and develop a good non-functional requirements you have the opportunity to deliver really what they need and want instead of what they think they want.

I was a former Mercury customer way back in the day. I started in 1997 working on the HP products -- Mercury products back then. I worked on WinRunner 2000, when we're all doing Y2K testing which was an absolute joy -- if you'll pardon the sarcasm -- as you all remember Y2K was for IT folks. It was a lot of work.

When I moved into Cardinal, initially my reaction was probably what a lot of people listening to this reaction would be when they think about SaaS. What can I do and how quickly can I bring it in-house? That was my initial reaction, and I had a very wise manager at the time. He said, "Just give it six months before you do it." He told me to get myself familiar with it and go from there.

So, I spent six months and I just kind let it be how it was and I got to work with our technical account manager at the time. It became a situation where not only did I feel that it was valuable to keep it that way, but I started realizing that I was able to focus on our core competencies.

Do I have FDA validation concerns? Do I have to put this into a validated environment? Do I have HIPAA compliance concerns? Do I have SaaS compliance concerns?



We went from just having BSM through SaaS. I'm trying to use the current HP acronyms, because they like to change names on us. At the time, it was just BSM that we had through SaaS. Now, we've Quality Center through SaaS, BSM through SaaS, and Performance Center through SaaS.

I spoke here at the conference about how leveraging SaaS, not only can we focus on our core competencies, but time to market is a huge benefit. [View the slides from Don's HP Discover presentation on Fundamentals of Testing.]

When you look at a healthcare industry, you have to look at new applications when you stand them up. Do I have FDA validation concerns? Do I have to put this into a validated environment? Do I have HIPAA compliance concerns? Do I have SaaS compliance concerns? All that kind of stuff.

It's almost at a turnkey level when you work with SaaS, assuming that you've established a good relationship with your sales staff and your client account manager. We were able to stand up Performance Center, which is an enterprise application, in one week. From the time we signed the deal until the time we were live, executing performance tests, was one week, and I think that's very powerful.

Another layer of testing

T
he SaaS organization takes another layer of testing that they do before they even recommend to us that we should start looking at it and potentially upgrade. The SaaS guys work with us very closely, for example, with ALM 11. It's a radical shift from the Performance Center, Quality Center days. It really is, and we're still not on ALM 11. We've chosen that because we want to make sure that it's ready and do our due diligence to make sure that it's ready.

The SaaS organization is doing a lot of testing on it right now to make sure that in a multi-tenant environment it will perform and function the way that we needed to. Once they feel it's ready then they are going to provide a testing environment for us, so that we can do our own testing in-house to make sure it's ready.

All of that stuff, all of that set up, all that conversion is done by them. I don't have to worry about it. I'll have to go through the plan. From my perspective, once they feel it's ready, then we do some testing, and I can scale back the level of testing that I have to do, because a lot of that's already been covered by them, and off we go.

A great example – we upgraded point releases of BSM, when we went from 75 to 75.1 to 75.2 and 75.5. I got a notification from them that they were putting in this point release and I wasn't going to have any downtime. I came in Monday morning, and instead of 75.1, it now said 75.5.

That's really powerful, and that goes back to my core competencies. I don't have to focus or be concerned about that. I can let the guys who are specialists and really know in-depth the HP tools, which would be HP, focus on that, and I can focus on what my customers' or clients' need.

SaaS is a type of cloud. It's now new. We're just calling it "cloud."



Gardner: This is probably a question for an enterprise architect, but I'll ask you, given your depth of experience and your trust and results from SaaS. We're hearing a lot about cloud and we're hearing a lot about moving toward dev-ops. Do you think that what work you've done, the experience you've established, would lead to an easier path for you to do more SaaS and perhaps even start using private or hybrid clouds for operations and deployment?

Jackson: It's definitely something that our CIO has been talking about. Let's be honest, SaaS is a type of cloud. It really is a type of cloud. It's now new. We're just calling it "cloud." It's another one of those marketing term. But, cloud is a huge thing.

Vendors, come in and talk about different capabilities, not just HP but other vendors obviously. We're a big company and we deal with a lot of vendors. We typically will ask them, can this be implemented through SaaS or through a cloud model? [View the slides from Don's HP Discover presentation on Fundamentals of Testing.]

Once again, for the same reasons, you're the expert in your tool. You know your tool. If we think it can bring value to us, let's work on that value realization instead of us trying to become an expert in your tool.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

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Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Talend open-source approach provides holistic integration capability across, data, devices, services

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Talend.

The latest BriefingsDirect podcast discussion centers on how the role and impact of integration has shifted, and how a more comprehensive and managed approach to integration is required, thanks to such major trends as cloud, hybrid computing, and managing massive datasets.

Moreover, the tools that support enterprise integration need to be usable by more types of workers, those that are involved with business process activities and data analysis. The so-called democratization of IT effect is also rapidly progressing into this traditionally complex and isolated world of applications and data integration.

So, how do enterprises face up to the generational shift of the function of integration to new and more empowered users, so that businesses can react and exploit more applications and data resources and do so in a managed and governed fashion? This is no small task.

We're finding that modern, lightweight, and open-source platforms that leverage modular architectures are a new and proven resource for the rapid and agile integration requirements. And, the tools that support these platforms have come a long way in ease of use and applicability to more types of activities.

So we assembled a panel to discuss how these platforms have evolved, how the open-source projects are being produced and delivered into real-time and enterprise-ready, mission-critical use scenarios, and what’s now available to help make integration a core competency among more enterprise application and data activities and processes.

Please join Dan Kulp, the Vice President of Open Source Development at Talend’s Application Integration Division and also the Project Management Committee Chair of the Apache CXF Project, along with Pat Walsh, Vice President of Marketing in the Application Integration Division at Talend. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: Talend is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:
Walsh: We're seeing a couple of overriding trends that have really shifted the market for integration solutions. The needs have shifted with changes in the workplace.

First and foremost, we're seeing that there is much more information that needs to be managed, much more data associated, and there are a couple of drivers of that.

One is that there are many more interactions amongst different functional units within a business. We're seeing that silos have been broken down and that there’s more interaction amongst these different functions, and thus more data being exchanged between them and more need to integrate that data.

There’s also this notion of the consumerization of IT, that with so many devices like iPhones and iPads being accessible to consumers in their everyday life. They bring those to work and they expect those tools to be adapted to their workplace. With that just comes an even larger increase in the data explosion that you had referenced earlier.

Coupled with that are overriding trends in IT to shift the burden of supporting systems away from the traditional data center and into the cloud. Cloud has been a big movement over the last couple of years in IT and it has an impact on integration. No longer can an IT department have full control over the applications that they are integrating. They now have to interact with applications like Salesforce.com.

A number of these trends converged. In the past, you may have been able to address data issues separately with small portion of your IT group within the data center and say application integration separately with another group within the data center. Nowadays, you are not only in control of your own systems, you have to depend on systems that someone else would be supporting for you in the cloud. Thus, the complexity of all of the integration points that need to be managed has exploded.

The architectural trend is really driving the need for the data and application integration technologies and the team supporting those to come together.



These are some of the overriding trends that we are seeing at Talend and responding to in terms of issues that are driving our customer needs today.

Gardner: Why is it important for data and application integration activities to become closer or even under the same umbrella?

Walsh: The two trends that you talked about are related. The architectural trend is really driving the need for the data and application integration technologies and the team supporting those to come together. The reason is that data and application integration no longer are necessarily centralized in a single location.

When they were, you had, in essence, a single point of integration that you needed to manage amongst the data and the applications. Nowadays, it’s distributed throughout your enterprise, but also distributed, as I mentioned before, across a network of partners and providers that you may be using.

So many touch points

With that, there’s now the mandate that you can no longer isolate data from application, because the touch points are just so many. You now need to look at solutions that, from the get-go, consider both aspects of the integration problem -- the data aspect and the system and application integration aspect.

Gardner: And, I suppose we need to tool in such a way that we can approach both of these problem sets, the data integration and the applications integration, with a common interface or at least common logic. Is that correct?

Walsh: Yes, and up until now the two audiences have been treated quite differently. I think the tool expectations of the audience for data management versus the audience for application integration were quite different. We're finding that we need to bridge that gap and provide unified tool sets that are appropriate for both the data management user, as well as the application integration user.

Gardner: Why must we take a different kind of architectural step here, Dan?

Kulp: As Pat mentioned earlier, with the shifting of the requirements from silos into more of a distributed environment, the developers that are doing the application integration and the people doing the data management have to talk a lot more to get these problems solved. Your older solutions, from five years ago or whatever, that had each of those things completely separate were not able to scale up to this distributed type environment.

One aspect that open source brings is a very wide range of requirements that are placed on these open source projects. That provides a lot of benefit to an organization, as these requirements may not be required of your organization today, but you don’t really know what’s going to happen six months or a year from now.

You may acquire another company or you have to integrate another set of boxes from another area of your organization. The open source projects that you see out there, because of their open-source nature, have been attracting a wide range of developers, a wide range of new requirements and ideas, and very bright people who have really great ideas and thoughts and have made these projects very successful, just from the community nature of open source.

There is also the obvious cost benefit of not having all these high priced licenses, but the real value, in my opinion, is the community that’s behind these projects. It's continuously innovating and continuously providing new solutions for problems you may not even have yet.

Gardner: With cloud computing, you're also dealing with more moving parts. I'm quite sure that many of the cloud providers have a significant amount of open source in their infrastructure that helps make these interactions technically possible.

New complexities

Walsh: Agreed. The cloud brings a whole new set of complexities and challenges and as you are deploying your applications into the cloud, you need to think about these things. And a lot of these open-source projects that are addressing some of these cloud needs have thought about these things.

If your organization isn’t into cloud yet, but you're thinking about it, leverage the expertise that's already out there. Talk to the communities and get engaged with those communities. You'll learn a lot, and you'll be probably better off for it in the long run.

Expanded market

One interesting point to raise before talking about what we're seeing people doing is that there is an expanded market now for these integration challenges. It used to be that we would see very large enterprises were the ones that were addressing complexity in their organizations.

With cloud-based initiatives and such, it’s affecting even small to medium-size businesses (SMBs). We see a much broader set of enterprises trying to address it. Companies that have fewer than 1,000 employees are now looking at integration solutions to manage their data and their applications in the cloud in a much more sophisticated way than just three years ago. It’s a much broader problem.

The way that people are hoping to address it is by looking for a way that doesn’t require a massive outlay of investment in consulting resources. The traditional large organization, in addition to purchasing product to help them with integrating their data and integrating their applications, would typically have systems integrator help them pull everything together. That’s obviously not an affordable path for an SMB.

Therefore, people are looking to see, how they can find a combined, easy to use way and how they can gain knowledge from people who have experience, having tackled these issues and problems in the past.

We're finding that people are looking for just a simpler, prescriptive way to do the majority of the challenges out there. In terms of the 20 percent outlier problems, you may need to have a systems integrator come in and help you with that. But, people are really focused on the meat and potatoes of the integration of their functions, the data, and the applications that go along with those processes and functions.

We grab those and bring them together, the best of breed from the various Apache projects that solve real world problems.



Gardner: Five or seven years ago, this all was a very complex and costly activity. We've now been able to abstract up the value, but I also reduce and subvert the complexity. Tell me how you do that.

Kulp: The first step in that process to solve that problem was identifying where the best solutions are. They're primarily in open source. I mentioned CXF and Camel, and there is Apache Karaf providing some OSGi stuff.

That was the first step. We grab those and bring them together, the best of breed from the various Apache projects that solve real world problems.

The next step was trying to find or produce a set of tooling that makes using those products a lot easier. One of the things about Apache that you will discover, if you are heavily involved is that we are hardcore developers. For us, writing Java code to solve a problem is natural.

Skill sets

One of the problems that we're trying to address is bringing this great technology produced by the Apache people into the hands of those that don’t have that same level of skill set, expertise, or mindset.

That includes those from the application integration side, where you have developers that are used to doing point-and-click type enterprise integration pattern things, to the data integration people that are used to their data mappings, GUIs, and things like that, and trying to bring both sets of people together into a platform that can solve both teams.

Gardner: What is it about your tools and approach at Talend that is helping to bring this to the masses in a way that’s automated; a service factory approach, rather than a hand coding approach?

Walsh: Talend has a great history of unifying technologies onto a common platform, to really keep the power of the underlying tools, but simplify the interface to it. This unified platform really consists of five key components.

The first one is a common development environment that is used across the products. The second thing is a common deployment tool that allows you to deploy into a runtime environment.

By providing this unified platform of tools, it allows someone to learn a single interface, regardless of whether it’s at the development stage, the deployment stage, or the management stage.



There's also a common repository that allows you, across the lifecycle of your process, to be able to manage it consistently, regardless of the type of technology that’s being used. Finally, there is common monitoring across the entire environment.

What we are doing now is extending that model that has been applied to our data management products to encompass the ESB, the application integration aspect of it. By providing this unified platform of tools, it allows someone to learn a single interface, regardless of whether it’s at the development stage, the deployment stage, or the management stage, and get the power of master data management technologies, data integration, data quality, or the ESB technologies themselves.

By providing this one interface, this one common environment, allows people to become comfortable with this common interface, but have the benefit of multiple sets of tools.

We've gone to great lengths to include security mechanisms into the solution, so that we can have approaches whereby there are certain permissions for just individuals. Or, IT management can look at certain aspects while opening it up maybe to a broader audience, when it comes to development and use of the interfaces that are going to be developed on the data in application side.

Democratizing technology

I
t’s very important, as you say, that as we bring this technology to the masses, as we refer to it, democratizing the technology, lowering the barriers to entry that historically have been in place, we don’t remove any of the enterprise qualities that are expected. Security is certainly a major one, as is policy management, so that you could have a number of different business roles that allow you to have the flexibility you need as you deploy it into a large- or even medium-size enterprise.

We're providing both capabilities, simplifying the interface, while not removing any of the enterprise qualities that have come to be expected of the integration products we provide.

Gardner: Talend has also been merging and acquiring. Tell me a little bit about your business and the evolution of Talend that has allowed you to provide this all in one integration capability to the masses?

Walsh: It came quite naturally from Talend’s perspective. Data customers were using our data integration tools, as well as our data quality tools. We have Talend Open Studio, which is our popular open source data integration technology. Customers naturally were inquiring about how they could provide these data jobs as services, so that they could be reused by other applications, or they were inquiring how they could incorporate our technology into a SOA.

This led Talend to partner with a company called Sopera. They had a very rich ESB-based integration platform for applications. After two years of partnership, we decided it made sense to come together in a stronger way, and Talend acquired Sopera.

We're providing both capabilities, simplifying the interface, while not removing any of the enterprise qualities that have come to be expected of the integration products we provide.



So, we have seen this firsthand from our customers. It really drove us to see the convergence of data and application integration technology, and therefore the acquisition of Sopera’s technology, as well as the people behind that technology, has enabled us to really come in with this common platform that we are just now releasing.

We have a couple of examples that I can refer to. I think the most tangible one that may make sense to folks is that we have an insurance company that we work with. While they've been working with us for quite some time on the data side of the house, looking at how they can have their back office data shared amongst the different industry consortia that they work with to do ratings and other checks on credit worthiness or insurance risk, that has really been about integrating data on the backend.

Much like any business, they're making it more accessible to their consumers by trying to extend their back-office systems into systems that have more general web interface or maybe an interface at an ATM.

Opened to consumers

So, they required some application integration technology, and with that, they built this web interface and opened it up to consumers. The expectation of their user is a much more rapid response time. When they had to interface with an agent in the office, they may wait 24 hours for a response, but now they expect their answer to come during their web-based session.

The timeframe required has led them to have an application integration solution that can respond in sub-second response rates for their transaction. In the past, they were going with a much longer latency for the completion of transactions.

It's just a typical example that I think folks can appreciate. As people extend their back office systems to consumers, number one, consumer expectations raised the bar in terms of the overall performance of the system, and thus the technology that’s supporting those systems needs to necessarily change to support that expectation.

Gardner: In listening to Pat describe that use case, Dan, it sounds as if what we're trying to accomplish here is to do what the data warehousing, data mining, and business intelligence (BI) field have done, but perhaps allow many of those values to be extracted with more agility, faster, and then with a dynamic approach.

Is that fair? Are we really compressing or creating a category separate from BI, but that does a lot of what BI does vis-à-vis the integration of data and activities for application services?

That requires a whole new set of skills, a whole new set of challenges.



Kulp: That’s exactly what’s happening. A couple of years back, data mining ended up being batch jobs that were run at midnight or overnight. Then, the data would be available to the front end people the next morning. You'd get your reports or you'd log into your system and check the results of these batch jobs.

With extending your back-end data systems to the consumer, these overnight batch systems are really not meeting the expectations of the consumers. They're demanding that their information be available immediately. They submit a new request and they want to have things updated immediately, so that results are available and displayed within seconds, not overnight.

That requires a whole new set of skills, a whole new set of challenges. The people that were doing the front-end application integration that queried the data from the overnight batch jobs suddenly have to have some expertise in not just cleaning the data, but allowing or working with the team doing the data space, to provide updates to that information in a much more dynamic form.

Gardner: Why in the future does what we are talking about today become even more important, therefore become more critical as a core competency?

Becoming more relevant

Walsh: You can see that, as the consumerization of technology increases. We're already seeing the pressure that IT feels from becoming more relevant to the business, that just expands.

As I said before about the consumerization of devices in the workplace, it really does come down to the interfaces and the expectations that it doesn’t require a specialist in an IT field to be able to manipulate and analyze the information that they need or even to create a service or application that would enable them to do their everyday task or work function.

That’s just going to expand it. It has been happening, and we are just going to see that at a more rapid pace. It’s going to require that vendors and technology companies like Talend respond in kind and build products that are more accessible to a broader audience of users.

I think it’s analogous to what we saw in the early days of the Internet. Early on you would do command-line interfaces to send files back and forth. Once there was a web-based interface, it opened it to the masses. Nowadays, we think nothing of using a web browser to do all kinds of activity that 20 years ago was reserved to just people that had a technical know how to manipulate those systems.

We are seeing the same across these aspects of the business that up until now had really been the bastions of IT teams.

If it’s beneficial to my organization, why wouldn’t it be beneficial to others in my industry or to an even broader audience?



Today, we see that they are really addressing data services as an efficiency within their organization. How can I leverage the investment that I have made in this initial data analysis or data job across the entirety of my organization? But it’s not a big step to take beyond that to say, if it’s beneficial to my organization, why wouldn’t it be beneficial to others in my industry or to an even broader audience?

So we absolutely see that as a level of commerce that will be enabled by more sophisticated data services, technology, with a more accessible interface to that technology.

Comes down to consumers

Kulp: It really comes down to the consumers of these services and data. As the markets have expanded and the consumers are demanding things to get their information faster or get more information or advertisers need to figure out, where are these consumers going and just the whole variety of information sources expand out as well, the architecture of the applications and the interactions between the front end and backend systems kind of get blurred.

Things are changing, and companies like Talend that are involved in the space need to adapt as well and provide better solutions that make these blurring lines occur a lot quicker. That’s what we are trying to target today.
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Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Discover Case Study: Health care giant McKesson harnesses HP ALM for data center transformation and dev-ops performance improvement

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

Welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you from the HP Discover 2011 conference June 8 in Las Vegas. We explored some some major enterprise IT solutions, trends and innovations making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers.

This enterprise case study discussion from the show floor focuses on McKesson Corp., and how they're improving their operations and reducing their mean time to resolution. We'll also explore applications quality assurance, test, and development, and how they're progressing toward a modernization front on those efforts as well.

Here to help us understand the application lifecycle management and dev-ops benefits issues better are Andy Smith, Vice President of Application Hosting Services at McKesson, and Doug Smith, Vice President of Data Center Transformation at McKesson. The interview was moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:
Andy Smith: What we've been doing over a little more than two years is improving our processes into ITIL v3. We focused heavily on change management, event management, and configuration management. At the same time, in parallel, we introduced the HP Tool Suite, for monitoring and configuration management, asset management, and automation.

What we've seen through the improvement in the processes and the improvement in the tools has been a marked improvement in all of our metrics. We've seen a drop in our Tier 1 outages of 54 percent during the last couple of years, as we implemented this tool. We've got three years worth of metrics now, and every year, the metrics have declined compared to the prior year. We've also seen an 86 percent drop in the breaches of those Tier 1 SLAs.

Doug Smith: We've been on this road of [data center] transformation now for about three and a half years. In the beginning, we focused on our production environments, which generally consist of fairly predictable workloads across multiple business units, and as Andy mentioned, quite a variety actually of models. In the past, the business units have obtained a great deal of autonomy in how they manage their infrastructure.

The first thing was to pull together the infrastructure and go through a consolidation exercise, as well as an optimization of that infrastructure. There we focused heavily on virtualization, as well as optimization of our storage environment, and to Andy’s point around process, heavily invested in process improvement.

We look to continue to take advantage, both from an infrastructure perspective as well as a tools perspective, in how we can facilitate our developers through a more rapid development cycle, more securely, and with higher quality outcomes for our customers.



A couple of years into this, we began to look at our development environment. McKesson has several thousand developers globally, and these developers spread across multiple product sets in multiple countries.

If you think about our objectives around security, quality, and agility, we look to continue to take advantage, both from an infrastructure perspective as well as a tools perspective, in how we can facilitate our developers through a more rapid development cycle, more securely, and with higher quality outcomes for our customers.

Andy Smith: When we first started looking at new tools, we recognized that we had a lot of point solutions that may have been best-in-breed, but they were a standalone solution. So, we weren’t getting the full benefits of the integration. As we looked at the next generation of tools, we wanted a tool suite that was fully integrated, so that the whole was better than the sum of the parts is probably the best way to put it.

We felt HP had progressed the farthest of all the competition in generating that full suite of tools to manage a data center environment. And, we believe we're seeing the benefits of that, because all these tools are working together to help improve our SLAs and shorten those mean time to restore.

Governance in place

Doug Smith: It's not unique, but to a large business like McKesson, as a federation, we have businesses that retain their autonomy and their decision-making. The key is to have that governance in place to highlight the opportunity at an enterprise level to say that if we make the investments, if we coordinate our activities, and if we pull together, we actually can achieve outcomes greater than we could individually.

Andy Smith: McKesson is a Fortune 15 healthcare company primarily in three areas: nurse call centers, medical pharmaceutical distribution, and a healthcare software development company.

It’s a very federated model. Each business unit has its own IT department responsible for the applications, and in some cases, their own individual data centers. Through Doug’s data center transformation program, we've been migrating those data centers into fewer corporate locations, and I'm responsible for running the infrastructure in those corporate locations.

For the products that McKesson develops and sells to the healthcare industry, in many cases, we're also hosting them within our data centers as an application service provider.

I can take the testing scripts that were used to develop the products and use those in the BAC Suite to test and monitor the application as it runs in production. So, we're able to share that testing data and testing schemas in the production world to monitor the live product.



And the bigger sum of the whole to me is the fact that I can take the testing scripts that were used to develop the products and use those in the BAC Suite to test and monitor the application as it runs in production. So, we're able to share that testing data and testing schemas in the production world to monitor the live product.

Doug Smith: As you look across product groups and our ability to scale this, and with Andy’s capability that he is developing and delivering on, you really see an opportunity for a company like McKesson to continue to deliver on its mission to improve the health of the businesses that we serve in healthcare. And, we can all relate to the benefits of driving out cost and increasing efficiency in healthcare.

So, at the highest level, anything that we can do to facilitate a faster and more agile development process for the folks who are delivering software and services in our organization, as well as help them provide a foundation and a layer where then they can talk to each other and build additional services and value-added services for our customers on top of that layer, then we have something that really can have an impact for all of us.
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Thursday, June 23, 2011

Private Clouds: Debunking the myths that can slow adoption

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Platform Computing.

Get a complimentary copy of the Forrester Private Cloud Market Overview from Platform Computing.

The popularity of cloud concepts and the expected benefits from cloud computing have certainly raised expectations. Forrester now predicts that cloud spending will grow from $40 billion to $241 billion in the global IT market over the next 10 years, and yet, there's still a lot of confusion about the true payoffs and risks associated with cloud adoption. IDC has it's own numbers.

Some enterprises expect to use cloud and hybrid clouds to save on costs, improve productivity, refine their utilization rates, cut energy use and eliminate gross IT inefficiencies. At the same time, cloud use should improve their overall agility, ramp up their business-process innovation, and generate better overall business outcomes.

To others, this sounds a bit too good to be true, and a backlash against a silver bullet, cloud hype mentality is inevitable and is probably healthy. Yet, we find that there is also unfounded cynicism about cloud computing and underserved doubt.

So, where is the golden mean, a proper context for real-world and likely cloud value? And, what are the roadblocks that enterprises may encounter that would prevent them from appreciating the true potential for cloud, while also avoiding the risks?

We assembled a panel to identify and debunk myths on the road to cloud-computing adoption. Such myths can cause confusion and hold IT back from embracing cloud model sooner rather than later. We also define some clear ways to get the best out of cloud virtues without stumbling.

Joining our discussion about the right balance of cloud risk and reward are Ajay Patel, a Technology Leader at Agilysys; Rick Parker, IT Director for Fetch Technologies, and Jay Muelhoefer, Vice President of Enterprise Marketing at Platform Computing. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: Platform Computing is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: Let's begin to tackle some of the cloud computing myths.

Private cloud, to put a usable definition to it, is a web-manageable virtualized data center. What that means is that through any browser you can manage any component of the private cloud.



There's an understanding that virtualization is private cloud and private cloud is virtualization. Clearly, that's not the case. Help me understand what you perceive in the market as a myth around virtualization and what should be the right path between virtualization and a private cloud?

Parker: Private cloud, to put a usable definition to it, is a web-manageable virtualized data center. What that means is that through any browser you can manage any component of the private cloud. That's opposed to virtualization, which could just be a single physical host with a couple of virtual machines (WMs) running on it and doesn't provide the redundancy and cost-effectiveness of an entire private cloud or the ease of management of a private cloud.

So there is a huge difference between virtualization and use of a hypervisor versus an entire private cloud. A private cloud is comprised of virtualized routers, firewalls, switches, in a true data center not a server room. There are redundant environmental systems, like air-conditioning and Internet connections. It’s comprised of an entire infrastructure, not just a single virtualized host.

Moving to a private cloud is inevitable, because the benefits so far outweigh the perceived risks, and the perceived risks are more toward public cloud services than private cloud services.

Gardner: We’ve heard about fear of loss of control by IT. Is there a counter-intuitive effect here that cloud will give you better control and higher degrees of security and reliability?

Redundancy and monitoring

Parker: I know that to be a fact, because the private cloud management software and hypervisors provide redundancy and performance monitoring that a lot of companies don't have by default. You don’t only get performance monitoring across a wide range of systems just by installing a hypervisor, but by going with a private cloud management system and the use of VirtualCenter that supports live motion between physical hosts.

It also provides uptime/downtime type of monitoring and reporting capacity planning that most companies don't even attempt, because these systems are generally out of their budget.

Gardner: Tell us about Fetch Technologies.

Parker: Fetch Technologies is a provider of data as a service, which is probably the best way to describe it. We have a software-as-a-service (SaaS) type of business that extracts formats and delivers Internet-scale data. For example, two of our clients are Dow Jones and Shopzilla.

Gardner: Let’s go next to Ajay. A myth that I encounter is that private clouds are just too hard. "This is such a departure from the siloed and monolithic approach to computing that we'd just as soon stick with one server, one app, and one database," we hear. "Moving toward a fabric or grid type of affair is just too hard to maintain, and I'm bound to stumble." Why would I be wrong in assuming that as my position, Ajay?

The fear of the operations being changed is one of the key issues that IT management sees. They also think of staff attrition as a key issue.



Patel: One of the main issues that the IT management of an organization encounters on a day-to-day basis is the ability for their current staff to change their principles of how they manage the day-to-day operations.

The training and the discipline need to be changed. The fear of the operations being changed is one of the key issues that IT management sees. They also think of staff attrition as a key issue. By doing the actual cloud assessment, by understanding what the cloud means, it's closer to home to what the IT infrastructure team does today than one would imagine through the myth.

For example, virtualization is a key fundamental need of a private cloud -- virtualization at the servers, network and storage. All the enterprise providers at the servers, networks, and storage are creating a virtualized infrastructure for you to plug into your cloud-management software and deliver those services to a end-user without issues -- and in a single pane of glass.

If you look at the some of the metrics that are used by managed service companies, SIs, and outsourcing companies, they do what the end-user companies do, but they do it much cheaper, better and faster.

More efficient manner

How they do it better is by creating the ability to manage several different infrastructure portfolio components in a much more efficient manner. That means managing storage as a virtualized infrastructure; tier storage, network, the servers, not only the Windows environment, but the Unix environment, and the Linux environment, including all that in the hands of the business-owners.

Today, with the money being so tight to come by for a corporation, people need to look at not just a return on investment (ROI), but the return on invested capital.

You can deploy private cloud technologies on top of your virtualized infrastructure at a much lower cost of entry, than if you were to just expand utilizing the islands of bills of test, dev environment, by application, by project.

Gardner: I'd like to hear more about Agilysys? What is your organization and what is your role there as a technology leader?

You can deploy private cloud technologies on top of your virtualized infrastructure at a much lower cost of entry.



Patel: I am the technology leader for cloud services across the US and UK. Agilysys is a value-added reseller, as well as a system integrator and professional services organization that services enterprises from Wall Street to manufacturing to retail to service providers, and telecom companies.

Gardner: And do you agree, Ajay, with Forrester Research and IDC, when they show such massive growth, do you really expect that cloud, private cloud, and hybrid cloud are all going to be in such rapid growth over the next several years?

Patel: Absolutely. The only difference between a private cloud and public cloud, based on what I'm seeing out there, is the fear of bridging that gap between what the end-user attains via private cloud being inside their four walled data center, to how the public cloud provides the ability for the end-user to have security and the comfort level that their data is secure. So, absolutely, private to hybrid to public is definitely the way the industry is going to go.

Gardner: Jay at Platform, I'm thinking about myths that have to do with adoption, different business units getting involved, lack of control, and cohesive policy. This is probably what keeps a lot of CIOs up at night, thinking that it’s the Wild West and everyone is running off and doing their own thing with IT. How is that a myth and what does a private cloud infrastructure allow that would mitigate that sense of a lot of loose cannons?

Muelhoefer: That’s a key issue when we start thinking about how our customers look to private cloud. It comes back a little bit to the definition that Rick mentioned. Does virtualization equal private cloud -- yes or no? Our customers are asking for the end-user organizations to be able to access their IT services through a self-service portal.

But a private cloud isn’t just virtualization, nor is it one virtualization vendor. It’s a diverse set of services that need to be delivered in a highly automated fashion. Because it's not just one virtualization, it's going to be VMware, KVM, Xen, etc.

A lot of our customers also have physical provisioning requirements, because not all applications are going to be virtualized. People do want to tap in to external cloud resources as they need to, when the costs and the security and compliance requirements are right. That's the concept of the hybrid cloud, as Ajay mentioned. We're definitely in agreement. You need to be able to support all of those, bring them together in a highly orchestrated fashion, and deliver them to the right people in a secure and compliant manner.

The challenge is that each business unit inside of the company typically doesn’t want to give up control. They each have their own IT silos today that meet their needs, and they are highly over provisioned.

Some of those can be at 5 to 10 percent utilization, when you measure it over time, because they have to provision everything for peak demands. And, because you have such a low utilization, people are looking at how to increase that utilization metric and also increase the number of servers that are managed by each administrator.

You need to find a way to get all the business units to consolidate all these underutilized resources. By pooling, you could actually get effects just like when you have a portfolio of stocks. You're going to have a different demand curve by each of the different business units and how they can all benefit. When one business unit needs a lot, they can access the pool when another business unit might be low.

You need to find a way to get all the business units to consolidate all these underutilized resources.



But, the big issue is how you can do that without businesses feeling like they're giving up that control to some other external unit, whether it's a centralized IT within a company, or an external service provider? In our case, a lot of our customers, because of the compliance and security issues, very much want to keep it within their four walls at this stage in the evolution of the cloud marketplace.

So, it’s all about providing that flexibility and openness to allow business units to consolidate, but not giving up that control and providing a very flexible administrative capability. That’s something that we've spent the last several years building for our customers.

It’s all about being able to support that heterogeneous environment, because every business unit is going to be a little different and is going to have different needs. Allowing them to have control, but within a defined boundaries, you could have centralized cloud control, where you give them their resources and quotas for what they're initially provisioned for, and you could support costing and charge back, and provide a lot more visibility in to what’s happening.

You get all of that centralized efficiency that Ajay mentioned, but also having a centralized organization that knows how to run a larger scale environment. But then, each of the business units can go in and do their own customized self-service portal and get access to IT services, whether it's a simple OS or a VM or a way to provision a complex multi-tier application in minutes, and have that be an automated process. That’s how you get a lot of the cost efficiencies and the scale that you want out of a cloud environment.

Gardner: And, for those business units, they'd also have to watch the cost and maybe have their own P&L. They might start seeing their IT costs as a shared services or charge-backs, get out of the capital expense business, and so it could actually help them in their business when it comes to cost.

Get a complimentary copy of the Forrester Private Cloud Market Overview from Platform Computing

Still in evolution

Muelhoefer: Correct. Most of our customers today are very much still in evolution. The whole trend towards more visibility is there, because you're going to need it for compliance, whether it’s Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) or ITIL reporting.

Ultimately, the business units of IT are going to get sophisticated enough that they can move from being a cost center to a value-added service center. Then, they can start doing that granular charge-back reporting and actually show at a much more fine level the value that they are adding to the organization.

Parker: Different departments, by combining their IT budgets and going with a single private cloud infrastructure, can get a much more reliable infrastructure. By combining budgets, they can afford SAN storage and a virtual infrastructure that supports live VMotion.

They get a fast response, because by putting a cloud management application like Platform on top it, they have much more control, because we are providing the interface to the different departments. They can set up servers themselves and manage their own servers. They have a much faster "IT response time,” so they don’t really have to wait for IT’s response through a help desk system that might take days to add memory to a server.

IT gives end-users more control by providing a cloud management application and also gives them a much more reliable, manageable system. We've been running a private cloud here at Fetch for three years now, and we've seen this. This isn’t some pie-in-the-sky kind of thing. This is, in fact, what we have seen and proven over and over.

They have a much faster "IT response time,” so they don’t really have to wait for IT’s response through a help desk system that might take days to add memory to a server.



Gardner: I asked both Ajay and Rick to tell us about their companies. Jay, why don’t you give us the overview of Platform Computing?

Muelhoefer: Platform Computing is headquartered in Toronto, Canada and it's about an 18-year-old company. We have over 2,000 customers, and they're spread out on a global basis.

We have a couple of different business units. One is enterprise analytics. Second, is cloud, and the third is HPC grids and clusters. Within the cloud space, we offer a cloud management solution for medium and large enterprises to build and manage private and hybrid cloud environments.

The Platform cloud software is called Platform ISF. It's all about providing the self-service capability to end-users to access this diverse set of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and providing the automation, so that you can get the efficiencies and the benefits out of a cloud environment.

Gardner: Rick, let’s go back to you. I've heard this myth that private clouds are just for development, test, and quality assurance (QA). Is cloud really formed by developers and it’s being getting too much notoriety, or is there something else going that it’s for test, dev, and a whole lot more?

Beginning of the myth

Parker: I believe that myth just came from the initial availability of VMware and that’s what it was primarily used for. That’s the beginning of that myth.

My experience is that our private cloud isn't a specific use-case. A well designed private cloud should and can support any use case. We have a private cloud infrastructure and on top of this infrastructure, we can deliver development resources and test resources and QA resources, but they're all sitting on top of a base infrastructure of a private cloud.

But, there isn't just a single use case. It’s detrimental to define use cases for private cloud. I don't recommend setting up a private cloud for dev only, another separate private cloud for test, another separate private cloud for QA. That’s where a use case mentality gets into it. You start developing multiple private clouds.

If you combine those resources and develop a single private cloud, that lets you divide up the resources within the infrastructure to support the different requirements. So, it’s really backward thinking, counter-intuitive, to try to define use cases for private cloud.

We run everything on our private cloud. Our goal is 100 percent virtualization of all servers, of running everything on our private cloud. That includes back-office corporate IT, Microsoft Exchange services like domain controllers, SharePoint, and all of these systems run on top of our private cloud out of our data centers.

We don't have any of these systems running out of an office, because we want the reliability that the cost savings that our private cloud gives us to deploy these applications on servers in the data center where these systems belong.

Muelhoefer: Some of that myth is maybe because the original evolution of clouds started out in the area of very transient workloads. By transient, I mean like a demonstration environments. or somebody that just needs to do a development environment for a day or two. But we've seen a transition across our customers, where they also have these longer-running applications that they're putting in the production type of environments, and they don't want to have to over-provision them.

At the end of the quarter, you need to have a certain capacity of 10 units, you don’t want to have that 10 units throughout the entire quarter as resource-hogs. You want to be able to flex up and flex down according to the requirements and the demand on it. Flexing requires a different set of technology capabilities, having the right sets of business policies and defining your applications so they can dynamically scale. I think that’s one of the next frontiers in the world of cloud.

We've seen with our customers that there is a move toward different application architectures that can take advantage of that flexing capability in Web applications and Java applications. They're very much in that domain, and we see that the next round of benefits is going to come from the production environments. But it does require you to have a solid infrastructure that knows how to dynamically manage flexing over time.

It’s going to be a great opportunity for additional benefits, but as Rick said, you don't want to build cloud silos. You don't want to have one for dev, one for QA, one for help desk. You really need a platform that can support all of those, so you get the benefits of the pooling. It's more than just virtualization. We have customers that are heavily VMware-centric. They can be highly virtualized, 60 percent-plus virtualized, but the utilization isn’t where they need it to be. And it's all about how can you bring that automation and control into that environment.

Gardner: Next myth, it goes to Ajay. This is what I hear more than almost any other: "There is no cost justification. The cloud is going to cost the same or even more. Why is that cynicism unjustified?

Patel: One of the main things that proves to be untrue is that when you build a private cloud, you're pulling in the capabilities of the IT technology that is building the individual islands of environments. On top of it, you're increasing utilization. Today, in the industry, I believe the overall virtualization is less than 40 percent. If you think about it, taking the less-than-40 percent virtualized environment, the remaining is 60 percent.

Even if you take 30 percent, which is average utilization -- 15-20 percent in the Windows environment. By putting it on a private cloud, you're increasing the utilization to 60 percent, 70 percent, 80 percent. If you can hit at 85 percent utilization of the resources, now you are buying that much less of every piece of hardware, software, storage, and network.

You put the right infrastructure in place with the ability to service your business, what you do successfully



When you pool all the different projects together, you build an environment. You put the right infrastructure in place with the ability to service your business, what you do successfully. You end up saving minimally 20 percent, if you just keep the current service level agreements (SLAs) and current deliverables, the way you do today.

But, if you retrain your staff to become cloud administrators -- to essentially become more agile in the ability to create the workloads that are virtual-capable versus standalone-capable -- you get much more benefit, and your cost of entry is minimally 20-30 percent lower on day one. Going forward, you can get more than 50 percent lower cost.

[Private cloud] is killing two birds with one stone, because not only can you re-utilize your elasticity of a 100,000 square-foot facility of data center, but you can now put in 2-3 times more compute capacity without breaking the barriers of the power, cooling, heating, and all the other components. And by having cloud within your data center, now the disaster-recovery capabilities of cloud failover is inherent in the framework of cloud.

You no longer have to worry about individual application-based failover. Now, you're looking at failing over an infrastructure instead of applications. And, of course, the framework of cloud itself gives you a much higher availability from the perspective of hardware up-time and the SLAs than you can obtain by individually building sets of servers with test, dev, QA, or production.

Days to hours

Operationally beyond the initial set up of the private cloud environment, the cost to IT, in an environment and the IT budget goes down drastically on the scale based on our interaction to end-users and our cloud providers is anywhere from 11 days to 15 days down to 3-4 hours.

This means that the hardware is sitting on the dock in the old infrastructure deployment model, versus the cloud model. And when you take three to four hours down into individual components it takes one to two to three days to build the server, rack it, power it, connect it.

It takes 10 minutes today within the private cloud environment to install the operating system. It used to take one to two days, maybe two-and-a-half days, depending on the patches and the add-ons. It takes 30 to 60 minutes starting with a template that is available within private cloud and then setting up the dev environments at the application layer, goes down from days down to 30 minutes.

When you combine all that, the operational efficiency you gain definitely puts your IT staff at a much greater advantage than your competitor.

Gardner: Ajay just pointed out that there is perhaps a business continuity benefit here. If your cloud is supporting infrastructure, rather than individual apps, you can have failover, reliability, redundancy, and disaster recovery at that infrastructure level. Therefore, having it across the board.

In most cases, a number of the components of a private cloud is just redeployed existing hardware, because the cloud network is more of a configuration than the specific cloud hardware.



What's the business continuity story and does that perhaps provide a stepping stone to hybrid types of computing models?

Parker: To backtrack just a little bit, at Fetch Technologies, we've cut our data-center cost in half by switching to a private cloud. That's just one of the cost benefits that we've experienced.

Going back to the private cloud cost, one of the myths is that you have to buy a whole new set of cloud technology, cloud hardware, to create a private cloud. That's not true. In most cases, a number of the components of a private cloud is just redeployed existing hardware, because the cloud network is more of a configuration than the specific cloud hardware.

In other words, you can reconfigure existing hardware into a private cloud. You don't necessarily need to buy, and there is really no such thing as specific cloud hardware. There are some hardware systems and models that are more optimal in a private cloud environment, but that doesn't necessarily mean you need to buy them to start. You get some initial cost savings, do virtualization to pay for maybe more optimal hardware, but you don't have to start with the most optimal hardware to build a private cloud.

As far as the business continuity, what we've found is that the benefit is more for up-time maintenance than it is for reliability, because most systems are fairly reliable. You don't have servers failing on a day-to-day basis.

Zero downtime

We have systems, at least one server, that's been up for two years with zero downtime. For updating firmware, we can VMotion servers and virtual machines off to other hosts, upgrade the host, and then VMotion those virtual servers back on to the upgraded host so we have a zero downtime maintenance. That's almost more important than reliability, because reliability is generally fairly good.

Gardner: Is there another underlying value here that by moving to private cloud, it puts you in a better position to start leveraging hybrid cloud, that is to say more SaaS or using third-party clouds for specific IaaS and/or maybe perhaps over time moving part of your cloud into their cloud.

Is there a benefit in terms of getting expertise around private cloud that sets you up to be in a better position to enjoy some of the benefits of the more expensive cloud models?

We offer a way to provide a unified view of all your IT service usage, whether it's inside your company being serviced through your internal organization or potentially sourced through an external cloud.



Muelhoefer: That's a really interesting question, because one of the main reasons that a lot of our early customers came to us was because there was uncontrolled use of external cloud resources. If you're a financial services company or somebody else who has compliance and security issues and you have people going out and using external clouds and you have no visibility into that, it's pretty scary.

We offer a way to provide a unified view of all your IT service usage, whether it's inside your company being serviced through your internal organization or potentially sourced through an external cloud that people may be using as part of their overall IT footprint. It's really the ability to synthesize and figure out -- if an end user is making a request, what's the most efficient way to service that request?

Is it to serve up something internally or externally, based upon the business policies? Is it using very specific customer data that can't go outside the organization? Does it have to use a certain type of application that goes with it where there's a latency issue about how it's served, and being able to provide a lot of business policy context about how to best serve that whether it's a cost, compliance, or security type of objective that you’re going against?

That’s one key thing. Another important aspect we do see in our customers is the disaster recovery and reliability issue is very important. We've been working with a lot of our larger customers to develop a unique ability to do Active/Active failover. We actually have customers that have applications that are running real-time across multiple data centers.

So, in the case of not just the application going down, but an entire data center going down, they would have no loss of continuity of those resources. That’s a pretty extreme example, but it goes to the point of how important meeting some of those metrics are for businesses and making that cost justification.

Stepping stone

Gardner: We started out with some cynicism, risk, and myths, but it sounds like private clouds are a stepping stone, but at the same time, they are attainable. The cost structure sounds very attractive, certainly based on Rick and Ajay’s experiences.

Jay, where do you start with your customers for Platform ISF, when it comes to ease of deployment? Where do you start that conversation? I imagine that they are concerned about where to start. There is a big set of things to do when it comes to moving towards virtualization and then into private cloud. How do you get them on a path where it seems manageable?

Muelhoefer: We like to engage with the customer and understand what their objectives are and what's bringing them to look at private cloud. Is it the ability to be a lot more agile to deliver applications in minutes to end users or is it more on the cost side or is it a mix between the two? It's engaging with them on a one-on-one basis and/or working with partners like Agilysys where we can build out that roadmap for success and that typically involves understanding their requirements and doing a proof of concept.

Something that’s very important to building the business case for private cloud is to actually get it installed and working within your own environment. Look at what types of processes you're going to be modifying in addition to the technologies that you’re going to be implementing, so that you can achieve the right set of pooling.

Something that’s very important to building the business case for private cloud is to actually get it installed and working within your own environment.



You’re a very VMware-centric shop, but you don’t want to be locked into VMware. You want to look at KVM or Xen for non-production-type use cases and what you’re doing there. Are you looking at how can you make yourself more flexible and leverage those external cloud resources? How can you bring physical into the cloud and do it at the right price point?

A lot of people are looking at the licensing issue of cloud, and there are a lot of different alternatives, whether it's per VM, which is quite expensive, or other alternatives like per socket and helping build out that value roadmap over time.

For us, we have a free trial on our website that people can use. They can also go to our website to learn more which is http://www.platform.com/privatecloud. We definitely encourage people to take a look at us. We were recently named the number one private cloud management vendor by Forrester Research. We are always happy to engage with companies that want to learn more about private cloud.

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