IT Management 2.0

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Onward and Upward - Journey to the Cloud!

September 3rd, 2009

Management, vClouds and IaaS - Musings from VMworld

From where I sit in sessions at VMworld, at our EMC Ionix booth, and from

VMWorld: Sunny with a Chance of -- CLOUD!

talking to customers/industry analysts/fellow vendors - not to mention the lady who sold me a bottle of water for $3.50!!! - it looks like IT management is creating another barrier to adoption, this time around the cloud. There seems to be a general bemoaning of the fact - with surveys to back it up - about the lack of tools that are really helping customers migrate with confidence to the cloud.

BUT GO THERE WE MUST!!!

At a session on Wednesday morning, VMware and supporting partners (Hosting.com, Verizon, Savvis, Colt Telecom, and AT&T) all spoke about their cloud offerings, the use cases and challenges they see in helping customers make the move.

VMware announced vCloud Express to “deliver on-demand, pay-as-you-go Infrastructures as a Service” (IaaS). These services are being rolled out on new infrastructures from today’s leading vendors, including EMC.

The bottom line is that the unified infrastructure vision around storage, network, compute, and virtualization rolling out as a service is breaking through.

NOW…Comes the hard part!!!

Migrating Applications to the Cloud - Step 1

You can’t migrate what you don’t know. A great quote at today’s session came from Hosting.com about the first thing they have to do now before every migration - map application dependencies! Because some apps are good candidates to move, and some - with complex interdependencies - are not, or not yet.

This dovetails right on top of our enhanced candidate selection service announced this week that utilizes Ionix Application Discovery Manager, vCenter AppSpeed and VMware Capacity Planner.

Speaking of Application Performance

As you map, you better benchmark performance, too - one of the reasons we’re now reselling vCenter AppSpeed as part of our Ionix portfolio. Know what you have and know how it performs - before you migrate.

Optimize What You Provision

SLAs across the IaaS demarcation or demarc line need to include application response time, no doubt. Analysts and vendors are also talking now about the concept of “Infrastructure Response Time” (IRT) that will be instrumental in managing the unified infrastructure. But besides measure what you - as a user - are getting across the IaaS demarc, the next wave is to optimize WHAT you’re putting INTO the infrastructure.

That’s where FastScale comes in (just acquired into the EMC Ionix portfolio) - by removing unnecessary interfaces, libraries, files and executables you end up with smaller server builds - for improved resource-efficiency, fewer components to update - reducing management effort, and removal of vulnerable components - decreasing security risks!

Cloud Management - Get You Apps and IT Tools in Order

By having your management house in order - with practical application management tools for dependecy mapping, performance management, and stack optimization - you’re much more ready to throw your application across the IaaS line of demarcation with confidence.

Now, THAT’S an express lane to the cloud!!!

I’d like hear your thoughts,

Bob Quillin

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