Q&A with Charles Rich of Nastel

VSM: There is a lot of talk about cloud computing and the benefits it can provide an enterprise. To start, what are your thoughts around cloud computing and why is it beneficial for companies to utilize it?

CR: In many ways, cloud computing can be considered more of a business model change than a technology change.  The change is in paying for value received rather than the cost of implementing a service.  The business drivers include consolidation, the need to move capital expenditures to operational ones and to improve ease of use and configuration. All of these are beneficial in that they save the enterprise money. Clouds come in many flavors including private clouds, public clouds and even virtual private clouds. Cloud service providers configure these services in many ways including software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), as well as others.

Offtimes, virtualization and cloud computing are used interchangeably; however, they are very different.  Virtualization enables you to run multiple computer systems on one physical server. Cloud computing may utilize virtualization; however, it in itself is a service with a subscription based pricing model that happens to use virtualization. Many large enterprises have completed or are in the process of turning their datacenters into private clouds by utilizing virtualization, metering and chargeback. In this way they are wrapping the datacenter as a service and charging the individual business units and partners for its usage as a service.

Businesses use cloud computing services similarly to the way they used managed service providers (MSPs).  One of the big technical differences is elasticity. Elasticity is the capability to enable applications to utilize more resources when they need them and less when they don’t. This automatic technical capability is a huge advance over the MSP model where specific servers, memory, disk and CPU are set up for the enterprise, whether they fully utilize them or not.

However, there is a hidden cost of the tremendous ease of use and elasticity of the cloud. The user’s simplicity becomes IT’s complexity. Often left out of the articles on cloud is the issue of monitoring. Now that my application, middleware and transactions can dynamically be relocated to many more places, the need for visibility in problem management becomes far greater.

VSM: How is an enterprise’s IT department impacted by the move to the cloud?

CR: In private cloud environments, as mentioned before, the enterprise’s IT department needs to manage the complexity of the cloud. The cost of simplicity is complexity and it is IT’s job to hide this complexity and provide assurance that all is well. They need to monitor applications and maintain high levels of availability and performance. In order to do that they need deep-dive visibility into their applications, the middleware that interconnects them and the transactions they invoke. Many applications when moved to the cloud will ease IT’s load as it will be the cloud service provider’s job to ensure application performance. However, not all applications will go to the cloud and it will be a gradual process. In the meantime, IT will live in a hybrid world and will still need 360° situational awareness in order to prevent the impact of problems on end users and resolve issues before they cascade into bigger problems. As these applications can now span the datacenter, the cloud and even trading partner sites, the challenge in monitoring this becomes still greater.