Is Virtualization the "Cloud" of the Enterprise? By John Suit published: Tuesday, August 12 2008
As virtualization expands its presence, today's IT services
are becoming more dynamic. With the
movement of mission critical applications into virtualized production
environments, the need for IT organizations to develop a comprehensive plan to analyze
the discovery, assessment and control related dynamics of a virtual
infrastructure is taking on greater importance.
Recent surveys from leading analyst firms, such as Gartner,
EMA, Aberdeen
and others, have highlighted the drivers for virtualization adoption-showing
that organizational needs are maturing from tactical to strategic. While server consolidation and improved
hardware utilization are still top of mind, initiatives that support the
delivery of quality service levels, such as reducing downtime, enabling
disaster recovery and increasing flexibility, are now strategic goals of
enterprises adopting virtualization.
As the market evolves, legacy concepts are reemerging for
many major infrastructure providers.
Some call it "cloud computing."
Others call it "dynamic IT."
Regardless of the label, policy-based automation is playing a central
role in the future of the data center.
Dynamic IT is a concept of accessing resources and services
needed to perform functions that have constantly changing needs. The concept is not new-it is framed around the need for requests
to be delivered to a mesh infrastructure (a cloud) rather than a specific
endpoint or named resource. In a world where dynamic IT exists, requests are
presented into an architecture that manages multiple infrastructures across
multiple organizations and consists of policy-based management frameworks that
provide the mechanism for automation and control, including:
- Policy-based service levels
- Automated enforcement and reconfiguration
With the resurgence of dynamic IT as a vision for the data
center of tomorrow, the need for centralized, policy-based automation is
becoming a key theme for maintaining and managing the infrastructure.
Today, enterprise IT departments have adopted the idea of
using service level agreements (SLAs) to measure the delivered quality of
service to an organization. In the
virtualization space, these same service level metrics are being developed based
on business requirements. When considering virtualization SLAs and the concept
of dynamic IT, it is important to include measurable requirements that can be
used to track the performance of the IT department. In an environment where automation is driven
by centralized, policy-based management, it is important to develop and
categorize areas for discovery, assessment and enforcement that encompass both
traditional and non-traditional aspects of IT Operations Management.
As virtualization permeates more and more of the
infrastructure, policy-based automation will continue to expand its presence
within many of the major areas of management, including change management,
configuration management, performance management and IT security management. Long term, the viability of effectively
supporting service delivery in a highly dynamic environment depends upon
incorporating centralized, policy-based management.
Policy-Based
Management and Dynamic IT
Policy-based management in the virtualized infrastructure is
an approach that is used to simplify and automate the management of the
environment by establishing policies to deal with situations that are likely to
occur. Policies are operating rules that are derived out of internal or
external best practices that can be leveraged as a means of maintaining consistency
and control to support corporate initiatives.
Policy-based management is being used today to automate the critical operations
of an efficient computing environment in those data centers where
virtualization technologies are already deployed.
As the data center drives to support the vision of cloud
computing and "Dynamic IT" becomes more pervasive, organizations will increasingly rely on automation to
support service levels through policies that are clearly defined,
maintained and enforced.
When considering the complexity of managing thousands of
virtualized elements-including servers, desktops and applications-policy-based
management enables IT to support enterprise-wide tasks, such as change and
configuration management, in a centralized manner. With the approach of policy-based automation,
the resources and time required to administer the infrastructure becomes
greatly reduced. As IT continues to work closely with executive
management to meet the demands of a rapidly changing business environment, they
will need to leverage automation products that help the IT infrastructure
deliver highly efficient, on-demand services.
Related Links:
Fortisphere , Cloud Computing: The Perfect Storm
John founded Fortisphere in 2006 and is responsible for
developing the core technology behind the Fortisphere product suite. He brings
more than 19 years of experience in architecting and leading both start-ups and
publicly held technology companies. Prior to founding Fortisphere, John was the
founder and CTO of SilentRunner, a successful company that was acquired by
Computer Associates. John has held several leadership positions at both vice
president and CTO levels, and he has invented and launched countless new
products in the security space. John continues to advise the Department of
Defense and Directorate of Central Intelligence in the areas of virtualization
security and management as well as information operations.
John holds five U.S. and
International Patents in Information Security Analysis and has a B.Sc. in
Computer Science and Information System Management from the University of Maryland.
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