How the Enterprise Cloud Will Affect the Datacenter

There are a variety of applications that support numerous business lines across an enterprise. These applications exhibit a wide range of operational characteristics as they service the diverse business demands. That diversity is the key to business success, but it has consequences. Ask an enterprise application architect about how IT should run a data center and you will find that the range of behaviours exhibited across the portfolio of applications cannot be run on one set of standard platform configurations. Most critical applications have extreme operational requirements that require specialised adjustments to operating environments.

Ask any data center manager about accommodating those different application behaviours and they will tell you the proliferation of platforms makes it impossible to contain costs, manage complexity or maintain reliability, especially for those critical applications.

Ask any business executive about how business is running and they will tell you that applications cost too much to develop, run and maintain. They cannot correlate growth to investment in IT.

Offering IT as a service requires a paradigm shift in technology, operational processes and thinking about how business demand – manifested by applications – affects the use of all data center resources. Enterprise Cloud Computing enables IT as a service and is the next phase in data center evolution to solve this spiralling dilemma. The question is, how does business successfully operate this expensive investment?

ENTERPRISE CLOUD IN BRIEF

The Enterprise Cloud combines a series of evolving and maturing technologies with associated techniques that make it easier to leverage the power of distributed processing while minimising the complexity and difficulty associated with such distribution. The location of compute, network and storage resources required to operate applications becomes transparent through virtualisation and dynamic allocation. Applications are serviced by pools of infrastructure services that do not have to be dedicated to an application. This fluidity is supported by advances in resource monitoring, advanced security and faster networking. The promise of cloud computing is providing significantly improved user experience, while balancing cost and efficiency – three critical pillars that must be satisfied for a business to succeed. But IT promises rarely live up to the hype, and the reason is simple: IT typically builds such projects with little input from the business on growth and general usage.

The cloud, even with all its new technologies, is not magic. It is an operating environment that needs to be designed to perform optimally. The design must start top-down, with business requirements taking into account:

• How the business operates;
• What are the peaks, cycles and key operating drivers; and
• How vital is availability, or processing massive throughput?

The typical IT response has been to design from the bottom up. In a sufficiently large enterprise, the answer will be yes for many requirements questions, but not for all the applications, nor for all lines of business. In the absence of that knowledge, the answer has been to design from the bottom up, resulting in an overengineered operating platform, which increases cost and complexity while causing data center sprawl to swell, thus reducing reliability.