Posts tagged ‘virtualization’
The Oscars of Private Cloud Management
By Russell Rothstein
March 7, 2010
It was fun to watch the Academy Awards this year – a glitzy evening replete with glamorous movie stars, stylish attire, and most importantly to those of us from the software industry, totally cool computer-generated characters. (Unless you preferred to spend the evening watching your favorite Super Bowl commercial for the umpteenth time or the latest OK Go video instead.) It’s a night where aspiring actors and screenwriters silently wish that next year they’ll get that break to make it to the Oscars, and we wish we had taken that extra course in computer graphics in college, observing the box-office proceeds from Avatar and Alice in Wonderland.
And while OpTier won’t be releasing a 3-D feature film any time soon, we do believe a multi-dimensional approach is critical to that new genre of enterprise IT service management – managing private clouds. Private clouds are becoming more pervasive – according to Gartner, by 2012 enterprises will spend more than half of their cloud dollars on private cloud services because of improvements in cost and management efficiency.
OpTier BTM provides performance management, resource management, and cost-based accounting for private clouds
That’s where the 3-D approach comes in. Some enterprises erroneously assume that since virtualization is the enabling technology for clouds, then virtualization-centric management systems are sufficient for managing cloud-based services. In effect, they are extending the flawed silo-based APM approach to IT management by applying another one-dimensional toolset to manage virtual hosts and guests in the cloud. (It’s no surprise that in these cases, when a performance issue occurs in the cloud – everyone first blames the “VM guy”.)
OpTier takes a multi-dimensional approach to the cloud. In order to provide true end-to-end service management in the cloud, you need to include visibility into both virtual and physical metrics. Only with a business transactional-based approach do you have 3-D visibility to cover the three key dimensions of transactions that flow through the cloud:
- Time per transaction (i.e. cloud performance management)
- Resource utilization per transaction (i.e. cloud capacity management)
- Cost per transaction (i.e. chargeback and activity-based costing for the cloud)
Frost and Sullivan found that two of the top three concerns about cloud are loss of control and availability. OpTier’s business transaction management approach to private clouds is the most efficient manner to address these concerns – enabling organizations to take control and assure 24/7 availability of services in the cloud.
So the OpTier 3-D feature film may be off in the future, but for some time already, OpTier customers have been using OpTier BTM’s 3-dimensional approach to manage services in the cloud on a daily basis. Now that’s worth an Oscar speech.
Virtualized in Vancouver
By Russell Rothstein
February 22, 2010
We’re fascinated by what’s going on in Vancouver this month. Sure, there’s a lot of drama, action and suspense going on over at the Winter Olympics (such as the valiant efforts of the Jamaican Freestyle Skier to be the first to restore the pride of winter sports to his homeland since the 1988 Jamaican Bobsled team) but we’re even more intrigued by the less mesomorphic young singles cross-town in Vancouver engaging their social skills in a flittering party – flirting virtually with one another through the twitter platform.
For those of you not previously familiar with flittering, it means sending a flirtatious tweet to someone that interests you in the room. And while having the option of flirting online is generally a good thing as it provides a new way for people to find their match, it presents a management challenge – keeping up with the fast pace of the tweets and achieving the visibility to link the virtual (witty tweets) with the physical (cute guy or gal – hopefully).
We find these issues remarkably similar to the management challenges companies face when deploying virtualization. While virtualization presents huge benefits in efficiency gains, it also creates three application management challenges:
- Lost Visibility: Applications become more difficult to manage because virtualization masks the underlying infrastructure layers. It becomes difficult to isolate the problematic tier when a problem occurs, or even understand that a problem is starting to occur before users are impacted. Likewise, it is difficult to determine the impact of VM changes on performance.
- Dynamic Environment: If becomes difficult to keep up with speed of changes in virtual infrastructure. As the folks at EMC call it – “VMotion Sickness”. Then when application performance begins to degrade, people tend to first blame the VM administrator, even if the problem lies elsewhere.
- Overprovisioning: Due to lack of visibility, enterprises often overprovision infrastructure in order to assure performance. Overprovisioning physical hosts (e.g. extra CPU) reduces the cost savings of virtualization.
Virtualization-aware Business Transaction Management addresses these challenges. With OpTier BTM you can regain the visibility lost from virtualization, keep up with changing VMs, and rightsize to maximize cost efficiencies. And while that last sentence would fit into a 140-character tweet, we’re not sure it would get us any dates at the next flittering party.
February 22, 2010 at 2:14 pm Russell Rothstein Leave a comment
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