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Achieving IT Agility with Self-Service, Automation and Cloud

In most IT organizations, the service delivery process for infrastructure and business service requests is complex and expensive. When application developers or project managers request a new data center service (e.g. host a new application), each request is treated as a one-off projecteven if that same request is made dozens or hundreds of times. Whether the application is mission critical or notwhether for development, testing, or productionthis traditional process is cumbersome, manual, inconsistent, slow and painful. Each request usually comes with custom requirements, requiring approvals and exceptions. It starts with an inefficient and time-consuming series of manual steps, involving back-and-forth clarification and requirements validation among architects and engineers. Once the specifications have been agreed upon, IT then jumps into action, getting approvals for purchases; buying and provisioning hardware; buying and ordering software licenses; constructing systems; resolving dependencies; configuring network resources; installing, testing, and deploying applications and business services. Virtual machines are less costly and faster to provision than physical servers, but virtualization technology alone doesn't solve the problem. In a well-run organization, IT can complete this overall process in a matter of weeks. But weeks is simply not good enough. These long cycle times exacerbate the tension between application development and data center teamsand result in costly delays for new projects and business initiatives. With providers like Amazon EC2 offering cloud computing within minutes for pennies per hour, business and project leaders ask,why does IT take so long and cost so much? This calls for an IT transformationfrom bottleneck to business enabler. The rise of public cloud services such as Amazon EC2 has provided an example for what is possibleand an example for what enterprise IT must become. IT organizations that fail to make this transformation will lose control as rogue workloads leak into the public cloud, following the path of least resistance. Enterprise IT organizations can make the transformation, becoming a simple, on-demand provider of IT capacity, infrastructure and business services by combining a self-service catalog of standard offerings with automation and private cloud infrastructure. And by controlling access to public cloud resources, a hybrid cloud model can deliver the capacity and cost-efficiency benefits of a public cloud for certain workloads while ensuring enterprise-class security and governance. The combination is the new platform for IT agility: Controlled, consistent services and compute capacity available on-demand for business project owners, application development and testing groups.

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IT can step out of the way, focus on higher-value tasks, and free up budget for innovation. Together, newScale, rPath and Eucalyptus deliver this platform for IT agility. There are three key foundations to this platform: self-service, automation and elasticity.

Figure 1: newScale, rPath and Eucalyptus deliver the foundation of IT agility.

Self-ServiceOn-Demand Provisioning from a Menu of Options

The first step in IT agility is enabling self-service from a catalog of standardized service packages. This Service Catalog empowers users to serve themselves by choosing from a Web-based menu of standard offerings, with automated fulfillment and tracking initiated from a self-service storefront. Consider that public cloud providers like Amazon EC2 offer a self-service portal with standard options, pricing, online ordering, tracking, and billing. These capabilities are equally important for IT agility within the enterprise, and it is the service catalog that defines standardized offerings, communicates pricing options for different tiers of service, provides an easy-to-use interface for self-service, initiates automated provisioning, tracks the lifecycle of the service, and captures demand data for consumption-based cost allocation. Some organizations are beginning to adopt hybrid cloud environments that combine services from both public and private clouds. These organizations will strive to implement the optimal combination based on their specific needs and resources. A service catalog can provide the policy and governance controls to manage requests for both internal IT and public cloud services, providing guidance and comparisons to drive the right decisions while reducing risk. This same catalog can be used to manage requests for ITs physical server infrastructure, while steering demand toward lower cost virtual or cloud computing options when appropriate.

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Screenshot: newScale provides a self-service IT storefront where users can order what they need from a menu of standard options

The newScale software solution helps IT deliver more cost-effective, responsive and cloud-like data center operations: Define and publish standardized infrastructure offerings in a service catalog; Enable self-service with an easy-to-use "e-commerce" ordering experience; Govern approvals and orchestrate the end-to-end provisioning process; Ensure operational compliance and track the lifecycle for workloads; Manage consumption and costs, with visibility to enable pay-per-use billing.

With self-service through a newScale Service Catalog, IT organizations can drive adoption of standard service options and eliminate the expensive back-and-forth requirements gathering process. It provides a key component of an IT agility platform for delivering on-demand IT services, shortening the time-consuming traditional IT service delivery process outlined above by 90 percent or more.

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AutomationThe Software Distribution Hub
rPath is a next-generation system automation solution that provides a unique approach to automating the construction, deployment and maintenance of software systems across physical, virtual and cloudbased environments. For enterprise IT organizations, rPath can: Accelerate IT reducing deployment cycles from weeks to minutes Reduce cost improving system-to-admin ratio by 6-10X Mitigate risk for auditable, controlled and compliant software systems rPath is a model-driven and version-controlled solution for system automation. Based on a versioncontrolled repository, rPath acts as a software distribution hub for controlled reuse of application, OS, middleware and other system artifacts. From this hub, version controlled system components can be reused (directly from rPath or by populating a service catalog) to construct new systems and business services that are consistent, compliant and dependency complete. These business services are ready to deploy to any physical, virtual or cloud environment and theyre easy to update, patch, roll back or regenerate automatically and on demand. These centrally managed system components are integrated back through their software supply chaincustom, commercial, and open source. As changes are made to these software sources, they can be easily flowed through rPath and propagated across deployed systems and business services. rPath automates four key functions for IT system deployment and maintenance: 1. 2. 3. 4. Automated generation of images for rapid deployment to physical, virtual or cloud targets Automated updates and rollbacks Compliance reporting and remediation Controlled lifecycle promotion

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ElasticityThe Hybrid Cloud
Eucalyptus Systems is a software framework for implementing a private cloud platform using an organizations own information technology (IT) infrastructure, without special-purpose hardware or reconfiguration. Eucalyptus Systems turns data center resources such as machines, networks, and storage systems into a cloud that is controlled and customized by local IT. Eucalyptus Systems supports the same application programming interfaces (APIs) as public clouds, and today Eucalyptus Systems is fully compatible with the Amazon Web Services cloud service. For enterprise environments, a Eucalyptus Systems-based private cloud provides several important business benefits: Enables self-service provisioning of IT resources Manages diverse hypervisors and guest operating systems with one unified management interface Quickly and easily build hybrid clouds for cost-effective scale Auto-scale applications based on demand to internal and external resources

Eucalyptus Systems provides a unified management interface to diverse hypervisors, including KVM, Xen, and VMware ESX and ESXi. Data center virtualization environments can be managed using the same tools, processes, and techniques as public clouds, which allows the implementation of auto-scaling and hybrid clouds. Eucalyptus Systems also supports multiple guest operating systems for maximum flexibility when designing an application stack. Private and hybrid clouds can help you make more effective use of your existing IT resources and solve regulatory and compliance problems by keeping sensitive data inside the datacenter while maintaining elastic scale and self-service capabilities. In addition to the open source platform, Eucalyptus Systems also provides the Enterprise Edition. Eucalyptus Systems Enterprise Edition (EE) is built on top of the open-source core and adds enterpriselevel features such as robust user and group management, resource usage accounting and quotas, and auditing features. Also available are an integrated SAN adapter for large-scale and high-performance clouds, and support for Microsoft Windows guest operating systems.

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Joint Solution Benefits

newScale, rPath and Eucalyptus represent the new tool chain for IT agility, providing an end-to-end solution for self-service, automated and elastic IT. The combination of newScale, rPath and Eucalyptus provides a way to: Deliver a self-service storefront for enterprise IT services: A Web-based menu of standard options provides developers and other users with easy, yet controlled, access to the IT resources they need on-demandimproving user satisfaction with IT and eliminating costly delays to new application projects. Automate construction and deployment of business services: Build complete business services from scratch, with policy compliance, in minutes. Maintain one set of standardized system definitions, allowing lines of business to choose the best deployment target (physical, virtual or cloud) based on the requirements or policy constraints of the application. Establish an elastic computing environment for scale: Make more efficient use of computing capacity, increase productivity, deploy new applications faster, and protect sensitive data while achieving savings in capital expenditure.

Figure 2: newScale, rPath and Eucalyptus provide an end-to-end solution for self-service, automated and elastic IT.

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Together, newScale, rPath and Eucalyptus help organizations to: Dramatically reduce IT service delivery costs by making policy-compliant and ready-to-deploy service offerings available with an Amazon.com-like consumer experience; Achieve unprecedented agility and responsiveness by allowing business lines and development and test organizations to reuse centrally managed building blocks to create their own platforms, systems and business services; Dramatically reduce operating expense by automating the construction, deployment and maintenance of complete IT systemsfrom the business service through the operating system.

In this age of massive scale, accelerated change and expectations for zero-latency responsiveness, IT is forced to become agileparticularly with the added backdrop of contracting budgets and do-more-with-less mandates.

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About newScale
newScale, Inc. is the leading provider of IT Service Catalog software. With more than two million users worldwide, newScale helps IT organizations and service providers offer a self-service storefront for both workplace and data center servicesacross physical, virtual and cloud environments. newScale customersincluding 20 percent of the Fortune 50benefit from greater IT agility, increased user satisfaction, and tens of millions of dollars in savings. For more information, visit www.newscale.com.

About rPath
rPath is model-driven system automation and control for enterprise IT, ISVs and on-demand service providers. rPath uniquely provides full lifecycle management of software components, configured systems and orchestrated business services for rapid provisioning, conflict-free change, and consistent and compliant IT systems. rPath models and manages the entire software stack, from the application through the OS; and back through the software supply chain, from the deployed system to the source of software content and change. The result is a low-overhead solution for consistency and control in software systems construction, deployment and change across physical, virtual and cloud-based environments. Visit www.rpath.com

About Eucalyptus Systems

Eucalyptus Systems develops enterprise-grade technology solutions built on the open source Eucalyptus software for private and hybrid cloud computing. Originally developed as part of an academic research project, Eucalyptus technology is quickly becoming the standard for on-premise cloud computing, delivering the cost efficiencies and scalability of cloud architecture with the security and control of deploying on an organizations own IT infrastructure. Eucalyptus Systems mission is to support the open source Eucalyptus platform and to deliver private and hybrid cloud computing solutions for large-scale enterprise deployments. Visit www.eucalyptus.com.

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