Remember the days when you could look under the hood of your car when your check engine light went on? That feels like eons ago given that many of us have cars with start buttons to literally boot up the “computer.” The check engine light today means a mandatory visit to the service department of your dealer to run detail computer diagnostics to figure out if the problem is digital or mechanical. As a result, even simple problems come with timely and often costly resolution.
I find the check engine light analogy is a very useful one as I engage with my enterprise clients on the concept of the cloud. The parallels are there: two steps forward sometimes come with one step back. There are many strong business arguments for the cloud including economies of scale, but positive gains are soon lost when the cloud light pops on and there isn’t any good answer as to why. This problem will be even more acute as we start to migrate our real time communications and collaboration tools to the cloud. Even worse, what if the light doesn’t even go off and there is a performance issue with a critical application, video session or a C-level exec’s virtual desktop? Will we really need to bring experts in to diagnose the problem to find even the simplest of problems? As we continue to integrate things up and down the IT stack and then fully automate many of the manual tasks we do today, troubleshooting cloud problems will become more and more difficult. And, unfortunately, our “check cloud” light will be users complaining about performance issues leaving the IT department possibly fighting more fires than before. Sure the “old way” of running a data center was highly expensive, operationally intensive, wasted data center resources but at least IT had control over the environment.
I hate to be the grounded pragmatist while everyone has their heads up in the clouds (pardon the pun), but unlike most analysts I started my career working in internal IT for a financial services firm — I have seen with my own eyes how IT can shoot itself in the foot if it doesn’t look before it leaps (as I did several times). And as an analyst, I have heard horror stories from my clients stuck in dysfunctional outsourcing relationships because the outsourcer was all too happy to finger point back at internal IT. Am I calling the ethereal cloud, “outsourcing?” I am– because I think it frames the gravity of the conversation that IT must have with a prospective cloud provider.
Sure there are basic questions about security, data integrity, provisioning and so on, but they pale in comparison to knowing about the operational management and processes surrounding issues of performance and availability. And I can speak to my own canvassing of cloud providers that the answers are underwhelming when we get into a conversation about what they do when their cloud underperforms, or just isn’t there at all. That is because the performance management frameworks they have in place are inadequate for the cloud. Most of the current management tools were built for a different era of computing and if we’re going to move IT to the cloud, then our industry needs some better cloud management tools.
I find that most cloud provider has some kind of framework management solution that has modules or connectors that get performance information about the different infrastructure silos: e.g. server, network, storage and desktop (in the case of VDI). These modules worked fine when infrastructure was dedicated and fairly static, but are completely inadequate in an environment where all resources are shared and relationships to deliver services come together and disband at the drop of a hat. Add to that the concept of workload mobility and automation where the virtual resources are automatically moved from one place to the other and the problem is compounded. Lastly, there is generally no model of management transparency between an enterprise and the cloud provider and you can how the provider–customer relationships can easily become rocky.
Given the challenges I have noted above I wanted to highlight a company that I see gets the challenges of managing the cloud–it should be no surprise it is a start-up. Many years ago, the management of IP networks was driven by start ups such as Micromuse and SMARTS (who were later acquired). The company I am talking about is Xangati, which I highlight last year as a start up worth watching. Xangati actually started as a UC management vendor and then migrated its product to broadband service providers and has nove evolved into an enterprise virtualization management vendor that can also help with cloud management. Xangati solves the “check cloud” light quandary because its solution is attuned to the relationship the IT silos have with one another instead of focusing on just managing one specific silo. It does this through a predictive profiling engine that automatically learns the behavior of each specific infrastructure component–in other words down to your specific VM or set of VMs–not treating performance as a generic concept that cuts across all cloud customers. Moreover the system is continuously comparing real-time performance to let you know immediately when your part of the cloud is experiencing a problem.
Taking things even further it provides the kind of context necessary to understand why the cloud light has gone on in the first place. It does this by coupling its alerts with a DVR-like recording of what was happening to your part of the cloud at the time there was a performance issue. For example, is a cloud application is running slow because of network latency or because of a code change? The former is an issue owned by the cloud provider, the latter one that is with the enterprise IT department. The recordings can then be shared between the cloud provider and the enterprise. Being able to parse this contextual information in real-time with these DVR-recordings provides insights that allow operational support models to extend comfortably into the cloud.
Another important element of cloud management that Xangati addresses is transparency into the cloud. Xangati allows the cloud provider to offer its customers a mini dashboard allowing IT to look into the cloud when it needs to instead of having an expensive mechanic come in and hook it up to a special tool.
By covering both the proactive and reactive cases, Xangati is assuring the enterprise and the cloud provider that all bases are covered with regards to performance management issues. In other words, the cloud light is no longer a vague warning, but rather one that has precise details on performance issues that are understandable to both the cloud provider and the end customer and if understandable therefore quickly remedied.
It seems with all IT trends we tend to make management the last thing we think about it. Being proactive with cloud management will create the acceleration of cloud services, which is what we’ve all been waiting for.
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