This paper summarizes the results of our research around data center transformation, and discusses the kind of metrics and visibility you will need to successfully migrate and manage applications in a true, high-performance Infrastructure Anywhere environment.

1. To Cloud, or
Not to Cloud?
Transformational Metrics and Analytics for
Managing “Infrastructure Anywhere”

2. To Cloud, or Not to Cloud?
To make smart decisions about where to run applications and
what kind of resources you need, you first must understand
your workload utilization, capacity, and cost.
The Data Center in Transformation
Today’s IT infrastructure is in the midst of a major To make smart decisions about where to run
transformation. In many ways, the data center is a applications and what kind of resources you need,
victim of its own success. The growing number of you first must understand your workload utilization,
technologies and applications residing in the data capacity, and cost. Gaining unified visibility is
center has spawned increasing complexity, which difficult when your application workloads are
makes IT as a whole less responsive and agile. distributed across data centers and colocation
While businesses are focused on moving faster than facilities in different parts of the country or
ever, large and complex infrastructure is inherently around the world. With limited visibility, how do
rigid and inefficient. you accurately align resources and capacity with
workloads for efficient processing, cost control, and,
As a result, IT is moving outside the traditional more importantly, achieve the full business value of
data center into collocation facilities and cloud your IT investment?
infrastructure – essentially Infrastructure Anywhere.
The move to Infrastructure Anywhere is driven by As part of our ongoing research into data center
the core objective of improving responsiveness, trends, Sentilla surveyed data center professionals
increasing agility, and reducing costs. Using the about their plans for cloud deployments in late 2012.
cloud, for example, you can scale up resources This paper summarizes the results of this research
in minutes, not months. But for all of its benefits, around data center transformation, and discusses
this new ‘Infrastructure Anywhere’ model presents the kind of metrics and visibility you will need to
critical challenges. successfully migrate and manage applications in
a true, high-performance Infrastructure Anywhere
environment.
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3. To Cloud, or Not to Cloud?
It’s all about agility
According to Sentilla’s research, agility and limitation experienced by respondents – for all
flexibility were the top drivers behind enterprise IT infrastructure initiatives – is budget.
transformation initiatives such as cloud deployments
– followed closely by issues of capacity and cost. Note that several of the reported constraints
(personnel, storage capacity) are related to the
While agility is the prime motivating factor, the broader issue of budget. In this sense, cost is
importance of cost as a factor should not be ignored. overwhelmingly the most important constraint on IT
According to the survey, the major resource initiatives – including cloud initiatives.
Figure 1: Key drivers for cloud computing initiatives
Figure 2: Resource limitations
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4. To Cloud, or Not to Cloud?
2013 is for planning, 2014 for deployment
Of the organizations surveyed, nearly 50% plan to Similarly, those surveyed expect to gradually migrate
be deploying cloud initiatives in 2014. Many are more workloads to cloud platforms in the coming
in the planning phases. In general, we can expect years - with 28% planning to run more than half of
cloud computing deployments to increase by 70% in their applications in the cloud by 2014. The barriers
12 months. to cloud migration are lowering.
Figure 3: Data center cloud initiatives, by year
Figure 4: Percentage of applications planned to move to the cloud, by year
4

5. To Cloud, or Not to Cloud?
The cloud isn’t a homogeneous place
Cloud computing can refer to several different Community cloud is an emerging category in which
deployment models. At a high level, cloud different organizations with similar needs use a
infrastructure alternatives are defined by how they shared cloud computing environment. This new
are shared among different organizations. model is taking hold in environments with common
regulatory requirements, including healthcare,
Private clouds offer the flexibility of the elastic financial services and government.
infrastructure shared between different applications,
but are never shared with other organizations. The research showed that organizations are
Hosted on dedicated equipment either on-premises evaluating a broad range of different cloud solutions,
or in a colocation provider, a private cloud is the including Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google
most secure but the least cost effective cloud model. Cloud Platform, and Red Hat Cloud Computing, as
well as many solutions based on OpenStack, the
Public cloud infrastructure offers similar open source cloud computing software.
elasticity and scalability and is shared with many
organizations. This model is best suited for Without planning, ad hoc cloud deployments
businesses requiring managing load spikes and combined with islands of virtualization will
scaling to a large number of users without a large only add complexity to the existing data center
capital investment. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is infrastructure. The resulting environment is one of
perhaps the most widely deployed example of public physical, virtual and cloud silos with fragmented
cloud infrastructure as a service. visibility. While individual tools may deliver insight
into specific parts of the infrastructure puzzle
Hybrid cloud offers the dual advantages of secure (physical infrastructure, server virtualization with
applications and data hosting on a private cloud VMware, specific infrastructure in a specific cloud
and cost benefits of keeping sharable applications provider), IT organizations have little visibility into
and data on the public cloud. This model is often the total picture. This lack of visibility can impede
used for cloud bursting – the migration of workloads the IT organization’s ability to align infrastructure
between public and private hosting to handle load investments with business needs and cost
spikes. constraints.
Figure 5: Where respondents planned to deploy cloud initiatives
5

6. To Cloud, or Not to Cloud?
Without planning, ad hoc cloud deployments combined with
islands of virtualization will only add complexity to the existing
data center infrastructure.
Infrastructure complexity is the new normal
While it aims to bring agility to IT, the process of When asked about where cloud infrastructure will
cloud transformation will only increase infrastructure reside, survey respondents indicated that they
complexity in the near term. IT organizations must will be managing a blend of on-premises and
manage a combination of legacy systems with outsourced infrastructure, with the balance shifting
islands of virtualization and cloud technologies. dramatically from 2013-2014.
Figure 6: Where cloud infrastructure will reside, by year
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7. To Cloud, or Not to Cloud?
The need for unified visibility into
complex infrastructure
As you plan your own cloud initiatives, you must To support these phases, you need visibility into
prepare for multiple phases of transformation: workloads and capacity across essential application
infrastructure - no matter where it resides. From
• Deploying new applications to the cloud as part the physical and virtual resources, up through
of the broader application portfolio applications and services, you will need insight so
you can align IT with business objectives.
• Migrating existing applications to cloud
infrastructure where possible and appropriate
• Managing the hybrid “infrastructure anywhere”
environment during the transition and beyond
Figure 7: The need for infrastructure insight at all levels
Essential infrastructure metrics for right-
sizing infrastructure
Decisions about which applications to deploy to the • Comparative cost of providing that capacity and
cloud and where to deploy them will require visibility infrastructure on different platforms
into:
For application migration scenarios, you will need
• Historical, current and predicted application to understand the actual resource consumption
workload of the existing application. And whether it’s a new
application or a migrated one, you will need to
• Current and predicted capacity requirements of ‘right-size’ the cloud infrastructure to avoid the twin
the workload
7

8. To Cloud, or Not to Cloud?
dangers of over-provisioning (and wasting financial • Personnel for supporting the application
resources) or under-provisioning and risking outages
or performance slow-downs. You will need insight • Operating system
into:
• Management software
• Memory utilization
• Cooling and power
• CPU utilization
• Leased cloud
• Data transfer/bandwidth
• Server and storage hardware
• Storage requirements
To accurately predict the cost of running the
You will also need good metrics about the cost of application on cloud-based infrastructure, you will
running the application in your existing data center, need accurate metrics around the actual, historical
as well as the predicted costs of running that same resource consumption of the application (storage,
application on various platforms. These metrics memory, CPU, etc) as it maps to billable units by the
need to factor in the total cost of the application, provider. By understanding the actual consumption,
such as: you can avoid over-provisioning and overpaying for
resources from external providers.
Infrastructure analytics for cloud migration
For any given application that is a candidate for the its cost model or fee structure. For that reason,
cloud, you want to be able to compare the total cost you’ll want a tool that lets you get an accurate and
of the resources required across different options continuous view into current costs and model “what-
(public, private and on-premise). if” scenarios for different deployments.
While you could try to manually crunch these An emerging category of infrastructure intelligence
numbers in a spreadsheet, the computations are software can provide this kind of side-by-side, what-
not trivial. These are decisions that you will need if analysis.
to make repeatedly, for each application, and to
revisit when an infrastructure provider changes
Figure 8: Sample of a cost comparison
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9. To Cloud, or Not to Cloud?
Continuous analysis for continuous improvement
of the “Infrastructure Anywhere” environment
Before deploying an application, what-if scenarios The software can provide ‘single pane of glass’
help you make sound resources decisions and visibility into assets and applications throughout the
right-size applications. After deploying, continuous physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure, including:
analysis is key to ensuring that you are optimizing
capacity and using resources most efficiently. • Application cost/utilization spanning different
locations
While individual tools may already give you slices
of the necessary information, you need integrated • True resource requirements of apps (for more
insight into the complete infrastructure environment. accurate provisioning in cloud infrastructure)
Again, emerging infrastructure intelligence can
• CPU and memory utilization of apps, wherever
assemble necessary information from applications
they reside
and assets that are both on and off your premises,
virtualized and not, in different platforms and
locations.
Transformational analytics at its core
CRM
CRM HR
HR other
CRM HR DR
Apps
Apps Apps
Apps Apps
Apps Apps Apps
Policy
Transformational Analytics
SLA SLA SLA
Cloud
Automation
IT
Virtual Machines
Physical Resources
(Compute, Storage, Networking)
Unifying Your Physical, Virtual & Cloud Based Infrastructures
Figure 9: Transformational analytics
9

10. To Cloud, or Not to Cloud?
Summary
By 2014, the enterprise computing will look quite IT organizations need the insight to make fast, smart
different than it does today, yet many legacy and informed decisions about where workloads
systems and infrastructure will still be with us. and data should reside and how to deploy new
IT operations, business units and application applications. Rather than isolated silos of metrics
architects will need to manage applications that and capacity and utilization data, IT needs unified
reside in infrastructure than spans on-premise and visibility into infrastructure across the virtual
offsite locations, with public, private, hybrid, and computing environment – both on-premise and off.
community cloud infrastructure. Data centers will be And they need the metrics and continuous analysis
just one part of the total pool of infrastructure that IT to manage the evolving infrastructure in a manner
manages on behalf of the business. aligned with business objectives.
To manage this transformation, you will need to An emerging category of infrastructure intelligence
make smart decisions about where workloads can provide the continuous and unified analytics
should reside based on specific application and necessary to understand and compare your
business needs. And as these changes roll out, you decisions and to manage the data center during the
will need to manage the transforming and hybrid transformation. With broad ‘infrastructure insight’
application infrastructure to deliver the necessary you can align cloud platforms with business needs
performance and service levels, no matter where and cost requirements – delivering the agility to
applications reside. realize new revenue opportunities with the insight to
contain the costs of existing applications.
About Sentilla
Sentilla’s Infrastructure Intelligence software
enables Global IT organizations to successfully
exploit Infrastructure Anywhere architectures
through dynamic capacity forecasting/management,
resource allocation, workload migration, and critical
cost control.
Sentilla regularly conducts research into data center
trends. To access webinars about the ongoing
research, visit the Sentilla Resources page at http://
www.sentilla.com/resources.
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11. To Cloud, or Not to Cloud?
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12. Sentilla Corporation
©2012 Sentilla Corporation 3 Twin Dolphin Drive, Suite 225
Authored January 2013 Redwood City, 94065
All rights reserved. All trademarks used, referenced, or implicitly Phone: (650) 241-0220
contained herein are used in good faith and highlighted to give Fax: (650) 592-2740
proper public recognition to their respective owners. Web: http://www.sentilla.com