7
Assessing Applications
for the Cloud
The VMware approach to cloud
computing is not about a single
technology purchase or an abrupt
disruption to the business. It is a
path that you can follow based on
your environment today. Before
you achieve the full evolution to
cloud computing, there are
tangible, immediate steps that
you can take to start the process,
including identifying the different
types of workloads currently in
your datacenter.
Since virtualization is the foundation
for cloud computing and IT as
a Service, the first task for any
organization transitioning to the
cloud is to virtualize the majority of
its environment, including business-
critical applications. This will allow
you to guarantee service levels more
easily and economically.
The second step is to turn your IT
department into an agile and user-
friendly internal service provider.
This requires exposing IT services
to internal users through Web-
based portals as a fully automated,
catalog-based service. Whenever
internal users need IT services, they
should be able to get them as easily
as finding and downloading an
application from Apple’s App Store.
Yet where should you begin enabling
fully automated self-service? What
are the best initial application
candidates for this approach? The
answer is relatively simple: the best
candidates are those applications
most frequently requested by users,
which tend to be the following:
1.
Transient apps
– Applications
that will have a rapid rate of
provisioning, cloning, reallocation
and so on, for example, a staging
or preproduction development and
test environment.
2.
Elastic apps
– Applications where
the demand for resources will vary
greatly over time, so users will
request adjustments to the
application resources, for example,
scientific computation or anything
with seasonal transactions.
3.
“Long tail” apps
– Applications
that never get prioritized by
IT organizations, for example,
a customized Web farm for
an extranet.
VMware customers have prioritized
these types of applications for self-
service due to the high rate of change
they experience with them. Often,
the bulk of requests that consume
IT staff time are generated by
ad
hoc
workloads rather than business-
critical production applications. Plus
ad hoc
workloads cause the biggest
cost and administrative headaches
for IT. Applications such as these
will benefit considerably from being
served out of a cloud environment
and can drive immediate value to
the business.
“Strategically, server
virtualization is an IT
modernization catalyst
that will change how IT
is acquired, consumed,
managed, sourced and paid
for. Virtualization will even
change how businesses
innovate and grow,”
writes Thomas Bittman,
VP Distinguished Analyst
at Gartner. “Done well,
server virtualization makes
fundamental changes that
can lead an organization
down the path of private
and public cloud computing.”
Gartner, Inc “Server Virtualization: One Path That Leads to
Cloud Computing,” Thomas Bittman, October 29, 2009.
