Blog Entry

How times have changed—and in such little time. Just one short year ago, industry analysts were stating how IT managers would have to cobble together a hodgepodge of third-party, open-source and homegrown solutions in order to run a private cloud inside the data center.

Barriers to implementation were numerous

Some of the barriers that were often cited back then involved security concerns, compliance issues, software licensing, scalability and service-level agreements (SLAs) among others. You’ve no doubt heard or read them all before.

So what was missing?

Management tools were the primary missing component. Comprehensive tools that could autonomously keep track of all the different components—servers, OSes, applications, storage space, network availability and so on—and orchestrate all the necessary tasks that enable the private cloud. As you can imagine, cloud computing is most efficient when as many tasks as possible are automated. A private cloud requires that the right tasks execute in the right order at the right time. For example, to deploy a new server in the private cloud, a customer’s cloud software layer needs to obtain an IP address, set up a virtual local area network, configure routers, add the server to the load balancing queue, put the server in the firewall rule set, add the server to the backup queue, provision storage, allocate CPU & memory resources, select the right virtual host and more.

A tall order? Not these days.

Private clouds enable major benefits

Thankfully, with today’s technologies, like Novell Cloud Manager for example, customers can automate hundreds of discrete tasks that were traditionally performed manually by IT specialists, allowing them to easily set up a private cloud to maximize their data center flexibility while reducing costs.

• Using available technologies, your customers can now:
• Leverage the VMware*, Hyper-V* or Xen* servers they already own
• Automate the entire process of provisioning new workloads into the virtual environment
• Select from a service catalog of pre-defined workload templates, complete with pricing and service levels
• Establish a transparent workflow that ensures visibility every step of the way—from initial request to actual deployment in the production environment
• Accelerate service delivery by provisioning workloads on demand in a secure and compliant manner
• Use built-in connectors to pass detected events in the cloud to their security event managers

Simply amazing

Building private clouds was an incredibly difficult (and messy) undertaking just 12 months ago. Today, customers can easily expand and contract capacity on the fly, reducing provisioning time from many days down to just a few hours and mitigating virtual server sprawl. All while taking the human effort out of the equation.

– Rich