IT Roadmap

Cloud is Not a Matter of If, But How Much and How Fast

During the last 18 months, Cisco has been conducting customer round tables and research to uncover the themes driving enterprises to transition their network storage and compute infrastructures to the cloud. One of Cisco's forecasts, based on this information, is that 15% of IT workloads will migrate to a cloud-based infrastructure by 2013.

In this video, Chris Osika (Senior Director of Cisco's Internet Business Solutions Group Sevices Provider Practice) shares 4 emerging themes in relation to the cloud:

In summary, the four themes are:

1. Sheer Impact. In the past, it could take up to 45 days to provision a server. Now, companies are reporting an hour or less with data center virtualization. That's a pretty dramatic change.


2. Organizational Change. Companies are addressing the need to re-align in a functional way to take advantage of of virtualization and cloud. When they do so, they are able to enact a fully holistic business transformation.


3. The Ability to Flex. Virtualization with cloud computing not only allows companies to flex compute and storage resources, but to flex the network to reap rewards of economy.


4. Virtual Desktops (VDI) Enter the Discussion. Whereas in the past, the discussion of VDI was limited, it's now included in conversations about the impact cloud computing can have on the overall enterprise.

Do these themes ring a belll with your company? What other themes do you see emerging  in relation to accelrating your company's presence in the cloud?

Business Continuity Comes Front and Center

Business continuity is a key objective for any organization. Traditional best practices for continuity focus on geographic redundancy - meaning multiple sites with replicated systems, applications and data (based on critical business processing).

The advent of data center virtualization changes the face of continuity and the need for redundancy.  Rather than having replicated sites standing idle waiting for a failure, virtualization empowers backup resources to be utilized as part of the processing infrastructure.

By virtualizing data center resources across all sites, traditionally non-performing investments (e.g., disaster recovery systems, storage and networks) can be transformed into a productive IT asset. IT services can scale across these redundant sites, the sites themselves can be optimized for better efficiency and ROI, and business continuity is achieved in a much more active manner. The concept of failover is replaced by an active, virtualized infrastructure.

Virtualization brings additional benefits:

• Data replication, system upgrades and standard maintenance can be performed seamlessly.


• Single points of failure are eliminated.


• Overall costs of redundant systems can be reduced thanks to shared resources and services placed on lower-cost, higher performance racked servers vs. traditional standalone systems.

When leveraging virtualization to provide high availability and business continuity, there are a few areas to consider:

• Applications: Can your applications be virtualized? The easiest way to determine this is to ask about clustering of your application. If it can be clustered, then each instance can retain state and that empowers virtualization.


• Data:  Can data be replicated in real time to assure consistency and currency? If the data doesn’t require immediate updates, this may not be an issue since replication tools can run on a frequency basis to meet your data relevance needs. In many cases, real-time replication isn’t the best solution thanks to the bandwidth required to keep massive data volumes in sync.


• Connectivity: Virtualizing resources only works if users can access information regardless of their location. That’s where access devices come into play. Such devices route users to the best available resource, based on performance, availability, etc. Such routing is completely transparent and non-disruptive to users.

Virtualization may be a better model for your business continuity efforts. The best approach is to work with an expert, creating a complete virtualization architecture, then a phased deployment to fully realize the power of a virtualized infrastructure.