EMA Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst RSS feed

OpenTelemetry: Challenges, Priorities, Adoption Patterns, and Solutions

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

OpenTelemetry emerged as a key player in the cloud native arena, aiming to streamline the increasingly complex field of cloud native observability. The significant challenges enterprises face led to a broad consensus among software vendors to adopt a unified standard and framework for telemetry data management. This widespread enterprise enthusiasm is evidenced by a rapid increase in metrics that show the interest and adoption on the side of app developers, DevOps engineers, platform engineers, and general technologists.

Addressing the Key OpenTelemetry Challenges

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is a critical component for observability in modern cloud native applications. It enables developers to collect, process, and export telemetry data (traces, metrics, logs, and profiles) to help understand application behavior and performance. Grafana, a powerful observability tool, addresses key developer challenges associated with implementing and using OpenTelemetry.

IBM to Acquire HashiCorp in a Bold Move to Dominate Multi-Cloud Automation and Scalability

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Mon, 20 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The EMA Impact Brief titled "IBM to Acquire HashiCorp in a Bold Move to Dominate Multi-Cloud Automation and Scalability" discusses IBM's strategic acquisition of HashiCorp for $6.4 billion. This acquisition aims to enhance IBM's multi-cloud strategy by integrating HashiCorp's "Infrastructure Cloud" with Red Hat's Ansible Automation Platform. This integration will provide a consistent, automated layer for deploying, configuring, and managing software across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. The acquisition not only brings technological advancements but also adds over 4,400 new clients and $583 million in annual revenue to IBM. The brief highlights the potential of this move to boost IBM's product portfolio, improve developer productivity, and address previous licensing issues with HashiCorp's Terraform. By combining IBM's and HashiCorp's strengths, the acquisition is set to drive innovation and efficiency in multi-cloud environments, positioning IBM as a leader in infrastructure automation and scalability.

Compelling Reasons for a Pre-Integrated Internal Development Platform: Faster Application Delivery, Less Complexity, and Enhanced Productivity

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Mon, 20 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This white paper, titled "Compelling Reasons for a Pre-Integrated Internal Development Platform: Faster Application Delivery, Less Complexity, and Enhanced Productivity," authored by Torsten Volk, Managing Research Director at EMA, delves into the strategic benefits of pre-integrated Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs). In a rapidly evolving digital marketplace, swift software development and deployment are crucial for competitiveness. IDPs provide self-service access to essential tools, reducing developers' time spent on non-coding tasks. The API-centric model of IDPs simplifies access to resources, enhances productivity, and ensures compliance with security standards. The paper highlights how pre-integrated IDPs streamline development, promote consistency, and reduce complexity, leading to faster, more secure, and cost-effective application delivery. Additionally, it explores the role of key IT personas in establishing IDPs and the advantages of adopting pre-integrated solutions over DIY approaches. The VMware Tanzu Platform is presented as a prime example of how pre-integrated IDPs can support hybrid cloud consistency and simplify microservices management, ultimately enabling organizations to innovate efficiently and maintain a competitive edge.

Nine Cost Considerations for Observability Platforms

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This white paper by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) delves into the financial implications of implementing observability platforms in organizations. Observability is pivotal for stakeholders such as developers, DevOps engineers, platform engineers, and SREs to ensure real-time performance, system reliability, and rapid market response. The paper highlights the collaboration between these roles to maximize business impact through effective decision-making and infrastructure optimization. However, it emphasizes that without a clear understanding of the cost structure, observability expenses can become prohibitive, hindering business success.

EMA's research identifies nine critical cost challenges that organizations face when implementing observability platforms: lack of granularity and control, unpredictability, vendor lock-in, freemium plans, premium features, compliance and data security, geographical data storage, real-time monitoring and alerting, and the skill gap and training costs. The paper provides recommendations for each challenge to help organizations make informed decisions and avoid unexpected costs.

The conclusion underscores the importance of addressing these cost considerations during the selection process to ensure that the observability platform chosen provides a viable cost-benefit ratio, managing costs effectively while enhancing system performance and the developer experience.

Top 5 Critical Pain Points in Observability and How AI can Help

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Fri, 15 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This white paper discusses the critical challenges in observability within cloud native applications and microservices, emphasizing the need for AI in addressing these complexities. It identifies five key pain points: inefficiencies and risk, root cause analysis, issue prioritization, eliminating blind spots, and balancing productivity with performance and cost. AI solutions are proposed for each, highlighting their role in enhancing system health, performance, and alignment with business goals. The paper underscores AI’s necessity in modern observability strategies for effective management and futureproofing operations.

Observability: Challenges, Priorities, Adoption Patterns, and Solutions

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Observability has become one of the most prominent topics in technology because it is the key discipline that enables organizations to directly tie technology investments to business success. This research report identifies real-life challenges that can prevent organizations from achieving the level of observability required to squeeze the most business value out of their technology resources. Based on these challenges and current technology adoption patterns, we present enterprise priorities and make recommendations for organizations seeking to implement business-centric full-stack observability across the enterprise.

Observability: Challenges, Priorities, Solutions, and the Role of OpenTelemetry

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) webinar will present a wealth of research data from EMA’s recent study of real-world adoption patterns, challenges, trends, and enterprise-priorities related to infrastructure and application observability.

EMA AllStars 2024

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Wed, 10 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The “EMA AllStars 2024” report identifies the key trends and enterprise customer requirements in 2024 and crowns products and vendors that address them convincingly. EMA AllStars are products that deliver customer value in a strongly differentiated manner. Startups and established businesses are both eligible to receive the EMA AllStars award for their unique approach toward solving critical customer challenges.

Visit the EMA AllStars website to learn about our AllStar products and explore the latest market data.

Navigating the Complexity of Distributed Microservices across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The rapid adoption of distributed microservices applications has placed a significant complexity burden on DevOps teams, platform engineers, SREs, and app developers. This complexity burden has dramatically increased the operational risk in terms of performance, resilience, security, compliance, and financial management. As a result, managing the complex interactions among microservices running on a combination of AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and other resources in the data center or at edge locations has emerged as a critical challenge for many organizations. Ensuring round-the-clock availability, protecting critical data, complying with regulatory standards, and optimizing financial operations in cloud management are now emerging as vital concerns in this contemporary cloud computing ecosystem.

This research webinar seeks to illuminate the critical issues involved in handling application- and infrastructure-complexity in ever-changing hybrid multi-cloud settings.

Kubernetes Unveiled: Trends, Challenges, and Opportunities

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Discover the world of Kubernetes like never before! With over four million clusters worldwide based on over 140 different Kubernetes distributions and accompanied by over 2,100 complementing products belonging to 45 different categories, the Kubernetes landscape is vast and varied.

Join EMA Managing Research Director Torsten Volk for an informative webinar that will delve into EMA’s Kubernetes research. Based on the perspective of application developers, platform engineers, and security and IT operations professionals, this research provides insights into the real-world adoption patterns, challenges, trends, and enterprise priorities related to the Kubernetes container platform.

Torsten will also discuss:

Challenges and Solutions – The top issues developers, IT operations, and security teams face and how to solve them.
Real-Life Insights – From cost pitfalls to maximizing developer productivity, this research sheds light on what IT professionals face and delivers actionable insights into these issues.
Security Vulnerabilities – The core types of security vulnerabilities and how to mitigate them.
Community Priorities – What the Kubernetes community is working on.
Global Trends – Adoption patterns of Kubernetes worldwide.

Kubernetes at Scale: Challenges, Priorities, Adoption Patterns, and Solutions

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The equation is simple: to maximize the productivity of application developers, we need to minimize the time they have to spend on overhead tasks. These are tasks that go beyond writing, maintaining, and testing new application code. They include infrastructure provisioning and configuration, deployment, management, upgrades of Kubernetes clusters, application deployment and management, ensuring security and compliance of the overall application stack, configuring backup and disaster recovery, configuring observability and visibility, and optimizing cost.

Kubernetes at Scale: 10 Reasons to Use Multiple Kubernetes Distributions

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This report goes over ten reasons to use multiple Kubernetes distributions.

Kubernetes at Scale: Challenges, Priorities, Adoption Patterns, and Solutions

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

There is no shortage of metrics that illustrate the rapid rise of Kubernetes as the application platform of choice for many enterprises. The number of monthly Google searches doubled between 2021 and 2023. Meanwhile, the number of downloads of the Kubernetes client library for Python increased by 1,714% between 2019 and 2023. The number of operator questions on the Stack Exchange Server Fault support forum increased by 40% year over year, and the number of publicly accessible Kubernetes clusters also increased by 40% over the same timeframe.

Kubernetes at Scale: Public Cloud-Managed Kubernetes Alone is Not the Answer

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

From a business perspective, public cloud-managed Kubernetes alone is not the answer. Cloud-managed platforms such as EKS, AKS, and GKE are always embedded within the much larger context of the respective cloud vendor. While these offerings take care of managing the Kubernetes control plane, they still require enterprises to address many Kubernetes-related topics, such as cost control, security and data protection, scalability and performance, service reliability and availability, integration and interoperability, control and flexibility, technology lock-in, monitoring and analytics, and support and training.

Kubernetes at Scale: Three Perspectives

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In a world of complex cloud systems, developers, operators, and DevOps professionals grapple with a variety of challenges while navigating Kubernetes, a potent container orchestration platform. This narrative captures the essence of three distinct perspectives and their experiences with Kubernetes issues.

Kubernetes at Scale: Security Challenges

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The fact that the number of Kubernetes-related CVEs doubled over the past

year indicates the need to take Kubernetes security seriously. This increase

is a direct result of broader and deeper adoption of the Kubernetes platform

in combination with the rapidly increasing complexity of the Kubernetes

ecosystem.

Kubernetes at Scale: Top 10 Critical Kubernetes Challenges for Developers

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This report discusses ten critical Kubernetes-related challenges for application developers.

The Five Pillars of the Ideal Kubernetes Management Platform

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Squeezing More Value Out of Technology Investments: IBM to Acquire Apptio

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

IBM announced its intent to acquire Apptio, a FinOps software provider, to enable enterprises to maximize the business value of their often-escalating investments into public and private clouds by multiple service providers. Apptio’s financial visibility, management, and planning capabilities, combined with IBM’s portfolio of IT automation and AI software, provides IBM with a strong basis to enable customers, IBM consultants, and partners to proactively plan and continuously optimize their current and future investments into hybrid multi-cloud environments, talent, and project initiatives.

EMA ROI Study: Impact of Docker Desktop on the Application Delivery Lifecycle

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In this ROI study, we will look at how a cybersecurity company with over $600M in annual revenue, more than 2,000 employees, eight global offices, and approximately 20 product teams optimized all four target variables of their software supply chain through the use of Docker Desktop.

Code Once, Deploy Anywhere: Accelerating App Developer Productivity Through Simplified Service Mesh

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

What is preventing app developers from achieving optimal productivity? Optimal productivity is a state in which developers simply write business code during 100% of their work hours. Thinking this further, if your developers spend 100% of their time on writing business code for your customers while your competitors’ developers only spend 75% on productively coding, you could theoretically deliver 25% more features and capabilities to the marketplace.

Digital Transformation, Microservices, and Cybersecurity: 8 Critical Challenges

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Wed, 31 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Software developers need to deliver relevant product features in a rapid, cost-effective, easy-to-use, and high-quality manner. Microservices are the delivery vehicle of choice, enabling the continuous creation, release, and validation of new code in order to achieve this key business goal. Instead of betting on the success of large but infrequent product releases, developers deliver small sets of capabilities that address immediate and specific customer needs. This granular approach of creating customer value by solving concrete business problems on a daily basis shortens feedback loops, brings software developers closer to end users, and enables developers to more accurately identify new product capabilities that customers are willing to pay for.

Taking a Holistic Approach to Securing Cloud-Native Application Development

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Cloud-native application security has become the primary challenge in app modernization, hindering developer productivity, efficient operations, and optimal risk management. This prevents organizations from delivering better products faster, cheaper, and more often than the competition. Developers spend much of their time implementing and following corporate security policies while introducing more tools, open source libraries, container images, and data sources into the application stack.

Smart Observability: The Missing Link Between Business and DevOps Success

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Mon, 03 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Smart observability aims to eliminate the limitations of traditional observability platforms by providing actionable insights that directly enable application developers, DevOps professionals, IT operators, and business stakeholders to recognize, optimally prioritize, and execute tasks based on the most recent business priorities. Enabling staff to continuously align decisions and tasks with business KPIs allows the organization to focus its finite human and infrastructure resources on achieving business goals. As a result, each line of code, every new software release, and every hour spent by IT operations on efficiently, securely, and reliably deploying, running, and operating application stacks constitutes an investment in business success.

Observability 2.0: Smart Observability to Connect Business and DevOps

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

New code releases, new database queries, infrastructure upgrades, and configuration changes need to be evaluated by their business impact. There is no value in the most elegant code functions or the most streamlined and automated CI/CD pipelines if the resulting new capabilities do not “move the needle” for the business.

Five Critical Requirements for Maximizing Developer Productivity on Kubernetes: Harnessing AKS, EKS, and GKE

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Thu, 08 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The ability to maximize developer productivity is the key evaluation criterion for Kubernetes platforms. Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) research has found that approximately 44% of Kubernetes-related developer challenges occur on AWS, Azure, and GCP. At the same time, we observe cloud operations teams, SREs, and security engineers struggling to keep up with developers spinning up Kubernetes clusters at a rapid pace.

In this webinar EMA's Torsten Volk, Red Hat's Jonathan Gershater, and Michael Foster will discuss the top challenges around managed Kubernetes offerings on AWS, Azure, GCP, and other popular clouds.

Join this webinar to learn about:

Real world challenges around the adoption of public cloud managed Kubernetes for developers, operators, and security engineers.
Five critical requirements for enabling developers to optimally leverage Kubernetes platforms.
Key differences between Kubernetes-based developer platforms, like VMware Tanzu, Red Hat OpenShift, Docker and Docker Desktop, and SUSE Rancher.

Harnessing Kubernetes for Maximum Developer Productivity, Operations Efficiency, and Continuous Security

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Thu, 08 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Digital transformation focuses on establishing corporate cultures, processes, and technologies that enable an organization to deliver more valuable products faster and more frequently, sustainably, and efficiently than the competition. This allows organizations to attract and retain valuable talent, since the most impactful people gravitate toward an environment where they can be productive and successful.

Accelerators of Digital Transformation Maximizing the Business Impact of People

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 23 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Digital transformation is about people first. Hence, the success of digital transformation directly depends on an organization’s ability to provide staff with the skills, information, motivation, and autonomy needed for optimal decision-making, effectiveness, and efficiency.

This Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) research provides a data-driven analysis of strategic goals, priorities, success factors, and accelerators of digital transformation. The report ties each argument to its ability to maximize the impact of “people” as the foundation for business success.

EMA Products to Watch in 2022/2023: Data-Driven Guidance for Product Evaluation

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 03 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

EMA created the “EMA Products to Watch in 2022/2023 Guide” for anyone looking for data-driven and transparent market research and product recommendations. Our guide includes many charts and data points interesting for C-levels skimming through while providing the depth needed for more technical roles aiming to dive into detailed market metrics and product characteristics. Note that this guide is a living project, with ”EMA Products to Watch” published on an ongoing basis.

EMA Top 3 Enterprise Decision Guide 2022

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 18 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) presents its EMA Top 3 Awards to software products that help enterprises reach their digital transformation goals by optimizing product quality, time to market, cost, and ability to innovate.

The Self-Driving Data Center in 2021

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Fri, 31 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The continuous automatic optimization of end-to-end application stacks can free up 50% of operator time by shattering the proportional relationship between adding more application capabilities and requiring additional human operators. If the required data streams are available, the self-driving data center (SDC) can free up the approximately 50% of data center and cloud infrastructure resources that are currently wasted through overprovisioning.

The Self-Driving Data Center in 2022: Start Small, but Start Now

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Wed, 22 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

IBM Cloud Satellite: One Distributed Cloud to Rule Data Center, Public Cloud, and Edge

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Fri, 12 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Digital transformation refers to an organization’s ability to deliver software and services faster, at higher quality, and cheaper than the competition. This includes offering a better end-user experience, superior application resilience, tighter security, and optimal performance. By definition, organizations that enable software engineers, IT operators, DevOps staff, security admins, and site reliability engineers to spend most of their time on contributing to the delivery and efficient operation of customer-facing software capabilities have a higher chance of winning in the marketplace.

Accelerating the Monetization of 5G Through Distributed Cloud

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Fri, 12 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Telcos win in the marketplace by offering compelling applications and business services to end users, resellers, and business customers in a reliable, well-performing, and cost-effective manner. Offering a seamless experience for users working from their homes, offices, public transportation, at a job site, on an oil rig, or on a plane is critical and requires the ability to deliver an optimal user experience across high-speed Wi-Fi connections, legacy LTE infrastructure, and 5G access points.

Taming Deployment and Operations Cost Through Distributed Cloud at the Industrial Edge

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Fri, 12 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Organizations in the industrial sector differentiate from the competition by delivering products that are optimally aligned with customer requirements in a timely, high-quality, and cost-effective manner. Industrial organizations often demand low-latency application services delivered through regional near-edge hosting providers and typically rely on infrastructure located in numerous production facilities, or even out at the far edge.

Distributed Cloud as a Catalyst for Digital Transformation in the Banking Sector

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Fri, 12 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Digital transformation in the financial sector is often slowed down by a long trail of highly regulated legacy applications that are difficult and expensive to modernize or re-platform. It is common practice to add new cloud-native applications, typically in the form of loosely coupled collections of containerized microservices, in order to add new capabilities to these legacy applications.

Boosting Data Privacy and Developer Efficiency in Healthcare Through Distributed Cloud

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Fri, 12 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Data governance and efficiency in healthcare often appear to have an antagonistic relationship with healthcare professionals looking for pragmatic solutions to enhance patient care, while IT is focused on the centralized enforcement of continuous compliance rules. Due to the often-fragmented character of IT infrastructure in the healthcare sector, IT operations teams frequently struggle with the consistent application of compliance controls across departments, facilities, and geographical locations.

Kubernetes: Modernising Software Delivery

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Thu, 04 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Hosting this episode of the EM360 Podcast is Torsten Volk, Managing Research Director at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). Torsten speaks on how Kubernetes became a platform that brought developers and operators together with Grant Miller, CEO and Co-founder at Replicated. The two experts explore:

The term 'Multi-prem', where it comes from, and how it relates to Kubernetes How Replicated chase after integration points with Kubernetes vs OpenStack How to differentiate Kubernetes from other open-source contained orchestration systems How organisations should deliver and orchestrate applications to stay on top of developments

Why Observability is Key to Solving Business and Operational Challenges

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Thu, 14 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Modern applications based on microservices often run in a distributed environment across thousands of servers, VMs, containers, and serverless functions in data centers, public clouds, and at the edge. Operations and development teams have to process massive amounts of data to solve issues and determine root cause before they impact customer experience and revenue.

Observability is the key to solving these business and operational challenges and is fast becoming one of the strategic imperatives for organizations.

Join Torsten Volk, Managing Research Director at EMA, and Gagan Singh, VP of Product Marketing at Elastic, for an information-packed event where you will learn more about:

Understanding the top challenges faced by DevOps and SRE teams
Building observability strategy to address these challenges
Achieving instant visibility across cloud native and hybrid environments including Kubernetes
Analyzing and exploring logs, metrics, and traces for operational insights
Using machine learning-driven insights for faster root cause analysis
Enabling developers to continuously optimize end-to-end application performance
Connecting operational and business KPIs to deliver positive customer experiences
Leveraging the benefits of an open observability solution to instrument your environment without increasing operational costs

Additionally, Volk and Singh will discuss real-life scenarios and how the EMA Top 3 award-winning Elastic Observability solution can help developers and SREs in their observability journey.

Disrupting the Economics of Software Testing Through AI

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 21 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

As the ability to accelerate the delivery of customer value through innovation, and at lower cost, has become today’s critical source for achieving competitive advantages, traditional software testing practices can no longer scale to meet business demands. Test automation frameworks typically rely on a jungle of test scripts written in different languages, using different sets of runtime parameters, and lacking consistent compliance testing capabilities. This forces the organization into the unfortunate choice of adding cost or risk to their agile development processes. They can either hire additional staff and increase test infrastructure to cope with the increasing test overhead, or they can accept the added risk that originates from incomplete testing practices.

EMA Top 3 Enterprise Decision Guide 2021

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Wed, 15 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) presents its EMA Top 3 Awarsd to software products that help enterprises reach their digital transformation goals by optimizing product quality, time to market, cost, and ability to innovate.

End-to-End Kubernetes Acceleration and Management Efficiency

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Thu, 09 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Adoption of microservices-based application architecture and the Kubernetes container scheduling and orchestration platform continues to increase at an annual pace of approximately 50%. Over the past six months, the number of software engineers using Kubernetes (Python) software libraries grew by 110%, while the number of DevOps teams making the Kubernetes plugin part of their release pipeline increased by 27% over the same timeframe. The fact that 98% of site reliability engineers require Kubernetes expertise in 2021 further underlines the status of Kubernetes as the standard platform for application transformation.

IBM to Acquire Instana - Automate Everything

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

IBM has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Instana, the vendor of APM and observability platforms for microservices applications. The Instana platform can provide IBM’s Watson AIOps and Hybrid Cloud Management portfolio with a comprehensive stream of near-real time operations data at the application, platform, and infrastructure levels. That data includes performance metrics and dependencies for all containerized microservices for the Kubernetes container cluster itself, as well as for all databases and host systems.

VMware Harnesses AWS, Azure, IBM Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud to Deliver One Unified Enterprise Cloud

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

VMware announced numerous enhancements to its enterprise cloud platform, all aiming toward delivering one unified set of cloud infrastructure, infrastructure operations, cloud services, and application modernization capabilities to enterprise customers and partners.

Veeam Adds Kubernetes Data Management Capabilities Through the Kasten Acquisition

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 13 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Veeam acquired Kasten to add Kubernetes-native data services focused on application-centric backup, disaster recovery, and data migration to its cloud data management platform. This acquisition will enable Veeam to offer an end-to-end operations platform for consistent data management of applications running on bare metal infrastructure, hypervisors, cloud infrastructure, and Kubernetes containers.

Pure Storage Acquires Portworx to Offer Enterprise-Grade Data Services for Kubernetes

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 13 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Pure Storage, known for their all-flash block, file, and object storage, and more recently hybrid cloud storage services, acquired Portworx, a Kubernetes data services platform, for $370 million.

VMware Acquires SaltStack to Unlock Declarative Automation for Self-Driving Operations, App Modernization, and More

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 13 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

VMware announced its intent to acquire SaltStack as a crucial puzzle piece for the company’s mission of helping customers accelerate application modernization, multi-cloud management, and self-driving IT operations. SaltStack’s core intellectual property (IP) aims at providing the automation and policy guardrails for any enterprise to consistently implement cloud-scale application environments that are self-healing and do not require additional operations staff when scaling up.

Addressing the 8 Key Pain Points of Kubernetes Cluster Management

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and every other public and private cloud come with their individual sets of strengths and weaknesses, but they have one thing in common: they make it easy and fast for enterprises to spin up Kubernetes clusters. Meanwhile, development and application teams make their own cloud choices, often on a per-project basis. This leads to a fragmented landscape of differently architected Kubernetes stacks, managed by separate teams and with separate toolchains for development, operations, and security.

Join Torsten Volk, managing research director at leading IT research firm EMA, and Pete Cruz, manager, product and technical marketing at Red Hat, for an informative webinar in which you will:

Discover the “negative side effects” resulting from the proliferation of Kubernetes clusters across clouds
Learn how to optimally harness Kubernetes as the catalyst for IT transformation
Learn why Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes received the EMA Top 3 award for Kubernetes Multi Cluster Management at scale

The State of Multi-Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, and the Data Center in 2020

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Hybrid multi-cloud describes today’s reality of enterprises leveraging infrastructure and platform services from their traditional corporate data center, colocation hosting providers, and public clouds to deploy, run, and continuously enhance their individual mix of traditional and modern applications. All of these enterprises aim to achieve one central goal: eliminating the “vicious rectangle” that describes the tradeoff between software cost, quality, speed, and innovation. Hybrid multi-cloud provides the “toolbox” for developers, DevOps teams, and site reliability engineers (SRE) to achieve all four of these goals at the same time.

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Mon, 14 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Business success directly depends on an organization’s ability to identify and respond to customer needs earlier and more cost-efficiently than the competition. Busting the traditional vicious rectangle that forces enterprises into a tradeoff between speed, quality, cost, and innovation is critical. Typically, enterprises follow the standard playbook for digital transformation, adopting a similar set of modern technologies, tools, and metrics, all focused on developing and operating better software at a lower cost. However, after a seemingly successful implementation effort of these measures, many organizations have experienced a lack of correlation between these success metrics and increased business success.

VMware Acquires Datrium - Unified Disaster Recovery as a Service for Hybrid Cloud

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 04 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

VMware acquired Datrium to add a unified disaster recovery layer to its hybrid cloud portfolio. The Datrium Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) platform provides a federated but centrally managed layer of data services for backup, continuous data protection, and security. Datrium and VMware announced their joint disaster recovery service in August of 2019, making Datrium’s DRaaS platform available for VMware on AWS. Ultimately, this paved the way for VMware’s acquisition of Datrium, as the DRaaS use case fueled the initial growth of VMware’s strategic hybrid cloud offering. This already existing integration between both products significantly decreases the risk of this transaction for VMware, as there is no better proof of concept than the preexisting produ ction deployments.

Outpace the Competition: Optimize Cost, Speed, and Quality Through Hybrid Cloud Automation and Self-Service

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 04 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Relying on developers and corporate IT to complete a vast range of manual tasks for application deployment and day 2 operations limits the organization’s ability to release new software features at the required pace and forces executives into tradeoffs between speed, quality, cost, and innovation.

Unified Monitoring for Data Center, Multi-Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, Microservices, and Edge

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 21 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

“Nothing ever goes away in enterprise IT; instead, we keep piling new technologies on top of old ones.” This is the most popular problem statement when listening to IT and DevOps professionals, no matter the size of their company or the industry in which they are operating. This Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) impact brief explores how today’s ever-growing “hairball” of legacy technologies can stifle digital transformation by introducing an exponentially increasing monitoring cost for each new project and technology.

EMA Top 3 Enterprise Decision Guide 2020: Data-Driven Guidance for Product Evaluation in DevOps, SRE, IT Operations, and Business

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 23 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This EMA Top 3 product guide views, identifies, and categorizes the key pain points for today’s essential personas in business, software development, and corporate IT.

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Thu, 18 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Recent Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) research results illustrate the exponentially growing burden of technology complexity that originates from separating operating models for traditional and modern application architectures, and from the utilization of cloud-specific operations teams and management tools.

IBM Cloud Satellite: Policy-Driven App Deployment, Management, and Security Across Clouds, Data Centers, and Edge Locations

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 02 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

IBM Cloud Satellite enables DevOps teams to deploy, run, and manage the same code on hardware in their corporate data center, in colocation facilities, and at edge locations. Cloud Satellite lets developers continue to use the cloud-native APIs they are used to, while at the same time providing IT operators with a unified dashboard to centrally create and apply policies for optimal application placement, management, and security.

SaltStack Aims for Ultimate Scalability in Automation, AI, and Beyond

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 25 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The larger software projects get and the more two-pizza teams work on individual functional capabilities and microservices, the higher the maintenance overhead becomes. SaltStack experienced exactly this issue with their Salt open source automation platform and has now launched an original solution that replaces object oriented programming with its Plugin-Oriented Programming (POP) framework. All future SaltStack modules will be built on POP to address the most critical challenge when it comes to the development of cloud-native distributed applications that typically consist of a continuously increasing number of microservices: scalability.

ServiceNow Acquires Loom Systems - Boosting AIOps Through Advanced Feedback Learning

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Wed, 05 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

ServiceNow acquired Loom Systems to add the Israeli startup’s strong AI capabilities to its ITSM (IT Service Management) and ITOM (IT Operations Management) platform. Loom’s vision and determination to leverage unsupervised deep learning models to predict IT operations problems much earlier than conventional systems is dead on and a central key for digital transformation.

Improving Operational Efficiency for Kubernetes Applications

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Mon, 20 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The Kubernetes container orchestration platform provides developers with the APIs for simple code deployment while offering corporate IT a coherent, policy-driven operations framework.

Virtual Instruments is Now Virtana and Has Set Out to Optimize Operational Cost and Risk in the Data Center and Public Cloud

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Wed, 23 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

While users enjoy talking about multi-cloud, microservices, and Kubernetes, they often forget that approximately 80% of enterprise applications and an even larger share of mission-critical application workloads are still on-premises. These workloads are often tied to a specific set of host machines, typically requiring specialized staff and tools for silo-specific infrastructure management. Many of these traditional enterprise apps are not part of the corporate continuous delivery pipeline, living in a “parallel universe” that requires dedicated management tools and specialized operations staff. At the same time, cloud-native development and DevOps teams have created their own rapidly expanding universe, coming ever closer to automated release processes, near-instant rollback, and full observability of end-user interactions with individual microservices to inform the next incremental feature release.

Virtual Instruments Acquires the Pioneers of AIOps

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

On August 14, 2019, Virtual Instruments (VI), the AIOps vendor for data center and hybrid cloud, acquired Metricly, the Virginia-based SaaS platform for machine learning-driven full-stack application monitoring, alerting, and cost optimization. The Metricly IP includes a series of patented algorithms and self-learning services from the pioneers of machine learning-driven predictive analytics for IT operations: Netuitive.

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Mon, 29 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

With “VMware Cloud on AWS,” VMware aims to provide customers with the Holy Grail of operational consistency between the corporate data center and the AWS cloud for traditional enterprise applications and modern, cloud-native apps. Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) research has shown that the inability to leverage existing tools and existing operations staff for managing cloud environments are the two most critical pain points experienced by public cloud customers today. This demonstrates that the perspective of deploying the same compute, storage, and network infrastructure that enterprises are familiar with constitutes an appealing value proposition.

Serverless Computing for DevOps and Business: EMA Top 3 Report and Decision Guide for Serverless Technologies

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 05 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Serverless technologies enable developers to rapidly create and validate new applications without incurring significant CAPEX and OPEX requirements. This is due to serverless technologies providing developers with API access to all the resources they require to successfully run their code. These resources include basic CPU, memory, and storage APIs, but developers can also access higher-level capabilities, such as database services, machine learning, artificial intelligence, analytics services, or test automation.

WHAT IS AN EMA TOP 3 PRODUCT?

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA)

has awarded its EMA Top 3 trophy to products

that help enterprises achieve a state where 90

percent of development and operations resources go toward creating business value. Please note that the EMA Top 3 awards highlight products that address a set of empirically determined customer pain points in a clear and convincing manner. While some of these products “go where nobody has gone before,” others merely show a clear end-to-end solution, concept, and vision that makes them prime candidates to evaluate when looking to better optimize serverless functions.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for Optimizing DevOps, IT Operations, and Business: EMA Top 3 Report and Decision Guide for Enterprise

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 02 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) research shows that leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) for DevOps, IT operations management, and business management is the top priority for enterprises in 2018 and beyond. AI/ML brings data-driven intelligence to DevOps, IT operations, and the enterprise to optimize processes, recognize relevant trends, proactively prevent issues, rapidly detect and resolve problems, and enable human staff to make optimal and fact-driven decisions.

Guidance for AI/ML Product Decisions in DevOps, IT Ops, and Business

This EMA "Top 3 Decision Guide for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in DevOps, IT Operations, and Business" provides guidance for enterprises seeking to optimally leverage today’s AI/ML capabilities, depending on their individual situation and priorities.

Ten Priorities for Container Management and DevOps in Production and at Scale in 2018 - EMA Top 3 Report and Decision Guide for Enterprise

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Mon, 26 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

DevOps and containers enable enterprises to deliver better customer value in a more cost-effective manner by institutionalizing an automated, continuous, and rapid development, build, test, release, and deployment process.

Based on primary research data obtained from 300 U.S. enterprises, this report presents ten key priorities for successfully leveraging containers in production and at scale, within a DevOps context. These priorities will be the foundation for the EMA Top 3 awards presented to the outstanding vendors in each container management-related software category.

This report focuses on providing guidance that will help enable enterprises to transform into digital attackers by leveraging containers and DevOps to serve their customers faster, better, and cheaper on a continuous basis.

EMA Quick Take - RedHat Acquires CoreOS: A Tectonic Shift in the Container Landscape?

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Thu, 01 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

On January 30, RedHat, Inc. announced that it signed a definitive agreement to acquire CoreOS, Inc. for $250 million to double down on its open source-driven strategy to provide customers with a "best in class" hybrid cloud platform for traditional enterprise applications and cloud-native apps.

EMA Quick Take: Cisco Container Platform - Kubernetes Management Simplified

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Wed, 31 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

On January 31, 2018 Cisco Systems announced Cisco Container Platform, a Kubernetes-based container management solution. Cisco Container Platform will be available in late March for Cisco’s HyperFlex 3.0 hyperconverged appliance.

Cisco announced support for generic hypervisor environments and bare metal servers for summer. Cisco Container Platform will also become part of Cisco’s open hybrid cloud partnership with Google.

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Wed, 11 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) is impressed with Canonical’s focus on automation as the foundation for scalability in DevOps, cloud, containers, and IoT. "We have to be benchmarked against public clouds in strict economic terms," says Mark Shuttleworth, CEO at Canonical. This means that Canonical must address OPEX as the core pain point of private cloud that drove customers into the arms of Amazon and Azure. Canonical seeks to offer hybrid clouds that, at scale, are cheaper to operate than it would be to rent resources from one of the megaclouds.

EMA Quick Take: Cisco Launches AI-Enabled Cloud-Managed Infrastructure

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Mon, 02 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Introducing a Consumption-Based IT Model for the Corporate Data Center

Cisco has launched Cisco Intersight (formerly known as Project Starship) to offer developers public cloud–like access to data center resources while lowering IT OPEX. Intersight aims to consolidate operations for on-premises infrastructure into a centralized SaaS- based management plane that ties together, and will eventually absorb, the capabilities from Cisco UCS Manager, HyperFlex, and Integrated Management Controller (IMC) Supervisor. Intersight will initially be hosted by Cisco, but will be available as an on-premises or partner-hosted appliance in the future.

Intersight offers detailed performance metrics, telemetry, and inventory data for corporate IT to optimally target proactive maintenance and root-cause analysis tasks. Combined with machine learning capabilities, Intersight will provide guidance and, if desired, automatic issue resolution. At launch, Intersight connects to UCS Manager, IMC, and HyperFlex. It is safe to assume that Cisco will soon offer UCS Director integration.

EMA Innovator Awards: VMworld 2017 - Top 3

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 12 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

It’s All About the Business

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) Innovators of VMworld 2017 allhave one thing in common. They align IT with the business by making apps and services faster, cheaper and easier deploy and manage. EMA Innovators can be startups with a compelling value proposition or they could be more established vendors with an interesting new release around VMworld.

DevOps Needs Business Driven IT

EMA research has shown that silos still are the key obstacles of cost effective and business-driven hybrid IT management. New megatrends such as DevOps and containers introduce additional pressure on the enterprise to break out of these management silos and implement a much more business-driven IT operations paradigm.

EMA Quick Take: VMware vRealize Suite 2017

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 12 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Accelerated Deployment and Lower OPEX

Faster time to value, lower OPEX, and deeper multicloud support are the key elements of VMware vRealize Suite 2017 as it was presented at VMworld 2017 in Barcelona. The new vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (vRSLCM) provides one central user interface (UI) tying together the formerly fragmented and complex deployment process for new vRealize environments. Additionally, vRSCLM enables health monitoring, product con guration, IAM integration, and simpli ed upgrades.

Should You Care About the Release of vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager?

VMware vRealize Suite has received much criticism in the past for its complicated and too brittle deployment, con guration, and integration process. Considering that vRSLCM addresses exactly this critical issue by offering a uni ed installation wizard and a centralized operations dashboard for one or multiple vRealize Suite environments, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) can only conclude that this new release is signi cant and deserves a close look.

Slides From Bare Metal to Public Cloud and Containers - 5 Best Practices for Monitoring Modern Infrastructures

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Fri, 01 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

These slides - based on the webinar featuring leading IT analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) and CA Technologies - outline the five most important best practices to monitor a hybrid infrastructure.

Based on the latest EMA research, these slides provide key insights into monitoring hybrid stacks consisting of public cloud, container, hypervisor, hyperconverged and bare metal resources.

EMA Top 3: Ten Priorities for Hybrid Cloud, Containers, and DevOps in 2017 - Enterprise Decision Guide

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Thu, 29 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

This Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) decision guide focuses on how enterprises should manage hybrid cloud, containers, and DevOps to provide their business with an optimal IT environment where innovation can be delivered in the most efficient and effective manner.

Why You Should Read this Research Report

IT and software development decision makers and influencers will learn the following:

Ten priorities for efficiently managing hybrid cloud, containers, and DevOps
Concrete EMA recommendations for effectively implementing these priorities
EMA Top Three Products to optimally implement each recommendation

Research Methodology

All research results in this report are based on EMA's survey of 260 randomly-selected North American enterprises with 500 or more employees across all industries. Clustering these survey results by theme led to our ten priorities. EMA analysts examined each of these priorities within the context of today's key challenges of leveraging containers, hybrid cloud, and machine learning to reach the optimal compromise between rapid software releases and reliability of IT operations.

Report Metrics

260 Enterprises surveyed

87% Using private or public cloud

10 Key trends identified

IN A NUTSHELL: 2017 TOP PRIORITIES

Control your hybrid cloud cost.
Enforce security and compliance.
Private cloud is coming back.
Plan for container management.
Demand single pane of glass monitoring.
Evaluate hyperconverged systems for your scale-out cloud.
Focus on integration between cloud and data centers.
Push your developers toward server-less functions.
Bring automation and full visibility to your DevOps process.
Evaluate machine learning for operations management.

What Are the EMA Top Three?

EMA's Top Three products were selected because they enable customers to address the ten key IT operations priorities in 2017 in a convincing and often innovative manner. Please regard this report as a guide to help IT influencers and decision makers in their project planning and vendor selection processes. It is not a feature-by-feature comparison of all included vendors. In certain cases, EMA included products that are still in a late beta or preview stage simply to recognize a vendor's excellent alignment with research results. On the other hand, you may miss more traditional products that did not make it into the report, simply because newcomers took their spot.

EMA Deep Dive: How to Become a Digital Attacker - A Shift Toward an Outcome-Centric IT Paradigm

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Many of the 68 percent of enterprises who are currently experimenting with containers are in the process of finding out that it is simple to deploy containerized apps in a small environment, such as a laptop. It is less simple to deploy them to load balanced and scalable deployments with thousands of users and strict compliance requirements. For the latter, enterprises require a full container management stack, very similar to today's virtualization management stack. Traditional virtualization administrators cannot implement and manage this stack because doing so requires skill and experience specific to container infrastructure. A few years ago, OpenStack was in the place of containers today, with OpenStack architects and engineers being the most sought after tech experts around. This is not to say that containers will see the same decline that OpenStack experienced, but it is critical to understand that containers like OpenStack play at the infrastructure level. They are a means to an end: turning your organization into a "digital attacker" that can constantly deliver the best possible value proposition to your customers by optimizing business processes and end-user experience. Customers do not have a preference as to whether your app is running in containers, as serverless functions on AWS Lambda, or on a mainframe.

VMware Goes DevOps: Wavefront Acquisition Brings Massive Data Analytics Capabilities for IT Operations

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 18 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

On Wednesday, April 12, VMware and Wavefront entered into an agreement for VMware to acquire Wavefront, the Palo Alto-based data analytics firm. VMware plans to leverage Wavefront to complement its upcoming Cross-Cloud Services and its vRealize product line by enabling developers to monitor, analyze, and troubleshoot their applications independently of the cloud they rung on. Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) sees it likely that due to the modular and API-centric architecture behind Wavefront, VMware will find many more opportunities to cross-pollinate other products, such as VMware Workspace ONE or vSAN Health Services, with advanced data analytics capabilities.

IBM Cloud Automation Manager: Simplify Hybrid Cloud Deployment and Operation

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

IBM Cloud Automation Manager (CAM) is a multi-cloud management and automation platform, aimed at simplifying the deployment and operation of traditional enterprise applications and modern microservices-based cloud apps.

DevOps teams and traditional development groups can continue to use tools such as Jenkins to manage their code pipeline. Jenkins can then request the required development, test, or production environments from CAM via REST API calls, without the development team having to worry about differences between the underlying infrastructure clouds (Amazon EC2, Bluemix -formerly SoftLayer-, and vSphere are initially supported). IT operations and service desk teams can also continue to leverage their current tools (NewRelic, ServiceNow, BMC Remedy, or SystemCenter), while CAM provides a single pane of glass to ensure consistent management across cloud and datacenter boundaries.

VMware Paves the Way to Software-Defined Hyper-Converged Infrastructure with the Release of vSAN 6.6

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

On April 11, 2017, VMware announced the launch of vSAN 6.6, its 6th-generation software-defined storage (SDS) product. vSAN 6.6 includes 22 new features and capabilities with a principal focus on expanding security, data durability, automation, and performance. Extended support for Docker and analytics platforms such as Splunk and Hadoop coincided with this release. In this impact brief, EMA reviews the value of vSAN's new features and identifies how VMware's platform fits into the broader storage and hyperconverged marketplace.

Accelerate Cloud Transformation, Lower Cloud OPEX, and Increase Business Agility Through Blueprint-driven Cloud Automation

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Wed, 05 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Business today depends on the agility and speed of IT. Once it became clear that the corporate IT department was not able to accommodate the hunger for rapidly-provisioned application environments, business developers and managers looked for a pragmatic solution to "resolve just this one more bottleneck." Public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure were quick to jump in and provide the infrastructure, services, and application templates needed for the business to quench its thirst for the swift provisioning and teardown of applications even as hybrid IT architectures started to see increased demand. Due to the convenience factor, more and more applications gradually moved into a de-facto production state. As developers created many of these environments, release cycles were quick and informal. Shadow IT was born.

Accelerate Cloud Transformation, Optimize Cloud Costs Through Governance and Collaboration

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Wed, 05 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) research shows significant growth in both private and public cloud in 2017, with enterprises planning to move an additional 19 percent of their applications to public clouds and another 10 percent to private cloud platforms. To accommodate technical workload requirements, as well as for security, compliance, and nancial considerations, enterprises are increasingly adopting multiple cloud platforms. An approximate 35 percent of enterprise customers harness four or more public cloud o erings to complement their existing private clouds (see Chart 1).

Cisco HyperFlex 2.5: Scale-out for Enterprise and Born in the Cloud Applications

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Wed, 08 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

On Tuesday, March 7, Cisco Systems launched version 2.5 of its HyperFlex hyper converged infrastructure o ering. Version 2.5 includes three critical new elements:

• Simplified management: New HyperFlex Connect UI for cluster-wide health, capacity and performance management.

• Data protection and security: VM-level replication and Data-at-Rest encryption.

• NVMe Caching: Non-volatile Memory express (NVMe) enables SSD storage to leverage the server’s PCIe bus to achieve 3–5 times faster read/write speeds.

Background

"Simplify More" is Cisco's mantra around its HyperFlex Systems line of hyper converged products. In its first year on the market, HyperFlex obtained over 1,100 customers, ranging from mid-market to large enterprise. Over 30% were net new customers.

Cisco HyperFlex targets both traditional enterprise workloads – Microsoft Exchange, Citrix XenDesktop, VMWare Horizon, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server – and modern born in the cloud applications that inherently support infrastructure scale-out. It's versatility is a key reason for the rapid success of Cisco HyperFlex.

Platform9 Goes Serverless: A True Alternative to Lambda?

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 07 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

On January 24 Platform9, a vendor of turnkey private and hybrid cloud solutions, launched turnkey deployment and management capabilities for Kubernetes and announced the general availability of Fission. Fission is a serverless computing framework for Kubernetes designed as an open-source alternative to AWS Lambda. Like Lambda, Fission enables developers to upload and run "just the code" without having to worry about the architecture and management of the underlying containers and virtual machines (VMs).

This Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) Impact Brief illustrates the differences between Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda and Platform9 Fission and discusses how much these matter to enterprise customers.

Slides: How Analytics Optimize Migration to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Other Public Clouds

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The question of whether to transition enterprise applications to the cloud is a valid question in most organizations. Determining which applications should go and how to maintain control once they are there, however, is slowing down the journey to the cloud.

These slides - based on the webinar - cover how you can avoid the common mistakes and reduce risk in the transformation to cloud.

HPE Goes Web-scale: Analysis of the SimpliVity Acquisition

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Wed, 25 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Late on Tuesday, January 17 HPE acquired converged infrastructure provider SimpliVity for $650 million. This transaction was aimed at obtaining OmniStack, SimpliVity's Data Virtualization Technology that enables true VM-centric scale-out of virtualized environments. HPE's leadership team regards OmniStack as a "simplification layer that will drive down OPEX and increase application density in multi cloud environments."

Combined with HPE's hyperconverged and composable infrastructure offerings, OmniStack will allow customers to rapidly provision and centrally manage virtual machines (VMs) across racks, data centers, and public clouds using their existing tools, such as VMware vSphere. Within 60 days of closing the transaction, HPE intends to offer the SimpliVity OmniStack software qualified for HPE ProLiant DL380 servers. In the second half of 2017, the company will offer a range of integrated HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged systems based on ProLiant Servers.

Serverless Computing, Artificial Intelligence, and VMware Collaboration: Amazon is the Public Cloud Vendor to Beat!

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Mon, 23 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

55% year over year revenue growth and approximately $13 billion in 2016 total revenue (over three times the size of its closest competitor, Microsoft Azure) demonstrate Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) strong momentum. Amazon claims that new customers are mostly attracted by two core advantages: rapid provisioning speed of easily consumable services and cost savings. Research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) confirms this claim and EMA continues to be impressed by Amazon’s pace of innovation and bold investments in future technologies, such as serverless computing, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things. Exactly this innovation-centric strategy made Amazon.com the sustained and undisputed market leader in online retail, e-readers and ebooks.

The sheer number of significant fourth-quarter announcements (28), combined with this year’s size of the AWS re:Invent show in Las Vegas, NV, (32,000 attendees, 562 sessions, and 996 speakers) demonstrate that Amazon will not take their foot off the gas. This EMA Impact Brief provides an overview of the most strategically significant announcements and what they mean for customers and competition.

EMA Innovators of Amazon Re:Invent 2016

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Thu, 08 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) is awarding the "EMA Innovators of Amazon Re:Invent" trophies to vendors of any age and size that slay one or more of the "Four Horsemen of the Hybrid Cloud Apocalypse." These horsemen are responsible for the typical enterprise wasting over 50% of its IT resources -- hardware, software, cloud services and human resources -- and they are described in detail in our EMA essay "From the Software-Defined Data Center to the Business-Defined Intelligent Hybrid Cloud."

Virtual Instruments Acquires Xangati: The Birth of a Hybrid Cloud Monitoring Powerhouse

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Thu, 17 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

On November 16, 2016 Virtual Instruments announced the acquisition of Xangati, a performance control and service assurance analytics vendor for Hybrid Cloud environments. With this strategic move, Virtual Instruments catapulted itself ahead of the pack of application-centric hybrid infrastructure monitoring vendors. Combining its uniquely comprehensive storage monitoring capabilities for SAN and NAS with Xangati’s network and virtual server analytics capabilities now enables Virtual Instruments to move out of the niche of monitoring large high-end storage environments and toward the mainstream Hybrid Cloud performance monitoring and management market.

IBM-as-a-Service and Dynamic Cloud as a Catalyst for Innovation

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Wed, 02 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

IBM-as-a-Service is a new concept coined at the 2014 PULSE conference and referring to IBM's ultimate goal of offering customers the choice of ordering infrastructure services (bare metal or virtualized), entire application development environments, or turnkey systems management software, such as IBM Service Desk, Workload Automation and Application Performance Management. IBM-as-a-Service is enabled by IBM's "dynamic cloud" concept. "Dynamic cloud" refers to a policy-driven orchestration and automation platform, based on open architectures and continuous application delivery. "Dynamic cloud" is the path to IBM's "compassable" business strategy, aimed at providing customers with all of the IaaS, PaaS and SaaS building blocks they require to rapidly address business challenges.

This EMA impact brief examines how IBM-as-a-Service and "dynamic cloud" are enabled through a set of new and existing IBM offerings and how both can serve as a catalyst for innovation.

HP OneView: A Fresh Take on Unified IT Infrastructure Management

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Wed, 26 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

"We look at infrastructure as a pool of resources to be accessed programmatically and automatically," said Bill Veghte, General Manager of HP's enterprise group. In order to achieve this ultimate vision of a truly Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) there must be full visibility in terms of health, capacity and component interdependencies of server, storage and network infrastructure.

This EMA impact brief explores whether HP OneView is able to deliver the integrated approach to infrastructure management that is needed to operate data center and cloud infrastructure in a truly application and, ultimately, business-driven manner.

BlueMix: "Unleashing the Hounds of Hell" on Service Creation

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Wed, 12 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

On February 24, 2014, IBM launched the beta of its BlueMix Platform as a Service (PaaS) hosted offering, based on Cloud Foundry and aimed at allowing developers to compose services without having to provision or manage the underlying infrastructure. "When you think about cloud, you think about speed," said Jerry Cuomo, IBM Fellow and WebSphere CTO. "This is all about compositional innovation, and IBM has unleashed the hounds of hell building reusable services."

BlueMix, particularly in conjunction with related IBM Cloud announcements and organizational changes, marks a business and cultural change which one executive described as a "shift in IBM's center of gravity." It also carries implications which could change the way applications are created, assembled, hosted and delivered by both IBM and IT organizations in coming years. As IBM's cloud strategy continues to develop -- and all indications are that it will -- BlueMix may well become a foundation for continuous innovation which could dramatically increase the business impact of enterprise IT.

IBM Service Engage: Enabling Business and IT Practitioners

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Wed, 26 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) research has shown and continues to show the rapidly increasing influence of data center operations staff and even business stakeholders on the selection of enterprise IT infrastructure. At the same time, organizations are looking to reduce CAPEX in favor of a more consumption-based approach to acquiring IT services. Enterprise IT is increasingly regarded as a broker and integrator of internal and external technology components, which enables the rapid business-driven creation of hybrid services. EMA research has displayed that business units are exerting more and more pressure on enterprise IT to deliver these services in a quicker and higher quality manner. At the same time, business stakeholders are directly evaluating IT solutions and influencing the purchase decision.

IBM Service Engage is IBM's response to enabling practitioners and line of business buyers to test-drive IBM software products without investing time and resources in the deployment of a pilot environment. Through the IBM Service Engage portal, customers can spin up environments of IBM enterprise software, such as IBM Workload Automation, IBM Performance Management and IBM SmartCloud Control Desk, without having to obtain the hardware resources and staff knowledge that would typically be required for a local POC. Ultimately, IBM is planning to make more and more of its current SaaS and on-premise software offerings available via IBM Service Engage.

This EMA Impact Brief explores the customer value provided by IBM Service Engage and illustrates the strategic implications of IBM's new approach to delivering integrated IT software services.

Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud 4.0: Cloud Management for IaaS and Beyond

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Wed, 19 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In January of 2014 Cisco Systems launched Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud 4.0 (IAC 4.0). In combination with the latest release of Cisco UCS Director, responsible for management of physical and virtual servers, storage and network infrastructure, IAC 4.0 enables the rapid and policy driven provisioning of cloud-based IT services. These services can now be deployed on physical or virtual resources in massive and heterogeneous private cloud environments, and managed alongside resources from one or more public cloud platforms.

A Brain for the Software Defined Data Center

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 18 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

EMA analysts asked IT executives, IT operations staff and line of business managers and executives of 235 organizations with highly mature IT departments about the key obstacles and priorities to optimally deliver and manage applications. This EMA research has shown that IT service provisioning times in 2014 are still mostly measured in weeks or even months. This time can be broken down into a decision and planning period, and the time required for executing the actual provisioning actions. Therefore, tools to power the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) must offer solutions for both the decision and the provisioning challenge.

Serious About Cloud: IBM Commits $1.2 Billion to Global Data Center Expansion

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Thu, 30 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Following its $2 billion acquisition of SoftLayer in 2013, on January 17, 2014, IBM announced plans to invest $1.2 billion in dramatically expanding its global network of data centers. IBM will add 15 data centers to its existing 13 SoftLayer and 12 IBM Cloud facilities, creating a network of 40 data centers worldwide. Offering regional data centers on all five continents will satisfy privacy laws, data security concerns, latency demands and control requirements that are frequently voiced by enterprise customers as key challenges for public cloud adoption. To demonstrate SoftLayer's current momentum, IBM announced the addition of 2,400 hosting customers -- existing IBM customers, as well as net new clients -- in the first six months after the SoftLayer acquisition from summer of 2013.

Obstacles and Priorities on the Journey to the Software-Defined Data Center

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Mon, 27 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Organizations have long been frustrated with slow delivery of new applications and IT's common lack of ability to optimally operate, manage and update these applications. Public cloud services have benefited greatly as a result, due to the perception that they are faster to deploy and easier to manage. But internal IT must respond as well. The concept of the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) picked up tremendous traction in 2013 and it is safe to predict that the SDDC will become one of the dominating trends in enterprise IT in 2014. At the core of the SDDC is the belief that in order to better serve the business, IT infrastructure--internal and external--must be controlled centrally and become radically aligned along application and service requirements. Deploying, operating, managing and updating applications in the most cost-effective, secure, agile and policy-compliant manner is the key goal of the SDDC. Business units are exerting a tremendous amount of pressure on the IT department to accelerate this process, requiring IT to obtain new skills, such as "programming," and to focus on developing cross-domain expertise.

Today there are no central management technologies that are able to control and unify the entire data center and the public cloud. However, this Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) research illustrates that successfully implementing the SDDC starts with an IT operations mindset that focuses on reinventing the infrastructure provisioning and management process in a much more policy-driven manner. Study respondents acknowledged the fact that the SDDC cannot be implemented in the form of a technology project, but rather constitutes a concept that describes guidelines that follow the multi-year vision of entirely closing the traditional gap between enterprise IT and the business.

The SDDC today can also be described as a strategic shift that requires sometimes drastic changes in culture, organization and processes, more than posing a technology challenge. Positioning the SDDC as simply a technology challenge would be simplifying this complex topic and lead to missed expectations. This EMA study is taking a look into the future by focusing on the expertise and opinions of early adopters and visionaries to determine obstacles and priorities on the way to managing the data center and external resources--IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and ultimately BPaaS--in a performance-, resilience-, security- and SLA-driven manner.

Study respondents identified "centralized management across a massively heterogeneous IT infrastructure," "repeatable configuration of software and infrastructure for optimal application deployment" and "orchestration and automation for application deployments across silos" as the core priorities on the journey to the SDDC today. Organizations indicated plans to rely on IT vendors for help in the form of professional consulting and implementation services in the areas of "legacy infrastructure integration" and improved "IT alignment with business requirements."

In 2014, data center investments will focus on capacity management tools, multi-virtualization and/or multi-cloud management platforms, configuration management software and solutions for the centralized management of physical, virtual and cloud resources. Organizations are also seeking to benefit from the ROI and cost advantages of Software Defined Storage (SDS), software-defined networking and network virtualization. All three of these technologies can be seen as catalysts for a more application-centric data center.

OpenStack, by the end of 2014, will be found within approximately half of IT departments within the EMA sample of early adopters. However, until business-critical use cases become more common for OpenStack deployments, EMA is unwilling to declare OpenStack the winner of the IaaS race.

In short, 2014 is the year of the SDDC and providing developers and applications owners with what they need to successfully deploy, operate and manage an ever-growing number of enterprise applications.

Report Summary - Obstacles and Priorities on the Journey to the Software-Defined Data Center

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Mon, 27 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This is the summary of the EMA Report: Obstacles and Priorities on the Journey to the Software-Defined Data Center.

Report Summary

Organizations have long been frustrated with slow delivery of new applications and IT’s common lack of ability to optimally operate, manage and update these applications. Public cloud services have benefited greatly as a result, due to the perception that they are faster to deploy and easier to manage. But internal IT must respond as well. The concept of the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) picked up tremendous traction in 2013 and it is safe to predict that the SDDC will become one of the dominating trends in enterprise IT in 2014. At the core of the SDDC is the belief that in order to better serve the business, IT infrastructure--internal and external--must be controlled centrally and become radically aligned along application and service requirements. Deploying, operating, managing and updating applications in the most cost-effective, secure, agile and policy-compliant manner is the key goal of the SDDC. Business units are exerting a tremendous amount of pressure on the IT department to accelerate this process, requiring IT to obtain new skills, such as "programming," and to focus on developing cross-domain expertise.

CiRBA 8: Capacity Management for Application Centric Environments

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 14 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Enterprise IT constitutes the most important factor for achieving competitive business advantages today. Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) research has shown that line of business staff is now putting the pressure on IT operations to rapidly provision servers, network, storage and management capabilities for an exploding number of projects. The ability to quickly respond to line of business needs, while optimizing the traditional tradeoff between cost, risk and performance, represents the key challenge posed to enterprise IT in today’s age of big data, analytics, cloud and DevOps.

Is OpenStack the answer to giving business units the flexibility they need, while ensuring IT operations remains in control of performance, security, cost and compliance? Should you acquire one or multiple VCE VBlocks, rely on good old "pizza boxes" or expand your usage of public cloud resources? Should you move your VMware ESXi workloads to a lower cost hypervisor platform or should they stay where they are? In short, how can you create the most cost effective IT infrastructure -- consisting of internal and public resources and services -- to empower line of business developers to unleash hell on the competition?

CiRBA has set out to provide conclusive answers to these questions. This EMA Impact Brief reviews the capabilities of CiRBA 8 within the context of today’s discussions on cloud and software defined environments.

Workload Automation: The Business Process Integration Hub in the Age of Cloud and Big Data

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Mon, 23 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Today, enterprise IT is all about delivering services to the business in a well performing, secure, compliant and reliable manner. These services often depend on data and applications located on a variety of operating systems and even public cloud services, such as Amazon EC2 or Microsoft Windows Azure. The more seamlessly, rapidly and reliably these applications are able to exchange data, the better business units can take advantage of IT services and deliver value to their customers. Workload Automation (WA) should be seen as the plumbing that connects all of the operating systems, applications (custom and off-the-shelf ) and data sources (relational and unstructured). In short, WA is today's business process integration hub and therewith a central key for ultimate IT efficiency and effectiveness. This white paper is based on the EMA WA research report from September of 2013 -- Workload Automation in an Era of Cloud, Analytics, Enterprise Mobility, DevOps and Big Data -- and will explore how organizations of any size and vertical can benefit by recognizing the importance of WA software within a cloud and big data context.

It's All About the App: Application-Centric Systems Management

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Thu, 19 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Business staff is not interested in the technical details and explanations of why their application fails to perform adequately. When emails are delayed due to Exchange performance problems, the productivity of the entire organization is impacted. When customer or patient records are unavailable because of storage capacity issues, financial and even health consequences can be dire. Downtime of online storefronts -- no matter the root-cause -- can quickly threaten the reputation or even the survival of an ecommerce-driven business. Therefore, a modern approach to systems management is required where the entire stack, consisting of applications, databases, virtual machines, physical hosts, datastores, LUNs and storage arrays, must be managed in an application-centric manner. EMA research has shown that the traditional siloed approach to systems management is no longer viable and that technical issues must be evaluated and qualified based on their relevance to overall application performance and reliability. In short, application context is key when it comes to modern systems management.

Effective Systems Management for Healthcare

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Thu, 19 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

As described in a recent Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) white paper, application-aware systems management is a central challenge within modern enterprise IT. This application centricity is specifically important in healthcare settings, such as hospitals, specialty care centers and doctors' offices. These healthcare institutions cannot afford downtime or lackluster performance, as they must optimally utilize the time of doctors, nurses and other medical staff to ensure the best possible patient care, as well as financial viability of the overall organization. Furthermore, high-dollar medical equipment, such as MRI, CT or digital X-ray machines rely on the optimal operations of the institution's medical applications and the servers, network and storage resources on which they depend.

Healthcare IT environments need a pragmatic monitoring and management solution that is easy to deploy, operate and manage. This EMA white paper will explore systems management requirements derived from the specific challenges faced by the healthcare institutions today.

gen-E Resolve: A Human Centric Approach to IT Automation

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 17 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) research has identified "reduction of operating costs," "increased staff productivity" and "fewer human errors" as the top three business drivers of IT automation. At the same time, a 2013 EMA study on Data Center Automation, as well as a research paper on the business impact of cloud from the same year, has found that despite these compelling business reasons, there is an acute lack of automation in the data center, as organizations often have been unable to successfully implement the required systems, structures and processes. Frequently, automation platforms end up underutilized and siloed, as the "human element" is not sufficiently considered.

How Small and Midsize Data Centers Can Benefit from Unified Infrastructure

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Thu, 21 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

In small and midsize organizations, IT staff often wears many hats. This means that the same administrator who provisions the servers for a new environment also has to configure the required networking resources, as well as carve out storage volumes and configure the hypervisor. Furthermore, the same jack-of-all-trades employee might be responsible for compliance, patch management and security of the new environment, while at the same time ensuring application availability and performance. To make matters more challenging, we often find significantly less automation in small and midsize data centers, making provisioning and management of application environments a manual task. As a result, a lot of time and money is spent on "keeping the lights on," while IT staff is faced with configuration drift and inconsistent provisioning practices that can lead to security vulnerabilities, SLA violations, and general inefficiency in terms of operational expense (OPEX). With each server, network, and storage hardware refresh, there is a new layer of operational complexity, leading to a more heterogeneous environment, with many technology islands and proprietary management tools. This complexity, combined with a lack of integration and automation leads to decreased operational agility.

Optimizing Your Service Delivery: Change is in Your Hands

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Wed, 16 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Rapid deployment and efficient management of secure, compliant and reliable IT services constitutes a critical business differentiator today for almost any organization. Business staff quickly and easily orders and accesses personal IT services and therefore expects this same end user focus from the corporate IT department. To keep up with this new set of demands, a paradigm shift in enterprise IT must occur, away from the currently still prevalent infrastructure centric paradigm -- focused on the efficient management and provisioning of hardware and software resources -- toward a truly business centric approach. Eventually, non-IT services provided by different departments, such as Human Resources, Operations, Finance, Facilities and Customer Services, will also be delivered through the corporate service portal. Ultimately, enterprise IT will also be expected to offer standardized vertical solutions, directed at healthcare, financial, manufacturing or professional services use cases.

The CTO and CIO roles must initiate and support this paradigm shift. Every new technology introduced has to be evaluated based on its business value, in addition to its technical specifications. High end features and performance metrics matter significantly less than the new technology's ability to seamlessly integrate within the current data center infrastructure. Ultimately, IT needs to transform into a broker of business critical services. Success will be measured by the ability to eliminate complexity and rapidly provide impactful hybrid services that improve the competitive position of the entire organizations in the marketplace.

Innovating Through Cloud Technologies: Change is in Your Hands

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 15 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Realizing the business value of cloud is one of today's key challenges in enterprise IT. The key strategic capabilities of cloud -- agility, resiliency and efficiency -- can only be harnessed if the IT organization possesses the automation, orchestration and integration capabilities required to tie together hardware and software along the lines of business processes. This is a non-trivial challenge as there are many different clouds -- private and public -- available today, each of which is targeted toward a specific set of use cases. Centrally enforcing compliance, security and cost efficiency to enable the organization to take full advantage of today's world of many clouds requires a service management platform that facilitates policy driven provisioning and management of entire services consisting of application and infrastructure components sourced from multiple clouds.

EMA research shows that organizations typically encounter numerous challenges when leveraging cloud. These issues do not emerge on PowerPoint during the cloud vendor's sales presentation, but become evident when the cloud deployment project begins. In addition, most enterprises have much work left to do in terms of data center automation, as well as breaking down technology silos. Cloud platforms must integrate with the existing data center infrastructure, including enterprise applications and data sources, in order to facilitate the generation of true business value.

EMC ViPR: Software Defined Storage with no Hardware Required

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Mon, 23 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) research has shown the rapidly growing pressure exerted by business executives, line of business managers and their application developers on IT operations management. These groups argue that the quicker their applications are deployed and the more often they can be refreshed, the better the entire business can compete in the market place. Line of business staff today is savvier than ever in terms of understanding the potential impact of IT on the business, as they have grown familiar with public cloud offerings enabled by Amazon, Dropbox, Salesforce, Google, Rackspace and many others.

Workload Automation in an Era of Cloud, Analytics, Enterprise Mobility, DevOps and Big Data

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Mon, 16 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Almost one third of organizations (30%) and over half of companies with the most mature Workload Automation (WLA) software deployments (56%) currently consider abandoning their WLA vendor and migrating to a "superior" software solution. To make matters even more interesting, only 19% believe that there is no better WLA software out there than the product(s) they are currently using. In other words, 81% of organizations feel locked in by their WLA software vendor and believe that the cost of breaking out of this "embracement" would be too high to justify migrating to a better tool. These findings fundamentally contradict the common belief that there is no growth potential in the marketplace for WLA software.

CloudPhysics: Leveraging Big Data Analytics for IT Operations Management

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Wed, 14 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Current Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) research -- Demystifying Cloud -- has shown the tremendous traction gained by IBM's pre-integrated infrastructure as a foundation for private and hybrid cloud deployments. This traction is partially due to the fact that one third of cloud deployment projects runs over budget or significantly exceeds the anticipated implementation timetable. A recent EMA impact brief on the launch of SmartCloud Orchestrator and the importance of OpenStack, TOSCA and OSLC examines IBM's vision of offering customers the ability to freely place complex application workloads in the private or public cloud. PureApplication System "understands" the characteristics and requirements of these workloads and is able to automatically configure its servers, network components, and storage infrastructure to ensure optimal service performance, security and scalability.

Founded in 2011 with the clear vision of consolidating and simplifying IT operations management through a big data analytics driven collective intelligence approach, CloudPhysics launched its operations management service on August 13, 2013. At the same time, the company announced that it has closed a Series B funding of $10 million led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

In this Impact Brief, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) will examine if the SaaS-based CloudPhysics operations management solution has the potential to be a true game changer.

2013 EMA Vendors to Watch: Systems Management

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 13 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

EMA "Vendors to Watch" are companies that deliver unique customer value by solving problems that had previously gone unaddressed or provide value in innovative ways. The designation rewards vendors that dare to go off the beaten path and have defined their own market niches.

This document contains the 2013 EMA Vendors to Watch in the Systems Management field including CiRBA, CliQr, ServiceMesh, and Virtustream.

EMA Vendor to Watch: Virtustream

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 30 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

EMA Vendors to Watch are companies that deliver unique customer value by solving problems that had previously gone unaddressed or provide value in innovative ways. The designation rewards vendors that dare to go off the beaten path and have defined their own market niches.

Virtustream offers a private, hybrid, and public cloud solution targeted at the onboarding of mission critical workloads, such as SAP, Microsoft, and Oracle. In order to turn an existing virtualized environment into a secure and SLA compliant private cloud, customers can install Virtustream's xStream software alongside their current virtualization stack. If desired, Virtustream proactively manages the customer environment and guarantees the desired SLAs.

Data Center Automation in the Age of Cloud

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Mon, 15 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

While "cloud" is one of today's most discussed topics, the fact that the majority of enterprises do not receive the expected ROI out of their cloud projects is little known. Based on the foundation of Enterprise Management Associates' (EMA's) Demystifying Cloud study, this new research will demonstrate how cloud ROI directly depends on Data Center Automation (DCA) and how organizations can improve their DCA strategy to receive more value from their cloud.

The degree of adoption of each individual DCA discipline2 ranges from 34% of organizations for "Showback" to 66% of companies for "automated backup and recovery." All the remaining disciplines, such as "change and configuration management" (53%), "database automation" (49%), "OS provisioning" (47%), "storage automation" (56%), "server automation" (54%), and "job scheduling" (53%), show adoption rates that lie somewhere within this range. These adoption rates illustrate that there is still much homework to be done when it comes to DCA.

There is a direct logical connection between cloud ROI and DCA, as by definition, cloud requires automation to deliver business value through enabling the self-service provisioning of pooled resources. Without the presence of the above mentioned DCA tools or disciplines, the availability of cloud puts a growing strain on data center staff, as cloud would allow business units to provision their own application environments in a self-service fashion, while IT operations staff would have to scramble to deploy and manage the underlying resource requirements.

The "reduction of OPEX," "increased IT staff productivity," and the "reduction of human errors" are the key business drivers of DCA. These business drivers complement and enable the two most important strategic cloud goals -- "agility" and "reliability" -- as identified in EMA's Demystifying Cloud study.

Cloud without Compromise: Why IBM is Acquiring SoftLayer

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

On June 4, 2013, IBM announced a definitive agreement to acquire SoftLayer Technologies, a provider of bare metal, virtual, and cloud hosting services. SoftLayer's Infrastructure Management System (IMS) platform will be the central delivery vehicle for IBM's middleware, software, and vertical solutions portfolio in the future. Once the acquisition is complete, SoftLayer, together with IBM's existing SmartCloud Services group, will become part of a new cloud services division under the umbrella of IBM Global Technology Services.

SoftLayer is an excellent fit for IBM for two core reasons: 1) the company's open approach to cloud that is very much in line with IBM's cloud vision and 2) its ability to simplify and centralize IT infrastructure automation and orchestration. The SoftLayer acquisition must be regarded as an essential step of boosting IBM's cloud business toward the aspired $7 billion in revenue by end of year 2015.

SoftLayer was founded in 2005 in Dallas, Texas. In 2010 SoftLayer was acquired by GI Partners, a private equity firm headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Later that same year, SoftLayer merged with The Planet, a Texas-based provider of dedicated hosting services. SoftLayer currently operates 13 data centers in the US, Asia, and Europe. The company employs 700 staff, serving 21,000 customers worldwide. SoftLayer's customer base was traditionally focused on "born on the cloud" SMBs and small enterprises, but today includes major global enterprises such as Repsol.

Lance Crosby, the company's Chief Executive Officer, summed up SoftLayer's vision as follows: "We think everything in the data center should be available on demand as a platform." This Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) Impact Brief will examine how SoftLayer's capabilities will complement and enhance IBM's current cloud strategy.

PureSystems for Cloud and Big Data

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The adoption of Big Data solutions comes with often tremendous requirements in terms of hardware capacity and performance. IBM now offers a pre-integrated hardware platform -- PureData System for Analytics -- that is tuned to the specific needs of big data analytics and reporting. This new offering is in addition to IBMís existing PureData System for Transactions (aimed at processing of online transactions) and PureData System for Operational Analytics (real-time decision making).

This EMA Impact Brief will explore how the latest release of IBM PureSystems enables end customers and service providers to increase their ROI on cloud deployment and operations and Big Data analytics.

EMA Impact Brief: VMware Launches vCloud Hybrid Service

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Thu, 23 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Launched on May 21, 2013, VMware vCloud Hybrid Service supports traditional and next generation applications and offers customers the opportunity to seamlessly extend their VMware-driven private data center to the cloud. Customers can subscribe to vCloud Hybrid Services directly or through a VMware partner. In either case, VMware is responsible for infrastructure security, scalability and performance of this new service.

With vCloud Hybrid Service, VMware leverages its vast customer base and strong expertise in virtualization and cloud management, to offer customers an enterprise grade hybrid cloud solution that is supported by one single vendor. Instead of competing with Amazon EC2 on price, the VMware hybrid cloud offers an EC2 alternative that provides enterprise grade features, performance and security and is ready to accommodate most existing workloads. The true value of VMware's new offering is therefore located in providing customers with the ability to easily expand their data center capabilities through moving business critical application environments entirely or partially to the VMware managed cloud.

This Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) Impact Brief will examine how VMware's hybrid cloud offering impacts the company's customers and partners, as well as the overall hybrid cloud market place.

Workload Automation with Impact: Highlights from CA World

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Wed, 08 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

"To succeed, you've got to think big" was the motto of CA World 2013. The CA Technologies workload automation team acted accordingly providing customers with a grand vision of the future of workload automation. EMA specifically applauds CA Technologies' vision of making workload automation and automation in general much more accessible to the entire enterprise, including application developers and business stakeholders. Based on EMA research, a lack of automation is one of the main pain points in enterprise IT today. Addressing this automation deficit is CA Technologies' proclaimed goal, which goes in line with CA World 2013's ever-present theme of delivering IT with significant business impact.

This Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) Impact Brief will examine the CA workload automation strategy and provide an outlook into the future of the CA workload automation portfolio.

EMA Vendor to Watch: CliQr

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

"EMA Vendors to Watch" are companies that provide unique customer value by solving problems that had previously gone unaddressed. The award recognizes vendors that dare to go off the beaten path and have defined their own market niches.

EMA Vendor to Watch: CiRBA

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

CiRBA: Key Value Proposition

Inefficient workload placement and a general lack of ongoing infrastructure optimization are the key reasons for organizations not achieving the expected virtualization and cloud ROI. Optimal workload placement depends on multiple factors, such as SLAs, compliance and performance requirements, software licensing cost, application requirements and hardware cost. As none of today's cloud platforms allows customers to dynamically place and rebalance workloads based on these considerations, organizations often turn toward overprovisioning as their "insurance policy." This approach is costly and ineffective, as applications often cannot take advantage of this theoretical headroom.

Dell Active Infrastructure: Eliminating Complexity in Infrastructure, Operations, Applications and Service Delivery

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Dell has invested $10 billion over the previous four years to evolve from a hardware provider to a vendor of end-to-end enterprise IT solutions, consisting of hardware, software and services. Strategic acquisitions of enterprise software houses, such as Quest Software, AppAssure and Gale Technologies, underline Dell's ambition to compete with the Big 4 -- IBM, BMC, CA Technologies and HP -- on their own turf.

Dell's new Active System product line consists of pre-integrated server, network, storage and management components and can be tuned for specific application workloads, such as desktop virtualization, email, content management, CRM or ERP. Dell Active System constitutes the company's take on converged infrastructure, aimed at improving operational efficiency and agility, which are two of the key customer goals of cloud. Michael Dell eloquently summed up the key value of Active Systems, stating that Dell's mission is to help customers move away from worrying about CPUs, memory, LUNs, and switches. Dell now aims at assisting customers at making the transformation toward managing workloads, SLAs, and policies, instead of individual datacenter resources.

In today's world of constantly tightening IT budgets and CFOs repeating the "do more with less mantra," the allocation of IT resources is a zero sum game. The time IT staff requires to "keep the lights on" cannot be spent on creating innovative solutions to better support the business. Dell Active System aims at minimizing these operational worries, by simplifying and automating traditionally tedious server, network and storage provisioning and management tasks. With the release of Dell Active System Manager 7 (ASM 7) and Active System 800, the company now enables customers to simplify management at the infrastructure, operations, application and service level.

VCE Launches Vision Intelligent operations - Operational Excellence in a Rack

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

As the importance of enterprise IT is expanding quickly, the challenge of rapidly deploying and efficiently managing application environments is greater than ever. Each new infrastructure component -- hardware or software -- that is introduced must be managed within the context of the overall data center environment. In order to be able to quickly, securely and cost effectively deliver IT services, IT must find a way of standardizing the individual components that make up these services. This standardization of data center elements enables the more efficient deployment and management of IT services. The fewer management tools are used within the data center and the better integrated these tools are, the more the IT organization will be able to avoid technology silos. These silos are the biggest threat to enterprise IT agility, efficiency, performance and security, as the consequential management deficiencies eat up vast portions of the annual IT budget. The more organizations have to spend on "keeping the lights on", the less funding is available for new projects that can give the organization a competitive edge.

This Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) Impact Brief will explore how VCE Vision Intelligent Operations software that now comes pre-installed with each Vblock, addresses these operational issues.

Software Defined Storage: The Missing Link for Cloud and the Software Defined Datacenter

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Enterprises of all sizes are adopting cloud or have concrete plans for cloud adoption in the near future. Based on Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) Research (Demystifying Cloud), the core strategic cloud goals of these organizations are: a) improved service levels -- "less application downtime" (46%), b) agility -- "shortened resource provisioning time" (43%), and c) cost -- "reduced OPEX" (19%) and "storage tiering" (36%).

EMA research has shown that there are many severe customer pain points when it comes to implementing cloud. Over a third (36%) of cloud projects are running late, over budget (31%), didn't meet user expectations (31%) or missed ROI goals (29%). Each of these pain points comes with a significant cost to the business, which can partially be quantified in an actual US dollar value, but also includes aspects that are difficult to measure, such as reduced staff productivity and generally less relevant functionality than initially expected. EMA research shows the importance of completing the required homework in terms of virtualization and automation of the corporate compute, network and storage infrastructure, in order to overcome these challenges and maximize cloud ROI.

This is a companion paper to EMA's server-centric white paper on how IBM SmartCloud can enhance existing VMware environments for increased cloud ROI.

EMA Vendor to Watch: ServiceMesh

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

"EMA Vendors to Watch" are companies that provide unique customer value by solving problems that had previously gone unaddressed before. The award recognizes vendors that dare going off the beaten path and have defined their own market niches.

ServiceMesh: Key Value Proposition

While server, storage and network virtualization are the topics that are commonly discussed when talking about the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC), compliance, performance and security challenges resulting from virtualization and the use of public and private cloud resources are often ignored. ServiceMesh provides an abstraction layer on top of virtualized and hybrid cloud environments, that enables customers to centrally govern the management of application environments, as well as the process for deploying future environments.

CA Technologies Profile: EMA Radar for Private Cloud Platforms: Q1 2013

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

CA Technologies Profile from the EMA Radar for Private Cloud Platforms: Q1 2013.

This ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES (EMA) Radar Report analyses the marketplace for private cloud technologies from a customer perspective. Therefore, the only vendors included in this report are the ones with a sizable number of production deployments. In the end, EMA reviewed and empirically compared the 13 leading private cloud vendors in terms of "Solution Impact" -- features, architecture, and integration -- and "Resource Efficiency" -- time, effort, and cost. In order to ensure an "apples to apples" comparison, there are two Radar charts, one for solutions that focus on lightweight IaaS-centric private clouds (Abiquo, Citrix, Egenera, Embotics, Morphlabs, and Nimbula) and another for much more comprehensive, application-aware private cloud platforms (ASG, BMC, CA Technologies, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, and VMware).

IBM Announces SmartCloud Orchestrator Based on Open Standards

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

"It is not only about open standards, but it is about how these standards all play together for the benefit of the customer," said Angel Diaz, VP IBM Standards, Open Source, and Cloud Labs, at the IBM PULSE Open Cloud Summit in early March of 2013. From the opening event to the final keynote, IBM Pulse 2013 was strongly and consistently focused on how to leverage OpenStack, TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration specification for Cloud), and OSLC (Open Service for Lifecycle Collaboration) to create tangible customer value. Most excitingly, IBM and SAP presented a demonstration of how customers will soon be able to implement TOSCA patterns through IBM SmartCloud, eliminating the traditional pain points that come with standing up, managing and governing SAP environments.

At Pulse 2013, IBM announced the Beta of IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator, based on OpenStack, TOSCA and OSLC. SmartCloud Orchestrator constitutes IBM's new unified and open cloud management platform, consisting of three main layers. The infrastructure services layer is based on OpenStack for provisioning, configuring and managing storage, compute and network resources. The platform services layer includes virtual machine image lifecycle management capabilities and pattern services. The latter refers to IBM's so-called patterns of expertise, which include exact deployment and management instructions for the entire business service. The orchestration services layer is based on IBM's Lombardi acquisition, offering an easy-to-use business process management solution. IBM announced that later in 2013 the platform services layer and the services orchestration layer will both support the TOSCA standard. SmartCloud Orchestrator supports OSLC for continuous delivery across heterogeneous development environments and is able to deploy workloads to a software-based private cloud, IBM's integrated PureSystems or public clouds such as Amazon EC2 or IBM's SmartCloud Services.

EMA Radar for Private Cloud Platforms: Q1 2013

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

IBM Profile - EMA Radar for Private Cloud Platforms: Q1 2013

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

IBM's vendor profile from the EMA Radar for Private Cloud Platforms: Q1 2013.

This EMA Radar Report analyses the marketplace for private cloud technologies from a customer perspective. Therefore, the only vendors included in this report are the ones with a sizable number of production deployments. In the end, EMA reviewed and empirically compared the 13 leading private cloud vendors in terms of "Solution Impact" -- features, architecture, and integration -- and "Resource Efficiency" -- time, effort, and cost. In order to ensure an "apples to apples" comparison, there are two Radar charts, one for solutions that focus on lightweight IaaS-centric private clouds (Abiquo, Citrix, Egenera, Embotics, Morphlabs, and Nimbula) and another for much more comprehensive, application-aware private cloud platforms (ASG, BMC, CA Technologies, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, and VMware).

Report Summary - EMA Radar for Private Cloud Platforms: Q1 2013

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This is a summary document of the EMA Radar for Private Cloud Platforms: Q1 2013.

Report Abstract

Demystifying Cloud

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Narrowing and ultimately closing the gap between enterprise IT and the business has been a core challenge for decades. Private cloud is the "delivery vehicle" that ultimately will enable enterprise IT to bridge this divide and equip the entire organization with the agility and efficiency required to better compete in the marketplace.

This Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) research report examines how small, medium, and large enterprises across industries have implemented private cloud technologies to deliver business value. Observing the roles of IT operations staff, application developers, and business stakeholders throughout this process provides a unique perspective on customer requirements and challenges. Cloud today constitutes a central platform, where IT operations staff provision building blocks (software and hardware), which then are consumed by application developers and business stakeholders. The more easily developers and line of business staff can take advantage of these building blocks, the better they will be able to turn IT into a competitive differentiator for the entire organization.

While a growing number of application developers and business users are taking advantage of cloud today, there are still significant roadblocks on the journey of turning IT into a true differentiator. The study found a surprising lack of integration of private cloud technologies with existing IT management systems. This deficit can quickly lead to technology silos, where private cloud adds to the existing datacenter complexity instead of providing a consolidation and unification layer.

For a significant share of enterprises, the lack of private cloud integration planning has led to budget overruns and longer than anticipated durations of private cloud implementation projects. As a result, ease of use and ease of implementation are todayís core requirements when it comes to evaluating private cloud technologies.

This EMA research report identified security, storage, and a general lack of datacenter automation as the critical challenges of private cloud. The ability of private cloud vendors to help customers overcome these challenges will be key. Further lessons from this research are:

- Multi-hypervisor strategies are real and fueled by private cloud adoption

- The public cloud constitutes the third most common hypervisor and must therefore be governed by the private cloud

- Workload portability and cloud bursting are becoming more and more critical

- Converged infrastructure is becoming more popular as a foundation for cloud

The Demystifying Cloud research project provides guidance to organizations considering the purchase of cloud technologies, by allowing them to learn from the lessons of enterprises that already have been through the initial release of their private cloud deployment. Private cloud technology vendors may find this research interesting, as it will help them better understand customer pain points and therefore provide inspiration for their product roadmap.

iWave Storage Automator: An Essential Puzzle Piece for the Software Defined Datacenter

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Founded in 1993 and privately held, iWave Software is headquartered in Frisco, Texas and maintains offices in London, U.K., and Moncton, Canada. In 2011, iWave extended its product portfolio from general automation and cloud orchestration software to include policy-based storage automation.

iWave Software's iWave Storage Automator enables customers to automate the policy-based provisioning, management, and reclamation of SAN and NAS storage. Storage Automator works with most major storage hardware arrays, switches, and hosts, and provides an abstraction layer that facilitates hardware-independent storage management. Based on provisioning rules, the iWave product creates the storage volumes that offer the performance, capacity, disaster recovery and protection capabilities required by a specific application or requested by a particular end user.

Usability and Simplicity in Workload Automation: BMC releases Control-M v8

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

"Nothing ever goes away in the datacenter" (Robin Reddick, BMC), but legacy technologies are typically layered on top of new ones. This statement sums up one of the key issues that can be found in most of today's datacenters: the accumulation of legacy technologies. This accumulation leads to technology silos and management nightmares, where individual IT tasks must be managed by specialists and are not aligned with business goals.

The release of BMC Control-M v8 is titled "The Power of Simple" and designed to provide one simple and modern user interface to centrally manage legacy and current application workloads. Control-M v8 manages to hide the complexity of the underlying logic and functionality from the user. This rule of making software intuitive to use did not seem to apply to workload automation, for a long time. With v8, BMC consolidates the formerly separate user interfaces of Control-M Desktop and Control-M Enterprise Manager, and elevates Archived Viewpoints and Control-M Batch Impact Manager into places of prominence in the new interface.

The new consolidated v8 user interface, combined with Control-M's already excellent functional capabilities -- Control-M v7 was one of the Value Leaders in EMA's 2012 Workload Automation Radar Report and received the EMA award for "Best Overall Functionality" -- constitutes an RFP winning combination. In addition to the redesigned user interface, Control-M offers the following new features and capabilities:

a) Collaboration workspaces for workflow design

b) Performance improvements

c) Social collaboration portal

This EMA Impact Brief evaluates the new release of Control-M within the context of the market place for workload automation solutions. EMA also takes a close look at the upgrade process for agents and management servers.

Management and Automation: VMware's Journey to the Software-Defined Datacenter

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In recent years, VMware has achieved significant milestones in its evolution from being a virtualization vendor to a provider of business service focused virtualization and cloud management platforms. Proactive, service-centric IT management within a heterogeneous hybrid cloud environment is at the core of VMware's recent announcements, providing its customers with the key components for creating their own Software-Defined Datacenter.

VMware has developed a track record of numerous strategic acquisitions to provide customers with an increasing number of business service focused solutions. In August of 2010, VMware purchased Integrien, a real time application and infrastructure performance analytics vendor. The Integrien acquisition enabled VMware to add predictive analytics driven management of performance thresholds to vCenter Operations Manager. Real-time analytics driven operations management is at the core of the Software-Defined Datacenter, as infrastructure and application performance thresholds have to be monitored and adjusted dynamically, based on business requirements. In 2010 VMware also acquired multiple management products from the EMC Ionix portfolio -- Server Configuration Manager (formerly Configuresoft), Application Discovery Manager (formerly nLayers), the FastScale Composer Suite, and Service Manager (formerly Infra) -- to further strengthen its ambition of becoming a much more business service focused company. With the 2011 acquisition of Digital Fuel, VMware added significant IT supply chain analytics capabilities to its virtualization and cloud management portfolio, needed to turn the IT department into a true business enabler.

Earlier this year, VMware entered the next stage of its management and automation vision, by obtaining two important puzzle pieces: DynamicOps and Nicira. DynamicOps facilitates the policy driven and SLA-based provisioning of physical, virtual, and cloud resources across vendor platforms, while Nicira offers the foundation for Software Defined Networking across virtualization and cloud platforms. EMA's recent impact brief provides a detailed analysis of the strategic impact of both acquisitions.

At VMworld 2012 in San Francisco, VMware packaged a significant part of its cloud management software stack into vCloud Suite 5.1. (A detailed examination of VMware vCloud Suite 5.1 can be found in the EMA Impact Brief on this topic.) Little more than one month later, at VMworld 2012 in Barcelona, VMware added vCloud Automation Center to its portfolio. vCloud Automation Center is based on DynamicOps technology, facilitating the provisioning of server, network, and storage resources across different hypervisors, clouds, and physical servers. Further announcements at VMworld Barcelona 2012 were the launch of version 5 of vFabric Application Director, vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.6, vCloud Connector 2.0, and IT Business Management Suite 7.5.

This EMA Impact Brief examines the announcements of October 9th at VMworld in Barcelona. Each group of announcements will be evaluated based its impact and importance regarding allowing organizations to create and manage the Software Defined Datacenter, as described by VMware's Steve Herrod and further elaborated by EMA.

EMA Impact Brief: Cisco Introduces Workload Automation for Big Data

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In October 2012, Cisco Systems announced version 6.1 of Cisco Tidal Enterprise Scheduler (Cisco TES). Cisco TES is a Value Leader in Enterprise Management Associates' 2012 Workload Automation Radar Report and received the EMA award for "Best Implementation and Configuration". Version 6.1 will be available for general purchase in November 2012 and include new capabilities in four key areas:

a) Big Data: Hadoop Adapter

b) Public cloud: Support for Amazon EC2

c) Self-service: Web portal for business users

d) Mobile access: iPhone App for operations management

This EMA Impact Brief examines the significance of these new capabilities for existing and new Cisco TES customers.

VMware vCloud Suite 5.1 and the Software Defined Datacenter

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

VMware's VMWorld 2012 announcement of vCloud Suite 5.1 was carefully aligned around how to best move customers to the cloud. "Management" and "automation" were some of the most frequently used terms throughout the various keynotes and analyst events. Both terms sum up VMware's tremendous efforts of moving up the virtualization stack, helping customers address core post virtualization challenges.

VMware's goals for enterprise IT, as stated during VMworld, are ambitious: redefine business models, drive innovation, disrupt markets, and increase competitive advantage. During the previous months, VMware has coined the term of the Software Defined Datacenter, where applications "seek out" the compute, network, storage resources they require to run in an SLA and policy compliant manner. As described in EMA's series of blog posts on this topic, the vision of the Software Defined Datacenter entails the following set of technical requirements:

- Virtualization, abstraction and pooling - of network, storage, and compute resources

- Central management of network, storage, and compute abstracted from physical hardware

- Policy and SLA driven architecture

- Business logic layer to translate business requirements into automation instructions

- Automation & orchestration layer

- Performance, capacity, and lifecycle management modules

- Commodity x86 hardware

VMware vCloud Suite 5.1 announced at VMworld 2012 takes a significant step toward providing many of these capabilities in one SKU. This Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) Impact Brief will examine in detail how the vCloud Suite 5.1 announcement can help move customers toward the Software Defined Datacenter.

The Citrix Cloud: Achieving "Any-ness"

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

"Any-ness" was the term-du-jour at this year's Citrix analyst event. During the event, Citrix executives painted a picture of a "world of many clouds" (Wes Wasson, Citrix CMO), where workloads are matched with pools of storage, compute, and network resources, based on their technical and service level requirements. The Citrix portfolio of cloud products can be freely combined with the customerís existing IT infrastructure. Citrix credibly conveyed its vision of building workload-aware software that follows open standards, instead of locking customers into a proprietary technology stack. The fact that the Citrix portfolio of cloud products can be run on most hypervisors -- VMware vSphere, KVM, XenServer, and OracleVM -- underlines this philosophy.

Citrix CloudPlatform -- based on Apache CloudStack -- provides a central interface for customers to access and orchestrate the major public and private clouds. This EMA impact brief positions the Citrix cloud strategy within the overall marketplace.

EMA VMworld Innovators 2012: Virtualization Management

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Enterprise Management Associates' (EMA) 2012 awards go to companies that have clearly understood and internalized the ideas behind the software defined or programmable datacenter. The following five vendors enable customers to more efficiently take advantage of their previous, current, and future IT investments.

While the term "Software Defined Datacenter" was coined by VMware's CTO Steve Herrod in May of 2012, the actual concept is not new. As described in EMAís series of blogs on this topic, the Software Defined Datacenter has constituted the "holy grail" of enterprise IT since the beginnings of virtualization more than a decade ago. However, only today do enterprises have at least some of the components available to make parts of the Software Defined Datacenter a reality. EMA is pleased to provide its awards to the most innovative of these companies that all show a radical focus on customer requirements in terms of resource utilization, performance, and functionality.

IBM SmartCloud Announcements at VMworld 2012: Management & Automation

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

VMworld 2012 was all about the Software-Defined Datacenter, with management and automation requirements at its core. While VMware addressed management and automation from an infrastructure perspective, IBM's SmartCloud announcements were application- and business service-focused. These announcements included new capabilities for four of IBM's key offerings:

* IBM SmartCloud Provisioning

* IBM SmartCloud Cost Management

* IBM SmartCloud Application Performance Management

* IBM SmartCloud Workload Automation

IBM's SmartCloud Foundation suite of products is aimed at enabling customers to rapidly deliver, manage, and modify IT services, while at the same time optimizing storage, network, and server resources. Providing customers with business services by centrally controlling provisioning and lifecycle management, based on cost, SLA, and policy considerations, constitutes the central strong point of SmartCloud. EMA's Impact Brief on the launch of IBM SmartCloud in 2011 provides a general overview of the SmartCloud IaaS and PaaS suite, while EMA's recent white paper on how to Enhance Your VMware Environment with IBM SmartCloud focuses on how SmartCloud works with the VMware stack to offer a tightly managed and application-centric self-service cloud.

This Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) Impact Brief examines how IBM's SmartCloud-related VMworld 2012 announcements can bring organizations closer to the Software-Defined Datacenter.

Skybot Software Releases Skybot Scheduler Version 3.0

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

On July 10, 2012, Eden Prairie, Minnesota, based Skybot Software released version 3.0 of its Skybot Scheduler workload automation software. The release of Skybot Scheduler 3.0 comes only a few months after the February launch of Skybot 2.5 and demonstrates the company's commitment to offering a simple and easy-to-use enterprise-grade workload automation platform.

Skybot Software was founded in 2010 by Help/Systems, the makers of Robot, a leading suite of operations software for IBM Power Systems servers. Skybot Scheduler is a workload automation platform for distributed environments, running Windows, UNIX, and Linux servers, and was designed to eliminate the complexity and heavy upfront investment necessary for the implementation of traditional workload automation solutions. Offering a job scheduler that can be rapidly implemented, with a minimum need for professional services and training, can be seen as Skybot's key strength. Cron and Windows Task Scheduler jobs can be imported or managed through a browser-based interface. Skybot offers most of the dynamic job triggers -- file arrival, SNMP traps, calendars, email events, external applications -- required to run even complex job flows and provides robust forecasting, monitoring, agent grouping, multi time zone support, and job stream auditing.

Following the "80-20 rule," the appeal of Skybot Scheduler lies in the fact that the software offers about 80% of the features that can be found in much higher priced platforms at roughly 20% of the cost. Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) believes that this value proposition is compelling, in the face of many organizations only using 80% of the features of their high-end WLA solution in the first place. Offering those organizations the opportunity to obtain an enterprise-grade workload automation solution at an upfront cost that is similar to the annual maintenance fee of the established high-end packages can be regarded as a very promising approach.

VMware Launches vCloud Service Evaluation

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

On August 15, 2012, VMware launched vCloud Service Evaluation in order to provide its customers with a simple and low cost option for evaluating its vCloud offering. vCloud is VMware's solution to manage virtual resources and applications in multiple vSphere-powered clouds. vCloud consists of a combination of software and services, such as vCloud Director (including vCloud API, vCloud Connector, and vShield), vCloud Datacenter Services, vCloud Powered Services, and vCloud Consulting Services.

VMware and its partners have created a library of education and training resources to allow customers to easily find the instructions, training resources, and best practices they need to get started. Additionally, the vCloud Service Evaluation Portal includes a community forum where VMware partners offer advice to the user community.

In order to avoid competing with its hosting partners, VMware has emphasized that vCloud Service Evaluation is an evaluation platform for IT operations staff and developers to get familiar with the platform. The cost of $0.04/hour for a single core VM with 1GB of RAM illustrates that VMware is merely covering cost, while making vCloud more accessible to customers and prospects. Once customers feel comfortable with vCloud, they are directed to a VMware vCloud service provider for their production needs. Workloads deployed to vCloud Service Evaluation can then easily be transferred via vCloud Connector.

This Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) impact brief will examine how vCloud Service Evaluation will contribute to making vCloud more accessible to VMware customers.

The Software Defined DataCenter: VMware Acquires Nicira and DynamicOps

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

On July 23, 2012, Palo Alto, CA, based VMware, Inc. announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Nicira, Inc., a software-defined networking (SDN) and network virtualization company. VMware will pay 1.05 billion in cash and $210 million in equity resulting in a total deal size of $1.26 billion.

The Nicira acquisition comes only a few weeks after VMware acquired DynamicOps, a Burlington, MA, based vendor of policy-centric and platform-independent provisioning and management software for physical, virtual, and public cloud environments.

Both acquisitions are in line with VMware's mission of helping its customers achieve a software-defined datacenter (SDD) through the central application-focused management of traditional enterprise IT infrastructure -- compute, network, and storage -- as well as public cloud resources. The ultimate goal of the SDD lies in the dynamic placement of application workloads based on business requirements, without end users having to worry about the underlying physical infrastructure.

In this Impact Brief, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) will examine the effect of both acquisitions on the marketplace for cloud networking and management solutions.

SAP Process Automation by Cisco

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

On June 20, 2012, SAP AG and Cisco Systems announced a global reseller agreement allowing SAP to sell Cisco Intelligent Automation for SAP, branded as SAP IT Process Automation by Cisco. The central goal of this collaboration is to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of SAP business management solutions by standardizing and automating manual processes, such as incident responses, and complex operational processes, such as system readiness and validation checks after a critical SAP "system copy" procedure.

SAP IT Process Automation by Cisco integrates with SAP Solution Manager, as well as HANA and a planned integration with SAP NetWeaver Landscape Virtualization Management , offering operations staff over 350 management workflows, all based on SAP best practices. The solution is built on Cisco's popular Process Orchestrator platform, which in addition to automating SAP processes, can be used for enterprise-wide IT process automation (ITPA).

IBM Launches Virtualization Efficiency Study

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction: In June 2012, IBM launched its Virtualization Efficiency Study (VES) for customers worldwide. VES aims at assisting organizations with achieving optimal resource allocation within the virtualized data center to accomplish an ideal balance between efficiency and risk. VES is based on a combination of IBM professional services and the application of CiRBA's analytics software.

The fixed-priced VES engagement is aimed at organizations struggling with the transition to a virtualized data center. Many of these organizations consider the move to the cloud without having done their initial homework in terms of virtualization management. The IBM VES engagement takes advantage of the CiRBA software's ability to rapidly visualize data center risk and inefficiencies based on recent operational data within an easy-to-read dashboard. Based on this initial baseline, IBM will provide a set of actionable steps for customers to achieve optimal data center utilization, while ensuring policy compliance.

In this Impact Brief, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) will evaluate IBM's VES offering within the context of today's ROI-oriented IT paradigm. EMA will also look at the value of the VES engagement regarding organizations getting ready for the cloud.

IBM Releases IBM SmartCloud Workload Automation and TWS Fix Pack 1

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction: On June 14, 2012, IBM released Fix Pack 1 (FP1) for Tivoli Workload Scheduler (TWS). On the same day, the company also launched SmartCloud Workload Automation (SCWA). SCWA combines TWS and TWS for Applications into one platform, belonging to IBM SmartCloud Foundation. At the same time, IBM announced a fundamental change of its pricing structure, away from its traditional resource-based approach and toward a per-job pricing model. This new usage-based pricing scheme was launched to make SCWA more attractive for today's cloud-centric data center.

In this impact brief, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) will evaluate the importance of TWS FP1, SCWA, and the new pricing model for the overall workload automation marketplace, as well as for the market for cloud platforms. For more details on IBM Tivoli SmartCloud's ability to provide the necessary management capabilities for multi-hypervisor cloud deployments, please review EMA's whitepaper on this topic.

Enhance Your VMware Environment with IBM SmartCloud

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction: The Importance of Cloud

Based on a recent research study by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), the core reasons for the enterprise to consider private cloud solutions are agility, reduced CAPEX and OPEX, performance, resiliency, and scalability. These factors translate into two distinct economic arguments:

IT Services as a Strategic Differentiator

The ability to rapidly deliver, manage, and modify new IT services allows the organization to leverage IT as a strategic differentiator. Being able to adopt new business applications faster than the competition enables the enterprise to better compete in todayís highly dynamic marketplace.

Resource Optimization

Over-provisioning and under-provisioning of storage, network, and compute resources are ever-present challenges in todayís data center, leading to significant waste, as well as performance and reliability problems. Providing end-users with the exact required resources is key to getting the most out of every IT dollar spent. This means that resource provisioning and lifecycles have to be centrally managed, based on consistency, performance, compliance, policy, and security guidelines.

The Core Components of Any Cloud: Virtualization and Management

To deliver the economic advantages of the cloud to the entire organization, there are two core components required: virtualization and management.

Automating and Orchestrating the Third Era of Enterprise IT

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

After the passing of the mainframe era and the age of distributed computing, today we are at the beginning of the third era of enterprise IT. This third era focuses on delivering business services in a more efficient manner and is highlighted through three key trends: Cloud, Big Data, and DevOps.

Cloud, Big Data, and DevOps all focus on leveraging IT to make the organization more competitive through increased agility and efficiency. The third era of enterprise IT is characterized by a radical focus on utilizing this agility and efficiency for eliminating the traditional rift between IT operations and business process requirements. Ultimately, business stakeholders investing in IT resources are not interested in technical reasons for why a certain IT service is not attainable. For the overall organization to be more competitive, IT must help align business processes with market requirements more quickly and at a lower cost than the competition.

Cloud, DevOps, and Big Data initiatives all have grown out of the need to address the rising number of interdependencies between enterprise applications along with the ever increasing amount of data that those new systems collect. Yet all three of these initiatives can exponentially add to the complexity of the infrastructure needed to facilitate the demand for agility. For IT to reliably execute business workflows, these interdependencies must be managed end-to-end across the traditional automation domains, including workload and run book automation, virtualization management, managed file transfer, and application process automation and release management. Automation today can be seen as the "glue," tying together a rapidly growing number of business applications and aligning these applications with their respective business processes. Therefore, it is essential to implement a platform that can provide cross domain automation, instead of following the traditional siloed approach of deploying a myriad of domain-specific automation solutions.

Egenera Announces PAN Cloud Director and PAN Domain Manager

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

On June 5, 2012, Boxborough, Massachusetts based Egenera announced the launch of PAN Cloud Director and PAN Domain Manager, in addition to new disaster recovery features and vCloud integration for the PAN Manager product. These announcements constitute the next step in Egenera's strategic goal of providing a hybrid cloud that allows workloads to dynamically migrate to and from public and private clouds, as needed.

Founded in 2000, Egenera created the Processing Area Network (PAN), which was focused on the idea of pooling compute, storage, and network resources and managing these shared pools from a central control panel. From 2001 until 2010, Egenera offered its BladeFrame converged infrastructure solution, consisting of blade servers, network fabric, firmware, and management software. In 2009, Egenera launched PAN Manager as a separate product, available under OEM from major hardware vendors such as HP and Dell. Today the company is focusing exclusively on creating an open software platform that can be deployed on almost any brand of x86 blade server. As of now, Egenera supports blade servers by IBM, HP, Dell, NEC, and Fujitsu, as well as all major hypervisor platforms by VMware, Microsoft, KVM, and Citrix. Egenera works with storage platforms by Hitachi, EMC, Dell, Pillar, and NetApp.

PAN Manager allows customers to create their own converged infrastructure, based on a wide range of hardware components and without the constraints and cost considerations that come with the purchase of a pre-integrated system. Similar to these pre-integrated solutions, PAN Manager offers the tools to manage all physical and virtual infrastructure components together, while automatically clustering resources to eliminate single points of failure. This inherent resiliency, in combination with virtual and physical resource consolidation, results in a significant increase in overall resource utilization.

The Journey to Private Cloud

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Based on a recent Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) research study, the main reasons for adopting cloud computing, mentioned by 52%-62% of respondents, were as follows:

a) Agility: Accelerating service creation and provisioning

b) Performance & resiliency: Improving the performance and resiliency of business services

c) Resource optimization: Reducing operational and capital expense

Respondents mentioned a vast variety of enterprise applications -- e-mail, CRM, VDI, custom applications, ERP, accounting, HR, telephony, and even mainframe-based application services -- when asked what they were planning to host in the cloud. This response illustrates the importance that most companies place in the adoption of a cloud model. Organizations are looking for faster and more agile IT delivery models that help strengthen their positions in the marketplace. In today's relentlessly competitive markets, the ability to rapidly build and provision well performing and resilient business services at a reasonable cost can be seen as an essential strategic differentiator for the entire enterprise.

EMA Case Study for DynamicOps: Major Multinational Corporation

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

One of the world's largest multinational corporations, with an annual revenue of approximately $150 billion and over 300,000 employees, required a better way of providing IT resources to its numerous business units. These business units were free to choose between acquiring IT resources through the organizationís Central Infrastructure Group (CIG) or purchasing what they need from outside IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS offerings.

Recently, CIG was faced with an increasing number of more and more heterogeneous and complex resource requests, leading to a significant strain on the organization to consistently provide secure and correctly configured systems at acceptable provisioning times and cost. As the internally developed ITIL provisioning system was static, it was only able to serve approximately 10% of overall global resource requests in a zero-touch manner. The vast majority of resource requests required significant manual intervention by CIG staff, leading to wait times of often multiple weeks and increased provisioning cost that had to be charged back to the client business unit.

This issue had prompted a rapidly increasing number of CIG customers to turn to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to obtain server, network, and storage resources cheaply and instantaneously. The increasing reliance on AWS provoked the organizationís CTO and CIO to think about internal alternatives. Instead of having a myriad of IT resources "floating around in the public cloud," the leadership team was looking for a solution to restore governance and security.

EMA Radar for Workload Automation (WLA): Q2 2012

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The EMA Radar for Workload Automation -- created to assist IT professionals in selecting the right Workload Automation (WLA) products -- is based on the following key criteria:

1. Cross-Platform Job Scheduling - creating workflows across multiple platforms and applications.

2. ITSM Integration - orchestrating ITIL-based process inputs and outputs

3. Resource Optimization - dynamic resource allocation and load balancing

4. Business Integration - linking IT services to business requirements, business impact analysis

5. Predictive Analytics - dynamic thresholding, impact analysis, heuristic monitoring, etc.

You will also learn how the following 13 vendors rank in this new Radar Report:

* Arcana

* ASCI

* ASG

* BMC

* CA Technologies

* Cisco Systems

* Flux

* MVP Software

* Network Automation

* ORSYP

* Stonebranch

* UC4

* Terma Software Labs

Report Summary - EMA Radar for Workload Automation (WLA): Q2 2012

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is a summary of the EMA Radar for WLA: Q2 2012.

The EMA Radar for Workload Automation -- created to assist IT professionals in selecting the right Workload Automation (WLA) products -- is based on the following key criteria:

1. Cross-Platform Job Scheduling - creating workflows across multiple platforms and applications.

2. ITSM Integration - orchestrating ITIL-based process inputs and outputs

3. Resource Optimization - dynamic resource allocation and load balancing

4. Business Integration - linking IT services to business requirements, business impact analysis

5. Predictive Analytics - dynamic thresholding, impact analysis, heuristic monitoring, etc.

You will also learn how the following 13 vendors rank in this new Radar Report:

* Arcana

* ASCI

* ASG

* BMC

* CA Technologies

* Cisco Systems

* Flux

* MVP Software

* Network Automation

* ORSYP

* Stonebranch

* UC4

* Terma Software Labs

Symantec Releases Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware vSphere

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

On April 3, 2012, Symantec Corp. announced the release of Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware. Dynamic Multi-Pathing addresses storage as today's central virtualization bottleneck, by enhancing visibility, performance, and availability. These enhancements enable VMware administrators to consider storage cost, performance, availability, and a number of other crucial parameters, when creating and managing virtual resources. Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing supports any major storage brand such as NetApp, Hitachi, EMC, Fujitsu, IBM, 3PAR, Dell, and Oracle.

Atlantis ILIO Now Available for Citrix XenApp

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

On March 28, 2012, Atlantis Computing announced the release of Atlantis ILIO for Citrix XenApp to address critical storage performance and capacity issues that can be expected when migrating to XenApp 6.5 in a virtualized environment.

Atlantis Computing addressed a similar set of problems with the launch of its Atlantis ILIO virtual appliance for VDI in 2010. Atlantis ILIO for VDI significantly lowers the cost of each virtual desktop by performing inline de-duplication and data stream consolidation at the hypervisor level. This approach drastically reduces storage capacity requirements while significantly increasing the performance of existing storage, leading to higher virtual machine density. For optimal performance and to eliminate the need for shared storage, Atlantis is able to serve up virtual machines directly from server RAM. This diskless approach to VDI leads to stunning benchmark results and is further described in a separate EMA blog post.

Because the performance and capacity advantages offered for virtualized desktops also apply to servers and because the use of application virtualization through XenApp is much more widespread than the use of desktop virtualization, Atlantis Computing decided to launch its Atlantis ILIO for Citrix XenApp. As Citrix will cease to support all older versions of XenApp by July 2013, users are now in the process of planning their upgrades to XenApp 6.5. Because XenApp 6.5 requires migrating from older versions of Windows Servers to Windows Server 2008 R2, many customers will take the opportunity to move XenApp to a virtualized environment with shared SAN storage. Sharing a virtual host with multiple Windows Server operating systems leads to resource contention in terms of storage I/O performance and latency, as all operating systems compete for the same shared storage volumes on the SAN. Where there used to be 40-50 XenApp sessions per physical server often using local disk storage, you can now run 10-12 virtual XenApp servers per physical host, placing a considerably increased strain on the SAN. The storage contention problem will blindside many XenApp customers, leading to performance problems and the corresponding end-user complaints. As a counter-measure, the number of XenApp sessions has to be reduced and the storage capacity increased, significantly elevating the cost of hosting XenApp.

IT Optimization through Predictive Capacity Management

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Virtualization, cloud, and the resulting IT-as-a-Service paradigm constitute the core elements of the new role of IT within the enterprise. No longer is IT regarded as a cost center, but today is seen as a strategic differentiator, supporting and enhancing key business processes. Allowing business stakeholders to take advantage of more and more IT infrastructure elements in a self-service manner has led to a proliferation of virtual and physical infrastructure. Each additional infrastructure item comes with increased CAPEX and OPEX attached. Overprovisioning is often used as insurance against performance problems and downtime, as conventional methods of capacity planning are too static and costly to calculate the optimal balance between load balancing and adding new infrastructure components. To resolve the issue of overprovisioning, capacity management has to replace capacity planning.

Capacity management is based upon three core elements: empirical analytics, policies, and planning. If all three aspects are taken into account, the enterprise benefits from a dynamic capacity management solution that provides specific data center sizing instructions that are founded on future business and compliance requirements. The capacity management solution also exchanges information with other enterprise systems, such as service assurance, workload automation, data center orchestration, and composite application development. Due to this central importance, capacity management should be regarded as part of the backbone of corporate IT, helping the enterprise resolve its most important IT challenge of optimizing resource utilization, while at the same time guaranteeing application performance.

HP Project Voyager: Bringing Intelligence and Efficiency to the Data Center

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

On February 13, 2012, HP announced Project Voyager, a multi-year, transformational technology initiative aimed at drastically increased self-sufficiency of HP's converged server infrastructure. Based on lessons learned from the review of almost 100,000 real-life support cases, HP's new ProLiant Generation 8 converged infrastructure includes advanced sensors, analytics, storage array technology, and cloud-connectivity to optimally utilize compute, storage and networking hardware, and to resolve most common hardware issues, even before customers are faced with application performance problems.

This Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) impact brief explores the effect of Project Voyager on the data center infrastructure marketplace.

Stonebranch Launches Opswise Automation Center 5.1

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

On January 30, 2012, Stonebranch, Inc. announced the general availability of Opswise Automation Center 5.1. Less than one year after the merger with Opswise Software, the combined company now offers a fully integrated workload automation solution. Automation Center 5.1 still comes with Stonebranch's Independent Scheduling Agents (Indesca) -- now called Opswise Universal Agents -- which can be controlled by one or more legacy automation solutions, while at the same time being connected to Automation Center 5.1. This flexibility makes it easy for existing Stonebranch Indesca customers to try out Automation Center 5.1, without any operational disruptions or risk.

In addition to the new Opswise Universal Agents, Automation Center 5.1 now offers workload lifecycle management, consisting of the versioning, security, and deployment capabilities required for safely allowing developers and business users to benefit from workload automation.

Opswise Automation Center 5.1 includes numerous additional new features, all aimed at fostering adoption of workload automation across the entire organization: REST interface, script library, enhanced SAP support, multi record update, enhanced SQL support, more variables, added security roles, and usability improvements.

Opswise Automation Center 5.1 is the culmination of the successful software integration effort between Stonebranch and Opswise, aimed at bringing easy-to-use automation to the entire enterprise. Eliminating automation silos in this manner should be regarded as a significant step toward turning automation into a true strategic differentiator.

This Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) impact brief explores the effect of Stonebranch Opswise Automation Center 5.1 on the workload automation marketplace.

CA Technologies Launches CA Private Cloud Accelerator for Vblock Platforms

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

On January 30, 2012 CA Technologies announced CA Private Cloud Accelerator for Vblock Platforms. This solution builds upon CA Process Automation and CA Service Catalog and leverages EMC's Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM) to rapidly provision cloud infrastructure services. CA Technologies' private cloud solution supports multi-tenancy environments and is targeted toward enterprise customers and managed services providers.

This Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) impact brief explores and evaluates the effect of CA Private Cloud Accelerator for Vblock Platforms on the marketplace.

RES Software Announces RES HyperDrive

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

On January 26, 2012, RES Software announced the availability of RES HyperDrive, an easy-to-install, on-premises private cloud storage and file sharing platform, offering enterprise-class security, for the second quarter of 2012. The core idea behind RES HyperDrive is to provide the user with a "follow-me" drive -- similar to Dropbox and Box -- that is centrally controlled by IT. RES HyperDrive enables the end-user to securely store, access, and share files from virtually any desktop or mobile device -- iOS (iPad/iPhone), Android, Windows Phone and Blackberry -- through standard applications and interfaces, such as Microsoft Outlook, Windows Explorer, Mac Finder or simply a web browser. If a mobile device is lost or stolen, IT or the user can remotely wipe all sensitive data.

This Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) impact brief explores the effect of RES HyperDrive on the market for cloud-storage platforms.

CiRBA Announces Version 7.0 of its Data Center Intelligence Console

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

On January 10, 2012, CiRBA announced the general availability of version 7.0 of its data center intelligence solution. CiRBA 7.0 is aligned around an easy-to-read unique console, providing an immediate overview of data center resource utilization. CiRBA 7.0 offers clear instructions regarding how to allocate the right amount of infrastructure elements to each enterprise application workload.

This Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) impact brief explores the effect of CiRBA 7.0 on the data center intelligence marketplace.

IT Optimization through Workload Automation

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Workload automation (WA) has developed from an isolated discipline, focused on the static scheduling of batch jobs, to a central and proactive backbone for today's service-oriented approach to enterprise IT. Workloads are now part of the enterprise service catalog, working together with capacity management and process automation solutions to make existing applications run more efficiently and accelerate the delivery of new enterprise software.

The rise of the cloud opens up a new realm of possibilities to WA. Private, public, and hybrid cloud solutions are new options for processing enterprise workloads in a more efficient, flexible, and reliable manner. Dynamically shifting workloads to the place where they can be executed best at any given point in time constitutes a significant step toward IT resource optimization.

WA can no longer be seen as a commodity, but constitutes a strategic asset. The CA Technologies Automation Suite has all the components required to harness WA as a true differentiator for the enterprise.

Virsto Announces the Release of Virsto vSphere Edition and Virsto Server 2.0, Hyper-V Edition

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

On January 17, 2012, Virsto Software, the provider of hardware-independent storage virtualization solutions, announced the release of Virsto for vSphere and Virsto Server 2.0, Hyper-V Edition. Virsto's hardware-independent storage hypervisor promises up to 90% increased utilization of existing storage resources and the reduction of storage CAPEX and OPEX by up to 70%.

This Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) impact brief explores the effect of Virsto's product release on the virtualization marketplace.

HP CloudSystem Matrix 7.0 to be Available in Q1 2012

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

On November 30, 2011, Hewlett Packard (HP) announced the launch of CloudSystem Matrix 7.0, HP's ready-to-go cloud automation platform, for the first quarter of 2012. CloudSystem Matrix 7.0 consists of pre-integrated server, network, storage, and software components that provide a turn-key cloud experience. In version 7.0, HP added out-of-the-box cloud bursting capabilities, and enhanced functionality for the automated self-provisioning of storage through the software's central service catalog.

This Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) impact brief explores the effect of the release of HP CloudSystem Matrix 7.0 on the marketplace.

Abiquo Releases Version 2.0 of Its Self-Service Cloud Automation Suite

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

On November 7, 2011, Abiquo, Inc. announced the release of version 2.0 of its hypervisor-independent self-service cloud automation platform, for the first quarter of 2012. Abiquo's new cloud framework is targeted toward line of business end users (mostly developers), as well as the CFO and the IT department. Therefore, in addition to its self-service component, Abiquo 2.0 provides granular financial and compliance insight, as well as tightly integrated security features preventing accidental policy violations. Balancing three core stakeholder groups -- end user, IT manager, and financial department -- constitutes the central competitive differentiator for Abiquo's cloud management solution.

This Enterprise Management Associatesô (EMA) impact brief explores the effect of this product release on the cloud automation marketplace.

CA Launches CA Cloud 360 Solution for Accelerated Cloud Planning

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

On November 14, 2011, CA Technologies (CA) announced the launch of CA Cloud 360, a bundled offering of professional services, best practices, and CA software products, all aimed at evaluating how the enterprise can best take advantage of private, public, or hybrid cloud infrastructure. CA Cloud 360 predicts the performance, reliability, security, service levels, cost, and ROI of placing enterprise applications in the cloud. Through CA Cloud 360, CA delivers a transparent decision framework for the CIO, with a clear technology path to the cloud, eliminating the uncertainty attached to traditional cloud preparation projects.

This Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) impact brief explores the effect of the CA Cloud 360 offering on the marketplace.

EMA Advisory Note: Storage - The Final Frontier for Virtualization and Cloud

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

When creating the specifications for virtualization or cloud projects, storage is often regarded as a necessary evil. The virtualization team does not have sufficient knowledge of the enterprise storage infrastructure to fully understand the projectís implication on storage. On the other side, the enterprise storage team cannot completely fathom the future impact of virtualization and cloud on the storage environment. This challenge is magnified by the inability to exactly predict where the virtualization and cloud journey will lead the enterprise. Will there be desktop virtualization, once the server virtualization project is complete? Will there eventually be a self-service hybrid or private cloud? Is cloud-bursting feasible?

Pivot3 Makes Desktop Virtualization Accessible to Small Enterprises

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

On October 19, 2011, Pivot3, a maker of unified storage and compute appliances that were historically focused on surveillance systems, released its vSTAC VDI appliance, a purpose-build stackable server appliance that is aimed at providing out-of-the-box virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to the small enterprise. The appliance consists of commodity hardware, the VMware virtualization stack, and the vSTAC operating system (vSTAC OS). vSTAC OS provides the "wrapper" tying together the stacked appliances by providing core infrastructure features such as load balancing, high availability and most importantly, a built-in SAN.

This Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) impact brief explores the impact of this product release on the VDI market for enterprises under 1,000 employees.

Cisco Systems and Terma Software Labs to Join Forces for More SLA-Aware Workload Processing

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

On November 1, 2011, Cisco Systems (Cisco) and Terma Software Labs (Terma) announced a reseller agreement that integrates Cisco's Tidal Enterprise Scheduler (TES) and Terma's Predictive Analytics and Historical Analytics modules. This integration enables TES to be fully SLA-aware and to leverage historical analytics to predict workload performance and achieve true resource optimization.

This EMA impact brief examines the strategic importance of this collaboration for the Workload Automation (WLA) marketplace, as well as the impact of WLA-analytics on the broader IT Service Management arena.

IBM Launches New Set of SmartCloud Infrastructure Technologies

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

On October 12, 2011, IBM announced a set of new SmartCloud infrastructure technologies aimed at allowing the rapid deployment and management of private and public clouds by leveraging existing software and hardware infrastructure components. IBMís goal is to convert approximately 200 million users to SmartCloud by the end of 2012. The new SmartCloud infrastructure framework consists of three main components: SmartCloud Application Services, SmartCloud Ecosystem, and SmartCloud Foundation stackóthe latter of which includes SmartCloud Entry, SmartCloud Provisioning, and SmartCloud Monitoring. In addition, IBM also announced that WebSphere Cast Iron Cloud Integration and Workload Deployer have received significant updates to enable full compatibility with the new private, public, and hybrid cloud environments.

This Impact Brief by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) explores what the launch of these new cloud solutions means for customers, partners, competitors, and IBM.

Cisco and Citrix Team Up to Accelerate Desktop Virtualization

Torsten Volk - Former EMA Analyst — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

On October 12, 2011, Cisco Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) (Cisco) and Citrix Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: CTXS) (Citrix) formed a strategic alliance to advance virtual desktop adoption by providing an improved user experience, while at the same time significantly cutting datacenter bandwidth requirements. The collaboration is co-funded by both companies.

This EMA impact brief illustrates the effect of this partnership on the market place for desktop virtualization.