Preparing for the successful private cloud

By Brian Wilson

Marc, Columbus, OH, writes: "My organization is taking a close look at cloud-based solutions for managing our internal software development and test activities.  We have already begun virtualizing our infrastructure, but are evaluating how to effectively add cloud management to our environment.  What's your advice for how to get started with a private cloud?"

Brian Wilson replies: This is an extremely common situation in IT today. Organizations ranging from SMB to enterprise to government are evaluating how the concept of cloud can best be leveraged for their particular needs. Leading organizations have recognized that the real and measurable capital and operating benefits of cloud computing will be critical in the race to stay competitive as the economy continues to turn around. For those organizations evaluating the addition of private cloud technology, we've found that a few guiding principles can mean the difference between early success and a drawn-out failure. 

#1: Don't delay your cloud kickoff

One of the most common mistakes we see is delaying the kickoff of a cloud project.  Clouds, and private clouds in particular, are going to be a major part of how IT delivers services to the enterprise moving forward, and the sooner you can deploy a cloud and start learning how it will work for your organization, the better. The organizations with the most success with private clouds to date started with a small, defined project and then scaled quickly as they learned and achieved initial ROI.

#2: Research and plan the initial end user experience carefully

Users will make or break your cloud...implementing a private cloud is like any other major IT change management project, and the better the initial user experience is, the more successful it will be in the long run. Your users will quickly become champions or detractors, so it is crucial to the success of the private cloud project to plan your initial end-user experience adequately.

#3: Understand how your users view 'production'
Production means different things to different people, and it's important that you understand how your users view it early in your planning process. For example, while development is traditionally considered 'pre-production', the environments used by developers are critical to their success. These environments are as 'production' to those users as the external website is to most companies, and will often have greater availability and uptime requirements than you might expect.

#4: Create a robust image lifecycle management plan

Image lifecycle management can be easy to forget or even ignore in the initial private cloud deployment. At go-live, you start with a clean system, but after a few months, you'll start seeing drift. Within six months, you can have a serious sprawl issue, along with very unhappy end users if you don't have a solid image lifecycle management plan in place from the start.

#5: Look at what you've got already - you might not need much more

While a valid cloud deployment strategy is to purchase new hardware and set up a pristine environment, you likely have most of the pieces you need in your data center already - it just may be under-utilized. In fact, we find that in most data centers, non-virtualized infrastructure is running at about 8-15 percent utilization, and virtualized infrastructure is running at about 30-45 percent utilization. While virtualization provides a clear improvement, simply adding true cloud management and automation can drive that utilization up to 75-90 percent, enabling you to do much more with the resource you have already.

In short, the private cloud is a powerful and attainable model for efficiently delivering infrastructure in the modern enterprise. With the right planning and foresight, your deployment can go more smoothly than you'd imagine, and you can begin reaping the benefits of an optimized infrastructure delivery process.   

Biography

Brian Wilson, Director of Services for cloud implementations at Quest Software, is responsible for driving Quest client success as they plan, deploy, and manage private clouds across a wide range of use cases. Wilson and his team enable IT, government, and business leadership to create robust, secure infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) private clouds to efficiently manage and deliver complex IT services across the enterprise.