IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING

Priorities for Achieving Success in SDDC DeploymentsAn ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES® (EMA™) White Paper Prepared for QualiSystems

May 2014

Table of Contents

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Priorities for Achieving Success in SDDC Deployments

Obstacles and Priorities on the Journey to the SDDC ...................................................................... 1

Experiences and Best Practices from SDDC Adopters ...................................................................... 1

Dealing with Mixed Environments and Mixed Maturities ............................................................... 2

The “Silo” Factor ............................................................................................................................... 3

EMA Perspective ............................................................................................................................... 4

About QualiSystems ......................................................................................................................... 4

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Priorities for Achieving Success in SDDC Deployments

Obstacles and Priorities on the Journey to the SDDCThe concept of a Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC) has captured the imagination of many, representing the culmination of virtualization and orchestration technology innovations by allowing automated deployment and management of virtual IT resources. This is the complete promise of the cloud, for internal and mixed/hybrid settings. But reaching that goal is not yet a simple process, due to the evolving nature of many of the requisite technology components and the current state of existing IT infrastructure.

Experiences and Best Practices from SDDC AdoptersENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES® (EMA™) analysts recently completed a major research study into the obstacles and priorities that IT shops have encountered along their “journey” to the SDDC.1 Each participant in the study had deployed at least five SDDC-related technologies, so their experiences provide insights into which challenges are indeed real and what types of best practices are emerging.

One of the initial findings was that despite progress being made towards realizing the promise of SDDC, there were still significant opportunities to do better. When asked about current most pressing IT challenges, survey participants called out “Slow manual processes to reconfigure infrastructure to accommodate change” at high rates (39%) – second only to the “High cost of networking” (42%). Such concerns reflect the long tail of diversity in existing infrastructure technologies, and the challenges of crossing technology domains – even with new, virtualized technologies, let alone trying to incorporate existing legacy equipment and systems. The next most popular response, “Complexity of integrating external applications and services with the corporate datacenter” reflects issues that are quite similar to cross-domain/cross-system integration, but in this case cross external organizational boundaries.

Fully addressing these challenges will require organizations to rethink organizational models and work processes, and make reasoned investments in supporting management tools. EMA asked study participants where they were planning to make tools investments around SDDC (figure 1) and found a clear emphasis on capacity management, multi-virtualization/cloud management, configuration management, and centralized management across physical, virtual, and cloud resources.

47%

40%

39%

39%

34%

31%

31%

26%

26%

24%

1%

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60%

Capacity management tools

Multi virtualization and/or cloud management platform

Configuration management

Centralized management of physical, virtual and cloud resources

Infrastructure automation & orchestration

Software defined storage

Network automation

Intelligent resource scheduling

Automation of server and application lifecycle management

Dynamic application placement solution

Other (Please specify)

Figure 1. Planned areas of technology investment in 2014

1 Obstacles and Priorities on the Journey to the Software-Defined Data Center, EMA, January 2014

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Priorities for Achieving Success in SDDC Deployments

These priorities reflect practical insights into the reality of managing the mixed environments that will comprise an SDDC. For instance, they reveal the need for establishing accountability, not only for provisioning, but also deprovisioning, so that the loop can be closed to release resources when they are no longer needed and return them to pools of availability. This has long been a problem even prior to the advent of virtual infrastructure, but can become even greater in an SDDC due to the speed at which resources can be configured and deployed, coupled with new barriers to visibility that come with virtual resource environments.

A related and consistent set of concerns were expressed around the pain points and bottlenecks experienced when creating application environments. While the top pain point was identified as security configuration (45%), a close second was resource availability (43%), which along with resource rightsizing (34%) are essential aspects of proper capacity planning. The third most common pain point was software configuration (38%), which reflects the application side of configuration management. Specific provisioning of servers, storage, and networks were cited, but a less common rate, averaging only 35%.

Dealing with Mixed Environments and Mixed MaturitiesMuch of SDDC success depends on how well the technologies that comprise the SDDC have stabilized and matured. We asked our study group how they were doing in that regard, and their responses (figure 2) reflected a mixed story of success, and frankly a lot of work remaining.

45%

43%

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28%

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2%

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Server virtualization

Desktop virtualization

Network virtualization

Storage virtualization

Continuous deployment of applications

Infrastructure elasticity and scalability

Management of multiple hypervisors

Management of public cloud services

Dynamic sizing of application environments

Automatic placement of applications

Other (Please specify)

None of the above

Figure 2. Common enterprise IT challenges regarded as “fully resolved”

Clearly, organizations believe that server virtualization is the most mature, but surprisingly, that is not even a majority consensus. Not even a third of shops believe that network and storage, the other two pillars of datacenter technology, are fully resolved. And further, the true test of SDDC is the readiness of infrastructure to be elastic and scalable – but less than a fourth of respondents felt that was fully in hand! The takeaway here is that while individual technology areas may be relatively mature, SDDC is

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Priorities for Achieving Success in SDDC Deployments

about all technologies working together, requiring approaches that can accommodate the less-complete stories within other technology areas. And this will require management tools that can help not only to achieve high level automation and orchestration objectives, but that can also fill the gaps within and between constituent SDDC technologies.

The “Silo” FactorSilos in existing organizations and management strategies need to be re-assessed and accounted for in the transition to the SDDC. Only by linking technologies and workflows across silos can the true and full promise of the SDDC be realized. As mentioned above, this means crossing individual silos, but also requires addressing the likely mix of new technologies and existing, legacy technologies. EMA research indicated that “Integrating legacy with new technologies” was one of the three greatest pain points caused by silos within IT, trailing only security and operating cost concerns. This was especially true in mid-sized organizations, which called legacy integration out as an even greater pain point, second only to security. In a related measure, SDDC adopters indicated that help with spanning new and legacy technologies would be most valuable in terms of resolving the impact of IT silos (see figure 3).

39%

37%

33%

33%

31%

28%

28%

26%

24%

11%

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50%

Assistance with spanning legacy and new technologies

Help aligning IT with business requirements

Private cloud implementation services

Help with improving service management strategy

Help with policy based infrastructure automation

Advice regarding what software features are needed

Advice regarding application aware networking

Advice regarding what organizational changes to make within the IT department

Advice regarding application centric storage strategies

No external help needed

Figure 3. Types of external help that will resolve the impact of IT silos (on SDDC)

In the end, despite the pain points and the paths to resolve them, the final test is whether or not organizations are getting more from their SDDC than prior architectures. Within the EMA study base, 83% of organizations indicated that even though SDDC technologies were being adopted, they still expected to run some of their applications on dedicated physical resources.

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Priorities for Achieving Success in SDDC Deployments

0% 8%

34%

42%

16%

Not at all

Slightly

Partially

Mostly

Fully

Figure 4. How well existing applications take advantage of current infrastructure

Further, SDDC adopters still see a lot of room for improvement in taking full advantage of current network, storage and server infrastructure (see figure 4). This situation can readily be attributed to the fact that SDDC objectives of truly ubiquitous, seamless planning and provisioning have yet to be fully realized due to the lack of consistent levels of virtualization technology maturity (figure 3) and the under-addressed issue of mixing new technologies with legacy equipment and systems.

EMA PerspectiveThe steady extension of software-defined and virtualized technologies across all aspects of IT has opened an intriguing possibility to automate and orchestrate resources across the datacenter in the form of SDDC. But as with any new strategy, adoption and success is never a simple proposition. EMA research into shops that are moving towards SDDC has verified that while progress is being made, better answers for configuration and capacity management are still needed. Further, common challenges in making the transition concern how to bring together new infrastructure technologies with existing, legacy equipment and systems. EMA believes that the answers lie in embracing, engaging, and breaking down silos, and an important step along that path involves finding management tools and technologies that are specifically designed to help span mixed/hybrid environments and fill the gaps between physical and virtual resources and between new and legacy technologies.

About QualiSystemsQualiSystems offers infrastructure automation and orchestration solutions that deliver agility, productivity and cost savings to data centers, test labs and software defined networks.  CloudShell automates infrastructure resource management, provisioning and self-service of heterogeneous environments from bare metal to operations, development to deployment, and legacy to cloud and SDN.  CloudShell is a certified solution for orchestration and automated provisioning of EMC VSPEX platforms. QualiSystems solutions are deployed by hundreds of service providers, enterprises, government agencies, and technology manufacturers worldwide.

About Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.Founded in 1996, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) is a leading industry analyst firm that provides deep insight across the full spectrum of IT and data management technologies. EMA analysts leverage a unique combination of practical experience, insight into industry best practices, and in-depth knowledge of current and planned vendor solutions to help its clients achieve their goals. Learn more about EMA research, analysis, and consulting services for enterprise line of business users, IT professionals and IT vendors at www.enterprisemanagement.com or blogs.enterprisemanagement.com. You can also follow EMA on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

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