Business white paper Build open, flexible cloud The new standard for cloud management software
Cloud computing has emerged as a major driving force behind other significant innovations currently affecting the world of IT, such as developments in big data, security, and mobility, to name a few. To harness these new capabilities and the potential offered by cloud, however, IT s role within the business will need to undergo a radical shift, particularly with regard to managing hybrid cloud service delivery environments. 2
Executive summary Cloud computing is forcing many organizations to adapt to a new style of IT, one in which IT departments, in addition to acting as the architects and custodians of traditional IT environments, are expected to serve as builders of in-house cloud delivery systems as well as brokers of third-party cloud services. Driving this transformation is the need for businesses to become more agile, reduce costs, accelerate the pace of innovation, and ensure the highest levels of quality, security, and compliance. To meet these challenges, IT needs to master large-scale hybrid cloud service delivery environments that encompass private cloud, public cloud, and traditional IT. This white paper explores some of the challenges of provisioning and maintaining cloud-based services in a complex IT environment, and describes how HP Cloud Service Automation (HP CSA) can help organizations adopt the new style of IT and deliver on the promise of cloud. Business drivers translate into these goals for IT: Improve agility by reducing response time to new business service requests. Speed innovation by accelerating application development and service delivery times. Reduce costs by standardizing and automating manual tasks and processes. Capitalize on opportunities by accelerating time to market of new services. Deliver enterprise-grade services that are secure, high-quality, and compliant. Major industry trends Rarely before in the technology industry have so many major trends and developments converged at once on the IT world. Today, mobility, big data, security, and cloud computing are all having a felt (and profound) impact on how customers access and digest information and services, and how those services are being delivered. By far, however, the biggest trend among them is cloud computing and it s the one that s attracting the most attention from business leaders. And for good reason. Cloud computing has the greatest potential to enhance business agility, accelerate innovation, and reduce costs by delivering on-demand, pay-per-use services that are highly elastic, quickly provisioned, and easily scalable all with minimal service provider interaction. To exploit these new capabilities and benefits, however, IT s role will have to expand beyond building internal infrastructure and services exclusively, and into brokering third-party and external cloud services. The key to success here, of course, lies in understanding the unique requirements of each service such as availability, cost, performance, and regulatory needs and then addressing them in the most efficient and cost-effective way possible. This can only be accomplished by creating the right mix of on-premises and off-premises services that leverage the best of traditional IT, private cloud, and public cloud and then learning how to effectively manage this new hybrid cloud delivery environment. 3
New technology, new challenges Every 10 to 15 years, technology delivery undergoes a radical shift that changes the consumption of technology and the value it can bring to both businesses and consumers. Typically, a shift of this nature saddles IT with two new sets of challenges: one, on the technical side, how to implement and deploy this new technology to achieve optimum results; and two, from a business perspective, how to leverage this new technology to enable the business to better meet its ongoing strategic, cost management, and revenue growth goals. Cloud computing certainly provides no exception to this two-part rule. First, the technical side. Without the right tools and training in place, the complexities of managing a hybrid cloud service delivery environment will only multiply exponentially, essentially negating any benefits or advantages gained by moving to cloud. In this instance, the importance of a management solution that utilizes standardized best practices and automation cannot be emphasized enough especially when you consider that upgrading and managing applications in the future will be an ongoing and time-intensive task. Second, the business side of the equation. Technology is only valuable insofar as it enables the business to solve its most pressing challenges namely, accelerating innovation, exploiting marketplace opportunities, enhancing agility, and improving financial management. Ideally, an effective cloud management solution will be able to address all of these challenges at once but then that raises the broader question: What, exactly, constitutes an effective solution? We chose to work with HP for two reasons. Firstly, HP is well known and well established in the IT market, so it would bring credibility to our new service. Secondly, the HP solution was mature, very well designed, and complete with good technology; in fact, it included everything we needed to develop, manage, monitor, and provision the platform. Managed services marketing director of a major telecommunications operator Designing the optimal cloud management solution Booming demand for IT services has led many companies to embrace cloud computing, augmenting their own private infrastructures with the on-demand resources of a public cloud. When it comes to managing the resulting hybrid environment, however, these same companies have simply fallen back on using different tools to manage different services. Unfortunately, this sort of siloed approach to management can create enormous drag on IT, stifle innovation and compromise agility essentially handicapping the company at a time when ever-changing business requirements demand precisely the opposite. In the face of unprecedented IT complexity and external pressures such as increased competition and marketplace uncertainty, a new approach is needed, one that is specifically designed to meet the unique needs of cloud computing. HP has identified what we feel are the key features of the optimal cloud management solution: Integral part of the cloud journey Cloud is a journey, not an overnight transformation. As such, it can be divided into several distinct steps: consolidating and standardizing IT resources to free up both staff and funding for your cloud initiative; automation of manual tasks and processes, which is a prerequisite for moving to cloud; self-service requesting by line-of-business users; operating and managing the complete lifecycle of these cloud services, from service creation to retirement; and finally, brokering internally created and externally sourced services. Open and extensible architecture Your cloud environment should be capable of accommodating and adapting to your business needs as they change over time thus it is important to avoid getting locked into a single-vendor solution by keeping your environment open and flexible. The optimal cloud management platform would help retain this sort of flexibility by supporting publicly exposed APIs to facilitate integration with other third-party products. When building cloud services, it is critical to design for workload portability across public and private cloud. A cloud management platform that supports open source cloud computing standards, such as OpenStack, can help you design for portable and interoperable services and avoid vendor lock-in. 4
Support for heterogeneous environments In the real world, no large-scale cloud service delivery environment is going to be purely one type or the other, but rather, a mix of multiple elements. Thus, the most effective management solution is a single, comprehensive tool that lets you build, operate, and manage services in a heterogeneous environment with multi-vendor hardware, multi-os, and multiple hypervisors. Hybrid cloud delivery A solution that limits your management capabilities to the infrastructure only also limits your ability to fully exploit the potential of cloud computing. The most effective solution will allow you to manage the entire stack infrastructure (IaaS), platform (PaaS), and applications (SaaS) not just infrastructure services. This speaks to an inherent ability to embrace existing automation assets as resource components for greater choice and flexibility. Enterprise-grade capabilities Cloud computing is a key cornerstone of your overall IT strategy, and the tools you use to manage that environment should reflect that importance. To support your mission-critical applications, your cloud solution should be secure, compliant, and built on a highly available architecture, with the ability to scale infinitely and support large-scale enterprise applications. Simplified, seamless user experience In recent years, simple design and a seamless user experience have become the hallmark of many new consumer-facing applications, masking the complexity of the application underneath a modern and simple user interface. Today, line-of-business users expect this same simplicity, ease of use, and aesthetic appeal with their own IT applications. Gone are the days when IT applications were skinned in visually unimpressive monotones today s user interfaces are colorful, playful, and eye-catching, rendering perfectly on any device regardless of screen size or device type. 5
The HP cloud management software solution For businesses that want to harness the power and potential of cloud, HP offers an open, enterpriseclass service lifecycle management solution called HP Cloud Service Automation. HP Cloud Service Automation helps your organization increase agility by reducing service deployment time from months to minutes, deliver greater value to customers by improving responsiveness, and reduce costs by automating service provisioning. This robust cloud software platform features an open, extensible architecture that supports HP and third-party management tools, enabling you to quickly adapt to changing business requirements while supporting heterogeneous IT environments. Additionally, because HP Cloud Service Automation offers support for multiple hypervisors, multivendor hardware, and multiple private-public cloud service providers, you get a flexible platform for building and managing hybrid cloud services that frees you from the constraints of vendor lock-in. As a core element of HP Converged Cloud portfolio, HP Cloud Service Automation offers: HP stands out from the crowd by providing a clean and navigable interface that wraps substantial breadth and depth of capabilities into the fewest number of interfaces. The Forrester Wave: Private Cloud Solutions, Q4 2013 Figure 1. Forrester Research rates HP as the sole leader in private cloud provider evaluation. Strong Current offerings Weak Risky bets Contenders CA Technologies ASG Software Solutions Market presence Eucalyptus Systems Strong performers BMC Software Microsoft IBM VMware Leaders HP Citrix Systems Cisco Systems Weak Strategy Strong Support for heterogeneous environments An architecture that embraces the use of existing automation assets as resource components for greater choice and flexibility REST API integration with HP and non-hp products through an open, extensible architecture Multi-vendor hardware and multi-hypervisor support, including VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, and KVM* Multi-vendor private and public cloud services support, including HP Public Cloud, Amazon EC2, and Microsoft Azure Support for complex, multi-tier application services Support for the design and orchestration of full stack services, with an enhanced orchestration engine Use of a graphical service designer with an end-to-end service lifecycle platform for automated provisioning and management of infrastructure and application services Use of topology service designs that leverage standardized, well-established dependencies among resource components for rapid time to value Use of sequential service designs for complex multi-tier applications that require reiterative interactions among components during service realization Support for a complete management toolset for traditional IT and cloud Application and infrastructure brokering for secure, compliant cloud services Support for informed and transparent service delivery through cloud analytics Cloud security, performance, and availability monitoring, with advanced business reporting through a foundation of modular growth Transformation of IT service delivery to enable IT to be a broker of cloud services * KVM supported through HP Cloud OS integration. 6
Support for a modern, simplified user interface Highly customizable self-service portal supporting custom themes Mash-up capabilities to embed non-hp Cloud Service Automation services into the selfservice portal Responsive, auto-adjusting user interface for multiple device types and screen sizes Intuitive marketplace shopping cart experience Open standards for unlocking potential Moving to cloud should open up possibilities, not shut down your choices. Unfortunately, many cloud services have varying levels of openness when it comes to integration, security, and lifecycle management, oftentimes forcing you to adopt new tools and processes that are incompatible with core competencies and best practices of enterprise IT. This sort of limitation leaves you with two less-than-ideal choices: Either commit to a single proprietary cloud environment and integrate deeply, or use only basic services. The basics of IT are by now commoditized. The business value in IT is to become more of a trusted advisor. We must be in a position to advise customers on new strategies and services. With HP Cloud Service Automation, we have a strong provisioning suite, a strong automation suite and this is what cloud is all about. And with HP it was just one company, one phone number. Jens Maagøe, senior architect, NNIT, a large European IT services provider Neither choice, obviously, is acceptable that s why HP is committed to supporting OpenStack standards for cloud computing, as well as actively participating in the OpenStack project. HP s commitment to both sets of standards means that HP will be at the forefront of cloud software development and advancement as these initiatives continue evolving to deliver massively scalable and highly portable services. HP Cloud Service Automation benefits HP Cloud Service Automation is a complete service management platform for managing multiple cloud environments, bringing you: Freedom of choice by supporting heterogeneous environments, allowing you to leverage bestof-breed software and hardware made possible through an open and extensible architecture Reduced costs by increasing server utilization, improving IT administrator efficiency, and embracing existing automation assets as resource components for greater choice and flexibility Increased agility for faster time to value by reducing application and infrastructure provisioning time from months to minutes delivering new services faster and accelerating time to revenue Reliable, high-quality service delivery by providing an automated service lifecycle environment that incorporates best practices and knowledge capture, reducing outages and security incidents Support for the design and orchestration of full stack services with scalability and elasticity, to scale up and down as the business grows and demand for IT services fluctuates Multi-tenancy and role-based access providing secure, compliant services to multiple organizations Simplified management leveraging the same tools to manage private cloud, public cloud, and traditional IT resources, reducing both management complexities and operating costs Investment protection by building cloud services on a flexible platform that lets you add capabilities and easily adapt to changing business requirements and integrate with other management tools Support for award-winning cloud security, industry-leading performance management, availability monitoring, and advanced business reporting tools when ready Service assurance and control for monitoring and managing the entire cloud service lifecycle across request, ordering, provisioning, usage, and retirement in alignment with business policies, cost targets, and performance goals to unlock your IT potential to become a cloud service broker 7
HP Cloud Service Automation and HP Helion HP Cloud Service Automation is an integral part of the HP Helion comprehensive cloud portfolio. It serves as the IT control point when building your HP Helion portfolio of private, public, and hybrid cloud consisting of market-leading hardware, software, and services architected to work together. Build an open and flexible cloud with HP Cloud Service Management HP Cloud Service Automation is the only end-to-end cloud management software solution available on the market today, including advanced provisioning for composite applications as well as infrastructure, support for heterogeneous environments, and a flexible, extensible platform for complete management. HP offers a mature, proven, and integrated set of management solutions and services to improve service quality, availability, governance, and compliance, while supporting the entire lifecycle of your cloud initiative. HP also offers professional services, training, and support to help your organization develop the skills necessary to maintain and grow your cloud solution. Learn more If you re ready to build an open and flexible cloud and say no to vendor lock-in, contact your HP sales representative today to begin defining and developing your cloud strategy. For more information about HP Cloud Service Automation, visit hp.com/go/csa. Sign up for updates hp.com/go/getupdated Copyright 2012 2014 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein. The OpenStack Word Mark and OpenStack Logo are either registered trademarks/service marks or trademarks/service marks of the OpenStack Foundation, in the United States and other countries and are used with the OpenStack Foundation s permission. We are not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by the OpenStack Foundation, or the OpenStack community. VMware is a trademark or registered trademark of VMware, Inc. or its affiliates. Microsoft and Hyper-V are U.S. registered trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies. 4AA4-0507ENW, September 2014, Rev. 4 This is an HP Indigo digital print.