Virtualized Infrastructure Journey – Progressing to Service Assurance Xangati Blog Atchison Frazer Vice President, Marketing
Feb 23, 2015
Xangati Blog The dramatic growth of virtualized infrastructures and cloud architectures is being driven by a number of trending market conditions and customer requirements. Those market drivers include: an increase in demand for mobile computing, wider acceptance of hybrid cloud services, and implementation of so-called bimodal IT (conventional/digital). The associated benefits of the virtualized movement are reduced costs, increased productivity, business agility and operational flexibility. However, there remain a number of significant barriers to widespread VI adoption:
• • •
CISO’s still have a great need for granular security and policy management – at a virtual machine level, as well as dealing with the threat of untrusted user security, anomalous traffic patterns and management of failure domains in a virtual environment. The end-user experience also has to be top of mind to overcome perceptions that virtual workspace infrastructure suffers from poor and unreliable performance, negatively affecting employee productivity. Finally, even virtualizing desktops doesn’t necessarily eliminate the inherent weakness of measuring service assurance if the conventional cross-silo functions (compute, storage, networking), VI admins, end-users and line-of-business managers lack a common performance analytics platform.
Xangati Blog Many IT organizations are still struggling with managing multiple interactional functions. For example, with conventional, siloed management tools, VI admins are unable to perceive how different functions, shared storage for example, affect all the other VI components, and they also find it challenging to determine the root cause of performance issues. What is needed to effectively operate a high performance VI environment in real time is the ability to optimize the end-user experience from the following factors:
•
• • •
Resolve performance issues faster by collecting and analyzing data from the entire infrastructure out to the client devices Diagnostics to spot root cause of issues by correlating highly granular data Predict future resource contention storms and access dynamic remedial action recommendations Support large VI environments with scalable in-memory architecture, while managing performance of interrelated components from a single console
Xangati Blog Viewing performance issues through an operational maturity prism, the picture crystalizes in terms of how leveraging service assurance analytics can become a business critical strategy to moving from a reactive to a proactive to a predictive performance management posture. At a baseline level, in which the enterprise finds itself in a totally reactive mode, typically you will see disparate technology-specific organization silos with strong domain expertise. However, this type of organization maintains only partial asset control, tends to deploy hardware-based provisioning, and IT alone tends to define performance management tools. At the next phase of operational maturity, you will typically see more converged infrastructure spawned by cross-technology collaboration improvements spanning service support processes but with limited compliance. Web services are more progressively adopted that allow applications to be addressed without full understanding of the underlying technology. IT performance management tools and service support processes are being optimized. During the mid-journey phase of the continuum, where most enterprises and large organizations fall today, a corporate virtualization strategy and hybrid-cloud roadmap exists, and a migration plan from service-oriented architecture to contemporary API management is already defined.
Xangati Blog Additionally, high availability converged infrastructure services for virtualized applications are delivered with performance information aggregated in real time across all VI components. This makes it much easier to map applications to converged infrastructure and services, and deploy an integrated ‘data analytics fabric’ for performance management and business continuity scenarios. Integrated SLAs and OLAs (operational level agreements) and underpinning contracts are executed with well-defined, cross-silo metrics captured and measured. Following the continuum at the most progressive phase, the virtualized infrastructure is fully stable and services are dynamically provisioned according to business priorities. Autonomic and adaptive capabilities for self -healing and performance tuning are introduced into the environment. New virtual applications can be assembled rapidly as composites of existing applications, while performance management and governance start to converge through implementation of policy-based business imperatives. At this stage, the organization implements a fully integrated approach to performance so that end-to-end processes are optimized to meet defined business targets based on real-time metrics reporting.
Xangati Blog Finally, at the business outcome phase, whereby the enterprise has achieved full operational maturity in terms of a high performance virtualized infrastructure, infrastructure capacity and utilization trends can be aligned to right-sizing goals for application services, and policy-based performance management influences application and process behavior in real time. Unpredictable peak capacity can be accessed on the fly, internally and/or externally by way of a hybrid-cloud architecture platform. Key to delivering on service assurance targets is the reliance upon an intelligent data analytics platform that provides a holistic, 360-degree health status view of the entire virtualized infrastructure.
Visit our Blog for more information