Cloud computing infrastructure

Transcription

1 From the trenches Cloud computing infrastructure Reports on recent cloud deployments from IT managers from ITSolutionsAdvisor.com

2 Introduction This report features a sampling of project reports on cloud computing. These reports were gathered from IT managers in the ITSolutionsAdvisor community who have recently evaluated cloud computing infrastructure solutions and picked what they believe will work best in their circumstances. More than 50 reports on cloud infrastructure will be available to members on the site, and we expect to gather many more in the near future. The reports come from four very different kinds of companies: Defense contractor University Financial services company Residential construction company Active members of ITSolutionsAdvisor.com will not only gain access to more project reports, but also: Follow up reviews of the products that these projects were centered around Forums to discuss the challenges that people encounter in these projects The ability to private message the people who have contributed these reports and reviews to ask more specific and probing questions on a one to one basis Copyright 2014 by TechTarget Page 2

3 From a defense contractor From the trenches: cloud computing What problem were you trying to solve? I am a program manager at a global security company. We were looking for a private cloud solution that would enable us to bring in custom software and access data quickly in a secure environment. What solutions did you choose? We re using VMware, KVM and Cisco physical and virtual switches. Our OS is Linux Red Hat. How many users were involved? Initially we were managing the cloud with 3 people and had 25 users at most. What kind of project was it? New installation Upgrade Migration from another system How did you purchase the technology? Directly from vendor Through the channel Combination What was the overall cost of the project? The materials costs for 2 racks of equipment was $2 million and labor hours over the course of 2 years was $1 million, for a total of $3 million How long did it take to implement? 2 years. It took 6 months to get the cloud in and 18 months of testing use cases. We ran 25 simultaneous experiments. Copyright 2014 by TechTarget Page 3

4 What were the major obstacles you had to overcome? Working with the government and with IDC 503 security compliance was a challenge (an expected one but a challenge no less). Staff took VMware certification classes and quickly realized that VMware would allow certain things that were not allowed in our secure environment. Internal communication was also a challenge, especially getting the word out to people who would otherwise just buy a new physical box. What went better than you expected? Worse? Security accreditation went great. Being able to deploy the ISP quickly and augment additional hardware took about 6 months which was better than expected. What were the unintended consequences of the project? Providing Data as a Service proved to be difficult. How will you measure success for the project? Are there specific metrics you will use? We are measuring usage of the cloud in terms of CPU requirements, storage requirements and full time monitoring of resource requests. We are also collecting data on time-to-market, end user experience and resource utilization. What advice would you have for someone doing this now? Do a market study to see if there is a cloud available to use. Focus funding on making the biggest impact with your applications. What are next steps for you? We will continue service for a growing population of test cases and experiments. We will be expanding uses of other resources and will be adding custom hardware to the existing x86 community. Copyright 2014 by TechTarget Page 4

5 From a university What problem were you trying to solve? I am a systems administrator at a very large public research university. We are looking at cloud solutions to help with backup. We would also like to minimize our storage costs. What solutions did you choose? We are working with CommVault. We are specifically looking at their plugins for archiving data to the cloud. How many users were involved? There are 2000 clients with a support staff of 30. The support staff is expected to increase to 100 by year s end. What kind of project was it? New installation Upgrade Migration from another system How did you purchase the technology? Directly from vendor Through the channel Combination What was the overall cost of the project? The projected cost of this project is $10 million. How long did it take to implement? The entire implementation is slated to last 3 years. What were the major obstacles you had to overcome? Efficient storage and backup has been a major obstacle. Copyright 2014 by TechTarget Page 5

6 What went better than you expected? Worse? Our internal clients have been pleased with backup times. The evolution of our applications has gone worse than expected. What were the unintended consequences of the project? The use of Fusion-io cards has dramatically decreased backup times. How will you measure success for the project? Are there specific metrics you will use? Success will be measured by restore times. What advice would you have for someone doing this now? Learn what vendors have to offer and research how it will fit with your environment. What are next steps for you? The next steps will be testing in the cloud. Copyright 2014 by TechTarget Page 6

7 From a financial services company What problem were you trying to solve? From the trenches: cloud computing I am the Director of Enterprise Architecture for a large financial services company. We are in the process of developing long term enterprise-wide strategies for a variety of cloud services. We are looking at the pros and cons of various services, including their cost benefit. What solutions did you choose? We are looking at a wide range of solutions including IaaS, SaaS, Paas, private, public, and hybrid clouds. How many users were involved? There are about 50 users providing feedback. What kind of project was it? New installation Upgrade Migration from another system How did you purchase the technology? Directly from vendor Through the channel Combination What was the overall cost of the project? I am unable to estimate the overall costs of the various projects. How long did it take to implement? The strategy will last throughout Copyright 2014 by TechTarget Page 7

8 What were the major obstacles you had to overcome? Most recently, we were dealing with a legal issue with Amazon. The immaturity of the market is also an obstacle. I feel like IBM and HP are still formulating their strategies for moving forward. What went better than you expected? Worse? Proof of concept (POC) projects have gone well. Technology vendors have been eager to work with me. I ve been pleased to have pilot projects up and running but am experiencing reluctance and resistance from people within my organization. What were the unintended consequences of the project? The unintended consequence has been ruffling feathers within the organization. How will you measure success for the project? Are there specific metrics you will use? Success is being measured by service-level agreements (SLAs), total cost of ownership (TCO), performance, uptime and pricing. What advice would you have for someone doing this now? A good strategy is to start by identifying business goals and objectives and then develop use cases and scenarios. Determine if the use case is for developers, for testing etc then develop metrics for measuring success. Be prepared to be flexible -- then proceed! What are next steps for you? We will be reviewing strategies for proof of concept use cases before moving forward. Copyright 2014 by TechTarget Page 8

9 From a construction company What problem were you trying to solve? From the trenches: cloud computing I am an enterprise architect for an organization that builds homes. One of the drivers to move to the cloud was that many of our organization s remote workers were using consumer editions of Dropbox, which was a major security concern. We also wanted to encourage employee engagement with Yammer and SharePoint 365. What solutions did you choose? We went with Yammer, Office 365, One Drive and are now considering Exchange and a CRM app in the cloud. We currently use Siebel and are looking to move to MS Dynamics. How many users were involved? N/A What kind of project was it? New installation Upgrade Migration from another system How did you purchase the technology? Directly from vendor Through the channel Combination What was the overall cost of the project? The cost was between $3-5 million. How long did it take to implement? This is an ongoing implementation that will last a year in total. Copyright 2014 by TechTarget Page 9

10 What were the major obstacles you had to overcome? We were dealing with immature products, which brought up concern over future parity issues. What went better than you expected? Worse? We were pleasantly surprised with our ability to address the needs of multiple types of end user devices automatically. One problem we did not anticipate was scalability. We deal with architectural drawings consisting of many terabytes of data and millions of files. What were the unintended consequences of the project? There have not been any unintended consequences outside of the scalability issues. How will you measure success for the project? Are there specific metrics you will use? Yammer provides analytics for the number of people in the environment and how active they are. As for soft metrics, we expect employees to improve productivity by about 20% because they will not be stuck in Siebel. You can t measure the level of excitement and anticipation for the new CRM app, but they certainly are there! What advice would you have for someone doing this now? Be weary of solutions inundated with 3rd party applications. They may result in future compatibility issues and lock you in to a particular technology. What are next steps for you? Aside from working on the CRM, we will be moving from Symantec s Enterprise Vault for (onpremise) to Exchange E-discovery as a hybrid. We will also be replacing all of their analog phones with IP phones and bringing MS Lync into the picture. Copyright 2014 by TechTarget Page 10

11 About IT Solutions Advisor Launching August 2014, this new community is built exclusively for IT professionals researching specific technology projects. A peer-driven organization, this community will feature content about vendors and solutions that you can t get anywhere else and will provide direct access to: Peers who are undertaking the same projects you are Peers who have already completed the project you re starting Experts with vast experience with clients who ve tackled the project you re tacking The net of this it s like taking your small circle of trusted peers and expanding it by hundreds. If you re reading this document, then your membership is all set. Look for information from us the first week of August when the community is officially launched! Copyright 2014 by TechTarget Page 11