Dokumentation IDC Private Cloud WP

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W H I T E PA P E R

O p p o r t u n i t i e s i n P r i v a t e C l o u d C o m p u t i n g v i a a T u r n k e yA p p r o a c h

Sponsored by: Microsoft

Michelle BaileyJanuary 2011

E X E C U T I V E S U M M A R Y

The enterprise datacenter is undergoing a reinvention. The previous 10 years of datacenter operations will look nothing like the next 10 years, and much of thischange is driven by a combination of new technologies as well as shifting governanceand IT automation. To address increasing physical server proliferation, organizationshave been aggressively introducing virtualization. While virtualization has helped

reduce the number of physical servers in the datacenter, it has led to virtual server sprawl. IDC estimates that the density of virtual machines (VMs) will grow from anaverage of five VMs per physical server in 2008 to more than eight by 2013 and thatmanagement and administration expenses to maintain virtual servers will become thelargest single element of server spending by 2013.

In response, datacenters are entering what IDC has identified as the next wave of IT that of "cloud computing." While many think of cloud computing as the services-based delivery of compute, storage, and/or applications over the public Internet, IDCbelieves that there is a more important trend in the enterprise datacenter aroundprivate cloud computing, or the delivery of IT as a service on IT organizations' owninfrastructure.

With cloud computing, organizations now have several options for their applicationinfrastructure, including on-premises servers, public cloud services (which are hostedat a service provider's site and open to a largely unrestricted universe), or privatecloud services (which are built using dedicated hardware and designed for a singleenterprise with restricted access and which could be housed on-premises or at aservice provider's location). Today, customers can select the approach that worksbest for them based on the specific requirements of their organization andapplications.

Overall benefits of cloud computing include higher levels of responsiveness tobusiness needs, automation, improved orchestration, and faster provisioning. By

shifting the management burden to either an outsourced provider or a highlyautomated layer of infrastructure, organizations can reduce the labor hours requiredto manage and maintain their servers, whether physical or virtual, and can replaceperiodic large capital outlays with operational costs on a monthly or an annual basis.IDC expects that enterprises that do not improve their automation capabilities,whether through cloud computing or otherwise, will see their IT costs continue to risesignificantly.

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Microsoft has recently come to market with Windows Azure platform, the Windows Azure platform appliance, and Hyper-V Cloud offerings. Windows Azure platform is acloud-based approach to build, deploy, and manage scale-out applications anddatabases using traditional Microsoft tools and frameworks including .NET and SQL.Microsoft offers public cloud services out of its own datacenter based on the Windows

Azure platform. To support private cloud offerings based on Windows Azure,Microsoft has packaged the Windows Azure platform appliance as a turnkey solutionthat allows service providers and large enterprises to deploy Windows Azure. Hyper-V Cloud is another new set of Microsoft programs and offerings designed to make iteasier for customers and partners to build and deploy their own cloud infrastructureswith Windows Server and System Center. Hyper-V Cloud consists of deploymentguidance and the Fast Track offering, which includes predefined, validated hardwareand software designed for rapid deployment of private clouds based on WindowsServer 2008 R2, Hyper-V, and System Center. Hyper-V Cloud also includes a serviceprovider partner program for hosted dedicated clouds. Microsoft's approach is toenable customers to integrate existing applications on Windows Server with theWindows Azure cloud platform through consistent identity, development, andmanagement tools. These tools span private and public cloud deployments so thatcustomers can leverage their existing skill sets and more easily build, migrate, or extend out to the public cloud.

Enterprises and service providers want to realize the scalability, time to market, andcost benefits of cloud computing without having to rely solely on public clouds. Bytaking advantage of the private cloud capabilities of Hyper-V Cloud and the Windows

Azure platform appliance, organizations can still maintain levels of control andsovereignty of data required for mission-critical applications or to meet keycompliance or network latency requirements.

S I T U AT I O N A N A LY S I S

C h a l l e n g i n g E c o n o m i c s o f D a t a c e n t e r G r o w t h

Previous-generation application infrastructure was built using server hardware locatedin the enterprise datacenter. Until the advent of VMs, enterprises frequently deployedapplications on dedicated physical hardware. Including development and test hardware,more than one physical server was usually required per application. As the number of applications grew, datacenters suffered server sprawl and escalating capital andoperating costs for datacenter management and power and cooling. Virtualization hashelped alleviate aspects of sprawl and power consumption, but as the number of virtualmachines explodes, the net effect is replacement of physical server sprawl with virtual

server sprawl. This is leading to even greater management costs because doubling thenumber of VMs still doubles the amount of work for administrators.

High Capital and Operational Costs for Physical Servers

The result is server sprawl in the datacenter and an explosion in the global installedbase of servers, which IDC estimates grew from just over 5 million in 1996 to32 million in 2009. IDC estimates that there was an installed base of nearly 30 millionvirtual machines in 2005 and anticipates that the installed base of virtual machines


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worldwide will surpass 80 million by 2013. As a result of this explosive growth, staffingcosts on systems maintenance have risen 600% to over $120 billion annually, and thecost to power and cool installed servers has more than tripled from $2 billion to $10billion per year.

Aging Datacenter Facil ities Hamper Future Growth

The average age of a datacenter in the United States is 12 years, meaning that thetypical datacenter was not built to support today's sprawling systems environment andhigh server densities. Power and cooling has become the number 1 operationalproblem for the datacenter and is the primary factor limiting most datacenter growth.While IT organizations have been able to adapt by introducing supplemental power and cooling equipment and deploying energy management techniques, thesestrategies increase the burden on management overhead and can require significantintegration investments. Further, with many organizations' datacenters operating at or near their capacity, their ability to rapidly scale to adapt to new organizationaldemands with in-house IT infrastructure is limited.

Time to Market

Supporting a large physical server infrastructure can also hinder IT's ability to moverapidly to support changing business requirements. The time required to build, test,and fix servers and deploy them into a production environment can take weeks or even months depending on the processes and constraints of the organization. In thepast, this may have been sufficient lead time for most organizations' applicationdeployments, but as the pace of business continues to increase, enterprises requireways to speed the time to deploy servers from weeks or months to days or evenhours. Entrusting their application infrastructure to a cloud provider, organizations canensure that their infrastructure works out of the gate and can rapidly spin up newcapacity, without going through the time required to roll out new server deployments.

D r i v e r s o f C l o u d C o m p u t i n g

To address these challenges, organizations are turning to cloud computing, bothpublic and private. Cloud computing builds off the best practices of the past decadeand allows organizations to obtain compute resources as a shared, standard service,usually with elastic scaling, use-based pricing, and user interface (UI) technologiesaccessible via standard, published APIs. The promise of cloud computing is that itcan drive higher levels of automation, orchestration, provisioning, and deployment.

Cloud computing also addresses one of the key economic challenges of server infrastructures: administrator management. By significantly reducing the humanelement in the management of the infrastructure and application layer, organizationscan scale out their infrastructure without having to scale IT staff. By automating manyof the manual tasks that are performed by administrators today, organizations canmaintain their server infrastructure with their existing IT staff while continuing to growtheir application portfolio. Finally, because computing activities in the cloud can bequickly scaled up and down, cloud computing delivers an infrastructure that can moreflexibly adapt to changing business requirements.


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P r i m a r y B e n e f i t s f o r C u s t o m e r s

In a 2010 IDC survey of IT decision makers, respondents identified "lower total cost of ownership" (TCO), the ability to "aid in disaster recovery," and "improved availability"as the top 3 criteria in their consideration to move applications to the public cloud.

Interestingly, three additional criteria followed closely behind, namely "lower ITsoftware costs," "lower IT hardware costs," and "lower datacenter utility costs."

In the same survey, when respondents were asked to identify the three mostimportant criteria in moving applications to the private cloud, "improved availability,"the ability to "aid in disaster recovery," and the facilitation of "improved utilization of ITresources" were the top rated. Improved responsiveness to changes in workloaddemand was also highly rated (see Figure 1).

For public cloud computing, IDC believes that the primary benefits that will resonatewith customers are those that are fiscally focused, along with the essentially mandatoryrequirements of availability and disaster recovery. In contrast, the key benefits of privatecloud computing that appeal to potential customers focus less on TCO and more onimproved utilization of IT resources, availability, and disaster recovery.


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F I G U R E 1

I m p o r t a n c e o f C r i t e r i a R e l a t e d t o M o v i n g t o a P u b l i c o r P r i v a t eC l o u d

Q. Rate the following criteria for their importance in your decision to move applications to a public/private cloud.

n = 255

Note: Responses were based on a scale of 010, where 0 = not at all important and 10 =extremely important.

Source: IDC's Datacenter and Cloud Computing Survey , January 2010

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Save on IT staf f headcount

Lower IT sof tware costs

Lower IT services/maintenance costs

Speed time to d eployment

Simplif ied management

Lower datacenter facility costs

Lower IT hardware costs

Improve response to changes in

workload demand

Lower to tal cost of o wnership

Improve utilization of IT resources

Aids in disaster recovery

Improved availability

(Mean rating)

Public Private


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G r o w t h i n P r i v a t e C l o u d t o A d d r e s s C o n c e r n so v e r C o n t r o l a n d S o v e r e i g n t y o f D a t a

Cloud computing started with the public cloud and consisted of multitenant servicesthat were hosted by a service provider and addressed the needs of the market, not an

individual company. While public cloud offers the benefits of reduced operatingpersonnel costs, greater scalability, and increased agility, some applications particularly those with strict compliance requirements require an organization toretain stricter control and sovereignty over the data. These environments triggeredthe evolution of private cloud.

Private cloud deployments consist of integrating networking, storage, and server hardware with management tools and server virtualization. One of the main benefitsof private cloud is that it can be tailored to suit the needs of a specific company or organization. With private cloud deployments, organizations drive higher levels of automation, provisioning, and deployment orchestration and are able to scale their infrastructure in a way that ensures control over the data in the deployment without

having to scale IT staff. Private clouds are well-suited for data-intensive, mission-critical workloads that have high requirements for security, availability, andserviceability as well as for applications that, for compliance reasons, require agreater degree of control and ownership of the data.

While companies are adopting both public cloud and private cloud, IDC data indicatesthat they are moving more rapidly to private cloud deployments than public clouddeployments over the next three years. In IDC's 2010 survey of IT decision makers,the majority of survey respondents (57%) ranked their likelihood of deploying aprivate cloud at least a "5" out of "10" (with "10" being most likely), compared with42% for public cloud. In the same survey, 29% of organizations said they are"currently using" or "plan to use" private clouds, with another 44% "considering"

private clouds for their organizations. This data demonstrates both the interest in andthe early stage nature of the technology.

While IDC forecasts growth in both public cloud and private cloud, we expect faster growth in server revenue to support private cloud, with private cloud computing server spending growing from $2.6 billion in 2009 to $5.7 billion in 2014, corresponding to aCAGR of 17.3%. This reflects both a faster growth in actual units shipped for privatecloud and significantly higher average selling values (ASVs) for private cloud.

A N E W A P P R O A C H T O D ATA C E N T E RE C O N O M I C S

C o m b a t i n g V i r t u a l M a c h i n e S p r a w l

As discussed earlier, physical server sprawl was temporarily alleviated by theintroduction of virtual machines. However, these same VMs themselves soon led tomore server sprawl, but of the virtual kind.

As organizations continue to deploy virtualization, IDC expects the installed baseof physical servers to flatten out while the number of virtual machines explodes.


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IDC predicts that 2010 will be the first year that virtual machine shipments willoutnumber shipments of physical servers. IDC estimates that more than half of allworkloads were virtualized by the end of 2010 and expects that greater than two-thirds will be virtualized by 2013. Virtual machine density (or virtual machines per physical server) will rise from an average of five VMs per physical server in 2008 tomore than eight per physical server by 2013. Further, IDC expects that by 2013 morethan 80 million virtual and physical servers will be installed.

This robust adoption of VMs by the industry is a strong and powerful indicator of themarket's comfort with virtual technologies. However, if VMs are deployed over thenext five years as they have been for the past five years in-house, with ceaselessgrowth in complexity and requirements for systems management the number of headaches and sleepless nights will grow exponentially.

G r o w t h i n V M s L e a d s t o S p i r a l i n g O p e r a t i o n a lC o s t s

Virtualization has helped enterprises reduce their physical server sprawl, driveconsolidation, and increase server utilization. This has helped lower up-front capitalcosts and extends the life of the datacenter and drives up the levels of availability;however, many organizations are arriving at the hard realization that virtual machinesare not in fact a cure-all for the woes of physical server sprawl. The shift from physicalmachines to virtual machines has yielded some very real economic benefits toorganizations, particularly in terms of reduced capital costs and operating costs for areas such as power and cooling. But other cost elements have continued to spiralout of control, namely the personnel costs to manage and maintain the server environment. In fact, because of the explosion in growth in virtual machines in thedatacenter, IDC forecasts that management and administration expenses to maintainvirtual servers will grow to become the largest single element of server spending by

2013 (see Figure 2).


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discrete service provider. The major infrastructure choices available for today's ITorganizations include:

Traditional on-premises deployments. On-premises server deployments especially nonvirtualized workloads can be the preferred deployment method for applications that have very strict compliance requirements or other requirements that

necessitate keeping all data on servers physically under the organization's control.

Private cloud, hosted by the enterprise. These deployments not only provide keybenefits of cloud computing, such as automation, scalability, and flexibility, but alsoenable organizations to satisfy their requirements for strict compliance and control. Inthis form, internal IT staff must still manage the cloud technology infrastructure.

Private cloud, hosted by a managed service provider (MSP). Thesedeployments provide even more benefits of the cloud, with the added benefit of outsourcing the management of the cloud technology infrastructure to the serviceprovider. Applications that could be a good match for private clouds hosted by MSPsinclude mission-critical workloads such as business processing or decision support.

Public cloud. These deployments take full advantage of cloud benefits but providethe least degree of control and compliance. Applications for which public clouddeployments could be a good fit include collaboration, HR, scale-out Web, and email.

Given the multiple options available to customers, it is important for them to definetheir technology and vendor strategies and determine whether they are better servedin a private cloud environment in-house or with an MSP a public cloudenvironment, or an architecture that leverages both types of cloud computing.

Further, cloud computing enables new frameworks for application development. Manynew computing solutions are coming to market that enable developers to build

applications that leverage the relatively unlimited hardware resources with cloudcomputing so that they can scale up as they add more users or as business needschange. These new tools enable developers to build applications knowing that theseresources are available to them.

B e n e f i t s o f P r i v a t e C l o u d C o m p u t i n g

IDC sees a range of benefits associated with private cloud computing. These benefitsinclude:

Reduced burden on the IT staff. One of the great benefits of cloud computing isits degree of automation. Today, the average number of physical servers

managed by a single system administrator is 25, and with virtualization, thenumber grows to 43 VMs per administrator. IDC expects that by leveraging thebuilt-in automation tools that come with private cloud solutions, IT organizationscould potentially manage 100250 VMs per administrator depending on theapplications and IT processes.

Greater scalability. Without the need to deploy, test, and fix physical servers,organizations can spin compute capacity up or, more importantly, down at amoment's notice.


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Faster time to market. If an application development team requires five serversto be online in hours, the server team can provide the appropriate resourceswithout having to provision new physical servers.

High availability and workload balancing. With cloud computing, when thesystems management tools determine that the infrastructure supporting an

application is about to go down, they can automatically launch a new virtualmachine and shift the load to it.

Ability to maintain control over data and regulatory environments. Privatecloud computing brings together the benefits of public cloud computing while stillenabling an organization to maintain control over its data, including where it isphysically located, who can access it, and the physical security profile. Thiscontrol also enables customers to more closely adhere to regulatory constraintsfor data locality, disaster recovery, and privacy.

Ability to provide consistent support and service-level agreements (SLAs). With private cloud computing, IT organizations can apply business process

based SLAs to ensure that mission-critical applications continue to operate in theevent of an outage, while tier 2 and tier 3 applications can continue to besupported in a more cost-effective environment.

D r i v i n g N e w L e v e l s o f P o l i c y M a n a g e m e n t i nt h e D a t a c e n t e r

While cloud computing is enabling and, in some instances, forcing organizationsto change their approach to technology deployment, organizations must also changethe processes and policies governing their technology deployments. In addition to thetechnology benefits cloud computing provides, it can also be a strong catalyst for driving best practices in policy management. For example, when datacenters madethe transition to VMs, many relaxed their policies for requesting and approving server deployments because they assumed that VMs were "practically free." Thiscontributed to the VM sprawl we see today. Organizations are starting to reel their processes back in, requiring justification and approval for deploying new VMs, muchlike they did with physical servers. Having to justify the need for new servers makessense, whether those servers are physical or virtual.

B U Y V E R S U S B U I L D : C H A N G I N G H A R D WA R EA N D S O F T WA R E I N R E L AT I O N T O T H E N E WE R A O F I T

In the past, organizations building out an IT infrastructure effectively acted as their own systems integrator, purchasing servers, storage, networking, and managementsoftware and performing an implementation project to deploy and integrate thesetechnologies. Dependencies and risks had to be identified and evaluated, tasks andproject plans had to be assembled and executed against, and change managementhad to be put in place.


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Service providers and enterprises looking to deploy private cloud must go through asimilar process to assemble an appropriate infrastructure on which to host customers'applications. This can be an expensive, time-consuming, and risky process because itis not always easy to deploy cloud infrastructures that meet the required levels of automation, availability, and scalability, particularly for environments that demandhigh levels of regulatory compliance and data protection.

H a r d w a r e N e e d s

A fully deployable cloud computing infrastructure must include several hardwaretechnology areas:

Server. A cloud infrastructure requires the use of scalable servers that includebuilt-in hardware redundancy, system-level reliability features, and advancedsystem management software.

Storage. All enterprise applications require storage to maintain application anduser data. Any viable cloud infrastructure will incorporate storage that is both

highly scalable and accessible. Network. All cloud computing networks must provide high levels of security, data

integrity, failover and reliability, and of course, high levels of scalability.

S o f t w a r e N e e d s

Software requirements for a successful cloud computing infrastructure include:

Programming languages and tools. To create applications in the cloudenvironment, developers need access to a robust set of developer tools andapplications, ideally the same set of tools and applications they use for other noncloud development efforts.

Management tools: environmental. A successful cloud computing environmentmust include appropriate tools that measure, monitor, and maintain datacenter key performance indicators (KPIs) such as space, power, cooling, and securityand that support discovery, inventory and visualization, monitoring, reporting, andinfrastructure optimization.

Management tools: VM based. Cloud computing management tools mustcombine the substantial advances in server virtualization and integration withcomprehensive virtualization management suites. Additionally, they mustincorporate new management tool capabilities, including self-service provisioningand chargeback capabilities to automate many of the manual IT administrator tasks in a constantly escalating virtual environment.

Management tools: operating systems and applications. Management toolsshould also enable management of operating systems and applications. It is notsufficient for a management tool to limit its focus to the operation of the hypervisor if the applications that reside on top of them are unavailable or lacking resources.Management tools must extend in scope from the hypervisor all the way up thestack to the operating system and applications. One benefit of working in a privatecloud environment is that robust application monitoring capabilities can be


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integrated to provide IT staff with visibility into potential issues in all areas of the ITinfrastructure that may arise before they cause major outage.

Flexibility for application development. For developers to most successfullyleverage the features and benefits of both private and public clouds, there mustbe new frameworks for application development that are as flexible as clouds

themselves.

Database. Cloud-based relational data services are important tools for leveraging the benefits of cloud computing.

O V E RV I E W O F M I C R O S O F T P R I VAT E C L O U DS O L U T I O N S

M i c r o s o f t ' s S e r v e r a n d C l o u d C o m p u t i n gS t r a t e g y

For decades, Microsoft has been a leader in providing on-premises technology todevelop, deploy, and manage enterprise applications, enterprise databases, andoperating system infrastructure. With its Hyper-V virtualization technology andSystem Center management tools and its more recent Windows Azure platformoffering, Microsoft has established its presence as a provider of technology andservices for cloud computing as well (see Figure 3).

F I G U R E 3

M i c r o s o f t C l o u d C o m p u t i n g S t r a t e g y : " F o u r B r i d g e s "

Source: Microsoft, 2011


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The Microsoft server platforms, on the left side of Figure 3, display some of Microsoft's on-premises options and include offerings such as Windows Server, SQLServer, System Center, and Visual Studio. With its cloud offerings, Microsoft isextending its on-premises products into hosted deployment options, implementableboth via public cloud hosted at Microsoft datacenters and via private cloud with cloudcomputing technologies that can be implemented by a hosting provider or enterprises.

Critical to the Microsoft cloud computing vision is the fact that its on-premises andcloud-based offerings are in fact largely equivalent in features, functionality, and user experience. Whether deployed on-premises or via the public cloud hosted in Microsoftdatacenters, these Microsoft offerings use common development tools, managementtools, and identity. So, for example, developers already familiar with the .NETdevelopment environment can continue to develop to the same standards in theWindows Azure environment, customers who have deployed Active Directory canfederate identities in private and public clouds, and System Center can be used as asingle pane for datacenter and application management, whether on-premises or at apublic cloud.

Hyper-V Cloud

Hyper-V Cloud is a set of programs and offerings from Microsoft focused on making iteasier for partners and businesses to build their own private cloud infrastructure-as-a-service offerings using Windows Server, Hyper-V, and System Center. WindowsServer 2008 R2, Microsoft's server platform, already delivers virtualization andmanagement capabilities through Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V. Thesetechnologies, along with Microsoft System Center's enterprise management suite andthe recently released System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 Self-ServicePortal 2.0, provide hypervisor, operating system, and management componentsrequired for organizations to implement private clouds.

One of the key components of Microsoft's private cloud strategy is the Hyper-V CloudFast Track program. With the Fast Track program, Microsoft and its partners deliver integrated private cloud solutions based on predefined, validated hardware andsoftware configurations, comprising compute, storage, networking resources,virtualization, and management software. These programs and offerings help reducethe risk and increase the speed of private cloud deployments. Dell Inc., Fujitsu Ltd.,Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), Hitachi Ltd., HP, IBM Corp., and NEC Corporation havealready signed on as Hyper-V Cloud partners. In addition, Microsoft has the followingadditional programs in its Hyper-V Cloud offerings:

Hyper-V Cloud Service Provider Program. Microsoft has more than 70 serviceprovider partners around the world who offer infrastructure as a finished, fullyhosted service built on Hyper-V cloud technologies. Microsoft Service Provider partners can deliver a fast and cost-effective implementation for cloud services,both private and public. Service providers include Agarik (France); Fasthosts(United Kingdom, United States); Hostway Corp. (United States, UnitedKingdom, Netherlands, Germany, France, Belgium, Romania); and KoreaInternet Data Center.


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Hyper-V Cloud Deployment Guides. For customers who want to build their ownprivate clouds on top of existing infrastructure investments, Microsoft now offerstools and guidance based on expertise developed during hundreds of MicrosoftConsulting Services (MCS) private cloud customer engagements over the pastfew years. This element of the Hyper-V Cloud program optimizes enterprises thatrequire high levels of flexibility, control, and customization.

Hyper-V Cloud Accelerate. To tie it all together, Microsoft is making significantinvestments to help customers and partners fund assessments, proofs of concept, and production deployments. These services will be delivered byMCS and prequalified members of the Microsoft Partner Network and aredesigned to help enterprises and service providers more rapidly realize thebenefits of private clouds.

Windows Azure Platform

The Windows Azure platform is a platform-as-a-service cloud offering that consists of compute, storage, and management automation tools that can run across hundreds

or thousands of servers. The platform is designed for high availability and dynamicscaling of applications as well as self-service provisioning.

The Windows Azure platform provides a set of development services so thatdevelopers can build directly onto the Windows Azure platform. One of the keydifferentiators of the platform is that it automates management of all the libraries andthe runtime environment without the developer having to manage the operatingsystem. This infrastructure management is automated via a unique fabric controller that significantly reduces cost of operations and manual intervention.

Windows Azure platform consists of six primary components:

Windows Azure. The core Windows environment used to develop and run cloudapplications

SQL Azure. Relational database services in the cloud based on SQL Server

Fabric Controller. Manages servers, load balancers, switches, provisioning,operating system updates, application availability, and other platformcomponents (The fabric controller provides the unique automation capabilities of the platform.)

Windows Azure AppFabric. Cloud-based infrastructure services for applicationsrunning in the cloud or on-premises

Windows Azure Marketplace. An online service for purchasing cloud-baseddata and applications

Windows Azure Connect. A range of cloud networking technologies includingnetwork connectivity between on-premises and Windows Azure resourcesdesigned to be simple and easy to manage


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The Windows Azure platform is an open platform, just like Windows Server. It runsgeneral-purpose programming languages including .NET, Python, Java, Ruby, andPHP. It supports multiple development environments including Visual Studio andEclipse. The Windows Azure platform was initially offered as a public cloud offeringhosted out of Microsoft's datacenters, but Microsoft has recruited three serviceproviders Dell, Fujitsu, and HP to run and offer Windows Azure in their owndatacenters as well. eBay is one of the first enterprise customers to deploy theWindows Azure platform as a private cloud.

Complemen t s and In t eg ra t e s w i th Hyper-V Cloud P la t fo rm

The Windows Azure platform is designed to integrate with the core cloud-enablingtechnologies found in Microsoft Windows Server, Hyper-V, and System Center. For example, an organization with Hyper-V can run an infrastructure consisting of anumber of servers as a cloud. The Hyper-V Virtual Machine Manager, along withSystem Center, takes care of many basic deployment and provisioning functions, aswell as workload balancing, and provides a fully functional management suite.

One of the main design tenets of Windows Azure is that developers and IT operationsshould focus as much as possible only on application management whilemanagement of the operating system, hypervisor, and hardware is as automated aspossible. Consequently, Windows Azure can automatically determine when anapplication requires more resources and spins up additional VMs to support theapplication. Alternatively, if it detects that an application instance is nonresponsive, itwill automatically create an additional application instance to ensure high availabilitywith no human intervention. The Azure platform is intentionally architected withrecovery and availability as a foundational building block, even during operatingsystem upgrades or updates. With the integration of hardware and softwaretechnologies, users should never experience downtime because an application willfail over to another active instance. Importantly, the management capabilities of the

Windows Azure platform enable a single IT administrator to manage hundreds andhundreds of servers and thousands of instances.

Windows Azure Platform Appliance

In July 2010, Microsoft announced plans to release the Windows Azure platformappliance. The Windows Azure platform appliance enables Microsoft to provideservice providers with an integrated software stack and validated hardwareframework for offering cloud computing services to their customers. The appliancealso enables enterprises to run private cloud services in their own datacenters basedon Windows Azure.

The appliance is a turnkey cloud solution that consists of the Windows Azureplatform; the SQL Azure platform; and a Microsoft-specified configuration of network,storage, and server hardware. Like Windows Server, Azure is designed for high levelsof scalability as well as multitenancy and is optimized for datacenter efficiency. Thehardware is being built and will be delivered by a variety of partners, including Dell,Fujitsu, and HP. eBay is also an initial customer of the appliance, and it is deployingits Java-based ecommerce platform on the appliance.


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Prov id ing a Buy Ver sus Bu i ld Op t ion fo r P r iva t e C loud Comput ing

In f ra s t ruc tu re

By offering Windows Azure as an appliance, rather than restricting Windows Azure toservices provided out of Microsoft's datacenter, Microsoft is making it easier for service providers and enterprises to deploy private clouds. Instead of having to

integrate the piece parts, organizations can simply purchase a package of preconfigured, pretested server, storage, network, and management tools. Thisallows the service provider or enterprise to focus on its core business and not have toworry about assembling and integrating the necessary components to build a cloudinfrastructure on its own.

While service providers, government agencies, and large businesses will be the initialtarget market for this offering, small to medium-sized businesses are an eventualtarget as well.

B e n e f i t s o f t h e M i c r o s o f t A p p r o a c h

Some of the benefits of the Microsoft approach to providing cloud computingtechnologies with Hyper-V Cloud, Windows Azure platform, and the Windows Azureplatform appliance are as follows:

Streamline deployment of private cloud infrastructure. Service providers andenterprises looking to deploy private cloud infrastructures no longer need tovalidate the necessary hardware, software, and networking components out of piece parts.

Manage both public cloud and private cloud from a single platform. Microsoft System Center enables customers to manage their applications end toend, from the physical hardware, to the VM, to the application, whether it runs on

a private cloud in their datacenter or on Windows Azure.

Leverage existing investments. With Hyper-V Cloud and Windows Azureplatform offerings, customers can build on existing Microsoft investments andskill sets, including application development, database management, andheterogeneous hypervisor and operating system management.

Leverage both private cloud and public cloud capabilities to best suitcustomers' needs. With a common development and management platform,applications can be written to leverage the cloud platform that best meets theneeds of the business. For instance, a customer-facing front end could reside onWindows Azure, with the core SQL Server database running on a private cloud

on-premises.

Automate management of cloud infrastructure. Customers can move to a moreautomated infrastructure and reduce time spent on dealing with day-to-dayinfrastructure issues such as provisioning VMs or workload balancing. Windows

Azure platform appliance acts as an automation orchestration layer that takes careof management of the entire management infrastructure that is deployed via thefabric controller. System Center and Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track offerings optimizedeployments to increase automation and reduce management overhead.


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Support use of traditional development tools, languages, and management. Because Windows Azure supports native .NET and other leading developmentframeworks, developers don't have to learn a new language to use Windows

Azure or deploy applications to a Hyper-V Cloud. In addition, identity tools arealso consistent across the Microsoft cloud platforms.

Provide a seamless transition between environments. Customers who arelooking to get the benefits of cloud computing but are not ready to make the fullinvestment to obtain a private cloud infrastructure can start with a public clouddeployment based on Windows Azure platform or at a Microsoft service provider partner running the Hyper-V Cloud. Then if they are ready to move to privatecloud, they can seamlessly migrate to a deployment based on Windows Azureplatform appliance or Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track.

Improve datacenter efficiencies. Windows Azure platform has a built-inautomated service management layer via its fabric controller that lowers overalldatacenter TCO and the number of manual tasks required in maintaining thedatacenter. Similarly, by increasing server densities and improving infrastructureautomation, Hyper-V Cloud can reduce datacenter TCO while providing moreflexibility in deployment options.

Provide enterprise-class failover capabilities. Hyper-V Cloud and Windows Azure platform provide failover capabilities designed to be easy to deploy and tominimize application downtime.

Support massive scalability. Windows Azure can support hundreds tothousands of servers and thousands to tens of thousands of applicationinstances within a single environment, enabling organizations to achieve truecloud computing scale via a turnkey solution. eBay has adopted the Windows

Azure platform appliance because of this unique capability.

C H A L L E N G E S A N D O P P O RT U N I T I E S

IDC sees a number of opportunities and challenges for vendors, service providers,and customers of private cloud services. Opportunities include:

Organizations can choose infrastructure based on workload. As always, ITis about the application, not the hardware. Hardware simply enables theapplication to work properly. Therefore, it is important to consider which cloudmodel best fits the application's needs. Typically, private cloud will work well for mission-critical applications such as business processing and situations in which

the data must be under close control for regulatory or compliance reasons.Having multiple choices enables organizations to tailor the environment and TCOto their specific application needs.

Cloud is considered a part of the overall IT portfolio. At first, deploying cloudbehind a few low-risk workloads is a good idea. In reality, IDC believes that over time, most organizations should optimize their infrastructure by diversifyingbetween public cloud, private cloud, and traditional IT to optimize TCO andbusiness agility.


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Challenges include:

Customer perceptions of security and control. One of the key customer concerns with the public cloud environment regards where the data is stored,what security protocols are protecting it, and who has access to it. Customersmay have compliance requirements that require them to ensure data is not

shipped out of country, has four-hour recovery times, etc. In fact, in a recent IDCsurvey of IT managers, 45% of respondents rated security the number 1 concernfor moving to public cloud deployments. Private cloud, of course, addressessome of these issues because it allows companies to maintain sovereignty andcontrol of their data while still getting the benefits of the cloud platform.

Additional complexity in the IT decision. In the past, CIOs had a relativelyeasy set of decisions when it came to providing their IT infrastructure. They hadto identify and purchase the best hardware and software to suit their organization's needs within the available cost profile and then implement andmanage it to the best of their team's ability. Today, the burden on CIOs is muchgreater. They must choose whether to build and maintain infrastructure in theorganization's datacenter or to use private or public clouds. If they opt for privatecloud, they must decide whether to do so internally or via an outsourced serviceprovider. CIOs not only must decide the best place for each application to live butalso must consider changes that may be required to processes and procedures.

Need to pick the right partners. There is also a greater burden on IT toconsider carefully who it chooses as a partner. Contract management, internalprocesses, experience, and geographic reach all play a role. For example, if theorganization wants to roll out services to sub-Saharan Africa or Eastern Europe,it doesn't want to find out that its partner cannot offer services there.

C O N C L U S I O N

With the rapid adoption of server virtualization and the emergence of new cloudcomputing technologies, organizations are being pressed to identify the best ways tooffer developers and end users an infrastructure that is scalable, flexible, and cost-efficient. Enterprises have addressed the recent wave of physical server sprawl byimplementing virtualization, which solved only some of the problems. In fact, thesubsequent wave of virtual server sprawl, which we are in the midst of today,threatens to send costs to manage and maintain those VMs through the roof.

Cloud computing addresses many of these challenges. With cloud technology,organizations can achieve greater degrees of automation, scalability, and availability

while reducing the management burden on their own staff. For certain applicationsand business scenarios, enterprises can also shift costs from large capital outlaysevery six months or so to regular monthly fees. However, cloud computing introducesnew concerns over security and data sovereignty in public cloud deployments. IDCbelieves that these concerns with cloud computing can be addressed by deploying aprivate cloud.

But building a private cloud can be an expensive, difficult, and risky proposition,requiring the service provider or enterprise to integrate disparate components.


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With its Hyper-V Cloud, Windows Azure platform, and Windows Azure platformappliance, Microsoft has bundled and packaged the required cloud technologies,making it easier for service providers and enterprises to build private cloudenvironments and take advantage of the many benefits of cloud computing.

C o p y r i g h t N o t i c e

External Publication of IDC Information and Data Any IDC information that is to beused in advertising, press releases, or promotional materials requires prior writtenapproval from the appropriate IDC Vice President or Country Manager. A draft of theproposed document should accompany any such request. IDC reserves the right todeny approval of external usage for any reason.

Copyright 2011 IDC. Reproduction without written permission is completely forbidden.

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