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: R O F T N I R P E U L B

DELIVERING E C I V R E S A S A T I
nine steps for success
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Okay, now what?


Youve got the materials (your constantly changing IT infrastructure). Youve got the work order (your boss made that perfectly clear). But now what? Delivering IT-as-a-service has never been more challenging than it is today... virtualization, private, public, and hybrid cloud computing are drastically changing how IT needs to provide service delivery and assurance. You know exactly what you need to do, the big question is HOW to do it? If only there was some kind of blueprint for this

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blueprint for delivering it-as-a-service

Well fear not!


Based on our experience working with Zenoss customers who have built highly virtualized and cloud infrastructures, we know what it takes to operationalize IT-as-aService in todays ever-changing technical environment. Weve put together a guided list of questions in this eBook to help you build your blueprint for getting the job done, and done right.

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Lets get started...


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Unified Operations maximum automation Model Driven Service Oriented Multi-Tenant Horizontal Scale Open Extensibility Subscription Extreme Service

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Unified Operations
The rise of cloud computing and virtualization are magnifying the complexity of IT operations. Operations must now manage an environment where there is no direct connection between the physical devices and the services being delivered. In order to provide service assurance, operations must have visibility into the real-time state of the entire infrastructure physical and virtual. Only with a holistic view can IT maintain control over a constantly changing, on-demand infrastructure.

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Unified Operations

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there is no way to optimize IT operations without a global view of services and infrastructure effectiveness (costs vs. service levels); additionally, the diversity and complexity of data collected, resulting from the tool diversity and specicity, prevent us from obtaining accurate global information.

Jean-Pierre Garbani, Forrester Analyst: Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

http://blogs.forrester.com/jean_pierre_garbani/10-03-18-abstraction_layer_it_operations

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time to measure

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How quickly can you access a view of your entire IT infrastructure? Can you do this through a single view or do you have to stitch together with multiple tools? When there is an impact issue, is operations focused on xing the issue or in nding it in the rst place? Can you quickly see the dependencies between virtual services and the physical devices?

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Maximum Automation
The only way to scale in todays large-scale IT operations environment is to remove people from as much of the process as possible. Managing tens of thousands or more virtual machines in a modern cloud environment requires automation to be the standard approach. From provisioning, to monitoring, to de-provisioning, IT must be able to respond on-demand to the requests of the business, while at the same time maintaining complete control.

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Maximum Automation

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A combination of forces, including skyrocketing complexity and severe economic pressure, are radically and irreversibly altering the IT landscape. New methods, new functional sourcing, and new organizational structures are needed to address this onslaught, but one theme is obvious throughout all of these approaches a need to automate more of what you do in IT. The typical IT organization wastes a signicant portion of its budget on inefficiencies that only get worse as complexity grows. Automate many of these tasks and you become leaner and more responsive to business changes.
Glenn ODonnell, Forrester Analyst: IT Infrastructure & Operations
http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/it_operations_2009_automation_odyssey/q/id/54531/t/2

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1 2 3 4 5

Is there a linear relationship between the scale of your IT infrastructure and your operations staff? What processes have you automated that identify and correct problems? Do problems with resources take individual analysis to identify their impact on critical services? Is development working with operations or does it seem like they are on different teams? Does your current IT team facilitate automation or hinder it?

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Model Driven
Managing virtualized and cloud resources at scale requires the ability to understand the dependencies to the physical world. A hands-on approach will not be able to keep up with the rate of change in the cloud. Having a real-time, model-driven approach to monitoring all of your physical and virtual resources ensures that when there is a change in the environment, your operations team can quickly and automatically adjust to the demand for resources.

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Model Driven

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More than ever, we need to know where things are. Discovery and tracking of assets and applications in real time is more important than ever: As congurations can be easily changed and applications easily moved, control of the data center requires complete visibility. Conguration management systems must adapt to this new environment.
Jean-Pierre Garbani, Forrester

http://blogs.forrester.com/jean_pierre_garbani/10-12-07-the_cloud_technology_challenge

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time to measure

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Does the business trust your capability to deliver dynamic services? Can your applications utilize the services they need on demand? How do you free up and reuse IT resources when they are idle? If you have a server that needs to go offline, can you quickly determine what services will be impacted? Have you ever lost a virtual machine?

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Service Oriented
IT operations can no longer survive by just managing device performance and availability. Service oriented management means you can connect the dots between the individual resources and view them according to the services they deliver. Service oriented management enables operations to understand overall service level and to quickly address the root cause of issues that impact service performance.

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Service Oriented
The lack of an architecture typically, the lack of a SOA is a recipe for failure in the world of cloud computing. An architecture provides the structure necessary to mesh your existing enterprise IT assets with the emerging world of cloud computing.
David Linthicum, CTO Blue Mountain Labs

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http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/cloudsoa/2011/01/is-the-lack-of-soa-talent-killing-cloud-computing.php

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time to measure

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Can your operations team see the forest through the trees when it comes to service delivery? Can you predict service degradation ahead of time based on resource utilization or performance issues? Do you understand the impact of new service delivery on existing resources and how that may impact other services? When there is an impact event, can you prioritize and address your critical business services rst?

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Multi-Tenant
Whether you are a service provider or a large enterprise with multiple departments, todays cloud services require you to provide IT management views to the appropriate operations teams. Hybrid IT service delivery require multi-tenant support to give meaningful views into resources, while maintaining security and privacy of sensitive data.

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Multi-Tenant
Elasticity, horizontal scalability and multi-tenancy are often mentioned here and elsewhere as key distinguishing characteristics (or requirements) of cloud-computing technologies.
Yem V. Natis, Distinguished Gartner Analyst Referring to the Gartner research note Application Infrastructure for Cloud Computing: A Growing Market, 2010

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http://blogs.gartner.com/yem_natis/2010/03/24/on-multi-tenant-elasticity/

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time to measure

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1 2 3

Can you keep departmental or client views of shared resources isolated from each other? Do you have exible user-based roles that dictate the views they have? Can you generate custom reports and dashboards, so internal management and outside customers can verify their service operations and monitor key metrics?

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Horizontal Scale
Horizontal scaling is a fundamental requirement of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). Horizontal scale simply means the ability to grow computing capacity by adding new resources when required. Horizontal scaling is a fundamental principal of cloud computing, and is the source of much of its derived cost advantages and exibility. From a growth standpoint, operations must be exible and be able to maintain pace with the expanding enterprise.

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Horizontal Scale

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Horizontal scalability is about the ability of software to automatically expand onto additional underlying resources, or contract onto reduced resources, without interrupting operations.
Yem V. Natis, Distinguished Gartner Analyst Referring to the Gartner research note Application Infrastructure for Cloud Computing: A Growing Market, 2010

http://blogs.gartner.com/yem_natis/2010/03/24/on-multi-tenant-elasticity/

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time to measure

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1 2 3 4

Is operations seen as a roadblock when it comes to scaling the enterprise? Is the current solution to grow rst and gure out the operations approach after the fact? Can your operations tools scale horizontally with your growing datacenters? Can you deploy into multiple geographic locations, but still maintain a centralized view?

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Open Extensibility
While the goal may be the cloud, most IT organizations will maintain a hybrid IT environment with a mix of legacy and new resources. Agile IT operations will need an open approach to managing change in this heterogeneous landscape. Open and exible operations management software will allow IT to not only integrate with existing technologies, but also be prepared for whatever is next.

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Open Extensibility

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Its critical to simplify your cloud network infrastructure to ensure scalability as well as reduce the number of moving parts needed to secure the end-to-end platform. But to simplify, you must standardize the components and build on an open network platform as well as use shared components to get economies of scale.
Forrester Research Supporting Sustainable Cloud Services

http://www.getgreennetworks.com/us/en/local/pdf/analyst-reports/ forrester-supporting-sustainable-cloud-services.pdf

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Does your IT management platform have clearly published APIs to support legacy resources? Do you have access to existing plug-ins for a variety of technologies, and can you easily modify them for your needs? Does your management platform have a history of supporting open, extensible solutions? Are integrations efforts measured in days vs. months?

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subscription
One of the key values of IT-as-a-Service is predictability of costs. Subscriptionbased services allow organizations to buy what they need and grow over time. Subscription-based cloud services eliminate over-investment and premature obsolescence of IT resources. Subscription-based services help organizations avoid investing in IT infrastructure before they need it.

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subscription

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The power of cloud economics is elasticity the ability to pay for resources only when they are needed and to scale infrastructure up and down on demand.
Mike Gualtieri, Forrester Analyst Application Development & Delivery Professionals

http://blogs.forrester.com/mike_gualtieri/ 11-05-08-cloud_computing_will_save_it_millions_but_only_if_you_have_elastic_applications

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1 2 3

Can you provision virtual resources to meet peak demands as needed? Can you de-provision unneeded resources to keep costs in line with seasonal variations of IT demands? Can you plan your IT costs in more predictable monthly increments as opposed to large capital expenditure step functions?

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Extreme Service
A key to the success of cloud initiatives and IT-as-a-Service is condence and trust in the providers and technology. As IT infrastructure has moved from a supporting element to an integral component of business products, users must have unquestioned condence in that infrastructure. Monitoring and management of infrastructure must identify problems early and understand their impact. If the business is to depend upon IT-as-a-Service, they need proactive service that addresses issues before the business is impacted.

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Extreme Service

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Cloud computing is supposed to abstract sophisticated IT services so far from the hardware and software running them that end users may not know who owns or maintains the servers on which their applications run. That doesnt mean the people running the servers dont have to know their business, according to Bob Laliberte, analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. If anything, supporting clouds means making the servers, storage, networks and applications faster and more stable, with less jitter and lag than ever before, according to Vince DiMemmo, general manager of cloud and IT services at infrastructure and data-center services provider Equinix.
Kevin Fogarty, CIO
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/010311-5-most-surprising-things-about.html

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Can you identify problems that may lead to outages? What percent of the time is spent nding issues vs. xing them? Are you able to analyze your entire infrastructure to determine if there are negative performance trends that need to be xed? Can your forecast utilization to introduce new capacity just-in-time for business growth?

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About Zenoss:
As you work on your plans to deliver IT-as-a-service in a highly virtualized and/or cloud-based IT environment, you need an operations solution that was designed to manage a dynamic environment. Zenoss is a next generation management solution being used today to manage on-demand operations inside the worlds leading IT infrastructures. Zenoss is purpose-built to guarantee service delivery for physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures, allowing enterprises and service providers to accelerate the adoption of IT-as-a-Service. Control Your Cloud Zenoss provides a unied operations platform that enables IT to maintain control as managing change becomes standard procedure. It is ONE solution that gives you complete visibility of your IT infrastructure, no matter where you are on your journey from physical to virtual to the cloud. To learn more about Zenoss: Watch a short video, Zenoss Service Dynamics: A New Way to Deliver End-to-End Service Assurance for Hybrid IT Take the Zenoss Product Tour View the accompanying video series to this eBook, Blueprint for Delivering IT-as-a-Service: Evolution of Enterprise IT Operations
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Resources:
1. An abstraction layer for IT operations, Jean-Pierre Garbani, Forrester 2. An Automation Odyssey, Glenn ODonnell, Forrester 3. The Cloud Technology Challenge, Jean-Pierre Garbani, Forrester 4. Is the Lack of SOA Talent Killing Cloud Computing?, David Linthicum, Blue Mountain Labs 5. On multi-tenant elasticity, Yefim V. Natis, Gartner 6. Supporting Sustainable Cloud Service, Forrester 7. Cloud Computing Will Save IT Millions, But Only If You Have Elastic Applications, Mike Gualtieri, Forrester 8. 5 Most Surprising Things about the Cloud in 2010, Kevin Fogarty, CIO

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Authors:
Floyd Strimling, Technology Evangelist, Zenoss
Floyd Strimling is a technology evangelist at Zenoss, who enjoys creating, debating, and following technology trends with the goal of making them a reality. Floyds unique background spans both hardware and software environments with experience in Cloud Computing/Autonomic Computing, Datacenter Automation, Virtualization, Networking and Security.

Josh Duncan, Product Evangelist, Zenoss


Josh leads Product Marketing at Zenoss and is an active blogger on the topic of infrastructure and cloud monitoring on the Zenoss blog. Josh has spent the last 13 years working for technology companies like Dell, Bank of America, and Accenture, implementing and setting technology direction. While at Bank of America, Josh was responsible for Enterprise Architecture, and worked on the initial shared infrastructure and grid computing efforts.

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