Quantifying the IT and Business Agility Benefits of the RightScale Cloud Management Platform

By Tim Clark

349 First Street, Suite A Los Altos, CA 94022 (650) 233 1748 tclark@factpoint.com

About This Research

This white paper was developed from research commissioned by RightScale, the leader in cloud computing management. The research was designed to uncover and quantify the IT and business agility benefits that RightScale customers have achieved by using its fully automated management platform for cloud computing with Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud provider services such as Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, and others. The methodology involved in-depth telephone interviews by The FactPoint Group with executives at companies using RightScale on the condition that these organizations would not be identified. Companies interviewed ranged in size from small startups to large multi-national enterprises and represented industries including consumer goods, insurance, education, media, entertainment, travel, pharmaceutical, and Web 2.0. FactPoint also reviewed RightScale data on customer implementations and was informed by other FactPoint research on cloud computing. Through this research, FactPoint discovered that RightScale customers realize significant agility benefits by using the cloud management platform. This white paper focuses on two areas of agility achieved with RightScale: IT agility and business agility.

Quantifying the IT and Business Agility Benefits of the RightScale Cloud Management Platform 2010 RightScale and The FactPoint Group. All rights reserved.

Executive Summary
Cloud computing as a term has come to encompass several levels of IT resource delivery. This research focuses on the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) level. IaaS refers to offering ondemand, raw compute (servers), storage, bandwidth, and related resources that are paid for based on usage and accessed via an API. Examples of IaaS providers include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Rackspace and others. Although IaaS by itself can deliver substantial cost savings by providing the power of quickly accessible hardware resources at a low cost, these resources and the applications deployed on them must be actively managed to gain the greatest advantage from IaaS. The RightScale Cloud Management Platform offers an on-demand management platform that makes it easier for companies to move their applications to cloud infrastructures and manage them as they evolve. In this analysis of IT and business agility gains, FactPoint compared the productivity benefits of using the cloud with the RightScale Cloud Management Platform versus using cloud providers APIs or consoles without RightScale. With RightScale, users can save a significant amount of time both initially and over the lifecycle of an application. But the key question is: how much? The primary goal of this research was to quantify the IT and business agility benefits gained by RightScale customers compared to those who used IaaS cloud computing without RightScale. The findings were impressive: RightScale customers reduce the time required to initially deploy their applications on cloud infrastructures by up to 85%, save approximately 50% in ongoing maintenance, and decrease the time it takes to deploy additional applications by more than 90% by re-using existing cloud assets. These savings reflect a significant reduction in the amount of time IT staffers spend deploying and managing applications on the cloud. For instance, a single systems administrator using RightScale can manage hundreds, even thousands of cloud servers, and this ability fundamentally changes how common tasks are addressed. Many customers cited overall IT responsiveness quickly procuring and provisioning resources to meet demand of all types as an important gain from using the platform. Areas of IT productivity improvement include:

Fast on-boarding by leveraging proven, cloud-ready solutions Less time managing cloud applications through automation Defining and re-using system configurations on the cloud

In addition to significant IT productivity gains, this research uncovered benefits that help RightScale customers achieve greater IT and business agility. Customers reported that, with RightScale, IT resources can be marshaled quickly and at low cost to enable the business to do things it could not otherwise accomplish. Improvements in IT and business agility cited by RightScale customers as a result of increased IT productivity include:

Self-service IT Faster time to market Greater experimentation and discovery Access to new business models and markets

Quantifying the IT and Business Agility Benefits of the RightScale Cloud Management Platform 2010 RightScale and The FactPoint Group. All rights reserved.

How a Cloud Management Platform Increases IT Productivity

RightScale is the middle layer between the customers application and the cloud. RightScale enables us to connect more easily to cloud services and monitor changes. Major Life Sciences Firm RightScale has had a tremendous impact on reducing the time we spend building and managing our environments. We're using RightScale to implement and manage our automated server builds, configuration management, and monitoring for development, QA, performance and production environments. Content Sharing Service We want to build self-service capability for power users to provision application stacks, to make it one or two clicks away from logging on. Major Pharmaceutical Firm RightScale offers an on-demand management platform that makes it easier for companies to deploy their applications to the cloud and manage them over time. This fully automated cloud management platform enables users to achieve significant IT productivity gains by making it easier to access the scalable, cost-effective, on-demand power of cloud computing while also providing them complete IT control and portability across clouds. In a survey executed during the first quarter of 2009, Computer Economics found that nearly half (46%) of IT organizations were cutting IT staff in 2009, up from 24% in 2008. One-quarter of IT organizations were taking staff cuts of 10% or more in 2009.1 In that environment, its no surprise that IT efficiency becomes a critical objective. Sample Cost Savings with RightScales Cloud Management Platform IT Productivity Gains (Savings over using cloud APIs or consoles) Initial deployment: Save 67% to 85% Ongoing maintenance: Save 50% Re-using existing cloud assets: Save in excess of 90%

Interviews with RightScale users found widespread agreement that RightScale improves IT staff productivity and therefore saves time and costs over using only the cloud service providers APIs or consoles. But how much time is being saved, and where? We found that time savings as a result of increased productivity were significant and fall into three categories: Time saved to initially deploy an application Time saved to manage that application throughout its lifecycle Time saved by reusing RightScale Deployments and ServerTemplates as pre-defined configurations for mutiple cloud deployments
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See IT spending and Staffing Benchmarks 2009/2010, Why Benchmarking Cloud vs. Current IT Costs is So Hard, Computer Economics Inc.

Quantifying the IT and Business Agility Benefits of the RightScale Cloud Management Platform 2010 RightScale and The FactPoint Group. All rights reserved.

By using RightScale, savvy IT departments can procure and provision resources to meet demand of all types more quickly than ever. For example, entire grid infrastructures are ready for research in minutes; websites scale to meet consumer demand automatically; and unplanned projects can be addressed in a timely manner using pushbutton access to servers. By leveraging automation, IT staffers are freed from everyday chores and can devote time to higher-value activities. Going further, the most forward-thinking IT departments are pushing toward selfservice IT. RightScale Concepts ServerTemplates: These templates enable users to define how servers will configure themselves dynamically at runtime. They can be saved for future use and customized. They come from three sources: RightScale has created hundreds of templates for popular cloud configurations that Customers can use. Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) have published ServerTemplates for running their applications in the cloud managed by RightScale. Customers can create their own ServerTemplates for reuse and sharing. Deployment: A RightScale Deployment consists of one or more ServerTemplates and storage resources that can be configured, launched and managed as a unit. By leveraging RightScale Deployments, users manage entire systems instead of individual servers. Self-service IT not only minimizes burdens on IT staff but also, with RightScale, increases consistency and reliability in deploying applications across an enterprise because users start from standard cloud configurations and deployments designed by IT. Consistency saves IT application trouble-shooting time, produces more consistent results over time, and ensures compliance to regulatory requirements. At a major pharmaceutical firm, the IT department creates re-usable RightScale deployments for standard research applications, many of which require complex configurations. Researchers can launch applications by simply selecting the right deployment and pushing one button. An academic research institute has moved all of its operations to the cloud to reduce dependence on campus IT. With 50 employees and 30-50 applications ranging from software development to sophisticated data analysis, the institute uses RightScale for most computing activities. Since I came here, says the director, Ive done nothing on physical machines and have little interest in internal resources. That was the choice, for the flexibility and agility of the cloud.

Quantifying the IT and Business Agility Benefits of the RightScale Cloud Management Platform 2010 RightScale and The FactPoint Group. All rights reserved.

Achieving IT Agility
1) Get an application up and running quickly
RightScale gave us the ability to get up and running quickly. It would have taken three to four times the man-hours to complete our initial project without RightScale. Mobile Platform Provider RightScale provided a robust scalability solution out of the box that would otherwise have taken months of testing to get right. Open Source Development Platform Within two days we had our sites configured, load-balanced, and operational. Wireless Service Provider Customers report that RightScale gives them a fast on-ramp to the cloud. For the mobile platform provider quoted above, it reduced the time to deploy new applications onto cloud infrastructures by 67% to 75%. A service provider that uses RightScale to help get its new customers started in the cloud states, Since we have been using RightScale as part of our solution, our new customer deployment time has gone from roughly a week to a day a time savings of about 85%. By leveraging the platforms library of components, users get started rapidly and reliably. RightScales production-ready ServerTemplates and IT building blocks such as flexible load balancing, scalable application arrays, and resilient master/slave database configurations are easily incorporated into initial deployments. RightScale users also take advantage of complete solutions for common cloud applications such as scalable websites and grid processing. Customers often use RightScales pre-built components as a starting point to create more customized versions for their particular needs.

2) Manage cloud applications in less time through automation

Managing our deployment with RightScale allowed our small development team to shift focus away from coping with the technical minutia and back to improving the experience we bring to thousands of users. Entertainment Website RightScales dashboard, with its graphics and real-time readings, is both critical to our ongoing management and easy to use. Consumer Goods Brand Multiple customers testify to the fact that RightScales automation and systems management tools significantly reduce the ongoing management burden. A travel website and an academic research institute said they would spend at least two times the effort managing their cloud deployments without RightScale. The research institute went further to describe the time required to complete routine tasks with RightScale after the initial deployment as: Set up a new user: 15-30 minutes Set up a new research project deployment: 60 minutes Manage 20 projects: 1-2 hours/week
Quantifying the IT and Business Agility Benefits of the RightScale Cloud Management Platform 2010 RightScale and The FactPoint Group. All rights reserved.

Customer Mobile service Entertainment site Web 2.0 sharing site Hosting service Online retailer Gaming service

FTEs 2 1.5 1.5 1 0.25 1.25

Servers managed 100 200 Hundreds 500 300 2,000+

Ratio FTE:Servers 1:50 1:133 1:133+ 1:500 1:1,200 1:1,600

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Comparing the number of servers a full-time employee (FTE) can manage is notoriously difficult.2 With an external cloud, managing hardware is no longer necessary, and with RightScale, many routine systems administration tasks are automated. The chart indicates that with RightScale, one or two systems administrators can manage hundreds, if not thousands, of cloud servers.

How does RightScale reduce maintenance time and effort? First, rather than managing individual servers, users can leverage RightScale Deployments to manage systems or groups of servers architected to work together and adapt to events as required. Users can launch an entire deployment with one click, monitor the deployment as a unit, and respond at a deployment-wide level to events such as increased demand or server failure. Second, automation simplifies maintenance. Through RightScales patent-pending ServerTemplates, changes to deployment-wide variables can be made in a single place, instead of on each individual server or machine image. Scripts can be run across all or selected servers to update code, execute system-wide health checks, or accomplish other routine tasks. And with one button, an entire RightScale deployment can be cloned to create a new service or a test environment instead of starting from scratch launching server after server using a cloud providers APIs and then configuring each separately. By eliminating routine, repetitive tasks, systems administrators can focus on more critical issues. With automation in place, systems become more reliable and predictable entire systems configure and reconfigure themselves automatically using rules established by administrators. Finally, as systems or servers are decommissioned, RightScale ensures all system data is preserved for future troubleshooting and analysis.
2

Based on other FactPoint research, the number of servers one system administrator can manage varies based on the server type, utilization, age of hardware, application, architecture, frequency of changes, criticality, and other factors.

Quantifying the IT and Business Agility Benefits of the RightScale Cloud Management Platform 2010 RightScale and The FactPoint Group. All rights reserved.

3) Create reproducible environments

Starting with an existing deployment, RightScale reduces the time to deploy a new application from weeks to minutes, resulting in a much shorter cycle time. Major Pharmaceutical With RightScale, you can copy deployments easily; an administrator can do it dynamically. Mobile Platform Provider By reusing and sharing cloud assets, ServerTemplates and RightScale Deployments, customers say they reap a variety of benefits. First, they can quickly deploy new applications by starting with an existing RightScale Deployment. For example, a music website with thousands of artists profiles quickly creates new artist microsites starting with a standard configuration. All that is necessary is to import the new content, customize the application, and then change a few configuration parameters in the RightScale Deployment. As another example, a gaming customer estimates that it takes four hours to create a new RightScale Deployment, while it would take three to four times as long 12 to 16 hours without RightScale. Once the initial RightScale Deployment is set up, the customer can clone a new one in seconds, add a new game, launch it in the cloud, and have the application running in approximately an hour. The net savings are 75% for the first game launched, and more than 90% for launching additional games using RightScale. Customers also noted that they could easily clone a RightScale Deployment to create a development and test version of a project. As a mobile platform provider added new features to its website, it cloned a development and test environment that precisely replicated its production site to test new features. As the application scaled in testing, weaknesses emerged and were fixed before the new features went into production. Finally, codifying best practices was cited as being a significant benefit of creating a reproducible environment. Because ServerTemplates and RightScale Deployments can be saved and modified, they become a convenient way to store and reuse best practices. The entertainment website found that tremendous value comes from organizing all its configuration and systems management information in RightScale. This repository of best practices ensures predictability when new servers are launched and provides a way to build and leverage institutional knowledge.

Quantifying the IT and Business Agility Benefits of the RightScale Cloud Management Platform 2010 RightScale and The FactPoint Group. All rights reserved.

Maximizing Business Agility

With RightScale, we can launch collaborations globally in the same day we discuss them. Its not a multi-month process. Academic Research Institute Business agility depends on many factors. But in todays world where IT systems touch so many parts of a business, business agility often hinges on a companys ability to marshal IT resources quickly and at low cost to enable the business to do things it could not otherwise do. The cloud may deliver raw hardware muscle, but RightScale addresses the need for quick, coordinated deployment. When a companys market changes unexpectedly, raw power alone may not be enough if the organization has to struggle to leverage it. RightScales fast provisioning and easy cloning help a company respond quickly to a market shift or new market opportunities. Customers described three areas where RightScales fast provisioning of cloud resources on-demand improved business operations: time to market; experimentation, discovery, and testing; and new business models and access to new markets.

1) Speed time to market

RightScale reduced our time to market by three months. Digital Distribution Network Once we chose RightScale, it took us only four months from development to launch of our new service. RightScale's Cloud Management Platform was instrumental in creating and managing the operations infrastructure for our new service. Independent Software Vendor Whether starting up a new Web 2.0 service, launching a marketing campaign, or executing research faster, RightScale customers are able to move more quickly than their competitors. A start-up content-sharing service found the perfect partner in RightScale for quickly launching its service in the cloud, which scaled to 26 million users per month in its first two months. A more mature consumer goods brand needed to move a marketing website to the cloud to meet unprecedented demand. It would have taken its internal data center weeks to build out the capacity required time it didnt have. With RightScale, the promotion was deployed and ready to scale within five days.

2) Enable more experimentation, discovery, and testing

By automating our cloud computing deployments with RightScale, we accomplished our goal to significantly reduce overall administrative and management requirementsand increased the time we devote to translational science projects. Academic Research Institute When investing in creativity rather than hardware, organizations can use RightScale to experiment more, whether it be in the form of ambitious academic research or simply testing website widgets that could go viral in minutes.

Quantifying the IT and Business Agility Benefits of the RightScale Cloud Management Platform 2010 RightScale and The FactPoint Group. All rights reserved.

At both the pharmaceutical company and the research institute, researchers can focus on their research rather than the technical minutiae involved in getting their algorithms running in the datacenter. And because researchers can go faster with RightScale and unlimited cloud capacity, they can try more alternatives and pursue hypotheses that could not be investigated otherwise. Because attention spans are short, an entertainment website that uses the cloud for usergenerated content must move quickly: We can try hare-brained ideas and get user feedback with a lower cost than investing in hardware. We prototype stuff, give it our best, and dont worry about sunk costs. In other words, we fail fast.

3) Enable new business models and access new markets

By making cloud computing accessible, RightScale enables new business models, especially for cash-strapped young companies that need to harness massive amounts of compute power. RightScale also helps companies large and small reach new markets. With RightScale and the cloud, a start-up created a wildly popular service turning photos into music videos by accessing cheap computing power on-demand. Few financial backers would see the business case for acquiring 3,500 physical servers for this start-up that might or might not take off. Yet that was exactly what was required by and successfully delivered to this early stage RightScale customer during a critical stage in its growth.

Quantifying the IT and Business Agility Benefits of the RightScale Cloud Management Platform 2010 RightScale and The FactPoint Group. All rights reserved.

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Conclusion
The RightScale Cloud Management Platform helps users launch new cloud deployments more quickly and easily, with time savings of an estimated 67% to 85% compared to using cloud providers consoles and APIs. For ongoing maintenance of cloud deployments over their lifecycle, users estimate time savings of 50% using RightScale. RightScale increases IT productivity specifically by enabling: fast on-boarding to the cloud automated management scalability reproducible deployments for codifying best practices cloning of cloud deployments for re-use and cloud-ready applications

The RightScale Cloud Management Platform also boosts its customers IT and business agility. RightScale customers are initiating self-service IT; getting products, services, and promotions to market faster; experimenting and testing more; entering new markets; and pursuing new business models. In short, customers report that RightScale enables IT productivity to a significant degree, and that they benefit by achieving greater IT and business agility through cloud computing.

Quantifying the IT and Business Agility Benefits of the RightScale Cloud Management Platform 2010 RightScale and The FactPoint Group. All rights reserved.

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More Information
To estimate the cost savings and agility benefits you can achieve by deploying applications in the cloud with RightScale versus deploying them onsite in a datacenter, see the RightScale TCO Calculator at http://www.rightscale.com/tco-calculator/. The calculator estimates upfront and annual recurring costs over a five-year term based on the type of deployment, size of deployment, peak monthly resource usage, and expected load volatility. If you want to dig deeper into the calculated results and speak with an expert about your specific implementation needs, feel free to call us at 866.720.0208. We welcome your questions and feedback.

About RightScale
RightScale is the leader in cloud computing management. Founded in 2006, the company offers a fully automated cloud management platform that enables organizations to easily deploy and manage business critical applications across multiple clouds with complete control and portability. The RightScale Cloud Management Platform is delivered as "software as a service" (SaaS) and is available in a range of editions. To date, thousands of deployments and over 1.5 million servers have been launched on the RightScale platform for leading organizations such as PBS, Harvard University, Zynga and Sling Media. To learn more about RightScale, please go to http://www.RightScale.com.

About The FactPoint Group

The FactPoint Group (www.factpoint.com) is a boutique Silicon Valley-based research, publishing and consulting firm specializing in the early adoption of new technologies. The FactPoint Group has been producing world class research, analysis, and consulting since 1993 and continues to help its clients sell and use new technology solutions. It has focused on analyzing and documenting how cloud technologies produce solid ROI and TCO to customers.

Quantifying the IT and Business Agility Benefits of the RightScale Cloud Management Platform 2010 RightScale and The FactPoint Group. All rights reserved.

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