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• Takes you beyond virtualization
• Delivers the power of many servers with the simplicity of one
• Opens the door to every app on any cloud
• Enables the modern work style

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In early July 2012, Microsoft held its 2012 WPC and the cloud was again a major focus. But Ballmer’s 2010 opening remarks could well have stood in for this year’s (more collaborative and arguably less inspirational) keynote.

Ballmer followed his 2010 exclamation by saying he’d been talking about the cloud for four years and was excited to be talking about it during “a year in which I think it’s been clear that the opportunity and the transition to the cloud for enterprise and business customers … is absolutely clear.”

He went on to say that the move to the cloud can seem scary, since it “makes us reinvent our business models, yours and ours. But it’s a change that’s inevitable.”

Two years later, that comment can seem overly optimistic, or prescient. I asked four analysts what they thought about the following question: Today, is the move to the cloud “inevitable” for businesses of any size to remain competitive?

“I believe we’ve already seen that ‘a’ move to the cloud is inevitable, as it’s already occurred to a significant extent among both SMBs and larger enterprises. But is it ‘the’ move, or the end game? That depends,” says Christian Perry, a senior analyst with Technology Business Research (TBR).

“It’s more sensible to consider the impact of the cloud concept within traditional IT infrastructures,” Perry explains. “From a cost perspective, customers are finding that it’s good business sense to at least consider offloading archived or otherwise cold data to cloud storage. Businesses with widespread agility requirements also are increasingly considering cloud-based applications, but the cloud remains primarily an adjunct to traditional, brick-and-mortar efforts.”

Perry adds that the impact of the concept is also moving into the datacenter, and private clouds are delivering the same benefits, but with greater security and control.

“If you’re asking if ‘the’ move to the cloud is inevitable,” states Perry, “the answer is yes if you’re lumping private clouds into the discussion—and we do.”

Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-IT, says that if Ballmer was referring to highly virtualized, increasingly automated IT infrastructure processes and management, then he agrees.

“I believe IT is heading toward (or has already arrived at) a point where traditional approaches are untenable,” says King. “The state of data storage is a good example. Just a decade ago, the amount of information a single storage admin could effectively manage was pegged at a few hundred gigabytes. Today, that number is counted in terabytes, but how can enterprises whose storage infrastructures are growing toward/beyond the petabyte range afford that many personnel?”

King goes on to say, “You could argue that companies that refuse to seriously consider cloud will eventually reach a point where the burden – in terms of cost and inefficiencies – of supporting IT infrastructures will increasingly outweigh the inherent benefits those technologies are meant to provide.”

Roger Kay, founder of Endpoint Technologies, still sees some road ahead.

“The problem with cloud is that it relies on fast, ubiquitous, reliable, and secure communications, which we don’t have today, particularly in the United States,” Kay asserts. “Some European countries, Japan, and Korea have much better broadband infrastructure than we do. But 4G is coming, and that will improve things here.”

On the plus side, the cloud offers flexibility, simplified management, portability on the client slide, security, and arguably cost benefits, Kay explains. On the minus side are latency, availability, and productivity issues.

“If comms were perfect, cloud would be unarguably the way to go,” Kay states. “But they’re not, yet.”

Ken Hyers, also a TBR senior analyst, points out that enterprises can be cautious about moving critical core functions to the cloud due to the perceived loss of control.

“Questions about data protection and vulnerability are also of concern,” says Hyers. “A real-world example came a couple of weeks ago, when heavy storms along the Eastern Seaboard took out Amazon’s cloud due to power outages, directly impacting the ability of several companies, including Netflix, to deliver their services.”

However, Hyers adds, “I think that the cost savings of cloud computing, storage and services, and the increased flexibility and scalability that the cloud provides from a services delivery standpoint makes it increasingly appealing to all but the most risk-averse companies. So they’ll continue to move more functions, starting with non-core and non-critical ones, and move towards more complex ones as they grow comfortable with the cloud.”

What are your thoughts? Is 2012 the year your company makes the move, even partially, to the cloud? Let me know in the comments section below.

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Michelle Maisto is a Geeknet contributing editor who has been covering mobility and enterprise technology for more than a decade. 

Reach across multiple platforms

To get started on making my case for this point, we need some background information. A great place to get started is from a video I posted a while back titled “The IT Pro’s Heaven – The Private Cloud,” which provides a thorough overview of the full gambit of technologies that encompass the private cloud architecture. To summarize this video in a sentence, with Microsoft System Center at its core, a private cloud can automate, manage, and deploy physical, virtual, and cloud-based resources across multiple platforms for your organization, as well as provide self-service for your customers. This means that if I have a traditional datacenter with the majority of my IT infrastructure running on bare metal (i.e. not virtualized), a private cloud can interact with those assets on all levels. The same holds true if your infrastructure is largely virtual with Microsoft, VMware, or Xen-based virtualization: the private cloud can handle all aspects of that environment.

Private cloud for public cloud-based resources

What might be a bit more surprising to some is that the private cloud can also do the same for public cloud-based resources as well. As I mentioned in a previous blog post here, there are multiple cloud architectures available in the public cloud. When IT pros think of moving IT assets to the public cloud, the initial reservation is the amount of control that is lost when moving a resource they are responsible for there. This is where the public cloud actually shines. The private cloud can interact with, manage, automate, and deploy applications hosted in Windows Azure; deploy software hosted on VMs or deploy VMs to the cloud also hosted in Windows Azure; or manage an Office 365 implementation.

Total infrastructure control

To summarize, through a single pane of glass, the private cloud gives you control of your entire infrastructure regardless of where its living (physical, virtual, or cloud), and the workload is a first-class citizen operationally as it can be automated, managed, and deployed in a manner that makes the most sense for your business.

So back to my original point. With this knowledge, it really makes sense to evaluate your plans for using the private cloud in a manner that helps add operational efficiency while allowing you to leverage all aspects of your existing IT infrastructure. The private cloud has the ability to be the new center of the IT universe, and there is no forced upgrade to all virtual assets or major changes to run your servers or applications in the public cloud while still maintaining the control you seek of your infrastructure as an IT pro.

Ready to adapt

Even better news is that with Windows Server 2012, your IT infrastructure is ready to adapt to your business requirements better than ever. Whether it’s higher density on your VM hosts, better performance, or improved interaction with cloud-based resources, this is a significant paradigm shift worth looking into as well.

Getting started

Looking to get started with the private cloud? Resources to begin to download evaluation software can be found here. A blog post on the resources needed to build a private cloud lab environment can be found on the Slashdot site here. Additional information on private cloud offerings can be found here.

“The painstaking evaluation struggles that once plagued the cloud decision-making process have been all but eliminated,” an IDC vice-president said in a press announcement June 14.

At the CloudExpo 2012 event in New York City the day before, this theme was also present, with Kevin Hanes, a Dell executive director, delivering a lunchtime keynote offering advice on helping customers to “drive business change.” Hanes made three points — reiterations of industry themes, really — that are as worth repeating for potential cloud customers as for the people trying to sell to them.

The first point was that the cloud “isn’t a single path, it’s a transformation.” Microsoft’s cloud team has likewise repeated in webinars that the cloud is “a journey.” That can mean, generally, that it’s a thing in flux, to be learned from and tweaked over time.

More literally it could mean, as a Microsoft UK tech specialist laid out in a June 11 blog post, taking advantage of Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) features in Windows Azure to upgrade an application in stages — first the front end, then the middle tier and then the backend database.

“Over this journey,” he wrote, “you have gradually increased the value you get from your cloud, on your time frames, in your terms.”

Hanes’ second point was that the cloud can be overwhelming, but a pragmatic solution can help a customer to move forward. He described breaking down a project for a client — a university with limited funds — into manageable stages. Portioning the job not only made it seem less overwhelming but actually enabled the client to begin realizing new savings before it moved on to the next bit.

This made me think of a recent blog post by Forrester analyst James Staten. Alongside an inverted triangle diagram, Staten explained that an appeal of cloud IaaS is that it can offer specific expertise in areas that a majority of professionals are lacking. It’s another example of the cloud simplifying complexities (and stresses) and helping customers move forward.

Finally, Hanes talked about “meeting customers where they are,” or “recognizing that they’ve made investments,” which oftentimes leads to hybrid solutions.

“I think investors sometimes put companies in a box and say, ‘You’re either in private cloud or you’re in public cloud,’” Bill Koefoed, general manager of Investor Relations, said during Microsoft’s April 19 earnings call, resisting such labels.

David Linthicum, writing for InfoWorld has also bristled at this either-or. The focus, he said in a March 30 article, needs to be on the “architecture and the right-fitting enabling technology, including both private and public cloud technology, and not gratuitous opinions.”

He added that companies shouldn’t put a limit on their possible solution options, whether that means private or public or both. All of the above are fine, he wrote,  ”as long as you do your requirements homework and can validate that you have chosen the right solution.”

That homework is an important part of this. Cloud solution providers will indeed hold your hand, if that’s what you need. But first you need to decide if you need your hand held.

Have you put off investing in a cloud solution due to feeling overwhelmed or frustrated about where to get started? If so, please let us know by adding a comment below. I am sure our readers would love to help you out.

When I’ve spoken to IT pros during the various events at which I’ve delivered presentations, many of them said they have been able to delay or avoid using cloud computing in their IT environments altogether as their lists of projects didn’t explicitly require the use of cloud computing. As time has gone by, not only have the number of cloud computing options increased, but so have the applications and number of requests from project owners and management asking IT to look at either using or incorporating some cloud technologies into their projects.

This crossroads of IT professionals’ careers – where they must move into one or more aspect of cloud computing that they are responsible for – is uncharted territory that adds complexity and risk to a project that, in the past, they were able to engineer out of a project plan.

When the time comes to start to learn one or more aspects of cloud computing as it relates to the IT environment an IT professional supports, it’s important to understand where to start the journey. I’m thus going to outline several places to get started in the areas of public, private, hybrid, and hosted cloud computing options.

Public clouds

Public cloud options are possibly the most well-known cloud computing offerings, but depending on the solution chosen, they offer the least amount of customization for IT professionals and/or the organizations that they support. The large pool of public cloud resources, available on demand, is an appealing offering to quickly replace a workload in the datacenter. The risk for an IT pro with most public cloud offerings is that, depending on the vendor chosen, this offering replaces significant portions of the IT pro’s job responsibilities, potentially at a lower cost due to the massive scale of public cloud offerings.

Hybrid clouds

With respect to leveraging hybrid cloud functionality, where the opportunity exists to leverage both on-premise and public cloud resources, this is an option that is appealing to get the IT pro’s feet wet in public cloud computing without outsourcing an entire workload to the cloud. With the hybrid cloud, the IT pro is able to choose how much or how little of the cloud to include in a solution, but this flexibility doesn’t typically offer the cost savings of a public cloud-only solution.

Hosted solutions

Hosted server solutions offer the ability to replace the hardware a server is installed on with a virtual server hosted in the cloud, typically at a lower cost than running the same server on-premise. Sometimes hosted server solutions increase server resiliency as these solutions offer standard high availability and disaster recovery options that small to medium-sized businesses can’t often afford. Hosted server offerings do however add an additional site for IT pros to manage, and sometimes don’t offer features like security configurations to on-premise servers, which adds additional administration and server management complexity.

Private clouds

Unlike these cloud computing options, the private cloud offers what may be the best mix of control and customization the IT pro is looking for, while leveraging the flexible architecture of a public cloud solution. With the private cloud, an on-premise pool of resources can be created that are available to both IT pros and application owners on-demand in a self-service fashion. This pool of resources lives on premise under the control of the IT pro, but is assembled using an architecture not unlike a public cloud with IT pro and application owner self-service enabled by default. Through a single pane of glass, the IT pro can deploy and monitor the workload and get deep application insight, but still maintain complete control of the solution.

In addition, the ability to track resource usage back to an individual department for charge-back or “look-back” offers enhanced reporting that may not have existed previously. After understanding this architecture, private cloud offerings seem to be where most IT pros can agree the best benefits of cloud computing options exist.

Getting started

Looking to get started with the private cloud? Resources to begin to download evaluation software can be found here. A blog post on the resources needed to build a private cloud lab environment can be found on the Slashdot site. Additional information on private cloud offerings can be found here.

The report’s truer purpose, however, was to call attention to the less-than-green energy sources powering the data centers behind some clouds — and to make headlines. For example, it called out Apple as a major offender, while noting in fine print that it didn’t have all the facts on the company. Uncharacteristically, Apple responded that it’s currently building the world’s greenest data center and its next project will, better still, run on 100 percent renewable energy.

The report serves as a prompt, too, for discussing the environmental benefits of cloud solutions, whether public, private, or, as is most often the case, a hybrid of the two.

“The concept they had was great — let’s take a look and make sure things are being done right. But I think maybe they were stretching it a bit,” Ian Campbell, CEO of Nucleus Research offered with a kind laugh, during a private interview.

“The point I’d be rallying for instead,” he said, “is that if you’re not cloud-based in some way, you’re not as efficient as you could be.”

Nucleus Research has found cloud-based applications to use 91 percent less energy than traditional on-premise applications. In a survey of a major cloud-based solutions provider, Nucleus found its customers were saving the energy equivalent of 11 barrels of oil every hour.

Additionally, Accenture — commissioned by Microsoft to study whether there is a true net benefit to moving to the cloud, or whether one is just “outsourcing” one’s environmental impact — analyzed the use of three applications in cloud-based versus premise-based solutions and found the benefits to be greater the smaller the company. The decrease in CO₂ emissions for the cloud-based apps, it found, was more than 90 percent for companies with approximately 100 users, between 60 and 90 percent for companies with closer to 1,000 users, and between 30 and 60 percent for those with 10,000 users.

Which isn’t to say that only small companies can see a major impact. Unilever, for example, has stated that it plans to use cloud-based technology to double its business without increasing its environmental footprint at all.

Even premise-based cloud solutions can realize environmental benefits.

“With a private cloud, if you’re using virtual machines,” said Nucleus’ Campbell, “you’re definitely getting a significant benefit by doing that.”

During intense spikes in traffic, server farms are able to create efficiencies by spreading out the load. Private clouds, explained Campbell, are a “good way to take a step in that same direction.”

The Accenture study reached the same conclusion.

“Virtualization offers a strategy to improve server utilization for both cloud and on-premise scenarios by allowing applications to run in an environment separated from the underlying physical servers,” it stated. “Multiple virtual machines can share a physical server running at high utilization, which reduces the number of physical servers required to meet the same demand.”

In this way, it continued, IT departments can “narrow the efficiency gap between an on-premise deployment and a multi-tenant cloud service.”

Campbell noted that companies consistently perform cost analyses, balancing costs against rewards. Reducing hardware and so reducing energy demands, he said, “is more of a benefit analysis. You can be green and still save money.”

He added, wryly, “Even the cold, black heart of the CFO can be satisfied.”

Has a desire for a reduced carbon footprint — or to be “greener” — at all motivated your own cloud-solution decisions? Let me know in the Comments section below.

Christopher Yeich is Director of Strategic Content for Geeknet Media.

“Enterprises engaged in private cloud projects to reduce their costs will usually fail to meet objectives,” writes Bittman, “as well as miss the mark on potential business benefits.”

Gartner expects 2012 to be a major year for private clouds, with the technology moving from hype or pilot programs to mainstream deployments. In that rush from A to B, however, it also expects some casualties.

“Staying on top of best practices and learning from early adopters is a must,” Bittman emphasizes.

Below are very simplified version of three very different deployments: each a success and each motivated for more strategic reasons than frugality:

1. Eyes-Road, an e-commerce platform for France’s optical industry, needed a more agile and reliable platform. Its revenue depends on the volume of transactions made by its subscribing members — businesses such as eyeglass makers and contact lens laboratories — and service interruptions could cause members to cancel their SLAs at a direct loss to Eye-Road. A major interruption in service at high-traffic times had previously cost the company 30% of its subscribers.

It needed to guarantee members service availability 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and it needed to be able to scale to handle consistently high-traffic times of day.

Eyes-Road chose a combination of Hyper-V and Microsoft cloud services, and now it promises 99.98 percent availability, can scale as traffic demands, can more quickly address new member processing protocols, and didn’t lose any time in transitioning to the new solution.

2. Turkish bank DenizBank was struggling with its growing success. It had hundreds of stand-alone servers across three data centers, and increasing cooling costs and employee numbers to support it all. Also becoming more sprawling were its server maintenance and software licensing costs. Compounding all of this was the growing popularity of mobile banking and the pressure to have its systems be agile and always available.

DenizBank needed greater control of its infrastructure and costs, as well as to reduce the numbers of servers it was buying, the number of people necessary to run it all, and the amount of time it took to get things done.

It decided to virtualize its servers (with Hyper-V technology), and then configured its data centers as a private cloud environment using System Center 2012. Today, its entire business runs from 64 host servers than can scale to 1,500 virtual machines. It’s been able to save $7 million in server consolidation, avoided $12 million in data center costs, and anticipates a 20% reduction in IT staff costs. Further, services can be deployed faster, critical apps are always available, and — something the company equally celebrates — its more efficient data center has helped it save 3.3 gigawatts of energy and the carbon emissions equivalent of taking 400 cars off the road.

3. In Brazil, Dotz Marketing needed more advanced business intelligence (BI) tools. The company runs a rewards program for a number of clients whose customers receive dotz — awards points that are said to have almost become a second currency in Brazil.

Every second, more than 500 dotz are awarded, and every day Dotz was processing 1.5 million transactions from across 6,000 locations. It also needed a scalable database solution that could better manage these.

It deployed a database solution in a private-cloud environment, opted for a feature called Integration Services to handle the volumes of data being created by those million-plus daily transactions and another called Power View, which enables non-technical users to create rich Bi reports.

While before, it took weeks for reports to be created, as the data had to be gathered and analyzed, they can now be created almost instantly, enabling stores or brands to better plan marketing campaigns and promotions, and to more quickly detect and act on trends. Plus, with less time now spent on report preparation, employees can spend more time on what Dotz calls “strategic pursuits.”

While each of these companies turned to a Microsoft-based solution, it’s the variety of their needs and the possibilities for addressing them that’s being stressed here. Private clouds can be business savers — if they’re deployed with care and in pursuit of business-critical goals.

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Christopher Yeich is Director of Strategic Content for Geeknet Media.

Download the System Center 2012 Licensing FAQ in PDF format

One of the unique differentiations for System Center 2012 is the ability to deliver flexible and cost-effective infrastructure using what you already own. System Center 2012 enables this by:

• Managing different hypervisors centrally from a single pane of glass with support for Windows Server Hyper-V, VMware vSphere, and Citrix XenServer.
• Monitoring Windows Server, Sun Solaris, and various Linux and Unix distributions.
• Integrating toolsets from HP, CA, BMC, EMC, and VMware into automated workflows.

In this whitepaper, we explore System Center 2012 support for managing VMware environments.

Download Multi-Hypervisor Management Whitepaper in PDF format

Download the Features Comparison in PDF format