Pods2Clouds

Let me start off this blog with a simple question – “Is the lack of pre-integrated and out-of-box orchestration software to automate converged infrastructure slowing down the transition to private cloud?” I would say the answer is yes. If organizations are serious about using the converged infrastructure to build private clouds, they would realize this potential bottleneck. Otherwise, organizations will be limited to scale the pod based data centers and also cannot realize the private clouds promise – operational efficiencies.

Today’s datacenter architectures are getting complex with a mix of data center infrastructure, including servers, storage, networks and virtualization. These pre-built systems minimize the amount of up-front work and provide self-contained “pods” that include everything necessary to run a system. The advantages of converged systems are – “pre-integrated solution, simplified and less expensive”.  The complex and high cost data center orchestration software defeats the purpose of the converged infrastructure. The converged infrastructure systems need unified and integrated automation software to expedite the cloud transition – “pods to  clouds”.

The best of breed multi-vendor stacks provide the best features and performance according to Joe Onisick, Cloud Solutions Architect at WWT. These multi-vendor stacks provide organizations the  flexibility to build pod based next generation data centers organically on top of existing systems. FlexPod is one such multi-vendor stack that is a predesigned, simple, validated data center solution capable of running a variety of application workloads. The orchestration software that supports multi-vendors in both physical and virtual layers complements well with these best of breed multi-vendor stacks.

Organizations need a pre-integrated and out-of-box orchestrator with the following capabilities to fully leverage converged infrastructures for building private clouds

Speed of deployment: A very good point made by Joe Onisick in one of his blogs was “automation/orchestration software is included in a product offering doesn’t mean it’s ready to go ‘out-of-the-box.’ Orchestration and automation are very custom software sets that typically require significant service hours to integrate and tailor to each individual environment.” Organizations are looking for a pre-integrated and out-of-box orchestration solution with low footprint and faster time to implementation.

Unified orchestration: Having a diverse set of management tools not only adds to the complexity but also increases the failure rates. Data center admins spend a lot of time correlating data from different sets of monitoring and management tools. Integrated management not only streamlines the creation and management of Virtual Data Centers but also offers a complete visibility across the entire IT stack, thereby, helping in performance analysis and troubleshooting. This vastly reduces the complexity and gives IT a seamless way to manage the existing infrastructure as well as the new cloud based infrastructure.

Private cloud enablement: The private clouds can make internal enterprise data centers run as efficient as public clouds. Organizations need cloud management and automation capabilities such as self-service portal, service catalog, charge back and multi-tenant security in the integrated stack to enable private clouds. To really optimize the resource usage, enterprise managers need an orchestrator that can automate the management and provisioning of bare metal, virtualized and cloud resources.

Model-based orchestration: IT teams are not looking for tools that make scripting easier. Instead they are looking for a tool that packages task libraries, best practices and pre-built workflows based on infrastructure component models. IT teams should be able to build and execute repeatable physical and virtual infrastructure provisioning workflows without complex custom scripts and expensive system integration engagements. So a tool based on model-driven automation with a rich set of prebuilt workflow solutions for solving complex, repetitive and resource consuming IT tasks is “the need of the hour”.

Open Integration: Vaughn Stewart on his blog brought up a great point that “the multi-vendor pod architectures such as FlexPod provides a set of open APIs that enable third-party infrastructure and systems management solutions.” These open architectures truly enable partner eco systems to offer integrated stacks. Customers can also choose from a broad network of world-class solution delivery partners. So any orchestration software that leverages these open APIs and offers rich set of pre-integrated workflows will expedite the Pods to Clouds journey.