1. Report ID:S5170612
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PrivateCloud
Automation
Next up for private cloud initiatives:automation.Is your organization
ready to take that plunge? We’ll explore the fundamentals of preparing,
deploying,testing—and eventually letting automation systems run
without human intervention in production environments.We’ll also
examine integration and performance-optimization issues involved
with promising new automation technologies.
By Jake McTigue
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CO
NTENT
S
TABLE OF
3 Author’s Bio
4 Executive Summary
5 The Big Guys Do It.You Should Too.
5 Figure 1:Steps Taken to Build a Private
Cloud
6 Figure 2:Vendor Snapshot
7 Figure 3:Success in Meeting IT Goals
8 Build on Your Accomplishments
8 Figure 4:Success in Meeting Business and
Process Goals
9 Set Goals
10 Figure 5:Challenges Encountered When
Launching a Private Cloud
11 Figure 6:Importance of Features When
Selecting Private Cloud Technology
14 Related Reports
ABOUT US
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with real-world perspective based on
qualitative and quantitative research,
business and technology assessment
and planning tools,and adoption best
practices gleaned from experience.To
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© 2012 InformationWeek,Reproduction Prohibited
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I n f o r m e d C I O : P r i v a t e C l o u d A u t o m a t i o n
Jake McTigue is the IT manager for Carwild Corp.and a senior consulting
network engineer for NSI.He is responsible for IT infrastructure and has worked
on numerous customer projects as well as ongoing network management and
support throughout his 10-year consulting career.
Jake has been involved in server virtualization since 2002 and has been a
project lead on consolidation and virtualization projects for public safety,
education and private-sector applications.He has been a guest speaker for a
major virtualization vendor and has been instrumental in articulating the
benefits of virtualization for organizations all over the Northeast.
Jake McTigue
InformationWeekReports
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Our InformationWeek 2012 Private Cloud Survey shows that the technology has
reached a tipping point:51% of 414 respondents,all of them involved with managing,
purchasing,advising on or implementing data center technologies,are either starting a
project (30%) or have a private cloud today.
Unfortunately,when we asked those building private clouds about nine critical steps,
orchestrating automation across multiple subsystems came in dead last (see Figure 1,
p.5).Let’s be clear:no automation,no cloud.How do we figure that? NIST defines cloud
as having five essential characteristics:on-demand self-service,broad network access,
resource pooling,rapid elasticity or expansion,and measured service.While virtualization
and proper WAN engineering will provide resource pooling,elasticity and broad network
access,measured service and—most importantly—on-demand self-service are not part
of standard virtualization management suites.No,for self-service,automation is required
to drive the infrastructure in a preprogrammed fashion in accordance with “customer”
desire,even if private cloud “customers” are really just internal resources.Here’s how to
get there.
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EXECUTIVE
SUMMARY
Table of Contents

5. June 2012 5
Major public cloud service providers like
Amazon, Microsoft and Rackspace have been
driving hard toward automation since these
services hit the market. Their reasoning is
simple: Automation improves the bottom line
and drives customer satisfaction.Yes,automat-
ing a small-scale private or hybrid cloud is an
entirely different affair from Amazon enabling
customers to spin up an S3 instance, because
public cloud providers and very large enter-
prises have the in-house technical muscle to
wrestle with automation on a development
basis,rarely the case in midsize companies.
But the need is the same, because without
automation,you do not have self-service,and
self-service is one of the most compelling
things about cloud,no matter the size or type
of organization.Nearly 60% of respondents to
our InformationWeek 2012 Private Cloud
Survey who are in the process of building
private clouds have completed their self-
service portals.Among the full base of 414 re-
spondents, all of whom are involved with
Previous Next
What steps has your organization taken to build a private cloud?
23% 54% 23%
17% 43% 40%
11% 52% 37%
10% 49% 41%
8% 50% 42%
6% 50% 44%
4% 44% 52%
3% 55% 42%
3% 35% 62%
Completed In progress Not started
Built the underlying server,storage and networking infrastructure
Deployed hypervisors and management framework
Inventoried applications and workflows
Built a self-service portal
Automated subsystems
Integrated subsystems
Created required services like runbooks and CMDBs
Created application templates
Orchestrated automation across multiple subsystems
StepsTaken to Build a Private Cloud
Base: 123 respondents at organizations starting a private cloud project
Data: InformationWeek 2012 Private Cloud Survey of 414 business technology professionals, April 2012
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Table of Contents
Figure 1

6. managing,purchasing,advising on or implementing
data center technologies, 51% are either starting a
project (30%) or have a private cloud today.
Of course, self-service isn’t the only benefit of au-
tomation. More efficient use of resources, self-heal-
ing, improved application availability, better power
management and preplanned responses to contin-
gency scenarios are among the potential benefits of
a solid automation deployment.
Unfortunately,the problem with cloud automation
is that there isn’t a standard way to do it.While virtu-
alization vendors have invested a huge amount of ef-
fort in developing APIs that provide virtualized infra-
structure extensibility and control,automating those
same infrastructures is simply not a part of the core
virtualization feature set.And yet,controlling a virtu-
alized infrastructure is going to be a key point of any
automation strategy,because virtualization is where
your resource pools and elasticity live.
Automation for the private cloud is likewise not yet
standards-based, and, in fact, there isn’t even agree-
ment on what it entails.At the most basic level,cloud
automation packages support runbooks,which take
preprogrammed actions when a trigger event
occurs. But preprogrammed events aren’t the finish
line in terms of automating the private cloud.Better
are innovative products,like those we list in Figure 2,
that take management to a new level by enabling
policy-based automation.Essentially,these products
employ multiple management engines to stay in
touch with all aspects of the infrastructure and to
make policy decisions based on scenarios that may
arise or self-service requests that occur.
These products are evolving from the workload
management suites used to automate diverse virtu-
alization and infrastructure components through a
central policy engine. However, because they are
new and these waters are relatively uncharted,there
is no standard feature set—what you’ll be able to do
out of the box varies dramatically by product.While
most of these suites possess a powerful central exe-
cution engine that can read data and then act on it,
some products,like Moab,incorporate enhanced re-
source management for virtual infrastructures or
self-service Web provisioning portals as well.
But it’s worth evaluating one of these suites be-
cause automating the cloud has huge potential in
terms of maximizing your investment and reducing
operational and capital expenses—an important
point,as 61% of our survey respondents cite reduced
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Table of Contents
Figure 2
FAST FACT
51%
of the 414 respondents
are either starting a
project (30%) or have a
private cloud today.
VENDOR SNAPSHOT
Adaptive Software Moab
Cloud Automation
Pros: Robust task scheduling engine,
highly interoperable,advanced fea-
tures out of the box
Cons: Can be costly to implement.
BMC BladeLogic
Automation Suite
Pros: Market leader,robust engine,
integration with other BMC products
Cons: Expensive
Cisco Process Orchestrator
Pros: Built for Cisco hardware,robust
feature set
Cons: Expensive
Embotics V-Commander
Pros: Good value,features comparable
to suites from much larger vendors
Cons: Newcomer
IBM Tivoli Service
Automation Manager
Pros: powerful,robust engine,robust
feature set
Cons:Very complicated,high TCO
Stonebranch Opswise
Automation
Pros: Extensive Web interoperability,
integrates workload management,
innovative,robust feature set
Cons: Newcomer
UC4 One Automation
Pros: Powerful,lots of functionality,
reasonable cost,Web standard interop-
erability,extensible
Cons: Difficult to configure
June 2012 6

7. operational costs as a major cloud deploy-
ment driver, with capital expense savings
(44%) and technical advantage (45%) as
strong secondary factors. Respondents also
say increased operational complexity is a ma-
jor issue in terms of adopting cloud (37%).
This is important because automation helps
manage complexity.
Respondents with private cloud initiatives
do say they’ve seen excellent results in terms
of reducing operational and capital expenses
as well as in managing IT teams’ time.And this
is partly why automation is so exciting:Better
resource usage, life cycle management and
automated provisioning have the potential to
heighten these natural cloud competencies.
It’s also worth noting that satisfaction with
chargeback mechanisms is the lowest of all
the metrics in Figure 4,even as 41% of respon-
dents are charging back in some capacity or
another, whether to actually “bill” depart-
ments internally for resource use or just to
keep track of where the IT budget goes. This
is germaine because almost all the automa-
tion vendors we spoke with for this report say
Previous Next
How successful is your private cloud in meeting the following IT goals? Please use a scale of 1 to 5,where 1
is“completely unsuccessful”and 5 is“extremely successful.”
Success in Meeting IT Goals
1Completely unsuccessful Extremely successful 5
More efficient use of hardware
Better scalability
Better overall reliability
More efficient use of IT’s time
Standardized OS builds
Shortened time to deliver applications to the business
Better disaster recovery
Business user self-service portal for select IT services
Better peak application performance
Better average application performance
4.2
4.2
4.0
4.0
3.9
3.9
3.9
3.7
3.6
3.6
Note: Mean average ratings
Base: 87 respondents at organizations with a private cloud strategy
Data: InformationWeek 2012 Private Cloud Survey of 414 business technology professionals, April 2012
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Figure 3
June 2012 7

8. June 2012 8
their products feature accountability mecha-
nisms designed to accommodate chargeback.
Build on Your Accomplishments
Successful automation deployments sit on
top of successful virtualization deployments.
Modern virtual infrastructures, when config-
ured properly, will provide high availability,
scalability and a degree of fault tolerance, or
at least fault recovery.It’s no wonder then that
survey respondents cite investments in virtu-
alization technology (43%) as a primary factor
in deploying private cloud.
Even with virtualization in place,though,the
first step in preparing to automate is cleaning
house.Automatic actions and self-service pro-
visioning will only exacerbate poorly config-
ured virtual infrastructures.Further,the better
engines provide the means to improve
resource management,which is difficult to do
if the infrastructure is already overloaded. If
you don’t have the spare capacity to maintain
high availability, self-service provisioning is
hardly going to be a benefit.Worse, spinning
up new VMs and taking automatic actions on
an infrastructure that isn’t well maintained
and properly configured puts core network
services at risk.
For all of these reasons, the first step in
preparing for a successful automation initia-
tive is a thorough virtual infrastructure house-
cleaning. What exactly does this mean? Let’s
consider resource usage first.In an infrastruc-
ture with plenty of spare capacity, managing
resource use simply isn’t that important. If
Previous Next
How successful is your private cloud in meeting the following business and process goals? Please use a scale of 1 to 5,
where 1 is“completely unsuccessful”and 5 is“extremely successful.”
Success in Meeting Business and Process Goals
1Completely unsuccessful Extremely successful 5
Lower capital costs over time
Lower operational costs over time
Lower total cost of ownership
Improved quality control
Improved alignment between IT costs and business needs
Ability to meet service-level agreements
Ability to charge back to track expenses to business units
4.0
3.9
3.8
3.7
3.7
3.7
3.4
Note: Mean average ratings
Base: 87 respondents at organizations with a private cloud strategy
Data: InformationWeek 2012 Private Cloud Survey of 414 business technology professionals, April 2012
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Figure 4
FAST FACT
41%
of respondents are
charging back in some
capacity or another,
whether to actually “bill”
departments internally
for resource use or just to
keep track of where the
IT budget goes.

9. June 2012 9
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demand spikes occur, the infrastructure has
room to soak up the excess.
But as resources become scarcer, manage-
ment takes on an entirely different dimension.
Suddenly,a spike can jeopardize the perform-
ance of mission-critical business applications
by depriving application servers of resources.
Segregating workloads into resource pools
and assigning priorities to them becomes
very important—as the system comes under
load from self-service provisioning requests,
critical servers are given priority access to the
underlying physical resources, so perform-
ance is not negatively affected. When select-
ing an automation management system, by
all means look for the ability to manage
resource load in cloud environments. But be
aware that throwing resource management
at a badly configured infrastructure is likely to
net you a lot of angry help desk calls.
The upshot is that preparing for automation
requires a few things:
> Make sure that resources are allocated to
critical servers correctly and that automated
machine deployments won’t deprive mission-
critical servers of resources.
> Ensure that you have a method to track
when a machine deployment produced by
automation becomes a mission-critical server.
It’s easy enough to increase its resource pri-
ority after the fact,or to allocate resource pri-
ority via a user-reported importance factor—
though it still ought to be vetted by IT before
being assigned a high priority. But this is one
area where you don’t want to run blind.
> Don’t spend on automation if the overall
capacity of the infrastructure is lacking.If you’re
barely able to satisfy your current workload,the
last thing you need is new machines being
rolled out without human intervention. First
get your capacity in line with business need.
Set Goals
Determine what you want to accomplish
with your automation initiative. Do you want
self-service machine provisioning? Automated
responses to changing infrastructure condi-
tions? How about policy-based virtual ma-
chine and application life cycle management?
If the intent is to monitor application per-
formance and spin up additional application
servers when demand peaks,the plan is going
to be different than if self-service provisioning
with departmental chargeback is the primary
goal. For this reason, formulating a concrete
set of objectives is essential to the evaluation
phase of your automation project.Then,since
product capabilities vary so widely, map that
goal list to feature requirements.
How easy or difficult it will be to make that
map depends on the integration difficulties as-
sociated with various underlying virtualization
and management platforms.A full-featured au-
tomation product is going to need to plug into
multiple silos to gather the information it
needs to make policy-based automation deci-
sions. This means integrating server, storage
and network virtualization technologies as well
as maintaining accurate licensing and consis-
tent configuration information.Depending on
how your network is set up,every single one of
these resources could be a different silo—
which means integration is a daunting propo-
sition. In fact, this is a sore point for survey re-
spondents: 58% say integrating existing IT
Strategy:Predictive
Analytics for IT
While a technology that warns of
problems before they arise may
sound too good to be true,
predictive systems have been in
use for years by financial,retail,
healthcare and other sectors.
Now it’s IT’s turn.
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10. June 2012 10
products with cloud is a major issue.
Because integration can be such a bear, it’s
hugely important to delve into the compati-
bility matrix of any prospective product before
purchasing.If a vendor provides few hooks, it
may be impossible to integrate policy engines
without an absurd labor investment. Heck,
even for products that are compatible, inte-
gration may still be difficult.The Moab cloud
suite and BMC’s BladeLogic are strong in this
area,but integrating the software may require
a 2-to-1 or 3-to-1 investment in expert partner
consulting services or internal staff commit-
ment vs.software costs before the benefits of
automation are apparent.
Why? Again,a lack of standards.
Say total infrastructure automation is your
desired endpoint, and a user is able to initiate
a self-service provisioning request that requires
a new virtual network to satisfy.Your network
virtualization product is going to require a run-
book or script that’s capable of creating,linking
and delivering the new virtual network re-
source to the machines and services that re-
quire it.This process,the scripting and automa-
tion that drive it, and the way in which it’s
handed to new virtual machines is going to
vary widely based on the hypervisor in use.
And in environments with more than one hy-
pervisor, this sort of simple action could be-
come a real nightmare as configuration change
Previous Next
What were the main hurdles you overcame to launch your private cloud?
Challenges EncounteredWhen Launching a Private Cloud
Integrating existing IT products
Acquiring employee skill sets
Updating our current infrastructure
Acquiring cloud software and hardware
Inventorying existing applications and services
Making the business case for private cloud
Employee resistance
Managing automation
Creating runbooks
Other
Note: Three responses allowed
Base: 87 respondents at organizations with a private cloud strategy
Data: InformationWeek 2012 Private Cloud Survey of 414 business technology professionals, April 2012
R4840512/10
58%
51%
49%
30%
26%
23%
21%
17%
6%
6%
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Figure 5

11. June 2012 11
requests strike two or more hypervisors and
network virtualization management stacks.
That brings us back to goal setting. When
you get down into the details, embracing au-
tomation requires a very clear idea of what
you want to accomplish so that you can cre-
ate workflows and processes that are repeat-
able,consistent and trustworthy.Take incident
response: An application server has an issue
that jeopardizes the availability of a key soft-
ware system. If the application is in an app
server farm, other servers may continue to
meet client demand,but at a higher load with
reduced efficiency. If one goal of your auto-
mation initiative is a self-healing response to
the loss or degradation of that application
server,a great many variables must be consid-
ered before an automatic action can be taken.
First, we have to detect the application
server’s failure. Suppose the server stops
working because of a software or configura-
tion error,rather than failing outright; virtual-
ization management software is not necessar-
ily aware of the application’s failure. Finding
out that the server is not handling client
connections is going to take a synthetic ap-
plication monitor that tries to use the server
and reports failure.
At the same time, factors like latency and
utilization could cause a false-positive failure
once or twice, so perhaps the application
monitor should test the transaction against all
the servers in the pool a few times before
Previous Next
Please rate the importance of the following features when selecting private cloud technology,using a scale of 1 to 5,
where 1 is“not important”and 5 is“very important.”
Importance of FeaturesWhen Selecting Private CloudTechnology
Application
performance
management
Capacity
rights
management
Audit
logs
Application
mobility
VM
mobility
Demand-based
auto-scaling
Application
deployment
templates
Self-service
portal
Delegated
administration
Support
hybrid
mode
(public/private
cloud)
Service
catalog
Runbook
automation
Bare-metal
provisioning
Chargeback
billing
or
tracking
3.8
3.7
3.6
3.6
3.6
3.6
3.6
3.5
3.4
3.4
3.3
3.3
3.2
3.0
Note: Mean average ratings
Base: 123 respondents at organizations starting a private cloud project
Data: InformationWeek 2012 Private Cloud Survey of 414 business technology professionals, April 2012
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1
Not
important
Very
important
5
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Figure 6
Strategy:Delegation
Delivers Virtualization
Savings
IT can’t—and shouldn’t—
maintain absolute control over
highly virtualized infrastructures.
Instituting a smart role-based
control strategy to decentralize
management can empower
business units to prioritize their
own data assets while freeing IT
to focus on the next big project.
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12. June 2012 12
reporting, say, three consecutive failures on
app server 1 over a 15-minute window.As you
can see, just getting accurate information to
trigger a workflow can be a challenge. And
this is a major example, because application
performance management is cited as being
the single most important private cloud fea-
ture by respondents (see Figure 5).
Once information has been received, you
need to ensure that the automation policy
engine is capable of either pulling the failure
data or receiving notification thereof to begin
a workflow.Then you need to determine what
the workflow that addresses the incident
actually does. Perhaps it dynamically tears
down the malfunctioning application server
through calls to the hypervisor.Further,it may
need to use WMI calls to communicate with
the other servers in the farm to notify them
that a member has been dropped from the
Microsoft Network Load Balancing pool, or
even proprietary scripting controls if, say, Cit-
rix XenApp is the farm management applica-
tion for this particular app.
Then the automation flow needs to trigger
a predefined workflow,which rolls out a new
application server from a preconfigured tem-
plate, joins it to the Network Load Balancing
pool and prepares the application to accept
requests. At the same time, it should notify
application administrators that an adverse
event has occurred, a workflow has been
triggered and action has been taken. Finally,
it ought to test the new app server with an
application monitor and be capable of
integrating the results of that testing into the
report, which goes to application admins. At
the end of the process, an administrator
might receive a notification that says, “acct-
app1 performance degradation detected
consistently.A teardown and rebuild of acct-
app1 has been initiated and completed suc-
cessfully.Application monitoring reports that
performance is normal.”
As you can see, even a simple self-healing
action is going to take considerable work to
accomplish. Fortunately, this can be done in
bits and pieces.
Once a goal set has been formulated, out-
line the processes that must occur in order to
respond in the desired way. Formulating a
process inventory then becomes a critical
element of an automation strategy. At a high
level, automating responses to application
issues might look something like this for two
different goals:
>> Goal: Self-healing application server
farms
Processes associated: Detect application
server failure or degradation,destroy applica-
tion server farm member, provision new
application server farm member,notify appli-
cation support team.
>> Goal: Reactively sensing degradation of
application performance and taking action
Processes associated: Detect application
performance issues, provision new applica-
tion server farm member, notify application
support teams, destroy application server
farm member after the process has put a new
one up and checked that it’s working.
As you can see in both examples above,
there are individual processes common to
both goals. Both self-healing and reactive
application server provisioning require that
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13. June 2012 13
an app server deployment process exists.If we
can set up a single process-automation script
that deploys a new application server and
joins it to the farm, we can use that to satisfy
that element of both requirements. For this
reason,carefully outlining your goals and the
processes associated with each will quickly
uncover commonalities and make it readily
apparent which automation objectives are
likely to be costly (for example, containing a
great number of unique processes that do not
serve other objectives) and which are easily
attainable by creating a set of core automa-
tion processes and recycling them.
And since we’re talking about cost, let’s get
a little bit deeper. For large enterprises, the
cost could easily reach six figures and climb
to $300,000 or more, depending on the level
of automation required and the size of the
infrastructure. Consider what you’re actually
getting for your licensing investment. First,
you get a task engine that is capable of react-
ing to data by triggering workflows. Second,
you get whatever common integrations and
functionality that exist out of the box.
Examples include self-service provisioning
Web portals, a virtual machine optimization
scheduler or some basic VM power manage-
ment policies.
What you don’t get are workflows specific
to your network, application portfolio and
business processes.No matter how you tackle
the issue, those elements are your responsi-
bility to build and integrate,and that is going
to cost money in either capex or opex,
depending on whether you choose to out-
source or handle in-house. Add to this com-
plexities created by legacy application sup-
port, and it may be a very significant
investment indeed.For this reason,the single
most important step in choosing to automate
your cloud is to carefully scope goals and
requirements and conduct a thorough cost-
benefit analysis before ever purchasing licens-
ing.You’ll need your goals well defined before
tackling the actual nuts and bolts of your au-
tomation project anyway, and if you can’t
place a dollar value on each goal,it will be im-
possible to gauge the success of your au-
tomation deployment.
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