To lower IT operational costs and/or to become more agile, the business must simplify the processes to deliver and manage infrastructure and the applications running on that infrastructure. Focusing on one without the other is simply applying yet another band-aid to an already hampered environment. Delivering IT as a service requires transformative efforts across all of IT and a re-evaluation of the metrics currently used to judge success. Achieving these goals demands a new platform and approach to delivering data and applications to users.
I was recently reviewing a reference architecture for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and was confounded by the sheer complexity still required to deliver what amounts to a starting point for the higher level task of deploying software. Perhaps I set the bar too high, but if I were a CIO, any new infrastructure investment I made today would need to be part of a self-aware automatically elastic resource pool. That is, when I plug in the new hardware (e.g. server, storage, network) I’m asked a couple of basic questions about allocation and voila the hardware is automatically incorporated into one or more resource pools. Moreover, there’s software that sits on top of that pool that allocates it out to users on a metered basis. Any further time spent on operational configuration, engineering and deployment is simply wasted effort.
from Latest News from Cloud Computing Journal http://ift.tt/1ckNH49
