With the emergence of the private cloud direction this year, the UCS announcement, and the partnership between VMWARE, Cisco, and EMC, I’ve had a good deal of time to learn about Cisco’s UCS product. My initial reaction was to spend some time thinking about different ways of integrating EMC storage products into a UCS environment.
What storage system features would help differentiate EMC’s storage with UCS in a private cloud?
However, when looking at the problem from the customer point of view, one thing became clear pretty quickly.
I was asking the wrong question.
Stepping Through a Private Cloud Use Case
If private cloud is all about simplifying IT, then I need to approach the problem from the eyes of an IT specialist. Let’s assume a large IT organization, in a company of 5,000+ employees, has deployed UCS as part of a private cloud, and they’ve chosen Storage Vendor X. An employee notices that an application is running slowly, so they open up a ticket with IT.
Here’s a rough flow of how this type of problem could get resolved:
- employee submits the problem: application runs slowly
- IT opens the “data center blueprint” of blades, network, storage, and applications
- IT identifies bottleneck based on historical infrastructure monitoring
- IT schedules work order to fix bottleneck (e.g. network misconfiguration)
- Fix gets applied
- Fix gets audited and confirmed.
- employee is notified and issue is closed
The promise of private cloud is that this process is supposed to be fast, automated, and fairly painless.
UCS needs to show up as part of the blueprint. It needs to generate performance statistics. It needs an API to fix misconfigurations, and it needs an API to validate compliance.
Private cloud storage systems should do the same.
So I stopped asking about how to plug into UCS, and I started asking about plugging into the IT management framework. It’s not about isolated silos of technology; it’s about seamless orchestration.
So I turned my attention instead to Ionix. Ionix contains the software tools to do all of the tasks mentioned in the list above.
Where to start? The logical place to start was Infra (otherwise known as Ionix Service Management). Infra is the EMC software that opens, tracks, and closes tickets. Before the private cloud vision began to formulate, tools like Infra weren’t high on the list of storage system requirements.
With private cloud, however, the critical piece that will drive adoption is the overall IT management software. I plan to spend some time in future posts discussing these requirements and how the software architecture is coming together as a result. The requirements drive right down into the storage level.
Storage vendor choice in the private cloud is not about speeds, feeds, and features. It’s about integration to deliver services.
Steve
Twitter: @Steve Todd
