private clouds are more than a “trend” – they are the building block for a new approach to providing computing resources. But don’t limit yourself to the “self-service” aspect, especially since this is still not the norm in mid- and large-scale IT environments to empower users to allocate compute and storage resources on their own.
So there’s a additional approach to technologies like OpenStack: Using them as “agents” for automation. You can integrate OpenStack into existing work-flows and avoid the traditional “media break” when requesting new server resources: Instead of having to wait for hardware delivery (once your new server or service got approved) or some more or less manual provisioning of an according virtual machine, an optimum integration would allow to automatically provision the requested server resource right from your existing work flow tool. Even more, OpenStack could also dynamically and automatically provide additional computing resources “on demand”, i. e. when monitoring detects peak work loads that your existing resources fight to respond to. And of course, once the demand ceases, those resources can be reduced as automagically as they were added.
But of course, all those dynamics of “private clouds” and “public clouds” do not free you from having to integrate those dynamically allocated resources into your existing tool set for monitoring, performance management, and probably even billing. The more dynamically it gets, and the faster the resource allocations grow and shrink, the more automated your processes to configure the new resources, and to integrate them into your monitoring, need to work.
NDE AG is a leader in designing highly automated systems management environments and we have invested a great deal of time and know-how into coupling of “cloud” solutions with existing management environments. If need be, our implementations are able to handle tens of thousands of instances automatically, the same as they will do for physical machines and other IT components.
We’d be happy to have a talk with you, assessing where you are today, where you’d like to be tomorrow, and how we can help you to get there. Just give us a call!