Flying high in the Clouds: Cloud migration and datacentre optimization

ENSURING AVAILABILITY, maintaining flexibility and making sure that service level agreements (SLAs) are upheld are all top priorities for the modern IT team. But cloud adoption all too often makes these core tasks additionally challenging. The underlying reason for this is that they no longer have visibility of their potentially high-performing, but complex infrastructures.

Avoiding these potential pitfalls requires careful planning, the ability to view the IT infrastructure end-to-end using a reliable infrastructure performance management platform, and a well-planned set of SLAs.

Moving to the cloud
For anyone moving to the cloud the primary challenge is data migration. A great deal of work is required to transfer application workloads to the cloud and it is never a straightforward process. While the cloud is transforming the datacentre, it is widely accepted that a private cloud alone does not suit the majority of businesses, primarily because of security concerns such as data breaches or worse still, data loss. Instead, the private and public cloud, complements, rather than replaces, an existing infrastructure. This means more complexity, as decisions need to be made around which data should be stored in the cloud and which should be kept on the existing infrastructure.
Many mission-critical applications are I/O-intensive and supported by Fibre Channel SANs. Server monitoring tools alone cannot provide responsive troubleshooting for these applications in a cloud environment.

For maximum end-to-end performance, utilisation, and availability, real-time I/O traffic monitoring for the private cloud infrastructure (including virtual servers, physical servers, network switches and storage arrays), and the connections between them, is needed.
With many considerations going into a cloud migration strategy, businesses also need to contemplate whether or not the applications being relocated will benefit from the move. This is where infrastructure performance management (IPM) platforms become invaluable. IPM offers cloud migration services such as a critical infrastructure audit, and can be used before, during and after the migration takes place, thus eliminating a great deal of disruptive speculation.
Performance teams must manage perpetual complexity in their heterogeneous IT infrastructures and they require a sophisticated set of capabilities to measure and ensure application performance, which is why IPM is paramount to a successful cloud migration.

High flying in the cloud: the importance of SLAs
To deliver on any service level agreement, it is important to benchmark the values in existence before the new solution is in place so that realistic targets can be set and monitored in a meaningful and measurable way. IT managers in the past have tended to do this based on their experience and forecasts of what storage capacity and performance levels the business will need. However, because of higher levels of complexity in the infrastructure, these professionals are increasingly finding that in a cloud environment such predictions and monitoring are becoming more difficult to achieve effectively.

With IPM the risk of deploying mission-critical applications in the cloud is eliminated as the technology provides comprehensive monitoring, measurement and analytics to give a full picture of what is happening across the entire IT infrastructure. Indeed, industry-leading IPM solutions can non-intrusively monitor the performance of virtualised and cloud-based applications by analysing real-time I/O traffic data. So, for the first time SLAs can be based on real activity, monitored and adhered to. Furthermore, by using the analysis from this sophisticated platform, a full performance management programme can be implemented to ensure that server and networks are optimised and that problems are identified early on so that the risk of downtime is minimised. To achieve optimal performance in the cloud, the physical infrastructure or storage hardware must be carefully aligned to suit the cloud environment.
The cloud is a compelling solution for enterprises looking to scale up their performance and drive down hardware costs. But while transitions to cloud environments help to improve agility and reduce CAPEX growth in physical hardware, they often don’t address the increasing complexity and interdependence between a physical and cloud environment. This means increased CAPEX and OPEX in software and staff is required. In fact, there’s often a corollary risk of revenue impact from unacceptable performance or even downtime. The unintended consequences of aggressive consolidation, migration and new technology adoption can therefore lead to increased risk without demonstrable improvements in cost or cycle time between the start of one transaction and the next.
Enlightened enterprises worldwide realise the importance of addressing one of the most demanding aspects for IT managers to date, that of managing data in a cloud environment as a result of more complexity and the need for end-to-end visibility of the infrastructure. They are beginning to realise that, when armed with a real-time understanding of datacentre health, functioning and availability through deep monitoring, all the usual complexity of migration and consolidation begins to transform to logical, measurable, achievable outcomes and ultimately peak performance.
The high level of investment needed for today’s datacentre environments and the essential role that IT plays in day-to-day business operations proportionally require a more holistic approach to IT systems visibility. Infrastructure performance management can provide unbiased and comprehensive visibility across multi-vendor environments, deliver performance-based SLAs and help enterprises support critical workloads without hitting a limit in bandwidth. IPM enables companies to gain definitive, actionable insights from their IT infrastructures to guarantee optimum performance and ensure maximum returns on their investment.