Live blogging from the Internet Summit:
Revlon: Making The Cloud Glamorous
David Giambruno – Senior Vice President & CIO, Revlon
David runs through his hour-long presentation in a quick 20 minutes:
Key Points / Takeaways:
- The cloud is as impactful as the LAN was in the early 90s.
- It’s all about horizontal, not vertical.
- It’s all about the network, if it doesn’t work, you have problems.
- Fiber channel is not good for the cloud; get rid of it.
- The cloud allows faster, better cheaper infrastructure.
- We never spent any more money, we just changed how we spend our money.
- Shifting to the cloud creates a culture of change.
- Everything is a file. The cloud changes the perception of time for how fast work can be completed.
- Real applications & data to develop on, at no cost.
- Data can be transferred very fast during disaster relief to prevent data loss.
Managing a Top Tier Data Center: Change, Control, and Cloud
Duane Barnes – Senior Network Engineer, Windstream Hosted Solutions
Infrastructure challenges:
- Costs are going up, but infrastructure budgets are remaining steady.
- Managing change in a data center, requires multiple levels of approval.
- Procedures for different levels of change.m
What is the cloud?
- Scalability
- Resource pooling
- Self Service
- Pay by the drink – purchase only the resources you need
- Highly available
- SLA-driven (the higher the service level agreement, the higher the cost)
Why implement cloud?
- Flexibility
- Scalability
- Efficiency
- Reliability
Cloud types:
- Public
- Private
- Hybrid
Selecting a cloud provider:
- Security at all levels
- Reference customers
- Experience, mature product sets
- Enterprise-class equipment backed by major vendors
- Tier 2 or 3 SSAE 16 Soc 1 Type II compliant
- 24×7 NOC support w/ solid response times and SLAs
- Support is going to drive the cost of the solution and your happiness
Uptime SLAs:
- 99.5 = almost 2 days of downtime per year
- 99.99 = about of downtime per year
Migrating to the cloud:
- Biggest pitfall: getting access and connectivity to your cloud
- DNS changes and IP addresses are very important to consider
- Which applications should be virtualized?
- Data – how much does it change, and how long to store it?
- Server identities
- Environment architecture
Which option is ideal for you?
- Budget vs. acceptable risk
- Level of control
- CAPEX vx. OPEX
- Development vs. production environments
Pitfalls to avoid:
- Cloud sprawl – risks with self-service provisioning and complete loss of control by IT and potential bursting costs
- Application performance – making sure you know how your application will perform in a virtualized infrastructure
- Software licensing – a risk with maintaining compliance with your software vendors moving to the cloud
- Don’t get boxed in – make sure the provider you choose uses industry standards and best practices
- Platform support – don’t assume that everything can be moved to the cloud, have realistic expectations
Summary:
- Pick a partner you can trust that will change to your need and grow with you
- Have solid requirements and know what you are buying
- Focus on what you do
Find cloud services at Windstream.
The Public Cloud Security Challenge
William Dalton – Director, Corporate IT, Trend Micro
Key Point and Takeaways:
- The cloud is NOT secure
- Increased adoption of cloud correlated to a higher incidence of security lapse
- Enterprises are concerned about using cloud computing services
- Not all cloud providers meet enterprise IT security requirements
- Some enterprises don’t even know they are using a cloud computing service
- Enterprises are moving to the cloud at a fast rate
- More servers and endpoints are being virtualized
- Security is important, but performance and availability are equally important
- Develop a calculation model to address variable costs
- You must adhere to a cloud provider’s logging requirements; keep this in mind
- Make sure your vendor has the proper APIs in place to prevent vendor lock-in
- Look into cloud brokering services
- Encryption needs to be managed; don’t store your keys in the cloud provider
- Leverage corporate accounts where possible
Delivering End User Apps to users…wherever they are
Dave Lawrence – Practice Director, End User Computing, Varrow
Two main providers: Citrix and VMware
The Citrix Perspective
FlexCast – utilizes multiple technologies to deliver apps to users
- Users don’t like change
- To use all of these devices, we need an app store. People have been accustomed to the iTunes method of delivery
- Citrix is trying to create a consistent, identical experience for each user regardless of the device
- Citrix has been around longer than VMware
The VMware Perspective
- The PC is not dead, but it’s not the only game in town
- Horizon Platform – creating a catalog with a desktop and a data service, where the admin can choose what the users see and have access to
- Give users the app they need in one location (iTunes method)
- VMware is simpler at the moment but continues to increase in complexity
- Not a full solution yet
There is a very similar approach between Citrix and VMware. The goal is the same: create a consistent experience for end users.
Comparison:
- Both use an app store to deliver their applications
- Both are providing customers with multiple options
- Both are using multiple technologies to deliver apps based on user need
- Both have methods to deliver the user data to the user
- Citrix has longevity, and it shows in their functionality
- Citrix may require additional admin training
- Part of VMware’s solution is still in beta
- VMware has had success in server virtualization; VMware is to server virtualization as Apple is to the tablet
- Most of our customers choose Citrix on VMware
- Competition has benefited customers
Steps:
- Access your environment and use cases; analyze your users and their workloads
- Gather performance data on your desktops; know how your applications work
- Plan which applications will be delivered to your users based on which method
- Decide if you want a POC
- Design and implement the infrastructure this will run on
- Deploy in small groups so you can work through any issues
- Administer and constantly tune the environment, evaluate over time
Find out about Varrow here.