The workload in the Cloud

Vodacom Business recently demonstrated its intelligent workload management to nearly 1 000 delegates at the NOW-ology seminar at Vodaworld. In less than 10 minutes the Vodacom Business team, ably assisted by Markus J. Krauss, VP Service Providers Novell Europe Middle East & Arica, had added virtual servers, completed their configuration as well as set the access, security levels and compliance rules. All of this was on a live system operating in the Vodacom Business Data Centre.

Richard Vester, Executive Head of Hosted Services at Vodacom Business says the self-provisioning of business IT services directly from the customers desktop, in real time, demonstrated that many of the features of cloud computing are available now. ‚We are the only service provider in Africa to provide this exciting service. We have realised that CIOs have certain reservations about virtualisation and cloud computing, although at a recent Brainstorm Round Table the majority readily agreed it was time to take a different strategy for 21st century computing and maybe let go some of their own operated systems and services.‚

Some of the issues tabled were:

‚Ä¢ IT managers can’t ‚see‚ virtual servers the same way they can see and touch physical servers

• Physical server sprawl can turn into virtual server sprawl without careful management

• New service-level risks

• Because the whole management experience is different, IT is often unable to validate and justify virtualization as a strategy.

• Security, Access and Fraud risks are unclear

‚By using Novell’s WorkloadIQ solutions, Vodacom Business services can support a customer’s IT environment through workload migration, virtual and physical data replication and protection to achieve a scalable cloud. By allowing customers to also provision their own resources remotely, add machines to their resource pool as they need them and giving customers the ability to do all of this from their desktops, gives customers the flexibility and control to manage their IT assets whenever and wherever,‚ said Vester.

With automated Cloud Service provisioning from the desktop, a fully configured server can be added in minutes ‚ no waiting for the hardware, no installation or licensing issues, it’s a simple drag and drop to the virtual server. All approvals are built into the system, with compliance and governance also planned and included.

‚We have a proven path for customers to migrate into the cloud, which starts with an assessment of the entire architecture via a data centre inventory analysis. We then assist the customer to workshop the required timeline, plan the migration in parallel, perform a final data check and test, and then move into the cloud within a few hours,‚ Vester says. ‚My advice to those CIOs who are still unsure about letting go is to start with what you need to run your applications by migrating the apps into the cloud. This will demonstrate stability, access, control, security and other key areas such as protection of the data ‚ disaster recovery, replication, etc.

‚What a CIO needs to grasp is that complete control and management of servers in the cloud are even easier and more cost effective than traditionally. Also, it is far more productive to provision a virtual server and manage the workload than doing it physically. The provisioning service and procedures are all user defined and totally under their control,‚ said Vester.

Novell’s Krauss added, “The partnership between Vodacom Business and Novell is helping customers achieve a more secure, cost effective and scalable cloud computing environment. The work we are doing with Vodacom Business is yet another proof point for both companies to drive innovation, thought leadership and become the leaders in the intelligent workload management marketplace.‚

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