Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is an evolution with revolutionary consequences, says Charles Babock, editor-at-large for InformationWeek. It is less a breakthrough and more a convergence of improved technologies. It is a new model for distributing computing power where anyone can purchase as much computing power as they want by the hour, usually at low prices and potentially without any help from the IT department.

It is a new day for IT. No longer about managing technology, cloud computing is about managing services in order to meet business needs. IT organizations can either risk becoming obsolete or assume the role of "business" capacity manager. As a business capacity manager, IT will be more concerned with facilitating or brokering the computing power needed to support business needs. That might be accomplished through the capital acquisition of traditional information technology, or it might involve services delivered via an internal cloud, a public cloud, a hybrid cloud, or off-cloud.

Marketing hype regarding the potential for elasticity and scalability often leads people to believe that cloud computing eliminates the need for capacity management. Don't believe it. It isn't true. Cloud computing actually adds complexity to the capacity management problem. To step up, effective IT management will require a combination of business, financial, and technical expertise.

Two Perspectives
Cloud service providers	Cloud providers are responsible for meeting the service requirements contained in service level agreements it has with cloud service consumers. Providers who fail to use best capacity management practices will have trouble attracting savvy customers, and will be far more likely to suffer embarrassing service "brown-outs" and outages at some point.
	How does TeamQuest Software help cloud providers?
Cloud service consumers	Smart cloud consumers will perform due diligence regarding the historical performance of a potential cloud service provider and investigate the capacity management practices of the provider. Once a provider has been hired, consumers should verify that their provider actually meets required service level requirements
	How does TeamQuest Software help cloud consumers?

How TeamQuest Software Can Help Cloud Providers...

Free to leverage the increased elasticity offered by modern virtualization platforms, cloud providers must nonetheless use mature performance management and capacity planning processes to be certain they can meet future processing requirements of their cloud consumer customers.

TeamQuest software provides a variety of benefits and advantages to providers, which in turn benefits cloud consumers. The TeamQuest Capacity Management Information System (see TeamQuest Manager) provides a shared architecture for the collection, management, and storage of performance and capacity information used by all of the tools in the TeamQuest Performance Software suite.The TeamQuest CMIS offers a number of capabilities that are especially valuable in a cloud environment:

• Simple yet scalable architecture
• Low overhead data collection
• Efficient distributed data storage options
• Real-time service-based analysis
• Multi-vendor coverage of physical and virtual environments
• Inclusion of business performance data

TeamQuest Alert monitors performance and notifies the provider when there is danger of a service level violation, allowing action to be taken before cloud service consumers are affected.

TeamQuest IT Service Analyzer allows providers to detect, investigate and diagnose service performance issues. It can analyze and report the performance of cloud services, combining performance data from multiple servers, applications, or other IT components. Providers can analyze a problematic service and zero in on the IT component causing the problem, regardless of where that component may reside in the cloud.

TeamQuest IT Service Reporter can automatically create periodic service performance reports. Reports can be customized with appropriate content, format, and explanations for use either by managers within the cloud provider's organization or by the provider's customers, the IT service consumers.

TeamQuest Model allows cloud service providers to predict the infrastructure and configurations required for meeting service level requirements. For example, TeamQuest Model can help with these tasks faced by cloud providers:

• Determining the cost of adding consumers or services
• Minimizing infrastructure cost
• Proving to consumers that service costs are justified
• Substantiating capacity claims to potential new consumers
• Planning for spikes, growth, and seasonal changes
• Avoiding contractual penalties
• Finding problem components, past, present, or future
• Determining least costly disaster fallback configurations

How TeamQuest Software Helps Cloud Consumers...

TeamQuest software helps IT professionals determine how best to support business needs, providing decision support for determining which services should be relegated to the cloud and how much of those services should run on the cloud. A careful cost and performance analysis of various options is required.

Even for services that should remain off-cloud or on a private cloud for the most part, it may make business sense to tap into a public cloud to satisfy peak demand, potentially eliminating the need to run in-house systems that are over-provisioned 90% of the time. Again, the decision on what should run off-cloud, in a private cloud, or on a public cloud requires a diligent business capacity management analysis.

Every cloud service consumer will want to ensure their cloud provider is equipped to monitor service levels and provide regular reports. Particularly for critical services, consumers should use TeamQuest software to check response time and throughput service levels themselves and not rely solely on the provider for that information.

The TeamQuest User Agent, the TeamQuest Network Application Agent or the TeamQuest Network Device Agent all monitor service levels from outside the control and oversight of the cloud provider. All of these capabilities are part of the basic TeamQuest Capacity Management Information System (see TeamQuest Manager).

Organizations using a hybrid cloud environment will want to make the classic use of TeamQuest tools to manage the capacity of their own internal operations, as well as to externally monitor that part of the infrastructure that is provided via a public cloud.