Andrew Hillier

Few areas of human endeavor can match the pace of change in IT. Even by IT standards, the change being driven by cloud computing sometimes seems surprising. To refer to a virtual environment that has only recently been deployed as "legacy," as some organizations are now doing, underscores the fact that the only thing constant in the data center is change. To deal with change of this magnitude, which can involve transforming the workload hosting model of an entire organization, some industrial-strength thinking is required. In order to tackle this challenge, it's important to properly frame the cloud transformation problem. Many associate cloud with agility, flexibility, cost transparency and other end-user-oriented benefits. But many of these attributes are primarily associated with new infrastructure requests, and specifically, the use of self-service portals to "... (more)

If Only Your Internal Cloud Had a Brain

Internal clouds are gaining momentum in large organizations, both as a means to drive agility and efficiency and as a stepping stone to hybrid and external cloud models. Although establishing and managing an internal cloud seems simple and elegant in principle, in practice they rarely resemble the simple, fluffy white cartoons seen in presentations. More often than not, today's cloud strategy involves piecing together hypervisor management layers with self-service portals, orchestration solutions, provisioning tools, and other base components. While this will yield a functioning ... (more)

Three Ways to Keep Internal Cloud Computing Infrastructure Costs in Check

Many organizations are building internal clouds to capitalize on the agility cloud models offer and avoid the risk of putting mission-critical infrastructure outside of the enterprise's firewalls. The goal is to reap the benefits offered by public clouds, but with much higher levels of control, security, and availability. Building a private internal cloud, however, can come with a hefty price tag. The Private Cloud's Critical Cost Drivers The promise of increased agility and standardization in the supply of IT capacity is extremely compelling. Unfortunately, these benefits come at... (more)

Virtualizing onto Mainframes

The flexibility, efficiency, and reduced cost of ownership virtualization provides makes it extremely compelling to large and small organizations alike. Increasingly IT organizations are contemplating virtualization across all platforms. As this trend makes its way deeper and deeper into the data center, organizations are starting to leverage the fact that virtualization also lifts many of the constraints that govern which platform an application needs to run on. Different types of applications possess different workload “personalities” and these heavily influence how... (more)

Virtualization Economics: Balancing Efficiency and Risk

The fact that virtualization can have a positive impact on total cost of ownership is not new to those familiar with designing and managing IT environments. Many of the contributors to these cost savings, such as reduction in physical hardware and the corresponding savings in power and cooling, are key drivers for virtualization initiatives, and feature prominently in many ROI models. But these factors are just the beginning when it comes to the savings that can be realized with virtualization - having highly efficient assets provides the "first wave" of efficiency, but being e... (more)