Private Cloud Market Overview q2 2011

May 17, 2011
Market Overview: Private Cloud Solutions, Q2 2011

by James Staten and Lauren E Nelson for Infrastructure & Operations Professionals
Making Leaders Successful Every Day
For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Five Solution types to Choose From For advancing virtualization Maturity
by James Staten and Lauren E Nelson with robert Whiteley, Glenn Odonnell, and Nicholas M. Hayes
May 17, 2011
ExECut I v E S u M Ma ry
Over the past year, client inquiry questions have evolved from What is cloud? to What vendors should I consider? This market overview examines the landscape of vendors providing solutions designed to accelerate the implementation of an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud in a customers data center. Several standard criteria and a selection of differentiating factors are examined. All the solutions evaluated provide the core IaaS functions: self-service, standardization, automation, and pay-per-use. In this market we found five solution types emerging: 1) enterprise systems management vendors; 2) OS/hypervisor vendors; 3) converged infrastructure solutions; 4) pure-play cloud solutions; and 5) grid-derived solutions. Each brings the core IaaS features as well as unique differentiating value.
tabL E O F CO N tE NtS
2 Everyone Wants A Cloud, But Few I&O Teams Are Ready 4 A Mix Of 10 Key Criteria Make Up The Private Cloud Solutions Landscape 7 Were Early In This Market Lots Of Room For Improvement 10 More Vendors Coming
rECOMMENdatIONS
N Ot E S & rE S O u rCE S
Forrester interviewed abiquo, bMC Software, Ca, Cloud.com, dell, Enomaly, Eucalyptus Systems, Hexagrid Computing, HP, IbM, Microsoft, newScale, Platform Computing, red Hat, tibco Software, and vMware. Special thanks to HyperStratus and Kovarus for their assistance with the methodology and approach for this research.
14 Define What You Want First, Then Match The Right Solution 16 Supplemental Material
Related Research Documents Ignoring Cloud risks a Growing Gap between I&O and the business March 24, 2011
2011 top 10 IaaS Cloud Predictions For I&O Leaders February 14, 2011 youre Not ready For Internal Cloud July 26, 2010
2011 Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Forrester, Forrester Wave, RoleView, Technographics, TechRankings, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Reproduction or sharing of this content in any form without prior written permission is strictly prohibited. To purchase reprints of this document, please email clientsupport@ forrester.com. For additional reproduction and usage information, see Forresters Citation Policy located at www.forrester.com. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change.

EVERYONE WANTS A CLOUD, BUT FEW I&O TEAMS ARE READY Todays business executives are becoming more IT savvy, and most are demanding to have a cloud strategy for delivering more-efficient IT services. So its no surprise that theres a rush by I&O professionals to get to yes on cloud computing, with a particularly strong desire to build a private cloud. Forrester surveyed enterprise hardware decision-makers in Q3 2010 and found that 6% stated that they have a private environment today, while another 25% stated that it was a high or critical priority for 2011 (see Figure 1).1 What does all of this mean for I&O?
Theres increased pressure on I&O to go faster. This sense of urgency is driven by two major
trends: 1) executive pressure on IT to provide a private cloud solution to meet these demands that meets corporate security requirements and avoids lock-in fears, and 2) the perception that developers are circumventing IT and going straight to public IaaS clouds to meet their compute needs.2
But few I&O teams have a firm grasp on cloud . . . Private IaaS cloud environments are highly
standardized, automated virtual pools accessed via self-service by developers themselves, shared across business units and metered for pay-per-use chargeback or at least use-based accounting. This type of sophisticated environment is a highly evolved virtual infrastructure, making it a bit of a mismatch for most enterprises.
. . . and I&O must first mature their virtualization capabilities. Forrester found that most
enterprises havent matured their existing virtual environment management practices to the point of being ready to operate a highly standardized, automated, and thus autonomous cloud environment. In fact, the same survey shows that the larger priority for 2011 was still consolidation and virtualization (reported as a high or critical priority by 80% of respondents).3 According to our Q3 2010 Hardware Survey, less than half (45%) of the x86 servers within enterprises are virtualized today, making it imperative for I&O professionals to continue focusing more on virtualization maturity before looking to the cloud.4 In fact, those with mature virtual environments arent interested in pay-per-use billing, failing to actually establish a cloud or set up the right incentives to make their cloud successful.
But I Need A Cloud Now! This logical assessment of todays world falls on deaf ears compared with the demands to get to yes on private cloud. In light of this situation, whats an I&O pro to do? The answer is to:
Work on virtualization and cloud needs in parallel. Continue to evolve the management of
your core virtualization environment, and build a private cloud to sit beside it. Since a cloud is evolved beyond your current virtualization maturity, it must be a separate environment that you learn from and operate differently.
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2011, Forrester research, Inc. reproduction Prohibited

Merge management practices, not infrastructures. Over time youll want to merge
management practices as they align, but dont try to force this too soon. And dont expect your traditional virtualized environment and your cloud to merge into one. They shouldnt. They serve different purposes and carry different economics.5
Select from among five private cloud solution types as your fastest path. The fastest way to
meet demands and build out a parallel cloud infrastructure is to buy purpose-built private cloud solutions. There are five types of vendors that offer this: 1) enterprise systems management vendors; 2) OS/hypervisor vendors; 3) converged infrastructure solutions; 4) pure-play cloud solutions; and 5) grid-derived solutions. Each brings the core IaaS features along with unique differentiating value.
Figure 1 One-Quarter Of Firms Prioritize building an Internal Private Cloud Environment In 2011
Which of the following initiatives are likely to be your rms/organizations top hardware/IT infrastructure priorities over the next 12 months? (Percentage of respondents who answered critical priority or high priority) Consolidate IT infrastructure via server consolidation, data center consolidation, or server virtualization Maintain or implement broad use of server virtualization as the standard server deployment model Automate the management of virtualized servers to gain exibility and resiliency Build an internal private cloud operated by IT (not a service provider) Use cloud service oerings for storage-as-a-service or virtual-server-as-a-service at a service provider 29% 23% 18% 28% 60% 61% 80% 79% 80% 77%
2010 (N = 1,037) 2009* (N = 1,020)
Base: North American and European enterprise IT infrastructure decision-makers Source: Forrsights Hardware Survey, Q3 2010 *Source: Enterprise And SMB Hardware Survey, North America And Europe, Q3 2009
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A MIx OF 10 KEY CRITERIA MAKE UP ThE PRIVATE CLOUD SOLUTIONS LANDSCAPE For a solution to qualify as a true private cloud, it first needs to meet Forresters definition of cloud computing, which has three rather simple and specific criteria: A standardized IT capability (services, software, or infrastructure) delivered in a pay-per-use, selfservice way. Breaking down each piece we see that private clouds must be:
Standardized: provided the same way every time its requested. This doesnt preclude choice Pay-per-use: provides chargeback or showback. Private clouds must track the use of virtual
or variance in configuration but standard operating procedures for at least the provisioning and life-cycle management functions.
resources so that central accounting can be used to either: 1) charge back for their consumption, or, as we have found most enterprises prefer today, 2) show back, which is to report on this consumption.
Self-service: provides a client-facing portal or service catalog. Specifically, end customers

developers in most cases can self-request resources and have those requests automatically acted on. Since the solutions reviewed are for internal use, these solutions should also provide an automated approval workflow for requests.
Five Established Criteria Are Common Across All Private Cloud Solutions . . . All private cloud solutions today, at their heart, are IaaS solutions. They add further criteria to the evaluation, such as the ability to vend virtual machines in an automated fashion. Forrester examined private cloud solutions by first starting with five established criteria (see Figure 2):6
Self-service portal or service catalog. This software presents an interface for separate
authenticated end users via role-based access controls (RBAC) to select options for deployment. It must have unique policy controls per tenant and user role and the ability to present unique catalogs per user or group. In most cases this portal presents a web interface but may also be accessible in other ways, such as through a mobile client or command line interface (CLI).
Dynamic workload management. This is automation and orchestration software that
coordinates workflow requests from the service catalog or self-service portal for provisioning workloads and virtual machines. It must enable life-cycle management capabilities such as change and patch management, clone management, deployment expiration, and event-based configuration change or provisioning. In our analysis, we found that some of the solutions rely on the virtualization management layer beneath their offering for some of these capabilities. For example, newScale relied on VMware vCenter for these capabilities in its demo.
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Resource management. Private cloud solutions need the ability to validate configuration
requests, resource availability, and commitments across virtual compute, storage, and network resources. This software establishes secure multitenancy, isolates virtual resources, and helps prevent contention. It too should act automatically as much as possible.
Service accounting. Building on the outputs of resource management, this software accounts
for IaaS service consumption and serves as a metering and billing system. It should let customers set prices for the services they wish to offer and account for resources that make up these services if desired by the customer. In nearly all cases it should provide use reports to all customers or at least tenant administrators and the cloud administrator. Very few of the solutions reviewed served as a billing system.
Integration and control APIs. The IaaS software stack must provide a unified application
programming interface for third-party product integration and programmatic control. As the most common users of private clouds are developers, its often their preference to request resources and subsequently control those resources via CLI. Many cloud administrators may prefer this interface as well.
. . . But I&O Can Focus On Five Additional Differentiating Categories Beyond the core capabilities, private cloud solutions are more valuable to a wider set of enterprise and public sector I&O teams when they provide a collection of core enterprise management capabilities. By including these capabilities, the solutions can be set up and made operational more quickly and be applied to a broader set of workloads and use cases. The key differentiating features we reviewed were:
Image library. Its helpful when the private cloud provides its own repository for virtual images
like ISOs and VM templates to be managed and selected from the catalog. This isnt a core requirement, and some private cloud solutions simply connected to the image library provided by the core virtualization manager (VMware vCenter in many of the demos) or third-party solutions, such as rPath X6.
RBAC administration. To support tenant administrators as well as tenant users, its helpful
for a solution to provide separate rights and privileges based on role. Its also helpful if these capabilities integrate cleanly with Microsoft Active Directory, LDAP, or other authentication and identity mechanisms. Such features can be crucial to providing secure multitenancy, which is highly desired by I&O teams at many enterprises and government agencies.
Virtualization layer. All IaaS implementations require access to the virtualization layer but
dont need to provide it in the package. I&O teams value this capability so as not to have a dependency on a specific hypervisor but instead support multiple hypervisors. Some solutions in this review supported heterogeneous hypervisors in the same private cloud and within individual tenants.
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Integrated hardware and software solution. The fastest way to get a private cloud up and
running is to buy a solution that has everything you need integrated at the factory and shipped in a single box. The value: simply rack it, power it up, and start using it. A few of the solutions reviewed here were such a system including servers, networking equipment, and storage. Nearly all of these were based on a converged infrastructure with all components coming from the same vendor. While nearly all were self-proclaimed open systems, the meaning of this and exactly what types of alternative hardware could be added to these systems varies.7
Application services. We found that some private cloud solutions provide a variety of
application services, including load balancing, performance management, preconfigured middleware services, and high availability (HA). Some were core components of the solution, included to distinguish the offering, while others were add-on options for a fee.
Figure 2 Select a Private Cloud Solution based On Five Established and Five differentiating Criteria
Criteria Self-service portal or service catalog Dynamic workload management Resource management Established Service accounting Integration and control APIs Image library Dierentiating RBAC administration Virtualization layer Physical compute and storage Application services Business problem solved Agility to satisfy compute needs Automates highly repeatable tasks, saving IT time Security and accountability of users while maximizing utilization rates Metering enables pay-per-use pricing, incenting ecient use Interoperability between existing infrastructure and platform Serves as a reference, and pre-set basics improve ease of use Enables multitenancy and removes manual approval process per request Provides necessary component needed for cloud within platform Ensures interoperability between devices and platform Additional services that improve functionality of basic platform and tie into existing infrastructure and software at greater ease
Source: Forrester Research, Inc.
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WERE EARLY IN ThIS MARKET LOTS OF ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT Were just in the infancy of private cloud solutions. Many of the products now on the market are less than two years old, which means they have a ways to go on completeness, level of integration, and polish, which can affect your time-to-market and the degree of integration and customization work you will face (see Figure 3).
Figure 3 Solution Completeness Can affect time-to-Market
Software only
Fully integrated solution
Hardware only (i.e., converged infrastructure)
Longer
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Longer
But most enterprises arent really ready for the full capabilities of a private cloud, since their virtualization management isnt mature enough. Forrester recommends that I&O teams achieve stage 4 of Forresters Virtualization Maturity Model to fully embrace cloud computing.8 Through the client interviews conducted for this report we found very few customers of these solutions that were providing a full IaaS cloud environment to their constituents. Nearly all were leveraging the multitenancy capabilities, some of the automation features, and, where available, tracking resource consumption. Many customers were not fully enabling the self-service portal and few, if any, were charging back to departments or business units. Thus the majority of the deployments were merely at stage 2 or 3 maturity, with aspirations of a cloud. So theres time for this market to mature and harden its features and their integration. We also found that many of the solutions evaluated dont have any reference customers who are actually using the solution as a cloud. In one case, the vendors clients were only leveraging their run-book automation features atop a traditional virtualized environment they didnt exhibit multitenancy, self-service, or resource consumption tracking.
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As this market matures we expect to see a variety of enhancements that fulfill the private cloud promise as well as integration efforts in three specific areas:
Integration with enterprise management systems. No cloud should be an island, at least not
for long. As a consequence we expect to see universal efforts to integrate these cloud solutions with the leading enterprise management suites and hypervisor management tools used in the majority of virtual environment deployments. This is a lay-up for the enterprise management vendors themselves IBM, CA, BMC, and HP but they havent always played well with each other. As core IaaS capabilities become commodity, standards will emerge to make this easier; the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) and most recently the IEEE are working on such standards.9
Integration with public clouds. Many I&O execs express a desire for their private clouds
to integrate with public cloud environments for either the purposes of cloud bursting the moving of a workload to the public cloud when it demands massive scale or fits the economic and security model of the public cloud or centralized management of customer requests for either resource type. Most public cloud solutions reviewed integrate with Amazon Web Services EC2, the de facto standard public cloud environment today. Many support the vCloud API and Xen and KVM workloads, which are the dominant public cloud hypervisors, but these solutions dont have standard public cloud APIs.10
Integration with noncloud virtual server environments. Not all workloads are suitable for a
multitenant, metered IaaS environment and thus will stay, long term, in traditional fixed virtual environments. In many cases these workloads will be integrated with workloads in a cloud environment as part of a singular service that needs to be managed as a whole. Thus private cloud solutions will need to broker these connections as well. Since most of the customers Forrester spoke with for this report were using the cloud solutions to manage noncloud environments, this is an area of maturity needed by both the customer and the vendor solutions.
There Are Five Types Of Solutions Emerging For those trying to keep this all straight, the good news is that most of the solutions reviewed are at least covering the basics and differentiating among each other in compelling ways. Sadly, there are nearly countless vendors marketing products as private cloud solutions, making for a confusing landscape. Weve included a selection of vendors from each category who met our base criteria for inclusion in this report (see Figure 4). One key difference that came out was that the vendors with a service automation background have a greater ability to deploy multi-VM applications in a single step. We looked at 16 vendors that I&O teams should focus on; they fall into five categories (see Figure 5):
Enterprise systems management vendors: BMC, CA, IBM and newScale. For the most part,
these vendors entered this market with their existing cloud-appropriate management tools repackaged into a private cloud suite. From here theyve refined their offerings with tighter integration between the components and the ability to control cloud environments including
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VMware vCloud Director and Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud. At the heart of BMCs Cloud Lifecycle Manager is its BladeLogic automation tool, which is widely used by enterprises and public cloud and traditional hosting providers. Similarly, CA starts with its service automation technology, building a full solution from its suite of service assurance and virtualization management products. IBM packs a series of Tivoli systems management tools together in this offering, which is also integrated with its converged infrastructure, IBM Cloudburst, for a hardware-software solution.11 Recently acquired by Cisco Systems, newScale is mainly a provider of a robust enterprise service catalog.12 It has evolved this offering into a more complete automation offering, although it has strong dependencies on the automation capabilities of the virtualization platform beneath it.
OS/hypervisor vendors: Microsoft and VMware. Each of the leading hypervisor providers
has built a private cloud solution atop the hypervisor layer. VMwares vCloud Director is the most advanced of these offerings, providing full virtual infrastructure control and strong multitenancy, but it only supports the vSphere Hypervisor platform. Microsofts Hyper-V Cloud is a heterogeneous solution managing vSphere, Xen, and Hyper-V environments. This solution is built around Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager. At present its more virtualization manager and less full private cloud solution, as it lacks a robust self-service portal.
Converged infrastructure solutions: Dell and HP. These solutions combine hardware and
software into a fast-to-deploy private cloud solution. HP CloudSystem is a single-vendor solution with a series of integrated software components from the companys enterprise service and device management software portfolios. Its management software can also be purchased separately from the hardware; this product is sold as HP Cloud Service Automation (CSA). Dells solution is built with in-house and partner software, including Creator, its workload automation tool from DynamicOps.
Pure-play cloud solutions: Abiquo, Cloud.com, Enomaly, and Eucalyptus. The players in this
category dont have an enterprise systems management legacy and thus have built private cloud solutions specifically for this purpose. As a result, their offerings are in general more tightly integrated but are not by any means equal. Each vendor has taken a different approach and thus excels in unique ways. Abiquo combines virtual resource pools of any origin such as different hypervisors or private/public into tenants and provides a robust administration interface to the tenant manager. Cloud.com focuses on delivering a clean and simple cloud solution with an integrated user interface and high scalability. Enomaly and Eucalyptus are more bare-bones solutions aimed at more advanced administrators and developers. Both have strong public cloud connectivity.
Grid-derived solutions: Hexagrid, Platform Computing, and Tibco. These vendors all have
a heritage in grid computing that served as the foundation for their solutions. Platforms ISF is built on its workload management and provisioning solution and uses its history of managing
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multiple grid projects at once as the basis of its multitenancy and self-service portal. Tibcos Silver Fabric is based on FabricServer, a solution built to allow nongrid applications to leverage grid infrastructures. Hexagrid debuted with its VxDatacenter product, which didnt originate as a grid management solution, but its founders leveraged their experience in this market when building the product. Its key differentiator is its user interface, which was the most intuitive in our comparison. MORE VENDORS COMINg In this market overview we only invited vendors that: 1) had production-ready solutions that provided all the core capabilities of a private IaaS environment, and 2) felt they could provide solid enterprise customer references that were using the solution as a private cloud inside their enterprise. Sadly, even some of those that stepped up to our requests failed in this last category. Thus, the short list of vendors evaluated here is more a reflection of the maturity of this market than the extent of the participating vendor landscape. Nearly twice as many vendors have announced private cloud solutions, and we expect twice more again to enter the category in 2011. Some of the vendors that have announced solutions for your consideration include: Cisco Systems, Citrix Systems, Enomaly, Fujitsu, Gale Technologies, Intalio, Nimbula, NRE Alliance (a joint venture of Eucalptus, MomentumSI, newScale, and rPath), Parallels, Quest Software, Red Hat, ThinkGrid, Unisys, VCE (a joint venture of Cisco, EMC, and VMware), and Zimory. Theres also a growing contingent of vendors providing remote cloud environment management services so you dont have to build up the in-house expertise in managing a cloud environment. An additional option is to use a hosted private cloud solution thats deployed at and managed by a service provider on your behalf. We will examine these solutions specifically in a forthcoming market overview.
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Figure 4 Scoring Criteria

Criteria Scale explanation 4 = Vendors self-service portal and admin interface oer an intuitive UI, making core management functions easy (i.e., provisioning requests, conguration, health stats, and alerts are available on a central dashboard). A workload deployment approval mechanism is included. The UI is easily customized, and all functions are accessible through the CLI. The UI is browser-based; its functionality and intuitiveness are veried by a satised customer reference. 3 = Vendors service catalog oers an intuitive user interface thats easy to navigate. The UI is easily customized, and all functions are accessible through the CLI. The UI is browser-based. 2 = Vendors service catalog oers a user interface for service manipulation thats customizable. 1 = Vendor has basic self-service functions. 0 = Vendor does not oer a self-service portal. 4 = Vendor has core automated provisioning (i.e., stop, restart, modify) plus the ability to characterize and automate the deployment of complex multi-VM templates with resource requirement enforcement. The solution also has IT process automation (ITPA), workload automation (evolved from traditional job scheduling), or run book automation [RBA] capabilities, and supports user-dened process models and integration with basic task execution technologies (e.g., software distribution, conguration changes, monitoring). Can congure the virtual network and physical network equipment, and can congure load-balancing and apply scaling policies. These automation capabilities are highly recommended by their customer reference. 3 = Vendor has automated provisioning plus the ability to characterize and automate the deployment of complex multi-VM templates with resource requirement enforcement. Can congure the virtual network and physical network equipment and can congure load-balancing and apply scaling policies. 2 = Vendor has basic provisioning functions for creating and deploying single VM templates (using tool available in the standard oering). 1 = Vendor has basic functionality. 0 = Vendor does not oer dynamic workload management. 4 = Vendor supports automated adaptation of resource capacity capabilities based on monitoring and analytics (i.e., auto-scaling of cloud infrastructure resources based on ongoing capacity analysis) that trigger such adaptation both for internal cloud and public cloud resources. Vendor enables advanced automated life-cycle management capabilities (i.e., automatically pause deployments for resource reallocation, simplied patch and change management, or ability to change congurations and ensure standards compliance). 3 = Vendor has some life-cycle management capabilities. Vendor supports automated adaptation of resource capacity capabilities based on monitoring and analytics (i.e., auto-scaling of cloud infrastructure resources based on ongoing capacity analysis) that trigger such adaptation. 2 = Vendor supports some automated adaptation of resource capacity capabilities. 1 = Vendor has basic resource management capabilities. 0 = Vendor does not oer resource management.
Self-service portal or service catalog
Dynamic workload management
Resource management
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Figure 4 Scoring Criteria (Cont.)

Criteria Scale explanation 4 = Provisioning and conguration change actions are integrated with service fulllment processes and accounting for resource consumption. The solution provides full resource accounting granularity and a customizable reporting/billing engine. 3 = Provisioning and conguration change actions are integrated with service fulllment processes and accounting for resource consumption. The solution provides some resource accounting granularity and a reporting/billing engine. 2 = Most provisioning and conguration change actions are integrated with service fulllment processes and accounting for resource consumption. The solution provides basic resource accounting granularity and reporting. 1 = Some provisioning and conguration change actions are integrated with service fulllment processes. The solution provides basic resource consumption reporting. 0 = Vendor does not oer service accounting. 4 = Vendor has northbound (programmatic control of the private cloud solution) APIs that incorporate the vCloud, OpenStack, and/or Amazon EC2 APIs; southbound APIs or integration with third-party products (including public cloud platforms); and the ability to control these environments through the private cloud solution. 3 = Vendor has northbound APIs that incorporate vCloud, OpenStack, or Amazon EC2 and integration with third-party products (including public cloud platforms) allowing programmatic control. 2 = Vendor has northbound APIs and southbound APIs that integrate with key onpremises third-party products (including vSphere or Amazon EC2) allowing programmatic control. 1 = Vendor has a northbound API and southbound APIs that integrate with some third-party products allowing programmatic control. 0 = Vendor does not integrate with third-party tools and doesnt oer control APIs. 4 = Vendor provides a robust image library that can contain complex multi-VM workloads plus tenant and role segmentation of the library; built-in image creation tool and image import (VMDK, VHD, OVF, and from other library types) plus export and conversion features. 3 = Vendor provides a robust image library that can contain complex multi-VM workloads plus tenant and role segmentation of the library; and some image import (VMDK, VHD, OVF, and from other library types) plus export and conversion features. 2 = Vendor provides an image library with some tenant and role segmentation of the library and some image import (VMDK, VHD, OVF, and from other library types) features. 1 = Vendor has basic functionality: repository of virtual images (ISO, VM templates, etc.). 0 = Vendor does not oer an image library. 4 = Vendor provides granular policy controls with at least three unique precongured levels of users and admins and detailed customization options for each level. 3 = Vendor provides granular policy controls with at least three unique precongured levels of users/admins with limited customization options for each level. 2 = Vendor provides policy controls with at least three unique levels of users/admins with limited customization . 1 = Vendor has basic functionality with at least one unique policy control for the cloud admin and one unique policy control for group admin. 0 = Vendor does not oer a unique policy controls per tenant/role. * Subtract 1 from score (unless 0) if it doesnt integrate with LDAP and Active Directory.
Service accounting
Integration and control APIs
Image library
RBAC administration
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Figure 4 Scoring Criteria (Cont.)

Criteria Scale explanation 4 = Vendor solution supports multiple x86 hypervisors and non-x86 virtualization platforms. 3 = Vendor supports three x86 hypervisors. 2 = Vendor supports two x86 hypervisors. 1 = Vendor supports a single x86 hypervisor. 0 = Solution does not directly work with any hypervisors. 4 = Solution is a factory-built and tightly integrated converged solution of IaaS software and physical infrastructure resources (server, network, and storage). The IaaS software can integrate with a wide variety of third-party infrastructure components, and customer reference spoke highly of its integration. 3 = Solution is a factory-built and tightly integrated converged solution of IaaS software and physical infrastructure resources (server, network, and storage). The IaaS software can integrate with some third-party infrastructure components. 2 = Solution is a bundle (or loose integration) of IaaS software and physical infrastructure resources (server, network, and storage). The IaaS software can integrate with some third-party infrastructure components. 1 = Vendor integrates some physical resources into its solution or is part of a certied integrated solution specic, certied, and sold through partners. 0 = Vendor oers only a software-based solution. 4 = Vendor solution can deploy and congure (and received positive feedback from a customer reference about this) the following services: load-balancing and high availability, DR/security features (rewalls, virtual private networks [VPNs], etc.), performance-monitoring, and diverse precongured middleware services. 3 = Vendor solution can deploy and congure the following services: load-balancing and high availability, DR/security features (rewalls, virtual private networks [VPNs], etc.), performance-monitoring, and diverse precongured middleware services. 2 = Vendor supports load-balancing and high availability, DR/ security features (rewalls, virtual private networks [VPNs], etc.), and performance-monitoring. 1 = Vendor supports load-balancing, high availability, and rewalls. 0 = Vendor does not support load-balancing or high availability services.
Virtualization layer
Physical compute and storage included
Application services
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Figure 5 todays Private Cloud Solutions Market Offers a Wide variety Of Solutions
es ic rv se n d io at an d ic e e pl ut lud Ap mp inc co e r al ag ic or ye ys st la n Ph io at liz n io ua rt at tr Vi is in m ry ad ra AC lib e RB ag d Im an n Is io P at l A gr ro te nt In g co tin un co ac e t ic en rv em Se ag d an m loa ce ork nt e ur so ic w em Re am ag or n an tal Dy m or log p e ta ic c a rv e s e ic lf- erv Se s
Vendor Abiquo BMC CA Cloud.com Dell Enomaly Eucalyptus Hexagrid HP IBM Microsoft newScale
Platform Computing Tibco VMware 0

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Note: Please refer to Figure 4 for the scoring criteria.
r E C O M M E N d at I O N S
DEFINE WhAT YOU WANT FIRST, ThEN MATCh ThE RIghT SOLUTION
Since the private cloud market is just at its beginning, there are a variety of solutions to choose from with a wide range of capabilities. Some are best for greenfield deployments where youll operate them standalone. Here you can learn from the solution and then tune it to your current level of maturity. Others are more malleable and help you get to cloud at your own pace, but provide a few best practices to make this path easier. So what should I&O execs do? the best way to determine which is right for you is to first:
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Determine where your I&O team is in its virtual environment maturity. Is your
organization barreling down the path of standardization and automation, or are you still struggling to do something the same way twice? Private cloud solutions only work when standards can be defined and these operations done without human intervention. If your organization has a ways to go, that doesnt mean you cant create a private cloud, just that you should target a greenfield deployment, such as starting with test and development resources or a new business project where you can learn from the solution.
Set your short-term goals for the private cloud. What will it be used for and by whom?
If the initial target is test and development, consider comparing test automation solutions such as vMware vCenter Lab Manager or Soasta Cloudtest against some of the private cloud solutions. If you will be sharing the cloud among several departments, determine how varied their needs and requirements will be. For example, you may need to prioritize strong rbaC capabilities.
have a long-range vision for your private cloud. While the starting point may be easy
to define, you certainly dont want to pick a solution that cant grow with your needs. do you plan over time to support hybrid deployment with services composed of applications running in the public cloud, traditional virtual environment, and even on their own physical hosts? What tools do you envision using to manage this environment? Several solutions profiled here work best with or only support a single hypervisor, for example.
Be prepared for islands of hypervisors. While the majority of your virtual environment today
may be leveraging vMware, a growing number of I&O execs we speak with are planning to break from this model and are demanding solutions that support Microsoft Hyper-v, xen (and its variants such as Oracle vM), or KvM resources. If your solution will integrate with public clouds, determine if heterogeneous hypervisor support will apply here as well.
Try before you buy. Focus your evaluations on specific criteria, especially the user interface.
In our review we found wide swings in user interface and workflow models that will make one solution very comfortable for one administrator and completely foreign to another. Customers who love the CLI (and know their developers do, too) will put little credence in a cloud solution with a gorgeous, interactive administration portal.
Include your target users in the selection process. be sure your target users are in on the
demo as well, as what you like may be very different from what they want. Several Forrester client inquiries about private cloud vendor selection have been crafted without any target customer involvement. While you may think you know your customers well enough to represent them, weve found this rarely to be a safe assumption.
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SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL Methodology All participating vendors in this report were required to:
Respond to a questionnaire. The questionnaire asked them to describe their key features
and capabilities, their architecture, and their future plans. It was developed based on our interactions with clients and cloud computing consultancies, including HyperStratus.
Provide one enterprise customer reference. Vendors were asked to provide contact
information for a confidential enterprise customer using the evaluated version of the solution, preferably as a private cloud.
Conduct a product demonstration. Forrester provided participants with a compulsory script,
which specified actions they were to follow to demonstrate the capabilities of their solution. The first 20 minutes of the demo were allotted for the compulsory script, leaving participants 10 minutes to demonstrate any additional, unique features that differentiated their solution from the competition. The following details the demo script given to all participating vendors:
Demo actions: These actions are compulsory and should be conducted in this order. Variations in this flow should be discussed with and approved by Forrester prior to the actual demo. In each step, please highlight any unique actions you take which you feel differentiate your solution either verbally during the demo or in writing prior to the demo. 1. Describe the physical and virtual configuration used in this demo. What hardware is used? What hypervisor? What networking and storage equipment? Any software or other elements in this configuration outside of your private cloud solution?
2. From the cloud administrator interface, allocate physical and/or virtual resources to the IaaS pool. 3. From the cloud administrator interface, create two secure tenant environments inside the IaaS pool and assign them to Marketing and Engineering. Assign users and administrators (if applicable) to these tenant groups. 4. Populate the self-service portal (or service catalog) with two workloads that can be assigned to the tenant pools. Please describe or provide a written description of how you create workloads for the self-service portal (import VMDK, ISO, VHD files, assemble on the fly using a separate tool [name the tool], create multi-VM services, etc.). Assign attributes to these workloads (such as VM size options, network constraints, load balancer options, SLA options or requirements, prices, etc.).
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5. From the self-service portal, logged in as a Marketing user, select and deploy a workload into the Marketing tenant created in step two. Please describe or provide a written description of what actions are taken based upon this request, naming all separate executables that are invoked to complete this action. If approval workflows are incorporated into your solution please demonstrate them or describe them. 6. From the self-service portal, log in as an Engineering user and deploy a workload to this tenant environment. 7. As the Engineering user, move to the tenant administration interface and demonstrate user administration rights (add instances to a running workload, clone a workload, change/derive a workload, change resource allocations, etc. Use this step to demonstrate functions you feel should be standard user admin actions and those that you feel differentiate your solution). 8. As the Engineering user, demonstrate your reporting functions. What reports can be provided to this user? Use this step to show reports you feel should be standard user admin views and those that you feel differentiate your solution. At a minimum a resource allocation and consumption report and an environment health report must be shown. 9. As the Engineering user, demonstrate actions this user can take in response to reported activities (stop, restart, move, clone workloads, for example). 10. As the cloud administrator, demonstrate your reporting functions. What reports can be provided to the administrator? Use this step to show reports you feel should be standard user admin views and those that you feel differentiate your solution. 11. As the cloud administrator, demonstrate actions this user can take in response to reported activities (delineate admin rights of the cloud administrator from those of the user). 12. As the cloud administrator, add a physical server resource to the IaaS environment and assign additional resources to the Engineering tenant. 13. End of compulsory steps. Companies Interviewed For This Document Abiquo BMC Software CA Cloud.com Dell Enomaly Eucalyptus Systems Hexagrid Computing HP IBM
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Microsoft newScale Platform Computing ENDNOTES

1
RedHat Tibco Software VMware
Most firms are in the early stages of Forresters infrastructure virtualization maturity model. We used seven questions to probe where firms are on the journey to virtualization maturity and the ideal of internal cloud. (see endnote 11) Only 7% have implemented a self-service portal or usage chargeback today, two key markers for reaching stage four of virtualization maturity. When we look at how many firms report implementing all seven capabilities, not just some of them, only 6% will do so by 2011. For more information, see the March 24, 2011, Navigating The Shifts In Computing Infrastructure Markets report. Over the past several years, weve seen two key cloud trends in the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) space: 1) Public cloud adoption rates are highest among informal buyers (non-IT employees), and 2) infrastructure and operations professionals, the formal buyers of these types of technologies, prefer to build private internal solutions. Informal buyers are drawn to the fast and easy access to low-priced compute power that public clouds offer, slipping these purchases under the I&O radar. But I&O teams fear the public cloud for its immaturity and insecurity and seek to provide an in-house alternative delivering similar values but with proper controls. But for this to succeed, I&O pros must get informal buyers onboard to work with them. Unaddressed, as our survey data shows, these two groups will remain unaligned, threatening the IT-to-BT (business technology) progression for your organization. See the March 24, 2011, Ignoring Cloud Risks A Growing Gap Between I&O And The Business report. In 2009 and 2010, about 80% of enterprise IT infrastructure decision-makers reported that consolidation and broad use of server virtualization were high or critical priorities compared with just under 30% for internal cloud or public cloud in 2010. For more information, see the March 24, 2011, Navigating The Shifts In Computing Infrastructure Markets report. Source: Forrsights Hardware Survey, Q3 2010. Its one thing to say infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals need to invest in infrastructureas-a-service (IaaS) cloud computing for their high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. Its quite another to justify the financial and resource commitments. This requires a business case that validates the investment on grounds of business empowerment, cost savings, or faster time-to-market. Positive return on investment (ROI) from HPC cloud computing cant be achieved as a blanket business case because the benefits vary based on application design and use case. Cloud economics now makes HPC attainable for firms that couldnt afford such efforts before, and less costly, more expandable, and with a faster time-tovalue for those that already could. See the December 22, 2010, Justifying Your Cloud Investment: HighPerformance Computing (HPC) report. These five established criteria were used as a baseline for inclusion in the report. Vendors were required to first indicate in an email that they offered these capabilities and then asked to prove their capabilities through a questionnaire and demo as well as provide us with one enterprise customer reference that implemented and had experience with their private cloud solution.
4 5
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Vendors like Cisco, Dell, EMC, HP, and IBM know you need packaged solutions that just work, but until recently they left too much of the burden on their customers. Recent integrated solutions take a big step toward delivering complete virtual infrastructures in a box, but to effectively use them, you must assess your own virtualization maturity, start small with development and test workloads, and consider whether you really need to run it yourself. See the May 17, 2010, Are Converged Infrastructures Good For IT? report. Through more than 200 enterprise interviews, correlated with survey data, Forrester has identified four clear stages of infrastructure virtualization maturity that dictate readiness for various management and automation technologies, process improvements that must be made, and standardizations that have to be realized to achieve greater gains. Organizations progress from gaining acclimation with the technology, to strategically standardizing on it, through a period of chaotic VM sprawl that leads to process improvements, on to the point of pooling and policy-based automation. See the July 10, 2009, Assess Your Infrastructure Virtualization Maturity report. There is a plethora of emerging standards attempting to capture the mindshare of IT organizations, but still too many exist with no clear frontrunners emerging. The IEEE hopes to set standards through its newly launched cloud initiative. Charles Babcock has written about the emerging standards situation. Source: Charles Babcock, IEEE Targets Cloud Interoperability Standards, InformationWeek, April 5, 2011 (http:// www.informationweek.com/news/cloud-computing/infrastructure/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229400890 &cid=RSSfeed_IWK_All). Red Hat offers its Deltacloud cloud management API, which is purported to be the standard KVM cloud API but doesnt have an enforcement mechanism in place to ensure that this is universally exposed by service providers. VMware has a standard vCloud API that it strongly recommends service providers expose and a superset API presented through its vCloud Director product. Service providers are encouraged by both companies to expose these APIs to qualify for certain partner program status levels. IT pros have most of the basic ingredients to cook up their own cloud-like infrastructure but theres no recipe, and many ingredients just dont combine well. Complicating the story are the traditional infrastructure silos around servers, networks, and storage that must work together in a new, truly integrated way. Vendors like Cisco, Dell, EMC, HP, and IBM know you need packaged solutions that just work, but until recently they left too much of the burden on their customers. Recent integrated solutions take a big step toward delivering complete virtual infrastructures in a box, but to effectively use them, you must assess your own virtualization maturity, start small with development and test workloads, and consider whether you really need to run it yourself. See the May 17, 2010, Are Converged Infrastructures Good for IT? report. We reviewed newScale before it was acquired by Cisco. For more information on its acquisition, read Ciscos press release: http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2011/corp_032911.html.
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May 17, 2011

Market Overview: Private Cloud Solutions, Q2 2011

Making Leaders Successful Every Day

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Market Overview: Private Cloud Solutions, Q2 2011

May 17, 2011

Market Overview: Private Cloud Solutions, Q2 2011

May 17, 2011

2011, Forrester research, Inc. reproduction Prohibited

Market Overview: Private Cloud Solutions, Q2 2011

2010 (N = 1,037) 2009* (N = 1,020)

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Market Overview: Private Cloud Solutions, Q2 2011

Self-service: provides a client-facing portal or service catalog. Specifically, end customers

Dynamic workload management. This is automation and orchestration software that

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Market Overview: Private Cloud Solutions, Q2 2011

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Market Overview: Private Cloud Solutions, Q2 2011

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Market Overview: Private Cloud Solutions, Q2 2011

Fully integrated solution

Hardware only (i.e., converged infrastructure)

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Market Overview: Private Cloud Solutions, Q2 2011

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Market Overview: Private Cloud Solutions, Q2 2011

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Figure 4 Scoring Criteria

Self-service portal or service catalog

Dynamic workload management

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Market Overview: Private Cloud Solutions, Q2 2011

Figure 4 Scoring Criteria (Cont.)

Integration and control APIs

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Figure 4 Scoring Criteria (Cont.)

Physical compute and storage included

Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

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Market Overview: Private Cloud Solutions, Q2 2011

Platform Computing Tibco VMware 0

Note: Please refer to Figure 4 for the scoring criteria.

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