Migration to Cloud strategies - Gartner

Rehost, i.e. redeploy applications to a different hardware environment and change the application’s infrastructure configuration. Rehosting an application without making changes to its architecture can provide a fast cloud migration solution. However, the primary advantage of IaaS, that - teams can migrate systems quickly, without modifying their architecture – can be its primary disadvantage as benefits from the cloud characteristics of the infrastructure, such as scalability, will be missed.

Refactor, i.e. run applications on a cloud provider’s infrastructure. The primary advantage is blending familiarity with innovation as “backward-compatible” PaaS means developers can reuse languages, frameworks, and containers they have invested in, thus leveraging code the organization considers strategic. Disadvantages include missing capabilities, transitive risk, and framework lock-in. At this early stage in the PaaS market, some of the capabilities developers depend on with existing platforms can be missing from PaaS offerings.

Revise, i.e. modify or extend the existing code base to support legacy modernization requirements, then use rehost or refactor options to deploy to cloud. This option allows organizations to optimize the application to leverage the cloud characteristics of providers' infrastructure. The downside is that kicking off a (possibly major) development project will require upfront expenses to mobilize a development team. Depending on the scale of the revision, revise is the option likely to take most time to deliver its capabilities.

Rebuild, i.e. Rebuild the solution on PaaS, discard code for an existing application and re-architect the application. Although rebuilding requires losing the familiarity of existing code and frameworks, the advantage of rebuilding an application is access to innovative features in the provider's platform. They improve developer productivity, such as tools that allow application templates and data models to be customized, metadata-driven engines, and communities that supply pre-built components. However, lock-in is the primary disadvantage so if the provider makes a pricing or technical change that the consumer cannot accept, breaches service level agreements (SLAs), or fails, the consumer is forced to switch, potentially abandoning some or all of its application assets.

Replace, i.e. discard an existing application (or set of applications) and use commercial software delivered as a service. This option avoids investment in mobilizing a development team when requirements for a business function change quickly. Disadvantages can include inconsistent data semantics, data access issues, and vendor lock-in.

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Dell’s cloud Investment details

All-in-one infrastructure

vStart is a Dell’s take at a converged infrastructure system almost like Cisco’s Unified Computing System, HP’s BladeSystem Matrix or IBM’s CloudBurst. vStart has compute, storage, networking and management software into a single unit, and comes preloaded with VMware’s ESXi hypervisor. Dell’s goal is to give customers a product that is ready to run right out of the box with no complex assembly required.

New cloud data centers

When Dell started building large data centers and rumors had been swirling for quite a while about it wanting to buy Rackspace. Now we have the official announcement: Dell will build multiple data centers to offer IaaS, PaaS and storage as a service. Dell will offer a PaaS service based on Microsoft Windows Azure and it’s possible that Dell’s IaaS and storage services will be based on the OpenStack platform. Dell is an OpenStack project member.

New Solution Centers Provide Blueprints for the Future

Dell will open 12 Global Solution Centers this year and is planning 10 more over the next 18 months, to better bring open, capable and affordable solutions to organizations around the world. This global network of solution centers will provide a backdrop for customers to learn about Dell’s industry-focused solutions and domain expertise.

These are all big steps for Dell, which until now has been building its cloud computing identity through software products and partnerships to add value to Dell’s servers and through some highly dense PowerEdge servers designed for cloud data centers. With vStart and the promise of cloud services, Dell is showing that it wants to finally shake its commodity-box-maker image and hang with the big boys.

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Citrix’ pushes Personal Cloud

Citrix' wants to make all data and applications available to users on any device, without threatening IT security. The PC era, which replaced the mainframe era, is now being replaced by the cloud era, and each user will have a ‘personal cloud’!

A personal cloud is something that is much bigger than just a Windows desktop. It's the way people want to work, from any location, at any time, on any device, with everything they need to be successful.

Two new Citrix Netscaler technologies:

• Cloud Gateway, to be available in physical and virtual appliances, sits at the "front door" of the data center, connecting Web applications and Windows apps to any device in a secure manner, while providing single sign-on to users. The Gateway will also monitor a customer's licenses and service-level agreements.

• Cloud Bridge, a companion piece, sits at the "back door" of the network to provide a secure connection between the data center and cloud services. WAN optimization improves data flow and reduces use of bandwidth, and lets you split up the components of an application between data center and cloud. E.g. a customer could run most of an application in a cloud service but keep Active Directory and sensitive data in-house for security reasons.

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AT&T’s Billion $$ for Cloud & Mobility Solutions

After Verizon’s Terremark acquisition for more than a billion dollar and Dell’s announcement for investing billion dollar in Cloud and Datacenter, Now its AT&T’s Billion $$ for Cloud & Mobility Solutions

AT&T's 2011 investment priorities include:

Advanced Mobility Solutions and Connected Devices: In 1Q 2011, AT&T added 1.6 million emerging devices. More than 12 million emerging devices are now connected to the AT&T network. AT&T has seen the use of mobile applications triple since 2009.

Cloud Based and Emerging Services: AT&T has embedded cloud capabilities directly into its network so that the company can manage and deliver services and applications as part of a total solution to any device. These services offer customers tremendous flexibility and shared economics for their compute and storage needs – and are all protected by AT&T's industry-leading network-based security solutions.

Global Enterprise Networking: AT&T has invested in business-focused networks, systems and applications to provide a globally consistent set of robust and highly-secure services for target multinational customers.

Small Business Services: To serve its more than $3m SMB business customers in the U.S., AT&T is continuing to invest in delivering new and simplified service bundles and increasing download speeds within its existing 22- state broadband footprint.

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Microsoft-Cisco-Netapps : Private cloud

NetApp Simplifies Customers’ Transition to Private Cloud : Solution Enables Advanced Management and Service Automation.

Validated through the Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track program, the NetApp Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track with Cisco data center architecture design helps customers reduce infrastructure and application deployment time from days to hours while helping them achieve greater utilization of their physical and virtual resource pools.

The NetApp Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track with Cisco data center architecture design uses Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V R2 and Microsoft System Center, a common management platform to help ease management and enable automation and self-service provisioning of the entire private cloud infrastructure, including features such as automated self-service provisioning via native Opalis Integration Packs.

Built on a flexible, shared infrastructure, the NetApp Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track with Cisco design is a tested data center architecture that can scale vertically or horizontally.

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