For data center operators, cloud operators, and service providers, being able to grow their business and scale up is one of the major topics of discussion. Large enterprises, when managing large IT infrastructures and multiple business units, share the same requirements. Elasticity is another topic of interest in recent cloud computing discussions enabling IT as a utility or as a pay-per-use model.

In order to be elastic, and to pay only for true usage, management software needs to be able to scale up and down. Management and monitoring capability needs to change according to the data center and cloud environment’s computation power: network traffic, flows, packets, logs/events, metrics, and devices. Therefore, being able to scale is a prerequisite of being able to elastic.

A recent visit to a global Fortune 100 enterprise highlighted the strengths of AccelOps versus our major competition. Simply having multiple copies of a SIEM appliance, whether virtual or otherwise, is not synonymous with being able to scale out event cross-correlation capabilities. True elasticity requires clustered cross correlation capabilities, dynamic deployment of virtual appliances for more processing power, usage accounting, and a flexible licensing model. This is Elastic EPS and AccelOps provides this unique capability in our Integrated Data center and Cloud Monitoring solution.

A year ago, I was reading a cloud computing report from Lazard Capital and I could not agree more with them: cloud computing is not about technology, it is all about the business model; it is about how IT is consumed as a utility. So the data center is still made up of servers, storage, networking and security equipment. But how the data center is used or offered as a service is the key topic of interest.

One year later, at Gartner’s Datacenter Conference, cloud computing was greatly demystified. It is no longer something as fuzzy and remotely untouchable as a cloud in the sky anymore. Instead, more concrete definitions of cloud computing, its characteristics, and initial success stories in the real-world have been shared among analysts, vendors, and industry practitioners.

Management Software, whether it is provisioning, monitoring, or the help-desk, needs to meet the following requirements:

• Service-result focus: whether it can quickly and easily allow service providers bring up new services, add new clients etc.
• Shared/Multi-tenancy: an environment where multiple organizations or customers are hosted and managed. An efficient way to view, mark, and control them is key, but at the same time reducing the operational overhead of multiple solutions and their corresponding investment costs.
• Utility-based and usage-chargeable: can the management software support the IT-as-utility model by understanding how each organization and each customer uses resources, and provide the option of charging the customers accordingly.
• Scalable and Elastic: the goal of the service provider is to efficiently service many different customers. Can they easily scale to hundreds of customers? Service providers employ a recurring revenue and fee-based model so their licensing framework needs to be flexible and allow for unpredictable growth.

If you look at these characteristics, you will see that they are the common practices and requirements seen day-in and day-out in the service provider world, whether it is the traditional telephone service provider, or power and electricity providers. In other words, the data center, whether public or private, needs to run and operate like a service provider. If so, the management software is the key layer that considers all of the moving parts in the data center to provide the concerted effort of ‘IT as utility’.

Up to this point, management software of the last 10 – 20 years was focused on the traditional enterprise model. Many vendors’ products were built with one single organization in mind. Although they have been used in many enterprises and service providers , they are in fact serving the management of the data center, not the cloud (again, a difference in the business model). Therefore, in order to provide the ‘IT as a utility’ business model , one can not just say ‘we have been serving the datacenters and service providers, therefore we are serving cloud computing’.

A 10-20 year old tool cannot all of a sudden become a cloud computing software platform. As a matter of fact, many private and public data centers, and service providers, in the current transition phase to cloud computing or a utility computing business model, are feeling the pain of trying to put a square peg into a round hole. As a result, they are giving up on the legacy solutions and looking elsewhere for innovative solutions that realistically address the requirements and characteristics of cloud computing.

We encourage data center operators, cloud operators, and service providers to investigate these characteristics in management software. You will find exactly that with AccelOps’ Integrated Datacenter and Cloud Monitoring Platform.