Essentials of Cloud Computing: Capacity Planning and Optimization

During this 30 minute presentation CA Technologies will show you how a centralized catalog of all business and IT services can prove to be the solution to optimize end-to-end service delivery for service providers.

Long before the term ‘virtual sprawl’ came to be popular as it is today, organizations have suffered from other types of ‘sprawl,’ such as in this case, pertaining to applications, self-service portals, and light-weight catalogs that are specific only to focused service areas. The challenge? Users needed to know the various locations and formalities required to submit a proper request. A consequence? A high percent of erroneous service requests that lead to backlogs in other areas of IT, which can also lead to more manual tasks for resolutions that will cause more delay to the service delivery lifecycle. This is only one of many consequences.

In this session, we will discuss not only how CA’s Service Catalog addresses self-service sprawl, but also how leveraging it for automated service delivery and chargeback, benefit service providers to meet their service levels and improve customer relationships.

Regardless of industry, the demand on IT continues to grow- across all IT environments. But how can IT meet the needs of the business, drive innovation, and ensure the availability of both new and old applications with either flat or decreasing budgets? The need for IT to become more efficient at providing services to end users is no longer a luxury, it’s an absolute requirement.
Predictive Reliability provides visibility into transactions across various environments, enabling you to determine future requirements and the resources needed to meet those demands. You’ll be able to answer questions like, how efficiently are we using our resources? Is there waste within our data center? How can we repurpose resources and perform the necessary mediation to improve user experience?
Join us for this informational discussion with Kathy Hickey, Paul Peterson, and Jeremy Rossbach.

As a service provider, you are constantly looking for ways to deploy new cloud services faster, making smart infrastructure investment choices, and looking to help on-board customers more quickly into their public/private cloud environments.

Capacity management plays a critical role in order for you to be certain that you can meet current and future demands of your smart cloud customers.

Join this webcast and hear more about how some major service providers use capacity management to:
- Ramp up new services to advice customers on how to optimize their current IT environments and plan for the future
- Provide customers with trending, historic data with correlated intelligence between response time and cost
- Better manage internal changes and accommodate growth

Don’t miss this opportunity to hear how capacity management has evolved into a critical tool for business and IT planning to help prepare your business for the cloud.

Are you considering converged infrastructure as the platform for a private cloud initiative? Or should you be evaluating public cloud providers to offload your commodity services so you can focus more on innovative IT projects that drive business growth? How do you know how much hardware you need? How do you modernize application architectures and platforms to support business growth?

An essential step to answer these questions starts with capacity management. Join this webcast to learn how to:
• Use predictive analytics to tell you where you can put virtual workloads while ensuring application performance so you can overcome virtual stall.
• Combine real-world performance data and financial information with modeling, simulation and automation to project future performance and service levels of business services on converged infrastructure platforms or public cloud environment
• Use capacity management to form a strategy for platform application migration to a cloud computing environment on converged infrastructure or via public cloud providers

Don’t miss this opportunity to hear directly from domain experts on how to use capacity management to harness the cloud.

During this 30 minute presentation CA Technologies will show you how to efficiently automate your Datacenter migration. Technology has outpaced the ability to manage it manually in every large enterprise and many smaller ones. Failure to build and evolve a well-integrated automation technology portfolio will almost guarantee catastrophic failure of the organization as it tries to expand virtualization’s footprint. Automation is no longer an optional luxury; it is now a mandate.

CA Technologies software is designed to help you dynamically deploy and elastically scale IT services at your own pace to help minimize risk and make the best possible use of your existing investments. Efforts to improve agility and efficiency are driving rapid implementation of virtualization and cloud computing initiatives. However, the burden of managing the complexity these initiatives introduce can quickly outweigh the benefits. To address this complexity, the software provides a comprehensive, step-wise approach to automation that is designed to help you build a dynamic data center that delivers on the promise of virtualization and cloud computing.

CA Technologies solutions help you create a more agile and dynamic infrastructure with unified automation across the data center so you can automate the provisioning of physical, virtual, and cloud resources; build elasticity so you can dynamically allocate resources; orchestrate and automate routine processes; standardize and automate configuration management to minimize business disruptions; standardize data center management with policy-driven configuration tracking and template-based change that help you to create, run, and audit policies governing performance, security, regulatory and standards compliance; combine self-service with automated provisioning to empower users to turn up new services on-demand; and leverage automation to speed the progression of applications from development to production.

During this 30 minute presentation CA Technologies will show you how to dynamically deploy and scale IT services by leveraging internal private clouds while seamlessly integrating access to supplemental resources in public clouds. Implementing this requires cost effectively “bursting” capacity-demand, ensuring consistent service operation, automating the provisioning of physical, virtual and cloud resources, as well as enabling your existing infrastructure to deliver cloud services.

In order to fully capitalize on the promise of cloud computing, IT needs a well-defined methodology for exposing services in a standardized manner, accelerating delivery and managing demand—while monitoring, capturing and analyzing ongoing usage, cost and performance metrics.

CA Technologies cloud solutions provide automated self-service delivery of virtual and physical infrastructure as well as application services. Pre-integrated content is designed to deliver standard use case workflows so you can get up and running quickly, and deliver rapid time-to-value. To help accelerate the transition to automated service delivery, pre-integrated workflows that are designed specifically to support best practice IaaS use cases, are included out-of-the-box. Included is service metering, billing and reporting capabilities so you can easily associate direct and indirect costs to your services and provide cost transparency while aligning to your budgets and fiscal periods. A native billing engine will automatically calculate and invoice the consumption of cloud services for any size organization. A cloud solution requires compliance management and the requisite ability to discover and configure systems, services and application.

Industry research reports that most IT shops use only 18-20% of their CPU Capacity. A capacity management solution will help you identify opportunities for consolidation or virtualization, maximize VM saturation and realize the potential savings. Know with certainty how applications will behave after the migration to virtualization, freeing you to make those changes with confidence.

Join this webcast to learn how you can utilize capacity management to:
• Right size virtual and physical infrastructures according to workloads
• Size and plan virtualization projects, platform upgrades or cloud migrations
• Leverage a hardware model library to compare alternative infrastructures including Cisco, VCE, vBlock, Dell, HP, IBM and more.

IT organizations are increasingly being called upon to cost-effectively deliver reliable support for the entire catalog of business services, or risk outsourcing to a managed service provider. Previously, IT architects would use historical trends to predict capacity requirements and simply over-provision to account for any peaks caused by seasonality, error, or extraneous influences like Mergers & Acquisitions. Over-provisioning, combined with poor lifecycle management of new resources provisioned in the datacenter, has led to capacity utilization and inefficiency issues.

While historical data is great for understanding past issues and current state of the environment, the performance of servers, hosts and clusters is not linear; at some level of saturation, the performance of that infrastructure will quickly start to degrade. The impact is that business services dependent on that infrastructure suffer, and users experience longer response times, unavailable applications and unacceptable performance. Lack of predictability and uncertainty has caused many IT organizations to suffer “VM Stall,” meaning they have been unable to advance to a strategic deployment of virtualization and achieve expected levels of consolidation. IT must understand the impact of change on the infrastructure to ensure performance. Without that insight IT is unwilling to take that risk.

To proactively plan for capacity in order to support mission critical business services, IT must assess historical data captured by eHealth and couple it with predictive analytics. This allows you to efficiently manage what the actual capacity utilization of that business service is and what it will be as the workload grows, the infrastructure virtualizes, or other changes are introduced. Given this predictive capability, IT could effectively foresee capacity issues in the future to assess alternatives and provision the right infrastructure when needed.

Business and technology are changing faster and faster, in fact the top three technologies we all work with today causing major changes in business and IT are social media, cloud and mobility didn’t even exist a few short years ago…

The emergence of cloud computing alone has resulted in changes for both IT and the business resulting in the business demanding quick, easy to use applications to run their organization. If they feel that they can’t get it from IT, they’ll source it themselves.
And there’s always the ever changing economy that never lets up on competition. Organizations no longer can rely on budget and resource cuts to sustain business. They need to transform their businesses to maintain and drive growth in their organization – or face defeat.

Organizations need to develop a consistent cloud strategy. If the cloud is the next wave, why are organizations not moving faster? Because there are a lot of questions (and causes confusion). This is what keeps CIO’s and CEO’s awake at night, wondering about how they go about moving Apps to the Cloud, which ones first, which are good candidates, etc. Typically vendors come in to do an evaluate and advise on moving to the Cloud, and all they could tell them was they’d save 20% in server costs and hardware. They told them nothing about which apps were good candidates, what the savings would be, what the business value and/or impact would be Application Portfolio Management and Cloud Application Assessment does.

Cloud Capability Assessment and Strategy (CAAS) is designed to have a clear focus on providing recommendations to migrate the right applications to the right cloud environment at the right time. The focus is on applications and IT services, rather than a focus on infrastructure and operations. Establish a policy to make decisions about where and when to migrate applications and services to which Cloud Computing environment, based on application characteristics.

While IAM as a cloud service offers real value, many organizations have invested significantly in on-premise IAM implementations to meet their unique business and operational requirements. So how can a company realize the benefits of cloud IAM without sacrificing all the development and customization present in their on-premise IAM implementation?

Hybrid cloud IAM solutions offer the best of both worlds by combining the best practices of on-premise IAM implementations with the benefits, cost savings and efficiencies of cloud services. With careful planning and execution, the result is a solution that combines the cloud’s scalability and agility with all the traditional controls and data privacy of the on premise IAM deployment.

Please join Merritt Maxim from CA Technologies on October 17 for an informative session on how to plan for a hybrid cloud IAM architecture and key considerations organizations should take before moving down the path to hybrid cloud IAM. This session will be followed by an interactive panel session featuring a mix of industry experts and end-user organizations discussing hybrid cloud IAM.

You’ve probably heard how critical automation is on your journey to cloud. But how impactful is it really? And how can you prove the ROI of IT automation in order to build a business case for it? CA Technologies commissioned Forrester Consulting to investigate how best to demonstrate the ROI of IT automation solutions, specifically the total economic impact that CA Unified Automation solutions have on organizations like yours.

Join this webinar featuring guest speaker Michelle Bishop from Forrester Consulting and a customer using CA Technologies automation solutions to learn more about the methodology behind the study, the expected Return on Investment (ROI) of CA Unified Automation solutions, and the tangible benefits that one customer was able to realize. Session highlights include:
- Measuring and demonstrating the value of IT automation solutions
- Realizing the benefits of IT automation: A customer case study
- Assessing the benefits and expected impact of CA Unified Automation solutions

If you are considering automation or struggling to make that transition to cloud, this webinar will provide an insightful look into the impact IT automation solutions can have on your bottom line. Register today.

Organizations today are increasingly relying on cloud services for not only business-critical functions, but also to store and process their most sensitive data. Companies that meticulously control their internal identities and data frequently outsource their IT services to what is essentially a “black box,” thereby relinquishing direct control and relying on cloud service hosting companies to secure this sensitive data. To manage this risk, companies must determine the level of transparency and control they require for their cloud services and find a service provider that meets these requirements.

In this webcast, learn how to outsource more securely when moving to the cloud. Find out what key questions to ask as you evaluate your potential service providers, and how you can take advantage of Identity and Access Management (IAM) technologies to maintain visibility into your data, even when it is in the cloud.

Join us to learn how Unum, one of the world's largest benefits providers, transformed their IT Operations to a strategic, cost effective cloud services organization. This webinar will cover the transformation journey at Unum that went well beyond increased adoption of virtualization and included new collaboration models and a private cloud architecture made possible by CA Process Automation & Orchestration.

You’ve been asked to migrate your IT services to the cloud in order to capitalize on the promises of efficiency and agility. But with no incremental funding to build a private cloud infrastructure to support these workloads, your project has stalled. So where do you start?

Join this webinar to learn why capacity management is a critical step on your journey to cloud computing and how you can manage your near and longer term budget and capacity needs by understanding how your systems and hypervisors perform. You’ll see firsthand the technology available to help you:

•Rapidly assess the impact of new workloads on a cloud platform and size for variable demands
•Identify spare capacity where workloads can profitably be migrated from more expensive physical or virtual servers
•Predict the performance and service levels of existing workloads and automate load balancing activities
•Improve service quality by avoiding CPU, memory, and I/O capacity related incidents
•Understand the capacity tradeoffs between hypervisors by performing “what if” analyses based on actual workloads and hardware options
Lower the risk of V2V migrations when standardizing on hypervisors

The business is demanding revenue-producing business services and IT is expected to deliver those services despite growing complexity. You turn to the cloud to help create the speed and agility you need, but onboarding applications is slow and impacting your ability to deliver these services quickly. Sound familiar? You aren’t alone.

Whether you are migrating existing applications or deploying new services, this webinar will show how you can quickly onboard applications to cloud. You’ll see firsthand the technology available to help you:

•Create, provision and deploy new applications in minutes
•Quickly migrate entire business services from one data center to another
•Support multiple hypervisor types (XEN, VMware) in the same grid

Learn how IT organizations, like yours, are deploying cloud services fast and keeping the business happy by making true service agility possible.

Many organizations are turning to the cloud to deliver on the promises of improved service delivery and time-to-market. According to Gartner, agility and speed of deployment are the main benefits of private cloud computing*. But where do you start? How do you quickly deploy or migrate your applications to the cloud in order to turn these promises into reality?

Join this webinar to learn how to accelerate the delivery of your cloud services by quickly onboarding applications to the cloud. You’ll walk away with essential tips to help you:
• Accelerate time-to-market for new, innovative business services
• Reduce service deployment and provisioning time by as much as 90%
• Support consolidation or relocation initiatives by quickly migrating systems (i.e. P2P, P2V, V2V)

You’ll hear from one such organization that is already living the dream! Learn how they were able to quickly set up new business services, reducing deployment time and making service agility a reality for their business.

*Gartner, Inc., Private Cloud Computing: Target Services That Need Agility, Thomas J. Bittman, February 28, 2012

Watch this video and see how CA AppLogic Cloud platform helps Enterprises build cloud application from a catelog of appliances. Drag and drop! See for yourself.

Watch this video and gain insights into how you can deploy cloud services in hours, not month!

The Cloud is real and companies are adopting it for anything from CRM to email to their whole development environments. Your internal customers are spoiled for choice and they no longer need to get their services from their IT Department; they can now shop around for IT! With great choice comes great responsibility and while you may never move your most sensitive data or core services to the Cloud, you will be faced with decisions on what you should move, what are the benefits and pitfalls. Come to this session to hear how you should decide what is applicable to be moved to the Cloud, and how you take that first leap of faith! Get answers about what are the objections and pitfalls, as well as how organizations can avoid these. How do you balance the loss of control with the benefit of Cloud innovation and agility? How can you make do with imperfect alignment (80/20), and where can you expect benefits to be realized? Do these solutions ever really scale down or is it always just scaling up and who is really driving the decisions to adopt Cloud, is it IT or really the business?