– Courtney Behrens, Marketing Manager with Virtacore Systems (www.virtacore.com), says:

Cloud computing is extremely beneficial for today’s datacenters. Private clouds are typically offered as a more managed service offering, so companies can move some (or all) of day to day IT management duties to a cloud provider, housed in a datacenter. This increase of customers choosing the cloud means cloud companies will continue to increase their footprint in datacenters.
IT Managers should care because of the variety of operational and strategic benefits:

  • Better visibility into the underlying hardware, makes for better capacity management, planning, etc.
  • Ability to customize your underlying hardware as needed, from compute and storage. IE quad CPU’s and SSD storage for a database layer vs. dual quad and data for a development/staging environment. Companies leveraging cloud computing have the ability to implementtiered pricing to meet different levels of business requirements, as one size does not fit all.
  • Offload tasks such as patch management, data backups and replication, application delivery management, auto-scaling, to a cloud provider, in order to free up employees’ time, increasing productivity and efficiency.

Where should cloud computing rank in terms of overall priority in the data center?

Cloud computing services, in some form, can benefit every aspect of IT departments. From the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) perspective, companies can choose from self or managed private clouds, pay-as-you-go public clouds and hybrid, a mix of both. Additionally, there are SaaS and PaaS offerings to help at the application level.

Administratorsare most concerned about moving infrastructure to the cloud, but they can also utilizePaaS and SaaS providers, leveraging their already establishedfootprint within data centers.

Challenges for data center and IT managers when it comes to cloud computing:

Customers that operate their own datacenters often need to become more agile. They need to make sure they have high levels of automation to keep up with how business is being conducted. IT operations now have to keep up with the business and need to adapt to the changing needs of the business, in a timely manner.

There are providers that offer hybrid clouds, where you can move your data to and from on-premise servers and private or public clouds. These providers had business process in mind when building their clouds, and not vendor lock-in.

Data center and IT managerscan utilize virtualization in order to enable server consolidation and improve efficiency, all while lowering IT costs. For many, running in avirtualized environment will make the shift to cloud computing a bit easier as they have an understanding of how their applications run, what they need in terms of compute resources.

IT Managers need to choose cloud computing solutions that best map to receiving benefits such as flexibility and scalability. We at Virtacore have heard concern around giving up access todata, and that does not have to be true. A cloud provider should make it easy for you to access, or even remove any part of the cloud environment. An IT Manager should want their data in the cloud because of the business value it provides, and not feel they are being locked in with one particular vendor.