Monday, October 25, 2010

Jobs phased out by the Cloud

Is your job secure from being phased out by cloud computing?  Cloud providers will be responsible for most of the technical requirements, so where does that leave you?

Most technical issues in computing will soon be handled by the hypervisors, load balancers, etc. on the suppliers end. However, each supplier will have to be monitored and managed through service contracts.

Infoworld has specified some role shifts based on Forrester and Gartner:

IT jobs of the future will be highly administrative with a focus on capacity planning and contract management – Gravitant, Inc.

Quick tools to help you prepare for this shift are available here

Friday, October 15, 2010

Overutilization vs Underutilization of Virtual Machines

Does virtualization truly improve utilization?

If so, shouldn’t cost be lower as a result?  Well, maybe in the short term…  but in the long term we are starting to see cases where costs accumulate over time and virtualization ends up being more expensive.

Gravitant’s response:
Over-provisioning of Virtual Machines has resulted in Virtual Machine sprawl, which is difficult to manage.  This has resulted in higher cost over time.  On the other hand under-provisioning results in lower performance and SLA penalties.” – Mohammed Farooq, CEO Gravitant

Gravitant’s capacity planning tool configures the optimal physical and virtual machine landscape of servers, network, and storage to
  1. Minimize VM Sprawl
  2. Meet application performance thresholds
  3. Reduce data center costs – systems and operations
Operations Research tools are used to balance the tradeoff between cost (due to sprawl) and performance (from SLAs).