a buyerâ€™s guide to choosing a cloud service provider

A Buyer’s Guideto Choosing a CloudService Provider

white paper

© Skytap, Inc. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Dynamic IT Workloads are Ideal Candidates for External Clouds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

What Are the Top Ten Enterprise Requirements? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1. Ability to Run Existing Enterprise Applications Unchanged in the Cloud . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

2. Self-Service Web Portal for Functional Users . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

3 VDC Control, Configurability and Visibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

4 VDC Install and Snapshot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

5. Import and Export VMware Images . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

6. Support for Existing Software Licenses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

7. Role-Based User Access Control (UAC) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

8. Policy Management, Cost Control and Charge-Back . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

9. Team Collaboration and Workflow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

10. Enterprise-Class Support and Training . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Dynamic IT Workloads are Ideal Candidates for External Clouds

Enterprise CIOs are actively looking for ways to

adopt cloud computing solutions that (1) deliver

agility and immediate cost savings and (2) can be

adopted incrementally without posing a major risk

to business operations . Dynamic IT workloads, such

as application development and test projects, IT

prototyping projects, ERP and application migration

projects and virtual training classrooms, can account

for 35% or more of IT infrastructure and are prime

candidates for ‘virtual private clouds’ . They offer

immediate opportunities for cost savings as they

are often underutilized due to uneven demand,

and expensive to administer because they require

frequent set-up and tear-down work . They are also

low-risk candidates to move to an external cloud as

they don’t typically have an immediate impact on

mission-critical systems .

What Are the Top Ten Enterprise Requirements?

Given the recognition that dynamic IT workloads

are one of the most compelling use cases for

cloud computing, IT managers are exploring cloud

vendors such as Skytap, Amazon EC2, Rackspace,

and Microsoft Azure as a way to move these

environments externally to cloud-based Virtual

Data Centers (VDCs) .

1 White Paper » A Buyer’s Guide to Choosing a Cloud Service Provider


Based on our experience with Fortune 1000

companies, we’ve compiled the top ten enterprise

requirements to adopt external cloud for these

workloads:

1. Ability to Run Existing Enterprise Applications Unchanged in the Cloud

2. Self-Service Web Portal for Functional Users

3. VDC Control, Configurability and Visibility

4. VDC Install and Snapshot

5. Import and Export VMware Images

6. Support for Existing Software Licenses

7. Role-Based User Access Control (UAC)

8. Policy Management, Cost Control and Charge-Back

9. Team Collaboration and Workflow

10. Enterprise-Class Support and Training

Buyers need to ask themselves: how do different

vendors compare against these requirements?

There is a lot of discussion in the press around

Microsoft Azure, Amazon EC2, VMware vCloud

and similar offerings but are they ready to support

enterprise requirements, especially for dynamic IT

workloads?

This white paper explores the top ten requirements

in detail and explains how the Skytap Cloud

supports these requirements .

Most enterprises are now evaluating external clouds to offload their dynamic IT workloads, including application development, testing, training, IT prototyping and ERP migration environments . This white paper explores the top ten requirements buyers must evaluate to select the right cloud provider .



1. Ability to Run Existing Enterprise Applications Unchanged in the Cloud

Ask any enterprise CIO what platforms and vendors

they use to support the business, and a typical answer

includes most of major vendors and platforms .

Enterprises have many flavors of operating systems

(Windows, Linux, Solaris,etc .), application servers /

platforms ( .NET, JEE, etc) and databases (SQL Server,

Oracle, DB2 etc) . In addition, enterprises typically

have mainframe and Unix-based systems that

support key business processes .

Most cloud services are designed as a platform for

building new scalable applications and services,

not as a way to extend existing enterprise IT

workloads to an external cloud . As such, the range

of supported operating systems, infrastructure

applications (e .g . Windows Domain Controllers)

and enterprise applications falls well short of the

requirements for an enterprise cloud provider . In

contrast, Skytap supports all enterprise applications

and operating environments that run on the x86

platform, including ERP systems and client-server

applications . In addition, Skytap’s state-of-the-art

network virtualization provides virtual data centers

that support mainstream infrastructure applications .

Finally, Skytap enables a ‘virtual private cloud’

through an enterprise-grade IPSec VPN capability

to enable secure, seamless connectivity to in-house

systems, including mainframes and Web services

that cannot be moved to an external cloud .

2. Self-Service Web Portal for Functional Users

Enterprises have a wide range of business

activities that require virtual data center access .

These activities can range from development and

testing, application migration, technical sales,

consulting, support, and training . These activities

involve technical users, such as IT administrators

and developers, but also functional users, such

as business analysts, project managers, software

testers, and line-of-business users such as sales

engineers, trainers and support professionals . The

cost savings and agility associated with ‘self-service’

access to computing resources can’t be realized if an

external cloud solution requires a technical user to

provision and provide access to these resources .

Some ‘Infrastructure-as-a-Service’ providers such

as GoGrid or Amazon EC2 are designed for technical

users that need simple, low-cost environments, and

are comfortable using mostly command-line tools or

a basic Web interface . In contrast, Skytap’s Web portal

is designed to enable any user to perform complex IT

operations with simple actions . This enables rapid

adoption, immediate results and reduces time-

consuming manual set-up work for IT . This approach

also enables a self-service platform that can handle

a wide-range of use cases, from distance training

of business users, to user acceptance testing and

prototyping of new business applications .

Fig. 1 Skytap Self-Service Portal



Many ‘Infrastructure-as-a-Service’ offerings

only support “cookie cutter” instance types, so

it becomes almost impossible to fully replicate

an existing enterprise IT environment in the

cloud . Also, most cloud vendors don’t provide

sophisticated administrative tools to provide

visibility into deployed VDCs . In contrast, Skytap

offers full configurability of servers and networking

3. VDC Control, Configurability and Visibility

In the same way enterprises run a wide range of

applications and platforms, they also need to support

a wide range of infrastructure configurations in a

virtual data center (VDC) . For instance, a particular

application may be clustered and require servers

with multiple network interfaces (NICs) . Another

application may be processor intensive and require

a high number of CPU cores or memory per server

to perform effectively . Control and configurability of

VDC infrastructure becomes very important when an

external cloud is used for application development

and testing, because the test environment needs

to mirror the production environment as closely as

possible . Finally, administrators want visibility into

all the VDCs deployed across their organization,

including owners, usage details and audit trails .

through its self-service user interface . This includes

the ability to dynamically scale disks, set CPU cores

and memory per virtual machine, configure NICs

and MAC addresses, and specify network subnet

addresses, host IP addresses, host names and more .

Skytap also provides a powerful administrator

interface to query deployed virtual machines and

data centers, usage and audit trails .

4. VDC Install and Snapshot

Most enterprise applications are complex and

comprise multiple interconnected servers and

services . The concept of a virtual data center becomes

important to encapsulate these applications and

services and enable entire IT environments to be

deployed accurately and quickly .

With other cloud services, it’s not possible to easily

deploy an entire virtual data center, including

custom infrastructure settings and network

configuration . Furthermore, they don’t support the

capability of suspending an entire VDC and taking a

snapshot (including memory state of the machines) .

This results in a lot of manual set-up and tear-down

work to create IT environments .

Skytap provides the concept of virtual data

center configurations to enable deployment of

complex multi-machine environments in seconds .

Furthermore, it enables an entire virtual data

center to be suspended and saved (as a snapshot)

into the Skytap configuration library or simply

shutdown until later use . Snapshots are especially

useful when diagnosing software bugs, as an entire

application stack can be suspended at the point of

failure for a developer to debug at a later time . It is

also useful to save a ‘golden image’ of a virtual data

center for deployment at a later date .

Fig. 2 VDC Control and Configurability



5. Import and Export VMware Images

The vast majority of enterprises run VMware

for their virtualization platform and expect

their external cloud provider to run on the same

platform . Furthermore, the ability to import and

export virtual machine images is important to

enable interoperability between environments and

a way to avoid vendor lock-in . Finally, if an existing

VMware ‘gold master’ image exists, it’s much easier

to import this image than recreate from scratch in an

external cloud .

Most cloud services run on a customized version

of the Xen hypervisor and do not support VMware

images natively . In addition, they don’t offer full

import and export of virtual machines, which only

enables files to be moved an existing base image .

In contrast, Skytap supports the same VMware

platform that most enterprises use today and

provides the capability for self-service, automated

import and export of VMware images .

6. Support for Existing Software Licenses

Most enterprises have already negotiated and

paid for licensing agreements with major vendors

to cover their enterprise-wide usage . For instance,

Microsoft’s MSDN licenses cover the development

and test of Microsoft products by specified

individuals in an organization . Most cloud providers

charge a per hour fee for the use of Windows

machines and do not enable enterprises to use their

existing MSDN licenses . In contrast, Skytap enables

organizations to utilize their MSDN licenses within

its external cloud and avoid double payment for

development and test use cases .

7. Role-Based User Access Control (UAC)

Enabling sophisticated user access control (UAC)

is a key requirement for enterprise adoption of

external clouds . Users within an enterprise often

have different permission levels depending on their

role . For instance, an administrator may have the

right to view a complete audit trail of activity in a

virtual data center, whereas an offshore tester may

only have access to a sand-box test environment

to complete specific test cases . Furthermore,

enterprises often require a ‘single sign-on’ capability

to utilize the same LDAP or Active Directory servers

for user management .

Most cloud providers don’t offer sophisticated role-

based access to accounts or the ability to specify

permission levels for users . Skytap’s solutions,

however, offer a rich UAC model and ability to set

fine-grain permissions depending on the role of the

user . For instance, roles such as ‘managers’, ‘editors’

and ‘members’ can be implemented to enable

different levels of access to a virtual data center . In

addition, sandboxes can be created and published

for vendors or consultants that enable work to

be completed, but have no access to a corporate

network .



8. Policy Management, Cost Control and Charge-Back

The ability to enforce enterprise IT policies, ensure

costs are kept under control, and enable charge-back

billing to internal groups are key requirements for

any large enterprise organization . ‘Infrastructure-

as-a-Service’ providers typically offer no advanced

cost control capabilities or the ability to isolate

usage to internal groups for charge-back .

Furthermore, they usually require that IT policies

are implemented manually rather than enabling

policies to be enforced across the organization .

9. Team Collaboration and Workflow

Cloud-based virtual data centers are highly dynamic

environments which are accessed by a broad range

of functional users and typically deliver dramatic

improvements in team productivity . For instance,

an IT professional can be prototyping a new server

installation and want to share it with a security

expert for review, or a tester can find a bug that’s

very hard to replicate and want to suspend an entire

virtual data center and share it with a developer

for debugging . Facilitating an agile approach to IT

delivery is one of the major drivers that increase

IT’s ability to rapidly implement new projects and

maintain alignment with business priorities .

Most cloud providers offer virtual infrastructure, but

do not deliver a platform to dramatically improve

team performance . Skytap was designed from

the outset to provide a complete cloud solution

for enterprise IT teams, including collaboration

and workflow capabilities . For instance, Skytap

provides WebEx-type capabilities so users can

share desktops in real-time using a secure URL . In

addition, Skytap provides project functionality to

enable users to share virtual data centers, assets

and documents . It also enables users to save and

restore entire virtual data centers into a central

repository, so IT environments can easily be cloned

and shared across distributed teams, much in the

same way users collaborate using products like

Microsoft SharePoint .

In contrast, Skytap offers cost control capabilities

which have been proven to reduce the Total Cost of

Ownership (TCO) of enterprise workloads by 50%

or more . For example, Skytap enables virtual data

centers to be auto-suspended when not in use to

save costs . In addition, quotas can be applied to

individuals and organizations to cap usage unless

authorization is obtained to burst capacity . Skytap

also enables IT policies to be enforced globally, such

as approved subnet ranges for virtual data centers

and the ability to prevent assignment of public IP

addresses to virtual machines .

Fig. 3 Cost Control and Charge Back



10. Enterprise-Class Support and Training

Enterprises run mission-critical systems and expect

the highest levels of vendor support and training

to ensure smooth deployment and operation of

IT systems that support the business . Many cloud

providers offer premium support for a fee, but this

case-based support over the phone falls short of

the enterprise-class service typically provided by

vendors . In contrast, Skytap assigns a dedicated

account team for each customer, including a

named account manager and technical support

engineer . Our on-boarding process ensures

customers successfully adopt Skytap in their

organization and our account team is always on

hand to answer questions or help solve customer

issues . In addition, our product management and

engineering organization frequently engages with

our customers, ensuring new feature requests and

ideas for improvements are rolled into our solutions

on a regular basis .

Summary

Adopting a cloud vendor for dynamic IT workloads is

a smart move for almost any enterprise organization .

Considering the high cost and time burden involved

in managing workloads such as application

development, testing, IT prototyping and application

migration, external clouds such as Skytap can

provide an easy way to off-load these environments

to the cloud and gain time and resources to focus

on the core business priorities . Just as Software-

as-a-Service vendors such as Salesforce .com offer

a low-risk, high ROI alternative to in-house CRM

packages, using a Skytap for dynamic IT workloads

offers similar benefits . Organizations typically see

immediate cost savings, increased productivity

and improved responsiveness to the business by

incorporating Skytap as part of their IT strategy .

For more information, interactive demos and pricing for

Skytap please visit www.skytap.com or call a customer

representative on 1-888-759-8278 (1-888-SKY-TAP8).

Fig. 4 Sharing a Virtual Data Center in the Cloud

Skytap, Inc.

710 2nd Avenue, Suite 1130 Seattle, WA 98104

Toll Free: +1-888-759-8278 (1-888-SKY-TAP8)

Direct: +1-206-866-1162

Web: www .skytap .com


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