Excellent article by Stephen Foley, director of federal systems for Hewlett-Packard StorageWorks addressing cloud deployment challenges.
Federal cloud deployment provides deliverables in agility and cost-efficiency, but challenges remain in security, storage and system architectures. Although these challenges propagate opportunities for contractors; vendors supplying the infrastructure should provide answers to help systems integrators (SI’s) better manage IT operations in both virtualized and cloud-directed environments.
Challenges in virtualization support
SI’s commonly report difficulty deploying cloud modalities, consolidation of many applications onto a single server potentially increases memory utilization. Teams should consider load balancing strategies to create a combination of storage and server resources for each application. Infrastructure technologies that provide a mixed workload support can also benefit from dynamic balancing and are able to assure data is accessible.
Storage architectures that claim to be ‘cloud-ready’
Look for storage architectures that provide multi-tenancy capabilities with some provisioning, clustering and autonomic self-management to optimize scalability without performance limitations.
Costs and procurement policies that don’t leverage private/hybrid cloud scaling
Effectively configured private or hybrid clouds can seamlessly scale to encompass two, ten, or even twenty times the initial number of users without an increase in equipment and human capital. Short-sighted procurement policies can force SI’s to make decisions based on near-term costs, instead implementing a converged cloud infrastructure.