BMC's CTO gives advice on cloud management

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I recently had the opportunity to talk to Kia Behnia, CTO at BMC Software. Given that BMC's core business is software to automate, control and manage enterprise systems, I thought it would be worthwhile to get Behnia's insight on managing applications in the cloud. "Cloud computing" is the buzz phrase of the day, and Behnia reminds us that there are important management practices to consider before and while moving applications to the cloud. 

FAQ: Cloud computing, demystified

"Two year ago, BMC made virtualization -- and by extension, cloud management -- a corporate strategic initiative," Behnia says. "We talked with several of our large enterprise customers, as well as large service providers and outsourcers, about their plans for adopting virtualization. We talked about what they saw as their challenges in regards to both adoption and management, and where they saw their vision at that time. Many of them talked about self-service, and being able to dynamically provision systems. This was prior to the term 'cloud computing.'"

Behnia says these discussions led to BMC engaging with these enterprises on a number of their virtualization projects. "One of the critical things we realized was that virtualization, which is really the precursor for 'the cloud,' amplifies the need for having a unified integrated management architecture, because the environment is shifting radically and too quickly becoming dynamic. It's very difficult to keep disparate [management] point products up-to-date with what you have, what's going on and what the impact is," Behnia says.

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I recently had the opportunity to talk to Kia Behnia, CTO at BMC Software. Given that BMC's core business is software to automate, control and manage enterprise systems, I thought it would be worthwhile to get Behnia's insight on managing applications in the cloud. "Cloud computing" is the buzz phrase of the day, and Behnia reminds us that there are important management practices to consider before and while moving applications to the cloud. 

FAQ: Cloud computing, demystified

"Two year ago, BMC made virtualization -- and by extension, cloud management -- a corporate strategic initiative," Behnia says. "We talked with several of our large enterprise customers, as well as large service providers and outsourcers, about their plans for adopting virtualization. We talked about what they saw as their challenges in regards to both adoption and management, and where they saw their vision at that time. Many of them talked about self-service, and being able to dynamically provision systems. This was prior to the term 'cloud computing.'"

Behnia says these discussions led to BMC engaging with these enterprises on a number of their virtualization projects. "One of the critical things we realized was that virtualization, which is really the precursor for 'the cloud,' amplifies the need for having a unified integrated management architecture, because the environment is shifting radically and too quickly becoming dynamic. It's very difficult to keep disparate [management] point products up-to-date with what you have, what's going on and what the impact is," Behnia says.

"We invested quite a bit of our resources, not just in adding functionality that was very specific around virtualization management, or cloud management, but also investing in the integration layer that is required for both BMC and non-BMC products to interoperate and integrate and work together to provide a broader set of management capabilities," he says.

The heterogeneous nature of cloud computing is one of the aspects that draws customers to it. No one wants to get locked into a particular vendor's solution or a specific computing platform. "Virtualization gives customers choice," Behnia says. "This is something I have heard distinctly from customers over the years -- that they don't want to go back to the dog days of being locked into a processer architecture or an operating system and having to be held hostage to a vendor and pricing around servers or what have you."

I asked Behnia what some of the important cloud management practices are to consider. He offered his advice around planning, automation and control, and monitoring for performance, availability and capacity.

"Planning is very important, especially for private clouds. You just cannot create a cloud and say 'here it is.' The cloud is only as good as the applications and the work flows that live in it," Behnia says. "Start by identifying what applications you have, what the current environment looks like, where the most appropriate areas are where you could virtualize those servers and plan how they would be utilized." Behnia recommends using discovery technology that can look at what is out there, and then store that information in a configuration management database. From there, capacity management products can monitor utilization of those resources and make assessments around what candidates there are for virtualization and how to place these candidates close to each other. In other words, workload modeling.

Linda Musthaler is a principal analyst with Essential Solutions Corporation.