Have you ever been sucked in to a late night infomercial where the story sounded so incredible that you dug out your credit card to get the item? But when it arrived a few days later, it was a lot more complicated than you were led to believe? Sometimes, some claims are too good to be true.
When it comes to cloud deployments, we are starting to hear the same things. Cloud and virtual server technology providers promote the speed and agility of their offerings, claiming to take seconds or minutes to roll out a new instance of a VM. It’s touted as a competitive advantage – the ability to get new projects and applications up and running quickly.
While their claims are technically true, there should be an asterisk tied to the claim. Why? Because our customers are finding that reality is typically slightly different. They don’t take into account other network aspects that IT needs to complete and manage in order to take a new virtual instance onto a production network and into service. In fact, most customers I talk to measure time to deploy a new virtual resource in days or weeks, not the promoted seconds or minutes.
We asked IDG Research to look at real life situations to explore what’s hype and what’s reality, based on real-world experience.
The resulting IDG white paper, available here, compares some of the promises made about private cloud results with an objective assessment of how long it really takes to get virtual machines into service. It also discusses:
- How quickly cloud adoption is progressing
- Network provisioning issues that can undermine expected benefits
- The improvements that automated management of IP addresses and DNS records can yield
- How GlaxoSmithKline improved their cloud deployment with cloud network automation.
It’s a good read and a good dose of reality. Check out this white paper before you buy into the latest hype.