It is almost impossible to precisely know where data is at any one time in a virtual environment; however, it is the user experience and the impact to business that is most important.
This is the view of Ken Blackwell, CA's vice-president and chief architect, responsible for the technical direction of the company's service assurance products.
Blackwell spoke at one of the largest gatherings of business partners and IT leaders in SA, the CA IT Management Symposium Africa 2011, held in Sandton.
Quantum physics
“According to Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, for tiny things like subatomic particles, it is impossible to know precisely and simultaneously where it is and how fast it's going.
“In the IT industry, we are seeing that with cloud computing and virtualisation; it turns out that virtualised resources in the cloud are very similar to sub atomic particles in quantum physics. It is impossible to know precisely where they are and how fast they are performing at the same time,” explained Blackwell.
Yet, he noted, the challenge arises where the CIO still has the requirements to know how virtualisation is performing and what benefits it's bringing to an organisation.
Blackwell said the end-user generally doesn't know or care about where the data sits in a virtualised environment; whether it's in the public, private or public cloud. However, he said, it's up to IT to measure IT effectiveness to design the best strategy to meet growing business demands.
End-user demands
He said: “Service level agreements are not specified in terms of processor and memory utilisation, network throughput and system availability.
“The result is that measuring the end-user experience in the form of transactions that the user initiates with the service, becomes the critical metric to follow.”
Blackwell indicated the CIO needs to decide on the best service for the company, and the mechanism in which to deliver it; whether it's on-premise or in the cloud. “The decision needs to be based on the user experience and user demands and not so much about the IT infrastructure and what's under the hood.”
In order to better serve the business, Blackwell suggested that IT needs to deploy transaction management, bringing together infrastructure to fit with business service management.
He said a well-designed business service management strategy combining both IT environment and business requirements will improve the end-user experience and provide an overall view of where IT resources sit in the organisation.
“We are seeing a convergence of infrastructure management and application management. In the past five years ago, they were a world apart. However, a common management structure and similar requirements is forcing them to work together.”
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