IT infrastructure is not terribly agile today, but its imperative that it become more so in order to help businesses accelerate their time to market and over agility. This presentation covers a number of key challenges in achieving IT infrastructure agility across traditional, virtual and public cloud, within networked environments, and as self-service that doesn't end up in infrastructure waste. The presentation then introduces four key best practices and then tells a little bit about Quali's automation software solutions that are used by hundreds of customers today for agile infrastructure automation.

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Agile Infrastructure Automation
Alex Henthorn-Iwane
Vice-President, Marketing
Thursday, February 27, 2014
QualiSystems Proprietary & Confidential

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Quali Company Overview
Global Software Company
Established 2004, privately held
North America HQ: Santa Clara, CA
R&D Center: Tel Aviv, Israel
Market-leading supplier of automation solutions for:
• IT infrastructure self-service for DevOPS agility and cloud evolution
• Network test and test lab efficiency, productivity and savings
Mature, proven technology:
• Hundreds of customer deployments
• Millions of infrastructure elements managed
• $Billions in infrastructure managed
QualiSystems Proprietary & Confidential

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Oh Infrastructure, How Agile Art Thou?
The Goal:
•
•
•
•
•
The Reality?
Cloud-like self-service
Continuous everything
SDN/SDDC
Hybrid elasticity
Agile /Lean IT / DevOps
451 Research reports that 61% of companies were still at
the virtualization-only stage in the path to cloud readiness
QualiSystems Proprietary & Confidential

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Agile Infrastructure Implies Automation
Primary Value
Stream
APP
APP
APP
APP
Application Delivery Stakeholders
Secondary Value
Stream
Self-Service/Automation
QualiSystems Proprietary & Confidential

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Challenge: Self-Service Model
How to evolve self-service?
• Prevent VM creep/resource gridlock
• Make self-service a round-trip
• Reservation-based
• Both auto-provisioning and auto-reclamation
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Automation Challenge: Legacy’s Long Tail
Existing IT infrastructure a major
obstacle
• Massive investments in legacy
infrastructure
• Silo’d & homegrown applications
• Industry-specific infrastructurebeyond the traditional datacenter
“stack”
58% of CIOs
said the complexity of
their existing IT
environment was their
main barrier to adopting
the cloud
NTT Europe 2013 Survey of 300 CIOs on
barriers to cloud adoption
How to create self-service from this mess?
• Old apps & infrastructure are like the proverbial “old soldier”
• Mainframe + dedicated server + private VM + public cloud VM?
• Agility mandate is in no less intense in these environments
QualiSystems Proprietary & Confidential

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Challenge: Automation is Fixed or Fragmented
“80% of automation today is scripts
(you just might not know it)”
Automation
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Challenge: Code-Centric Automation
Infrastructure teams have few programmers, majority are nonprogrammers
Programmer bottleneck
Knowledge not systematized
• Lives in programmer’s brains
• Tribal knowledge phenomenon
Non-programmer productivity:
• Limited, dependent
• Expertise trapped in silos
Automation can’t scale its penetration of business processes
QualiSystems Proprietary & Confidential

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Challenge: Not Ready for Networking
Most orchestration & automation built for
compute virtualization/cloud
Complex IT infrastructure are topologies
Networking gear = metal = not built for
multi-tenancy
Even with overlay network virtualization,
you still have to deal with the fabric
SDN will make things more complex
QualiSystems Proprietary & Confidential

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Build & Maintain an Object Layer
Inventory objects:
• Actual inventory including physical, virtual, cloud, apps, tools,
subnets, etc.
• Hierarchical structure for granular multi-tenancy
o
o
EG: Chassis—blade—port for bare metal switches
Attributes: abstraction+ provisioning object parameters
• Enables reservation/multi-tenancy
Provisioning objects
• Resource level interfaces
Process task objects
• Test automation (functional, sanity, regression)
• Continuous Integration
QualiSystems Proprietary & Confidential

11. Slide Header… & DIY Integration Tools
OOTB
Pre-packaged libraries (of course)
Independent interface creation:
• Integrate and “objectize” API’s
• Utilize existing scripts (TCL, python, etc.)— no
“starting from zero”
• Capture and objectize CLI, SNMP, terminal
interactions
Make them small and maintainable
Overcomes interfacing obstacles
Removes roadmap dependencies
Helps integrate legacy infrastructure
QualiSystems Proprietary & Confidential

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Integrate Orchestration & Workflow
• Visual environment creation
o
o
o
o
Inventory-based modeling
Simple to any arbitrary network topology
Abstract design to maximize utilization
Packaged with provisioning & reclamation
flows
• Visual workflow authoring
o
o
o
Hide syntax from users
Dramatically scale “service creation”
Continuous integration, test automation
QualiSystems Proprietary & Confidential

13. Infrastructure Self-Service to
Slide Header…
People & Processes
TO
QualiSystems Proprietary & Confidential

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Agile Infrastructure Maturity Model
Level 5
Level 4
Level 3
Operational
Level 2
Shared
Level 1
Ad Hoc
Local
&
Manual
Automation of
Complex Infrastrutcure
Round-trip
Self-Service
Continuous Integration
against elastic
infrastructure
Strategic
Enterprise
Object-Layer
Collaboration
Resource
Consolidation
Continuous Delivery
of End-to-End
Environments
True Hybrid
Cloud
QualiSystems Proprietary & Confidential
Continuous
Deployment

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What’s QualiSystems Solution?
Agile Infrastructure Automation
Orchestrate & Automate
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•
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Legacy, traditional, dedicated
Private and public cloud
Software-Defined Networking
Reserve, provision & reclaim
Full object & workflow automation toolset
Patented, object-oriented automation technology
QualiSystems Proprietary & Confidential

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Risk-Mitigated Application Evolution
QualiSystems Proprietary & Confidential

17. DataHeader… Provisioning &
Slide Center
Orchestration
•
Bare metal provisioning of complex
data center environments
o
o
•
Provisioning of converged
infrastructure product stacks
o
o
•
Experienced architects create complex
provisioning workflows
Less experienced engineers can execute
provisioning processes successfully
From bare metal to “ready to consume”
Accelerates time to value
Orchestrator for ongoing data center
automation
o
o
Sustainable, object-oriented architecture
Can work with variety of automation
languages
QualiSystems Proprietary & Confidential

18. Slide Header…
SDN Network DevOps
•
SDNs offer northbound
API’s for applications to
drive network behavior
•
Yet SDN adopters will need
to manage heterogeneous
network environments with
both legacy and SDN
elements
•
CloudShell provides the means to automate the delivery of
SDN/legacy network environments for agile network application
development, testing and deployment
QualiSystems Proprietary & Confidential

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Visit our Website
www.qualisystems.com
QualiSystems Proprietary & Confidential