What do we mean today when we talk about managing our environments in the cloud? In the old physical server days, we had diverse systems to manage the network, the storage, the server infrastructure. As time moved on, these systems began to merge into products like Spectrum and OpenView. There came to be many players in a space that involved quite often a vendor specific tool Your server manufacturer would often tie you in to a specific management tool.

Again, as time moved on, we began to see 3^rd party tools built to specifications that used SNMP traps and API’s that were no longer unique to particular vendors and furthered the ability to monitor hardware for faults, and alert to high utilization, or failures. This helped our abilities extensively. But, were these adequate to handle the needs of a virtual environment? Well, in enterprises, we had our virtual management tools to give us good management for that infrastructure as well. However, we still had to dig into our storage and our networks to find hot-spots, so this was not going to allow us to expand our infrastructure to hybrid and to secondary environments.

This whole world changed drastically as we moved things to the cloud. Suddenly, we needed to manage workloads that weren’t necessarily housed on our own infrastructure, we needed to be able to move them dynamically, we needed to make sure that connectivity and storage in these remote sites as well as our own were able to be monitored within the same interface. Too many “Panes of Glass” were simply too demanding for our already overtaxed personnel. In addition, we were still in monitor but not remediate modes. We needed tools that could not only alert us to problems, but also to help us diagnose and repair the issues that arose, as they inevitably did, quickly and accurately. It was no longer enough to monitor our assets. We needed more.

Today with workloads sitting in public, managed, and private spaces, yet all ours to manage, we find ourselves in a quandary. How do we move them? How do we manage our storage? What about using new platforms like OpenStack or a variety of different hypervisors? These tools are getting better every day, they’re moving toward a model wherein your organization will be able to use whatever platform with whatever storage, and whatever networking you require to manage your workloads, your data, your backups, and move them about freely. We’re not there yet on any one, yet many are close.

In my opinion, the brass ring will be when we can live migrate workloads regardless of location virtualization platform, etc. To be sure, there are tools that will allow us to do clones and cutovers, but to move these live with no data loss and no impact to our user base as we desire to AWS, to our preferred provider or in and out of our own data centers is truly the way of the future.