enabling the path to private cloud: self-service - netapp€¦ · enabling the path to private...

White Paper

Enabling the Path to Private Cloud: Self-Service Scott Baker, David Freund, Ankur Jain, Anand Louis, Richard Treadway, NetApp June 2011 | WP-7139

ABSTRACT Self-service is an advanced element of private cloud environments that improves management efficiency and business agility and lowers operating expenses. A self-service environment streamlines the interaction between users and the IT department within an enterprise. It empowers internal consumers of IT services to request and receive appropriately configured IT resources on demand, with minimal IT intervention. NetApp® open APIs and key ecosystem partnerships enable enterprises to easily integrate their orchestration solutions and custom management tools with our storage service catalogue for automated storage provisioning and protection capabilities as well as metrics for showback and chargeback. Customers can thereby create a self-service Web-based portal that efficiently delivers IT as a service to virtualisation and application administrators and end users while enabling IT staff to focus on higher value activities.

2 Enabling the Path to Private Cloud: Self-Service

Table of Contents

1 PRIVATE CLOUD WHITE PAPER SERIES .................................................................................... 3 2 WHY SELF-SERVICE IS AN ESSENTIAL ELEMENT OF PRIVATE CLOUD ............................... 4 3 SELF-SERVICE REQUIREMENTS ................................................................................................. 5

ON-DEMAND SERVICE DELIVERY FOR PRODUCTIVITY AND SLA MANAGEMENT .................................................5 SHOWBACK AND CHARGEBACK ...................................................................................................................................5 AUTOMATION ....................................................................................................................................................................6

4 THE ROLE OF ORCHESTRATION IN DELIVERING SELF-SERVICE .......................................... 6 CENTRALISED, COORDINATED MANAGEMENT OF CLOUD RESOURCES ...............................................................6 INTEGRATING STORAGE SERVICES WITH CLOUD MANAGEMENT FRAMEWORKS...............................................7

5 NETAPP’S APPROACH TO ENABLING SELF-SERVICE ............................................................. 8 NETAPP INTEGRATION WITH ORCHESTRATION AND ITSM PARTNERS ..................................................................8 DEVELOPING A SELF-SERVICE MODEL ......................................................................................................................10 EXAMPLE OF INTEGRATED, AUTOMATED PROVISIONING AND SELF-SERVICE ..................................................11 NETAPP INTEGRATION WITH VIRTUALISATION SOLUTIONS ..................................................................................12

6 EXAMPLES OF SELF-SERVICE IN PRACTICE .......................................................................... 13 EXAMPLE 1: FINANCIAL INSTITUTION .........................................................................................................................13 EXAMPLE 2: SERVICE PROVIDER FOR GOVERNMENT AGENCIES .........................................................................14

7 SUMMARY ..................................................................................................................................... 15

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1) NetApp private cloud white papers. .......................................................................................... 3

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1) Self-service is an advanced stage of private cloud deployment. ............................................ 4

Figure 2) Orchestrating storage, compute, and network resources for self-service. .............................. 7

Figure 3) NetApp cloud management ecosystem partners. ................................................................... 8

Figure 4) Integrating automated NetApp storage services with data centre orchestration. ................... 9

Figure 5) Self-service portal through an orchestration framework. ...................................................... 10

Figure 6) BMC Atrium manages NetApp storage with self-service interface. ...................................... 12

Figure 7) Example of integration of NetApp storage services with orchestration workflow. ................. 13


1 PRIVATE CLOUD WHITE PAPER SERIES Enterprise IT departments are under extreme pressure to reduce capital and operating expenses, driving them to virtualise their infrastructures to improve hardware utilisation and scalability and move toward the enhanced operational efficiency and flexibility of cloud computing. Key attributes of a cloud infrastructure include automated on-demand provisioning of resources to make sure that service levels can be achieved and a pay-as-you-go model that enables resources to be tied to services and associated costs as they are consumed. The cloud landscape includes private clouds, public clouds, and hybrid clouds. A private cloud is a shared virtualised infrastructure that remains within the control of the enterprise’s IT organisation, behind a firewall. IT departments in a private cloud essentially take on the role of service providers in delivering applications and storage and server resources to their internal customers as services.

Many organisations have virtualised portions of their infrastructures but aren’t sure how to navigate the next steps toward a fully automated, service-driven model that enables them to further reduce costs, improve efficiency and deliver IT as a service. The migration to cloud computing is a multiyear/multiphase effort, and most enterprises are still in the early stages of data centre transformation. This transformation involves a fundamental shift in focus from the infrastructure optimisation provided by virtualisation to service optimisation necessary for the cloud.

NetApp has helped many industry-leading firms deliver data and applications as a service using our storage solutions as the foundation for their private (as well as public and hybrid) clouds. Based on our experience with countless IT environments, we’ve identified four fundamental elements that organisations should include as they evolve to a private cloud. These elements are captured and explained in the NetApp private cloud white paper series. These white papers explain how NetApp helps enterprises transition from a shared virtualised infrastructure to a private cloud. Each one describes the design, deployment and benefits of one of the four key elements as it relates to a service-oriented infrastructure. An important point: these papers are not focused on NetApp® hardware. They instead explore the NetApp management software that enables policy-driven service efficiency as well as many advanced storage efficiency capabilities. They also describe how NetApp APIs integrate with third-party or customised orchestration solutions at each step, enabling organisations to deliver comprehensive storage management as part of their automated, end-to-end service fulfillment capabilities.

The NetApp private cloud white papers do not necessarily have to be read in sequence. In addition, some elements described in the documents might overlap and can be deployed together.

Table 1) NetApp private cloud white papers.

Service Catalogue Define your services with well-defined policies that automatically map service levels to storage attributes.

Service Analytics Optimise your services with centralised monitoring, metering and chargeback to enhance visibility and both cost and SLA management

Automation Rapidly deploy your services by integrating and automating provisioning, protection and operational processes.

Self-Service Empower IT and your end users by enabling service requests to be fulfilled through a self-service portal.


2 WHY SELF-SERVICE IS AN ESSENTIAL ELEMENT OF PRIVATE CLOUD

One of the forces driving organisations to move from virtualised infrastructures to a private cloud is the enhanced efficiency that comes from a fully automated, service-oriented environment: one that translates virtualised resources into services that can be easily requested and rapidly delivered. Self-service is a key cloud computing element that leverages automation and orchestrated cloud management solutions to take virtualised environments to higher levels of productivity and business agility. It streamlines the relationship between the subscribers (consumers) and providers of IT resources and services. Users such as application or virtualisation infrastructure (VI) administrators can be empowered to request and receive computing and storage resources for a variety of applications on demand, with appropriate quality of service from a secure, virtualised resource pool.

An automated self-service environment enables greater time savings and cost effectiveness than virtualisation alone by using policies to cut through tedious manual provisioning processes, getting resources to users faster and enabling IT personnel to focus on higher level objectives. For example, storage provisioning and data protection processes that might normally take weeks could be reduced to minutes. Think about the tremendous operational benefits that result when this scenario is extended across tens or hundreds of application environments in a large enterprise data centre. Self-service is usually implemented after consolidation, virtualisation and automation and often represents the most advanced stage of the enterprise’s path toward a private cloud.

Figure 1) Self-service is an advanced stage of private cloud deployment.


3 SELF-SERVICE REQUIREMENTS The need for a self-service model becomes clearer when we view resource delivery and consumption from the perspective of a subscriber (consumer) of IT resources. The subscriber might be an IT professional such as an application administrator or a virtualisation administrator. In some cases, the subscriber might also be an end user from a non-IT department within the organisation. While the subscriber might not necessarily be a direct consumer of IT resources, he or she has the responsibility to procure resources such as storage or compute capacity for end users, often under very tight deadlines, to meet fluid application and business needs.

The following capabilities represent some of the key subscriber requirements for self-service and are described further later in this paper:

• On-demand service delivery • SLA management • Showback or chargeback capabilities • All of the preceding self-service capabilities build upon and leverage policy-based automation

ON-DEMAND SERVICE DELIVERY FOR PRODUCTIVITY AND SLA MANAGEMENT

As cost-conscious IT departments step up their attempts to manage more resources with fewer staff members, it’s no surprise that storage, server and network administrators who fulfill IT requests are finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with user demand. In the meantime, the IT subscribers experience frequent extended delays, which prevent their new or rapidly growing applications from getting the resources they need to meet scalability, performance, availability and other service-level objectives.

Organisations that have implemented private clouds have taken a new approach. Instead of trying to adjust IT headcount to balance cost and productivity goals, they are improving efficiency and business agility by enabling subscribers to request and procure IT resources in the form of automated services. The services can be delivered on demand, with little or no time constraints and with minimal IT involvement.

Because IT subscribers do not always have deep technical knowledge about the resources they are requesting, self-service operations should be as simple as possible. These operations should ideally leverage and enhance the productivity benefits of automation by making it possible for subscribers of services to perform common operations for themselves using an interface or portal that doesn’t expose them to the underlying complexity of the technologies used to automatically deliver the resources.

A self-service IT model thereby enables subscribers to easily gain almost immediate access to hardware and associated software resources to consistently meet their application SLAs and maintain end-user productivity. At a higher level, self-service enables enterprises to dynamically scale their IT services and add new cloud-based applications throughout the organisation in accordance with client demand.

SHOWBACK AND CHARGEBACK

It’s not enough to be able to rapidly procure resources. IT subscribers often represent specific applications or departments within an organisation and are increasingly required by their executives to manage the efficiency of their IT consumption in order to improve utilisation and eliminate waste. The self-service capabilities for subscribers must therefore also include showback and cost management capabilities, including visibility of the resources consumed as well as mapping of physical and logical resources to the services that are actually delivered to users. Showback can provide subscribers with resource utilisation metrics to enable better cost awareness and is a particularly useful capability within enterprises that have not yet implemented a full chargeback model. From the perspective of an IT service provider (to either internal or external cloud customers) it is also imperative to understand how much of a given service your customers are consuming and how to appropriately charge them for that service.


AUTOMATION

It should be emphasised that automation is a vital component of the cloud infrastructure and sets the stage for self-service. Policy-based automation can be used to map end-user requirements to specific levels of service. Once policies are established, new resource subscribers (representing a new application, business unit and so on) can request and receive storage, server or network resources through a self-service interface and automatically get the appropriate level of data protection and other services with minimal manual intervention and fewer errors. Simplified, automated management and operation enable more capacity to be managed with fewer resources for increased operational efficiency. Automation can also be used to integrate multiple disparate technologies and processes together to provision a higher value service to internal customers.

Automated on-demand service delivery, including showback and chargeback, enables enterprises to realise tremendous productivity gains, operational efficiency and capex savings.

4 THE ROLE OF ORCHESTRATION IN DELIVERING SELF-SERVICE Virtualised infrastructures can improve hardware resource utilisation but these complex environments can be difficult to manage. They can include countless applications, virtual machines, physical servers, desktops and storage systems. In addition to vendor-specific hardware management tools, virtualised environments typically rely on a variety of device managers, network management tools, hypervisors and other virtualisation solution interfaces. Unfortunately, these disparate tools are almost never completely integrated. They also usually don’t function across all storage and server platforms or provide centralised cross-domain management, which adversely affects administrative productivity and responsiveness. And we haven’t even begun to include the management of complex operations such as storage and VM provisioning, backup and disaster recovery.

In order to better manage their sprawling virtualised data centre environments, many leading edge IT departments that are moving toward a private cloud have deployed broad cloud management solutions, also known as orchestration or IT service management (ITSM) frameworks, that can deliver centralised, end-to-end deployment, monitoring and management of the entire cloud infrastructure, including all physical and virtual resources. The orchestration solution is designed to manage the IT environment in real time, in accordance with defined policies for automation, to achieve desired business goals.

CENTRALISED, COORDINATED MANAGEMENT OF CLOUD RESOURCES

Because orchestration solutions can provide integrated management and coordination of storage, network and compute resources and automated workflows, they represent an ideal location for self-service interfaces. While “single pane of glass” management consoles are available for many vendor-specific storage, network, server and virtualisation solutions and can be shared by various users throughout an organisation, “self-service” in a private cloud environment implies something more powerful and more challenging to accomplish. A request for IT resources often encapsulates multiple requests and requires a higher degree of coordination and automation to execute. For example, a request for an additional physical server might also be accompanied by the need for more virtual machines and storage capacity to support the new compute resources. A single, centralised user interface for storage or servers alone doesn’t help coordinate the request across multiple IT resource layers. For this reason, self-service models in private cloud environments are often created within the context of larger orchestration or ITSM frameworks that can provide such coordination.


Figure 2) Orchestrating storage, compute, and network resources for self-service.

INTEGRATING STORAGE SERVICES WITH CLOUD MANAGEMENT FRAMEWORKS

The key to a successful self-service model is the ability to access and manage advanced storage functionality, as well as compute and network resources, directly from an end-to-end IT management or orchestration solution. In this manner, the workflow to deliver storage resources as a well-defined service can be automatically coordinated with the compute and network resources necessary to meet the broader needs of the user and application, beyond the request for storage alone.

In order to make this happen, enterprises require a simple self-service interface or Web-based portal, that integrates their storage and/or server management solution with their orchestration solution as well as their virtualisation or “homegrown” customised management solutions. The portal should enable their users, VI administrators, application administrators or even end users, to easily request and obtain storage resources in the form of a policy-based service. In addition, the details regarding resource selection, configuration, provisioning and other processes should be handled in the background to both minimise the burden on the orchestration solution administrator and hide the underlying complexity from the users of the self-service portal.

As a result, both the subscriber (consumer) and provider of the resources can realise tremendous productivity improvements. A self-service model also facilitates rapid scalability and responsiveness to business needs. For example, when an integrated self-service portal is used, the storage provisioning and data protection processes for a new production environment can be reduced from weeks to minutes. While some critics have positioned the self-service model as a means of eliminating IT staff, it does something more important. It enables IT staff to minimise the amount of time spent on repetitive administrative tasks and instead focus their time on higher level IT objectives and projects.


5 NETAPP’S APPROACH TO ENABLING SELF-SERVICE Within the storage arena, many vendors do offer centralised management for their solutions; but their technologies usually do not easily coordinate with third-party virtualisation management solutions or larger cloud management or orchestration frameworks. As a result, you often have to use separate proprietary tools to take full advantage of advanced storage features, which increases management complexity, reduces efficiency and might require additional staff training. This is where NetApp provides a key differentiator over other storage solutions.

NetApp has adopted an open strategy when it comes to storage management, automation and self-service within a private cloud infrastructure. Storage is our area of concentration and expertise, so we focus on helping you optimise storage resources and service efficiencies. We then integrate our solutions with those of best-in-class partners that can provide broader IT service management and self-service capabilities for an end-to-end cloud solution. NetApp open management interfaces offer better, faster integration and greater storage abstraction that let software partners and in-house development teams easily leverage our policy-based automation features. This open storage management approach gives you the choice to provision new services from a variety of (or combination of) management interfaces that best suits your environment, including solutions from NetApp partners as well as your own in-house or “homegrown” management solutions.

Our ecosystem of cloud management partners includes:

• IT service management (ITSM) or orchestration platforms • Virtualisation management solutions provided by VMware, Microsoft, and Citrix

Figure 3) NetApp cloud management ecosystem partners.

NETAPP INTEGRATION WITH ORCHESTRATION AND ITSM PARTNERS

Large enterprises and service providers with complex IT environments are challenged to manage thousands of moving parts from different domains and to provide the required service levels as prescribed by the various businesses they support. Perhaps you currently use or are considering ITSM or orchestration platforms from vendors such as BMC, CA, DynamicOps, Fujitsu or NewScale to address this challenge. These solution platforms consolidate the management of various data centre elements and give enterprises and service providers the ability to orchestrate their entire infrastructure operations from a single management console.


Unlike other storage vendors that offer their own infrastructure management solutions, but are unlikely to offer comparable levels of functionality, NetApp’s approach is to make it as easy as possible for these higher level orchestration and ITSM platforms to integrate automated NetApp storage functionality within their self-service workflows.

NETAPP OPEN INTERFACES

The NetApp Management SDK - available for free - and Web APIs enable you to integrate with NetApp technologies at a high storage abstraction layer. In fact, our open APIs offer third-party management solutions or your own customised tools the same level of access to NetApp technologies as our own management tools. This includes access to the NetApp OnCommand® storage service catalogue and all of the provisioning and protection policies and resource pools required to create storage services. In other words, we provide everything an orchestration solution and administrator need to deliver automated, policy-based storage management from a single pane of glass and greatly simplify their ability to develop self-service capabilities.

Our APIs also provide access to OnCommand data repositories that contain capacity utilisation statistics, protocol usage, I/O performance, and other metrics. You can make this information available to users of self-service portals for showback or integrate it with financial applications to enable actual chargeback to users and business units for effective cost management.

NetApp has taken measures to make sure that our partners can easily leverage our APIs. We support all industry standard operating systems and offer Web services, API documentation, solution guides, sample code, and developer tools for all NetApp technologies related to automated storage provisioning and data protection.

Figure 4) Integrating automated NetApp storage services with data centre orchestration.


DEVELOPING A SELF-SERVICE MODEL

STORAGE SERVICE CATALOGUE

The storage service catalogue, a key component of NetApp OnCommand, is an essential first step for the automation and self-service of storage services, as it defines standard levels of service based on user and application needs. An IT department can create a storage service catalogue that provides a list of service offerings (for example, gold, silver and bronze, as shown in Figure 5) from which to select when provisioning storage. Each service offering (or level) is defined by specific provisioning and data protection policies and storage resource pools, which together can translate to one or more quality of service attributes, such as efficiency, performance, availability and protection, and might also represent a guaranteed SLA.

Figure 5) Self-service portal through an orchestration framework.

For more information on the NetApp OnCommand storage service catalogue, see the service catalogue white paper, part of this NetApp private cloud white paper series.

ORCHESTRATION WORKFLOW

By providing easy API access to the storage service catalogue, NetApp enables your storage architect to create both a customised self-service portal and an orchestration workflow for automated storage provisioning. The orchestration layer executes the subscriber request from the self-service portal by communicating it directly to the storage service catalogue, which automatically provisions storage with the appropriate policies from the virtual storage resource pools. The workflow driven by your orchestration software might also include services from compute and network catalogues for coordinated provisioning of multiple resources to more completely meet subscriber and application requirements.

SELF-SERVICE PORTAL

The self-service portal can be created using the orchestration solution Web services once the storage service catalogue is published using the NetApp API. The self-service portal provides direct access to the storage service catalogue offerings. As a result, all of the automated storage provisioning and data protection capabilities provided by NetApp OnCommand can be made available to service subscribers (application administrators, VI administrators and end users) who use the portal.


Subscribers can simply select the service-level offering that best meets the required SLA for their application from a pull-down menu and enter the size of the storage share to be provisioned without getting lost in the details of how the storage is provisioned and protected each time new resources are required. The rest of the provisioning process would be automated using the orchestration workflow in the same manner that it is when directly initiated through the OnCommand interface.

The service-level offerings within the self-service portal can be very simple (for example, gold, silver and bronze) or can include more choices associated with storage efficiency, performance, availability and data protection. Regardless of the type and number of service levels offered through the self-service portal, all of the complex provisioning and protection capabilities within the policies - thin provisioning, deduplication, creation and scheduling of backup copies, remote mirroring and much more, are handled automatically and are not exposed to the subscriber or the orchestration administrator. This greatly simplifies the process for integrating automated storage management into the orchestration workflows and creating a self-service portal.

Developing a self-service environment in which your internal customers can request and receive appropriately configured IT resources with little or no intervention is an important step in cloud deployment and overall business agility. As a result, you can:

• Consistently meet service levels • Rapidly scale and add new cloud-based applications and services • Respond to changing business demands with minimal effort • Efficiently use IT resources to maximise hardware utilisation • Improve productivity by automating repetitive activities • Streamline administration with integrated tools and automated provisioning processes

EXAMPLE OF INTEGRATED, AUTOMATED PROVISIONING AND SELF-SERVICE

The storage service catalogue and other OnCommand service-centric data repositories can be aligned with broader ITSM technologies through a variety of integration techniques. Many NetApp partners have provided this type of integration with their solutions. For example, BMC Software has implemented a software adapter (BMC Atrium) using the NetApp open APIs and SDK, which take full advantage of the storage service catalogue to enable full-stack automated provisioning from BMC’s cloud lifecycle management (CLM) product. Using a single management interface, a system administrator can provision VMs and the corresponding storage at a particular service level based on the service-level definitions within the service catalogue. The storage is automatically provisioned and protected by defined SLAs, which in turn deliver both storage and service efficiency.


Figure 6) BMC Atrium manages NetApp storage with self-service interface.

NETAPP INTEGRATION WITH VIRTUALISATION SOLUTIONS

In addition to orchestration and ITSM solutions, leading server and desktop virtualisation vendors, including Citrix, Desktone, Fluid Ops, Microsoft, VMware, and others, have recognised the benefits of integrating NetApp storage into their toolsets, enabling you to easily tap into advanced storage features. Using the NetApp Manageability SDK, these partners are delivering storage monitoring, alerting, provisioning and data protection functions through a single console. NetApp has also created a select set of integrated management tools or plug-ins for rapid backup and recovery, space-efficient VM cloning and more, all of which integrate with VMware® vCenter™. Similar capabilities are available for Microsoft® Hyper-V™ and Citrix XenServer and XenDesktop environments.


6 EXAMPLES OF SELF-SERVICE IN PRACTICE

EXAMPLE 1: FINANCIAL INSTITUTION

BACKGROUND

Using a financial institution as an example, the institution was building an internal cloud environment for hosting applications. Some of its key objectives were to enable end-to-end configuration control, decrease provisioning time and increase business agility through delegation. The initial deployment for its internal cloud storage included three primary data centre locations. The firm expects its private cloud to represent up to 80% of its computing infrastructure over the next three to five years.

SOLUTION

By leveraging NetApp OnCommand APIs, the institution was able to integrate the storage service catalogue with its existing orchestration framework using open management interfaces (as shown in Figure 7). This enabled it to integrate NetApp into a stateless computing model for internal cloud. As a result, it can automate data protection, provisioning and deprovisioning processes for storage, minimising human intervention and expanding its stateless deployment methodology. In addition, by linking storage provisioning to its workload management engine (orchestration layer), the institution was able to include storage as part of its end-to-end workflow configuration process, which includes compute (server) and network resources.

Policy-based automation and integration with its orchestration framework enabled the institution to reduce storage provisioning time, and both operating and capital expenses. In addition, NetApp OnCommand advanced reporting capabilities provide proactive ongoing management.

Figure 7) Example of integration of NetApp storage services with orchestration workflow.


EXAMPLE 2: SERVICE PROVIDER FOR GOVERNMENT AGENCIES

BACKGROUND

Using a service provider as another example, this provider delivers products and services to various departments within a state government. The departments were geographically dispersed and operated independently from each other. In addition, because each department had its own IT policies for resource allocation and data protection, each one had its own IT silo. The silos were inflexible, didn’t scale well and couldn’t easily accommodate new technologies. As a result, SLAs were not being met.

The service provider required a solution that would unify its storage environment and deliver significantly greater space and management efficiencies. The organisation was also aware of the benefits of cloud computing, but it was necessary to choose a leading storage provider with infrastructure management solution partnerships, and integration, already in place. NetApp fulfilled this requirement.

SOLUTION

The service provider implemented a private cloud using NetApp storage to support storage as a service (StaaS), backup as a service (BaaS), software as a service (SaaS) and virtual server and desktop infrastructures for the various departments.

The entity created its automated storage service catalogue and integrated with an orchestration software product as the top-level orchestrator to build a self-service portal. Individual departments use the portal to easily and quickly procure file-based storage, virtual servers, virtual desktops and application and database instances. Chargebacks to the departments are also automated and can be accessed using the self-service portal.

The combination of NetApp unified storage, orchestration software, and the self-service portal has resulted in improved efficiencies, a new storage service can now be provisioned in one day versus months, as well as improved availability of up to 99.99%.


7 SUMMARY Self-service builds upon the efficiencies of virtualisation and automation to deliver enhanced productivity while reducing operating expenses. It empowers subscribers of IT services by simplifying the process for requesting and procuring resources from IT departments. Due to the complexity of most virtualised, shared infrastructures, it is recommended that a broader IT management framework such as an orchestration or ITSM solution be used to enable self-service capabilities for the cloud. These solutions provide end-to-end management of the entire IT infrastructure and make it easier for self-service storage, server, and network workflows to be centrally coordinated, automated, and executed.

From a storage perspective, NetApp plays a key role in enabling self-service storage for private clouds. Our open management approach and APIs enable us to work with a broad ecosystem of virtualisation and orchestration partners who integrate automated storage management, provisioning, protection and other advanced capabilities into their solutions. NetApp has been able to help remove complexity from the self-service process by enabling orchestration administrators to easily build self-service portals without exposing users (or themselves) to the underlying sophisticated technologies and processes that deliver these advanced storage services. The benefits of the NetApp OnCommand storage service catalogue and automated provisioning and protection capabilities, as well as metrics that can be used for chargebacks, are accessible to users of orchestration solutions.

By leveraging NetApp and its ecosystem partners to deliver a self-service model, enterprises can meet or exceed service-level requirements, reduce time to deploy new resources and rapidly scale their environments and add new applications in response to business needs. A self-service model has also helped organisations improve productivity by automating many manual-intensive tasks and enabling their IT staff to focus on higher value activities. All of these advantages represent the expected outcome of a successful, advanced private cloud deployment.

NetApp provides no representations or warranties regarding the accuracy, reliability or serviceability of any information or recommendations provided in this publication, or with respect to any results that may be obtained by the use of the information or observance of any recommendations provided herein. The information in this document is distributed AS IS, and the use of this information or the implementation of any recommendations or techniques herein is a customer’s responsibility and depends on the customer’s ability to evaluate and integrate them into the customer’s operational environment. This document and the information contained herein may be used solely in connection with the NetApp products discussed in this document.

© 2011 NetApp, Inc. All rights reserved. No portions of this document may be reproduced without prior written consent of NetApp, Inc. Specifications are subject to change without notice. NetApp, the NetApp logo, Go further, faster and SnapVault are trademarks or registered trademarks of NetApp, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Microsoft is a registered trademark and Hyper-V is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation. VMware is a registered trademark and vCenter is a trademark of VMware, Inc. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation. All other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such. WP-7139-0511

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