Savvis Pursues Cloud Governance
Savvis Inc. is aiming to provide what the company believes cloud providers typically lack: policy and governance. Ken Owens, vice president of security and virtualization technology at Savvis, said vendors aren’t thinking about the policy and governance issues around resource allocation. Those issues deal with questions such as, “Which resources have priority within an application stack?” But that’s not all…
“They’re doing it in their own IT shops, but they’re not doing this in the cloud,” Owens said of policy and governance. “So in our mind, it’s a pretty big gap in the way cloud providers are today providing services to the enterprise.”
Savvis plans to build policy and governance components into its Savvis Symphony Virtual Private Data Center, formerly know as Project Spirit. The cloud platform will provide three quality of service tiers: Essential, Balanced and Enterprise. Essential and Balanced will be first in line for general availability with Enterprise to follow.
Some governance elements are available in the beta releases of Essential and Balanced. Customers can, through Savvis portal or API, change cloud settings to allocate resources according to priority. They can also make adjustments for latency-intensive or delay-sensitive applications, using high, medium, and low performance settings. Savvis also provides a baseline service catalog via portal and API. Customers can build their own service catalogs on top of Savvis’ catalog.
Overall, customers can define a virtual private data center, creating an environment that includes Web, application and database servers, Owens said.
Savvis’ next step: add entitlement and identity components to policy and governance. Those pieces will help customers control who has access to resources, what they are able to tweak, and the amount of money they can spend to do that. The entitlement component is in beta, while the identity piece is in development.
The entitlement and identity pieces will apply to all three tiers of Symphony VPDC. Other Savvis offerings are evaluating entitlement and identity elements.
Savvis, meanwhile, is also working on resource sharing algorithms on the VMware platform for application, Web, and database servers. The idea here is to optimize the performance of those specific server types and provide for more efficient decision-making around resource allocation. This governance element, scheduled for release in the second half of the year, will apply to the three Symphony VPDC tiers and will also apply to other Savvis hosting products.
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Use of the term “governance”, which has an entirely different meaning from an IT compliance perspective, is misleading. What Savvis is referring to is basic traffic shaping and edge management. I do agree that this kind of service is helpful, but I’d be curious about where Savvis is proposing to impart their control. It’s one thing to shape at their data center connection and an entirely different matter to control traffic at the customer’s LAN/WAN.
To be sure, in the network management realm many of the words have been co-oped by one technology/application and cannot be re-purposed. This cloud governance offering is just another example.
Scott: Your point is well taken. I’ve also seen governance used in conjunction with SOA and service registries, service management tools, etc.