The biggest challenge in adopting a service catalog, I've observed, is the reluctance of teams to adopt standard packages, bundles, configurations, products, and offerings. The adoption of cloud computing is changing that by the day.
Read the excerpt below. It's a description of a service catalog that offers standard configurations.
The service offers Windows Server and standard Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP stacks. The basic service runs $1,200 per month per server. Users can provision up to 1T of storage. The provisioned servers will be accessible via the Unclassified but Sensitive IP Router Network and, beginning in the second quarter of fiscal 2010, the Secret IP Router Network.
Although DISA is using virtualization to maximize server use, end users do not need expertise in virtualization management. To them, the service appears as "a preloaded, preconfigured server," Sienkiewicz said.
Once commissioned, virtual servers can be operational within 72 hours, and agency officials hope to shorten that time to less than 24 hours. The agency has maintained an uptime of 99.999 percent with its hosted offerings and plans to offer that level of service to RACE users, Sienkiewicz said.
via fcw.com
What's nice is that it describes a service, including the kind of IP network, security level. And because it's standard, it can be provisioned very quickly, unlike the multi-month process most companies follow today.
The other advantage of the service catalog will come later. Benchmarking will be possible. For example, I can imagine a conversation that goes like this:
Customer: "Why does it cost us $1,200 / month for a server when Amazon can do it $72/month?"
Provider: "In addition to the basic server you get A, B, C. And you need 99.999 percent; Amazon only promises 99.5 percent"
Customer: "I have workloads that don't require that level of uptime, or security. Also, I like A and B, but C is not used. What would be the price for that?"
Provider: "We'll survey other customers and develop a new service next quarter."
Customer: "Thank for your responsiveness."
By the way, this is why I say: NO CATALOG, NO CLOUD.
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