At the the outset there is a lot of hardwork and confidence of various technical teams to pull it off...There are several things that were done on the technology camp(Network, Storage, Servers and Data Center teams) for over two years that culminated into facing this deployment with conviction, courage and grace...
The Major emphasis in cloud computing environments on how to execute the key processes such as Fulfilment(order processing and Provisioning), Assurance(monitoring, managment & SLO/SLA's) and Billing (usage reporting and Billing) with as as much automation as possible. These process famework has been established with our early SaaS initiatives.
The First forray in to building a SaaS platform came about somewhere around March 2007. This was just before I joined sify... the leadership saw the value in going after creating SaaS platform for multiple key applications such as E-Mail, Online Testing, Supply chain Managment and Security operation center. Messaging/Email was one of the first one...Our virtual team was lucky ot be assigned this job...There were several platforms evaluated and decision was zeroed down to Homegrown, Zimbra and Microsoft Exchange. I joined Sify in July 2007.
Hosted Messaging and Collaboration (Microsoft Exchange) was decided to be first SaaS platform. The decsion was to go and create Standardized hardware platform for internal and external deployment of Messaging for both Sify.com and SaaS platforms.
The initial deployment was around shared services architecture. This was little ahead of time with its emphasis
Servers: HP BL460 (50+ blades
Network: Cisco Catalyst 37xx - Gigabit Copper as a Unified Fabric for IP an iSCSI
Storage: EMC ClariioonCX-3-20, 3-40 and AX150 - All iSCSI deployment - HP-EVA(100+ TB)
Security Platform: Fortigate, Cisco Ironport
Application Network Services: Cisco CSS load balancer
Automation Platform : Ensim
After initial hiccups with deployment partner. We got our key people trained on Microsoft HMC platform in Singapore. This helped us deploy the HMC platform in-house expertise. The Study of HMC architecture and our understanding/ability to leverage Virtualization helped go against the grain and reduced the total server count by a double digit number. This architecture was validated by the Microsoft Professional Servcices team. We have seen that this approach had direct bearing on getting the platform profitable sooner due to lower platform costs.
The Bold deployment of Physical infrastructure in couple of datacentres helped us hone our remote management capabilites
We have realized the importance of launching smaller disaggregated services before bundling them together. the first disaggreated service that was launched was Anti-Spam Service based on Cisco Ironport, We built a Provisioning and Delegated administration portal for this service. later There were few more services the complemented the SaaS platform such as Mail-on-Mobile based on Synchronica and Blackberry, SharePoint etc. The lesson was to be judicious about build vs buy decisions.
In our case a fully built up server farms enabled faster execution on other customer requirements/projects . The live testament to this success is in deployment of projects such as Complaince email solution for close to a million users, sify.com portal, Storage as a Service PoC.
One of the lessons learned was to add more services (such as hosted CRM, OCS etc). We initialially implemeted CRM with very little off-take.
It is however difficult drive market adoption high value services-- as the complexity increases, it keeps getting better proposition to buy the automation platforms. However It is important to build the glue code/ components/configuration expertise that can emerge as unique differentors.
We are invested heavily into creating the body of knowledge for automating the cloud platform. Most Vendors have limited world view of the cloud computing - generaly restricted to virtual maching provisioning and rudimentery vLAN setup at distributed switch level.
Our Roadmap is a go beyond the current state-of-the art interms of cloud computing into the future of with virtual data ceneters. Our network team has thought through the processes and hand offs neccecary to realize the vision of virtual Data centers with not just a VM and some storage.
The Virtual Private Data Centers are technically a extention of customer datacenter over MPLS VPN. This is a post cloud scenario of appliance + cloud where CPE in MPLS cutomer premises as well as the muti-tenency at every level (access, aggregation and core).
The Class of Vendors for such broad automation objective are from Job Sceheduling and run-book automation camp. The key players in the VDC automation are Tidel(Cisco), Opalis(Microsoft), IBM and Control-M(BMC)...
The Sify iONi product lime is getting a makeover to handle portal interaction between users and workflows...
Master data Managment and Aggregation using standards based approcah such as RSS feeds
The Assurance activity needs to rechristened home grown monitoring and managment along judicious usage of opensource/vendor provided tools.
The Billing integration is a medium term automation candidate based on scale numbers.
Our goal is to enhance the current toolset to reflect our relavance as cloud platform developer by building upon the capabilities provided by OEMs/Management platform vendors. It is important to develop, deploy, provision and explore the ability to provide umbrella Cloud Services Management Framework(CSDF) to accomplish the objectives set out by the business leaders for increasing the yield per square feet of datacenter space and value of the per MB of Bandwidth sold.
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