Skip to main content

Building a Cloud Computing Lab

Cloud adopters should consider the following key elements when implementing Cloud service delivery frameworks:

  • Leverage existing infrastructure within the prospective Cloud providers.
  • Use a graduated adoption from semi-automated to fully automated processes.
  • Balance between customization and standardization while making an effort to have differentiated services.

In order to help cloud adopters realize the value of this approach, It is better to walk the talk....A Cloud Lab can be created and evolved in the same manner as a Production Cloud deployment.

As a Physical Manifestion of a cloud, there are three critical components

  1. Core Network and Shared Data Center
  2. Workload Execution Engines
  3. Resource Pool Management, Securty, SLA Analytics and Automation Infrastructure (on-going development/enhancement roadmap)

A Practical Deployment plan for

Core Data Center Network Services is as follows:

  • Core Network Services such as CRS, Nexus 7k
  • Cat 6k Services complex with Service blades for Firewall/Loadbalancers/SSL Accelaration/Wide Area Accelaration etc),
  • Storage-as-a-service(MDS with EMC VMAX-FC, Clariion-iSCSI, EMC-DataDomain(VTL/Dedup), may be even NetApp-NAS)

The end result is a creation and demonstration of Multi-Tenant PaaS SKU's for Routing/VRF, Firewall Contexts, Storage, Backup and ACE/WaaS contexts to supplement the core IaaS SKU's

Workload Execution Engines:

  • A VCE - vBlock 1(VMWARE, UCS B-Series + EMC Clarrion)
  • Secure Multi Tenancy(Microsoft, UCS-C series + 5k +Netapp) - Servers Storage and Access Network
  • This can complemented with Sample Workloads such as Unified Messaging/Collaboration(MS-Exchange/Cisco Unity/Call Manager/Sharepoint/Webex), ERP (SAP/Oracle) and VDI (each one taken as mini-deployment to simulate a customer on the Cloud)

The end goal is Creation and Demonstration of Core IaaS SKU's for Compute, Storage and Application Bundles(Basic SaaS SKU's)

Resource Pool Management, Security, SLA Analytics and Automation Infrastructure:

  • There is a need to create both in-band patform with Web/ReST based tools and out-of-band platforms with SNMP/IPMI and Native Command Line Interfaces for enhanced security and control of Below-the-line Activities.
  • Profile and Identity Services - LDAP-Active Directory/Raduis/Profile Server(SPML) are the key to tie all applications/infrastructure elements together with Access Control and Authentication.
  • The Components for Automation Platform are Tidal Enteprise Orchastrator for Service Orchestration and System-wide Semi-Automatic Job Execution and Tracking using Business Support Portal Front-end
  • XMPP based Presense service for Assessing Capacity/Performance and Availability of to existing Resource Pools and managment of Resource Pools using native tools like VMWARE Vcenter, EMC Control Center and UCS manager
  • Master Data Managment of the Entire Environment is Maintained in BMC CMDB with Business Support portal to Enable Semi-Automatic Tasks (Moves/Adds/Changes)
  • The Service Catalog Management and simpler BSS functions are handled using Open Source/Sify developed tools jBilling/NMS/Helpdesk
  • SLA Analytics and Reporting Platform using Crystal Reports(now from SAP)
  • Log Consolidation using SPLUNK and Profile Services

This environment needs to drive home the Completeness of Vison, Strategy and Execution to meet the Customer objectives of:

  • Security
  • Compliance
  • On-demand services / increased customer stickiness
  • Reduced TCO
  • Time-to-provision

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ForeThought -- Global directory service for the Digital world

ForeThought Real world is full of people. We have phone books,yellow pages, maps and postal addresses to get to them. Real world is governed by laws, rules and norms. Digital world is full of devices and devices only(severs, desktops, appliances, gadgets etc..) In the digital world, We have DNS, IP Addresses/SMTP mail address, Routers/gateways. All of these methods are still rudimentery to lookup and locate attributes, features and functions of devices. Most devices serve a useful purpose. some of them are misused to inflict pain and damage in the digital world. Clear knowledge attributes, features and functions of devices can hel in reducing the risk and help us in responding to misuse of these devices. An idea of a Global Directory Service -- for locating Devices worldwide....These devices are attributed to People, Resources and Services.... This type of service can help in Asset tracking, Monitoring, Communications, Incident response, forensics and Da...
2 comments
Read more

Blueprint for a new ITaaS Service Provider

Cloud computing is raising the expectation on the agility, availability and access to sophisticated computing and communication platforms for small and medium business. Today most critical IT components for running a successful business are available as SaaS, PaaS or IaaS platforms. There is little value in recreating all these services from the scratch by a new age service provider. It may be prudent to create a skeletal platform for essential services while taking a position of services broker to organize a rich portfolio by aggregating important services into tightly knit IT-as-a –Service offering. The initial target market for such a service provider is Small and Medium Business. We will review aspirations and capabilities needed to serve the ever increasing expectations of small and medium customers from a modern service provider. The Vision, Strategy and Execution plan to create a modern Information Technology as a Service (ITaaS) provider infrastructure is described on the...
2 comments
Read more

RAINing Appliances in the Clouds

Appliances always had a soft-corner in Data center and cloud strategy. My Brush with appliances started in early 2000. We were looking at soultions for traffic management and billing for small ISP. the solutions with software and hardware were quite complicated. We came across small company out of Israel called Allot Networks (www.allot.com). they did a good job in a simple way. Later at NVIDIA, I was exposed Netapp for NAS storage which quickly pivoted into block storage with iscsi. they literally gave away the iscsi protocol license for free with the box for a long time. On the network side, my Exposure was with F5 networks while managing nvidia.com. We were facing scalability issues during product launhces and driver release announcements. We tried newer players such as Array Networks and Netscaler while they were in Beta. We ended up assisting and supporting Netscaler with our feedback to evolve the product to have in-memory caching. In VMworld 2013, I have seen a emergence ...
8 comments
Read more