Private Cloud is a secure, stable, scalable and simple shared services model deployed within enterprise network boundary adhering to cloud computing principles.
Primary Goal of Migration to Private Cloud is Seamless transfer of Application Services from Current Data Center to the new facilities built using Shared Services Architecture for Private cloud.
AppsCloud – A Methodology for migrating to Private Cloud
The Emphasis of this methodology is on:
- Understanding application workload Behavior
- Ensure Security
- Leverage technology innovations
- Adherence to Cloud Computing Principles
The Goal is to de-risk the datacenter migration, reduce disruption due to change and simplify the path to Private cloud adoption.
Understanding Application Workloads
Application Infrastructure in a large organization is inherently difficult to comprehend as a single entity due to diversity of Application workloads (Email, Database, Data warehousing, ERP, Analytics etc). Deployment complexity coupled with primary and multi-level interdependencies, the resulting emergent behavior presents an even greater challenge in understanding.
Data Center Migration Methodology
The Conventional Approach of Datacenter Migration
- Rebuild the Physical, Infrastructure
- Deploy applications,
- Perform Data migration
- Test Application level integrity and Scalability
- Cut-over / Go live
This Approach is ridden with risks, uncertainties and a fairly long re-deployment cycle inhabiting the move to Private cloud.
Most of the Unix environment and some mission critical Windows servers (Oracle Database other business critical apps) are required to be migrated in the above approach.
The Windows workloads are more amenable to Virtualization/Private Cloud and Unix workloads are being rapidly converted to various supported variants of Linux for being virtualization friendly.
The several core technology innovations driving this transformation increasing adoption of Private Cloud by enabling features such as redundancy, multi-tenancy and high availability. These features help to realize the shared services architecture and to de-risk the transformation
Core technologies enabling the Private Cloud
The Popular tools and Core technologies utilized in realizing the goals of the Private architecture are:
- Service Orchestration
- Self-Service Portals
- Monitoring/Management and Reporting Platforms
- Master Data Management (CMDB/Asset/Inventory management)
- VMware Fault Tolerance
- VMware HA
- vCenter Heartbeat
- vMotion
- Storage vMotion
- vShield Manager built-in backup
- EtherChannel
- vPC
- Device/Link Redundancy
- UCS Dual Fabric Redundancy
Migrating to Private Cloud
The Most important drivers to Private Cloud migration is a need for optimizing the cost, improving manageability, increasing scalability and ensuring security. Moving from discrete server infrastructure to a virtualized share services model seems to meet most of the Cloud compute objectives of pay-per-use/pay-as-you-grow, on-demand scalability and easier management.
The key to developing a robust Private Cloud design is clearly defining the requirements and applying a proven methodology and design principles.
Introducing the key requirements for secure, stable, scalable and simple shared services Private Cloud architecture...
The security requirements for Private Cloud defined in terms of Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability pillars for the Shared services Architecture:
Isolation
Isolation or Secure Separation ensures meeting Confidentiality objective where one application/tenant does not have access to another application/tenant's resources, such as virtual machine (VM), network bandwidth, and storage. Each tenant must be securely separated using techniques such as access control, VLAN segmentation, and (If possible) virtual storage controllers. Also, each layer has its own means of enforcing policies that help reinforce the policies of the adjacent layers.
Service Assurance
Integrity of the environment is maintained by Service Assurance techniques. Service Quality is ensured with isolated compute, network, and storage in concert with SLA driven service delivery, performance monitoring and incident management during both steady state and non-steady state. For example, the network can provide each tenant with a certain bandwidth guarantee using Quality of Service (QoS), resource pools within VMware help balance and guarantee CPU and memory resources, while Hitach with its active-active architecture can balance resource contention across storage volumes.
High Availability
The focus on High Availability is reflected in the design of infrastructure to meet the expectation of compute, network, and storage to always be available even in the event of failure. Like the Isolation/Secure Separation pillar, each layer has its own manner of providing a high availability configuration that works seamlessly with adjacent layers.
Stable and Consistent Management
Technology innovations at the platform level are required to consistently manage, rapidly provision resources with clear visibility into resource availability. In some of our smaller deployments in its current form, each layer is managed by vCenter, UCS Manager, Nagios/Munin, Cisco Data Center Network Manager and Hitachi Management tools, respectively. We are collecting analyzing information from these tools to making capacity planning and provisioning decisions.
Need for Data center Intelligence for Private Cloud
As the environment expands in thousands of workloads and spanning multiple data centers capacity planning tools such as VMware capacity planner fall short in assessing the big picture requirements such as Network Topology, Non-IT resources (Power/HVAC) optimization, Business Continuity and Workload distribution.
There is a need for Data Center Intelligence tools such as Tideway(BMC) and Cirba to assist in decision making process. These data center intelligence products gather information by automated discovery processes and integration into the management /monitoring tools. They connect to systems of Record such a Asset management Database/ CMDB , ERP and CRM systems and correlate the northbound business data with the southbound intelligence on infrastructure to assist in quick and informed decision making
Data Center Migration techniques for Private Cloud
A Data Center Migration can leverage industry standard Datacenter intelligence and virtualization tools and methodologies for Capacity planning, Server Consolidation and Physical to Virtual conversion. This approach helps to de-risk the application redeployment complexity and quicken migration process to Private Cloud
Simple Datacenter Migration Approach for Private Cloud
1. Capacity Planning using Cirba, Tideway or VMware capacity planner
2. Physical to Virtual conversion using VMWARE converter
3. Multi-site Cluster with Live Migration - using Symantec/VCS and/or VMware SRM
Path to Cloud – Road Ahead
Virtualization ensures portability of the application infrastructure, the easy migration across datacenters.
The benefits can be realized with the advances in Server, Access and Virtualization Technologies.
Cisco is leading the pack by creating a Transparent Virtualized Shared Services Environment across multiple datacenters(Cisco UCS/Nexus), Other Server vendors(IBM/HP/Dell etc) are building Cloud-in-a-box solution with Clustered Servers(infiniband/10g Ethernet) and Storage, Storage Vendors (EMC/Netapp/Hitachi/HP) provide multi-tenant storage frameworks with remote replication capability, Boutique appliances are focusing on the other critical pieces of the puzzle such as Security(Hytrust/RSA), WAN optimization(Riverbed/Cisco WaaS) and Scalability(F5/Citrix)
These developments are paving way for easier and more affordable path to Private Cloud.
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