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Keep Your Head in the Clouds I
BY IVAN PEPELNJAK
magine being able to do what Amazon Web Services can do within your own private data
center: create a new disk or server, or start new instances of an application in seconds with a few clicks by choosing from hundreds of available templates that span a range of operating systems. That in a nutshell is what you could have by building a private cloud.
The phrase “private cloud” is a marketing term for
the ability to host applications and server or storage space in a private data center and provide access to these resources on demand. This means that you’re able to deploy new applications, servers and storage (in the form of logical disks) in minutes instead of the old model that took weeks or months to scope the requirements, get the budget approved, select the best offer and get the server delivered and deployed.
Rack Up the Savings
with a Private Cloud You can gain significant cost reductions by migrating
your existing applications and server infrastructure to virtualized servers in a private cloud. Today’s high-end blade servers have much better price/performance ratios at significantly reduced power consumption than yesterday’s standalone servers. You’ll also utilize the space in your data center better (sometimes replacing a whole row of rackable servers with a few blade servers in a single chassis that take less than half a rack), allowing you to deploy more servers in the same space or reduce the data center footprint and the cooling costs.
Start with Some Groundwork The foundation of the private cloud is server virtualization: the ability to run numerous virtual machines on the same physical server usually using Intel's x86 architecture and hypervisor software from VMware, Citrix, or Microsoft. Server virtualization increases CPU and RAM utilization as numerous virtual machines use the same physical resource that would otherwise be left idle. High-speed multi-core servers with extended memory architecture, for example, Cisco’s UCS blade servers with up to 32 cores and 384GB of memory, can run up to 100 virtual machines, each of
them using 4GB of memory (usual memory footprint for a Windows or Linux server).
Apart from optimizing the resource utilization, server virtualization gives you instant server creation ability. All you need is a virtual machine definition, specifying the amount of RAM, CPU and external resources a server
needs. Ideally you’d also have a library of predefined templates that you can use to create new machines, as it doesn’t make sense to provision each Windows or Linux server from a CD/DVD ISO image.
The second element of the private cloud architecture
is virtualized storage, or the ability to create virtual disks on demand and attach them to virtual machines as needed. Virtual disks are usually stored as files in a large shared file system; all you need to have to deploy them is server virtualization software (vSphere from VMware or Hyper-V from Microsoft) and a large enough storage array.
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VOLUME 3 • ISSUE 1
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