FOCUS SALESFORCE
Issue 11, Aug/Sept
Main Production Data Center
Back-up Production Data Center
Production Data Center & Archive
Development & Archive Production-Class
They must also be near major internet hubs. The company has about fi ve transit providers that can route traffi c via optimal paths anywhere around the world, and multiple MPLS backbone providers.
“They operate as a mesh,” Moldt says about the production data centers. “We have, basically, MPLS backbones, so I could choose to put my infrastructure anywhere… just based on capacity needs and on how I want to structure the infrastructure itself.”
Moldt explains that what they are looking for is “where we think is the safest place that still meets our criteria.” The effect of physical distance on response time does not play a role.
Virtualisation is heavily used in its traditional form in the R&D data center for development and testing
BUILDING A CLOUD ARCHITECTURE In Moldt’s opinion, the difference between building an architecture to support a traditional service and building one to support a cloud service is in the cloud environment’s fl exibility needs. A typical service provider looks at each customer separately and builds an architecture according to their needs.
“And then you hope you’re right, because you 20
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truly don’t understand what is the capability and capacity until you start running it. You can model it well in advance, but until you start running it you truly don’t know,” says Moldt.
A platform that supports a cloud-based service has to be able to support any type of application on the same infrastructure.
Salesforce.com’s meta-layer determines how to run each application, providing the needed fl exibility.
The company’s production environment does not use virtualisation in the traditional sense of spinning up application servers. “That is just merging capacity,” Moldt says.
“With the small number of devices we have (in production), we don’t see a signifi cant benefi t from virtualisation.”
EMPLOYING VIRTUALISATION Virtualisation is heavily used in its traditional form in the research and development data center for development and testing, with about 8,000 virtual machines spun up daily.
Within the production environment, virtualis- ation is only done on the back end, in the database layer. Once a customer signs up, they are allocated a slot in one of the multi-tenant databases. When they send a request, it can be sent to any of the application servers associated with that particular database.
“We manage the capacity and, frankly, whether it’s virtualised or not doesn’t really matter,” Moldt says. “We can scale up and scale down, so we have built in some level of elasticity into the basic functions themselves.” Infrastructure running the CRM product is similar to that running the application development platform
Force.com. While the two are separated, they act exactly the same.
FAST FACTS:
SALESFORCE.COM
CUSTOMERS SERVED 77,000-plus
NUMBER OF SERVERS 1,500 primary 1,500 redundant
PRODUCTION DATA CENTERS Retail colocation space at Equinix facilities in: • Silicon Valley • Virginia • Singapore
EXPANSION PLANS Wholesale suites at DuPont Fabros facilities in: • Chicago • Virginia
R&D DATA CENTER Colocation space at 365 Main data center in San Francisco
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