Bangkok--15 Jul--Core & Peak
Technology experts are unanimous in their belief that cloud computing will be the IT issue of 2010. While the notion is true that cloud infrastructures are poised to revolutionize the way we access technology, it is also true that it is a vast area and enterprises often grapple with understanding its full potential. Sunil Chavan of Hitachi Data Systems differentiates between the varied kinds of cloud environment to help enterprises make the right choice.
The ever increasing complexity of data centers coupled with the massive growth of data is leading to an increase in resources required to store, process, optimize and serve information back to end users when required. Many data centers now face shortages in floor space, insufficient power and cooling capabilities, trade-offs between IT agility and vendor lock-in, as well as ever increasing complexity and costs in managing disparate islands of information and infrastructure. Attempting to address these issues, organizations have rapidly adopted virtualization and are now looking to cloud delivery service models to reduce costs, increase flexibility and improve their time to market.
To keep pace with today’s competitive marketplace enterprises require greater flexibility and agility than their traditional storage architectures can provide. Factors like IT-to-business response time, speed-to-market, demand a more flexible architecture, which is why many organizations are looking to modernize their data centers through virtualization and consolidation, all while aiming to reduce costs. This, coupled with explosive unstructured content growth, is driving organizations to look toward instant IT delivery models.
On Demand IT Delivery
In the move towards on-demand IT delivery, it hasn’t taken long for customers to recognize the benefits of private, hybrid or public cloud models, the most tangible being significant cost savings. From a capital expenditure perspective, organizations tend to over-purchase to deal with the ebb and flow of storage and resource requirements to support the business. This often leaves them with an abundance of underutilized hardware assets. The ability of cloud infrastructures to grow and contract storage resources, in concert with the business needs, minimizes this upfront capital expense, moving them from “fixed costs” to “variable costs.”
If we take a look at the operational costs, ‘hidden costs’, the data growth and complexity to manage traditional IT environments has erupted. Customers can reduce much of this operational expenditure by deploying cloud models and leveraging cloud managed services, paying only for what they consume and eliminating the day-to-day management tasks altogether.
While on-demand access to computing resources is what the industry is striving for, it also poses concern and risk for IT organizations. This can be very disruptive to business process and control. If business users begin to outsource to cloud providers in order to get faster support, sensitive information could be put at risk. To mitigate this risk, IT organizations should be thinking about developing an internal cloud-enabled architecture to provide greater business agility, in addition to a process for ad-hoc projects that require to be outsourced to a public or hybrid cloud provider. This way they can move into the cloud in a controlled and orderly manner mitigating associated risks.
There are many deployment choices to consider for moving into the cloud. There are also some considerations to keep in mind when choosing the option that’s right for your business.
Private Cloud: For simplicity, let’s define a private cloud as cloud-enabled infrastructure within the physical walls of a data center. A private cloud can provide many of the benefits of cloud without the security risks associated with public deployments. Because it is accessed over an internal network or intranet, it’s as secure as the rest of your data. Since you control it and the environment around it (i.e. networks, servers, etc), you can achieve enterprise level SLAs. But you do sacrifice some of the operational cost savings such as physical floor space, power, and cooling. Unless you are leveraging a managed service you are also subject to management overhead.
Hybrid Cloud: Now let’s take a look at the hybrid or trusted cloud, which we will define as infrastructure that resides at a trusted service provider. In this case, access is limited to appropriate resources at your organization and delivered over a virtual private network or a secure Internet connection. Since the infrastructure is out of the organization’s direct control, service levels could be impacted by external factors. Customers also need to think about the physical security of the environment, which is why it is important to understand the service provider’s process and requirements around physical access.
Public Cloud: Lastly, the public cloud can be described similarly to the hybrid, except that there is usually more general access over the Internet providing limited security. Many public cloud offerings are quite inexpensive or sometimes even free and SLAs are generally not guaranteed or measured differently than how an enterprise measures their SLAs. Additionally, value added services and features such as encryption, compression, backup, tiering and replication are not available from public providers as they are from private or hybrid cloud providers.
What Makes A Cloud?
Regardless of the type of cloud, there are some key features every cloud platform should have. Firstly, it is a secure, direct connection to get data into the cloud, such as a REST[1] interface or an on-ramp to connect applications to the cloud without requiring application recoding. There also needs to be multitenancy capabilities to logically segregate the data, so that SLAs can be assigned to specific data types or applications. The cloud should also have namespaces with access rights and security layers to prevent unauthorized access. Depending on the provider, some clouds offer value added features like compression and single instancing to improve cost savings, encryption to provide greater security and billing and chargeback for organizations or service providers that wish to bill each business unit or organization based on consumption.
IT services are generally held to service level standards for availability, reliability and integrity. Augmenting or replacing “legacy” IT services with cloud services require the same quality guarantees. Although, managed cloud services allow customers to focus less on the storage management details such as RAID (redundant array of independent disks), replication, and capacity planning, it is critical that customers include an expected quality of service in their contracts with cloud providers. Not all cloud providers measure SLAs the same way, so it’s important to ask how they quantify their SLAs. Even if a company is building a private cloud internally it is important that IT meet the business units’ SLAs.
Given some of the trade-offs between the various cloud deployment models, how do you identify the most appropriate candidates for deployment? Well, to start with, use a phased approach. There’s no need to jump into the deep end without at least dipping a toe in to check the temperature. Start by identifying the data in your environment that generally has lower business value and lower SLA requirements. For example think of data types like home directory shares, static data or backup content that can be moved from on-site “primary” to cloud “secondary” storage.
You can get immediate cost savings by moving this peripheral data —data that doesn’t require active management or constant read/write access to the cloud. It is unnecessary to pay such high administrative and management overhead for this non-business critical data? This helps in a couple of other ways. First, it frees up resources to focus on the core business applications, improving operational efficiency and utilization of your existing assets. Next, it allows your organization to gain experience and develop best practices for cloud deployments. Lastly, it allows you to move toward your core, tier 1 applications at your own pace.
Organizations need IT agility to maintain their edge in today’s competitive market. To achieve this, cloud promises an on-demand service model that can support your business needs today, while providing a solid foundation for the data center of the future.
For more information, please contact;
Srisuput Siangyen
Core & Peak
Tel: 081 694 78074
[email protected]
[1] REST (Representational State Transfer) is an approach for getting information content from a Web site by reading a designated Web page that contains an XML (Extensible Markup Language) file that describes and includes the desired content