Windows Server Infrastructure Cloud Reference Architecture: Design on top of hardware

Review

There is no doubt that mobile internet, social networking, large data and cloud computing have become the four major trends in IT development. Cloud computing also provides an ideal platform for the top three. Today, not only internet companies, many of the traditional industries of large and medium-sized enterprises are also building their own private cloud. This article is intended to introduce a reference architecture based on Windows Server 2012 and System Center SP1 to build the hardware portion of the infrastructure cloud.

Design Objectives

From an operational perspective, the entire architecture should be easy to expand, from small to 4 cabinets to large to the entire data center for easy expansion and capacity planning.

From the user's perspective, the entire architecture should be compatible with different types of applications, such as for compute-sensitive, large-memory, and IO-intensive.

From a service delivery perspective, the entire architecture should be able to meet different service level requirements, such as high availability and no need for high availability.

From an economic standpoint, the entire architecture should not rely on specific hardware vendors or products.

Reference Architecture for the Windows server infrastructure cloud

The Reference Architecture for the Windows server infrastructure cloud is as follows:

Figure 1 Reference Architecture for the Windows server infrastructure cloud

In this article we will focus on the hardware Design section of the Reference Architecture above.

In order to realize the design goal, we adopt the model to guarantee the loose coupling between computation and storage, only in this way can we ensure more flexibility to dispatch computing, storage and network three kinds of basic resources, and build a sufficient amount of resource pool to carry different types of applications on demand. For the same purpose, we use centralized storage instead of lower-cost direct-attached storage. While the cost of direct-attached storage is lower, the storage solutions we use have more reliability, flexibility, and flexibility, which are of great concern to the enterprise. In addition, we are not using traditional fiber storage and substituting new completely network-based file-sharing storage, which has the advantage of lower hardware procurement costs and lower system complexity and maintenance costs relative to fibre storage, But this design requires that parts of the network must have sufficient reliability and high performance to meet IO-intensive requirements.

Figure 2 Hardware architecture model for the Windows server infrastructure cloud