It extra Xeon moves critical business load into the cloud platform

In the opening article of this issue of it extras, we have mentioned that while a significant number of companies have begun to scale and build their own cloud computing platforms, they have little intention of rapidly migrating critical business to the cloud platform because the need for critical business for Independent, dedicated IT platforms is still clear. However, there are exceptions to everything, every trend has its forerunners, and some users are now starting to move key business into the cloud computing platform, the case story of the United States Indiana University as this example.

Indiana University is a typical education user and a leading prestigious institution with a total of 8 campuses with more than 100,000 registered students, as well as 20,000 faculty, Tokyo graduates and more than 200 research centers and research institutes with an annual operating budget of $2.7 billion.

An attempt to migrate the application load, including the critical business load, to the cloud computing platform is not a whim for Indiana University, but a real demand driven. Before the program was implemented, the university's virtual machine (VM) was growing at a rate of 6% per month, and its School Information Technology Services (UITS) department wanted to update its virtual infrastructure to achieve higher performance and computational power. In addition, the department needs excellent stability to migrate key business databases, services, and applications from expensive proprietary platforms to a unified cloud computing platform.

In this way, Indiana University launched the unified IT infrastructure, building a cloud computing platform and migrating all enterprise-class workloads to it. As the head of the Uits department describes, it is committed to "strict standardization". To this end, the department has updated almost all of the server infrastructure and now has about 1600 virtual machines running on an internal cloud of 65 Dell PowerEdge R810 servers that use the Intel Xeon 7560 processor and VMware vsphere 4 Enterprise Plus. The migration lasted two months and did not have any impact on the user. This cloud computing platform is deployed with 8TB DDR3 memory and nearly 0.5PB of storage capacity to run more than 100 tier Oracle Database 11g instances.

Indiana University The successful advance of the above initiatives, which eventually brought good practical results according to Uits, compared with the previous platform, the new cloud infrastructure in the virtual machine computing power and performance, respectively, increased by 40% and 30%, while the footprint of the rack space reduced by 20%. This cloud infrastructure significantly improves end-user responsiveness and allows uits to more flexibly meet the rapid growth in computing needs of the leading universities in the research field. By running all applications from email to student registration on a single platform, uits employees have increased their work efficiency significantly while upgrading their professional knowledge. This update frees up a large amount of data center space, allowing schools to provide disaster recovery system hosting services for various state offices.

Summing up the attempt to build a cloud platform to support critical business with Intel's critical business platform, Mike Floyd, chief system architect at Indiana University, highly praised his performance: "I've used mainframes before, so I have high expectations for reliability, availability, and maintainability." The Intel x86 server provides good support for critical business applications and workloads, and our school is a argued, "he says:" All of our enterprise applications are virtualized and run on the Intel Nehalem-ex Technology (the Xeon 7500 processor platform). ”

Indiana University of this information project, for domestic universities and large educational institutions, is a rare, very valuable reference to the practical case of cloud computing. The main point of cooperation between domestic universities and Intel Corporation is to use high-performance computing to assist in research and teaching, and to develop a talent for IT hardware and software development for future parallel computing times, and in the future, more schools in China are planning to migrate the entire IT infrastructure and applications, including critical business applications, to a unified cloud computing platform, The story of Indiana University will be worthy of their reference.