Private cloud successfully built four principles

The enterprise IT department needs to stick to the four to make full use of the private cloud.

The private cloud is very similar to the public cloud in appearance and usage, and enables the enterprise to enjoy the high-speed, flexible and cost-saving features promised by cloud technology, while it is a single tenant environment, the tenant is yourself. However, this is only a goal and may not be realistic for most businesses.

The definition of corporate private cloud is still in a vague state. The lack of clear and applicable definitions has proven to be a serious impediment to the speed and flexibility that private cloud vendors are committed to in traditional it settings. Aneel Lakhani, research director for virtualization and cloud services at Gartner, a market research institute, says they are not tracking private cloud devices.

For the reason, Lakhani said: "There is no consensus among corporate IT staff as to what the private cloud should look like." Devices that are currently labeled ' private cloud ' include data centers with multiple virtual machines, data centers with basic functionality such as program automation, and data centers with some self-service components. As a result of so many changes, the results generated by these auto-generated reports are not valid at all. ”

Forrester Research, a market researcher, released the results of "Forrsights hardware Watch" in the second half of 2012. The results showed that of the 2,300-odd IT departments surveyed, 31% of respondents said they had deployed private clouds in the right place, while another 17% said they would deploy private clouds sometime in 2013.

"But if you ask further what actual work they are doing, you will find that they may be using some kind of private cloud portal through some infrastructure virtualization," says Lauren Nelson, who heads the private infrastructure, the service business. But the number of respondents who can enjoy high-speed and flexible services after actual access is not much. Nelson believes that the latter occupies a ratio between 7% and 13%.

' There's a little-known secret, ' says Peder Ulander, vice president of Cloud Platform product marketing. Ulander said: "Although 90% of IT departments are virtualized, the performance of these virtualized data centers is only 30%." On the contrary, private cloud can really promote it efficiency and performance optimization. ”

In general, analysts, manufacturers of private cloud development, and practitioners of private cloud deployments agree that the enterprise IT department must adhere to the following four basic principles in order to take full advantage of the private cloud.

1. Must have a converged infrastructure (i.e. CI).

"We are conducting a full discussion," said Andrew Hillier, chief technology officer at the Toronto Virtualization and cloud environment capacity management software provider Cirba. The server must implement virtualization. In addition, there must be a basic software definition network and a converged storage architecture. ”

The founder and CTO of Private cloud provider Piston Cloud Computing, Josh McKenty, agrees with Hillier's need to integrate infrastructure. However, mckenty that the corporate IT department must also consider factors such as disaster recovery, replication, and layout logic for private clouds. In addition, in order to eliminate the single point of failure in the service, supporting other tenants in the cloud, the private cloud may span multiple data centers. McKenty a private cloud network while working for NASA in 2008 and was a technical director in a project involving OpenStack.

"So far, in the public cloud field, these jobs have not been done very well." This is an opportunity for enterprise IT operations, which have not yet deployed complex systems, to skip these issues in the private cloud era. "McKenty said.

2. The allocation of Systems management and software distribution across the converged infrastructure must be fully automated.

"This is to save costs," said Robert Miggins, senior vice president for business development, a private cloud solution provider Peer 1 hosting. Automating deployment and simplifying people operations in day-to-day tasks will ultimately facilitate the sale of private clouds. ”

Forrester's Nelson believes that the configuration program must be significantly elevated to make them a veritable private cloud. "If the current configuration resource takes two weeks, shortening the time allocated to the resource to two days will not cause much change and must be shortened to 15 minutes." You cannot sit aside and wait for approval at all levels, which will lose flexibility and speed. This is the difference between virtualization and cloud computing. "said Nelson.

Cirba's hillier Identity automation is a critical view, but he also suggests that potential customers not just stare at the possibility of deploying instantaneous instances. "For your environment, it may be enough to shorten the deployment time from two weeks to a few hours," Hillier said. For most companies, it is sometimes correct to reserve cycles in a private cloud several days in advance. ”

3. There must be a directory of self-service services for standard computing solutions that users in the enterprise can choose from.

Piston's McKenty said: "The quick way is to see if there are any dashboards for business users in the enterprise, not just the interfaces that traditional IT staff use to allocate IT resources." If there is only the latter, it means that the IT department just has a new toy. "Public Cloud and private cloud service provider Bluelock's CTO Pat O ' Day agreed. "The real cloud means that users, not it, can control the performance of the application based on the resources assigned to them." "he said.

4. Responsibility must be established to track which users are using, and how long to use, by way of a fallback, retrospective, or playback mechanism.

Torsten Volk, an analyst with the EMA (Enterprise Management Association), believes that providing a minimal playback mechanism is critical for any newly created private cloud. "If you can't show who is responsible for the cycles that are being used, there's no incentive to use those resources efficiently," Volk said. ”

The ebay Cloud architect JC Martin is currently responsible for running the second generation of OpenStack based private clouds. He explained that ebay's withdrawal procedures were very similar to prepaid plans, and that the department paid their projected IT service costs in advance every year. Although the department will have many virtual machines, if they do not use them, then the system will help to cut off the idle virtual machines. Martin said: "If the report has a clear responsibility, then people will not occupy some of the machines they do not need." "(Receptacle World", Gundy compiled)

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)