Simplify common cloud operations with the IBM SmartCloud Entry Self-Service Portal

Cloud computing allows computing resources to be used for public utilities (such as water and electricity) and can be measured using instrumentation to track usage and report to service providers and consumers. In addition, cloud computing can track how many resources and utilities each subscriber consumes, so that service providers charge them a reasonable fee. The metering system records resource utilization, such as CPU, memory, data storage usage, and many other related resources consumed by cloud service users.

Metering is also the basis for current limits and billing. metering tracking, sorting and computing the resource usage of each Subscriber, using a given time unit to generate accurate resource usage information, therefore, measurement becomes the basis of "pay by use" billing model. On the other side, the corporate private cloud leverages metering services to show the actual resource usage of each user, ensuring the security and availability of the computing environment. For example, by using measurement of private cloud resources, subscribers are encouraged to release their resources to a resource pool after they have finished using them, thereby increasing the overall availability of the private cloud pool.

Currently, most cloud service providers, including Amazon elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and microsoft®windows®azure™, have their own metering systems. In general, the design and implementation of measurement components focus on measuring what data is available and what data to use, how to collect utilization data, and what measurement values can be calculated from the collected data.

IBM Tivoli®usage and Accounting Manager (Tuam) uses data collectors to collect data collected from different data sources, such as IBM z/vm®, VMware using collectors, and so on. The data is collected and converted to the Common Source Resource (CSR) format and then transferred to the processing server for further processing. The Integrator and processing engine for Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager will process the collected data. The processing steps may vary, depending on the collector you are using. You can summarize the data in the CSR format based on the given identifier and use that data as input to the next processing step to achieve billing or other financial and organizational-level services.

IBM SmartCloud Entry Overview

IBM Smartcloud™entry (Scentry) is a powerful cloud computing software product that brings the virtualized environment from the cloud-ready into the real cloud. It leverages the underlying hardware and virtualization management systems (such as IBM Bae Director vmcontrol™ and VMware vcenter) to provide easy-to-use functionality to easily build an entry-level private cloud. SmartCloud Entry allows users to focus on the end-user perspective in using virtual devices and workloads, rather than focusing on IT or the system administrator's point of view. It supports basic cloud operations, such as configuring and canceling configuration, drafting and cloning deployment configurations, power management for virtual servers, and resizing existing servers. In addition, it provides metering, billing, and approval processing features to help IT Managers monitor and manage the cloud environment, thereby improving data center efficiency and utilization.

As one of the key components, metering is loosely coupled with other components in the SmartCloud Entry, collecting virtual server allocations and other usage information from the underlying adapters, generating metering records, storing them in a database, and exporting data to the file system at a given time interval. Figure 1 provides an advanced architecture for SmartCloud Entry.

Figure 1. IBM SmartCloud Entry Architecture

Schemas and Components

The SmartCloud Entry metering service runs on top of the SmartCloud Entry Base service, which provides the underlying services to all other internal components. The layered architecture and components of the SmartCloud Entry metering service are described in the following sections.

Metrology Service Architecture

The overall architecture of metering services is divided into three layers, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Measurement framework in SmartCloud Entry

The data collection layer (Collection Layer) includes event Listener (event listener) and data refresher, which collects metering data from a variety of computing resources. The Data transformation Layer receives and processes the measured data collected by the data Collection Layer and converts the original metering data into an internal format and keeps it in the database. The consumption Layer (data consumption layer) provides functionality for metering data export and archiving, as well as interaction with end user RESTful application programming interfaces (APIs).

From the point of view of the data flow, the metering data flows from the bottom to the top of the three layers. First, data Collection Layer collects metering data and transmits it to the data transformation layer for processing and persistence, which is then used by the data consumption layer component. The data export service converts the metering data to the Usage Detail record (UDR) format and stores it in a file in the local file system. The Data Archive service (data archiving services) cleans up the already outdated information and prevents the database from becoming too large. The RESTful API component provides interface to the SmartCloud Entry user interface and Third-party software integration to initialize data export and archive requests. SmartCloud Entry Basic Service serves as a bridge to the whole data flow and processing, in which the metering component invokes SmartCloud Entry basic services to complete various measurement data processing.