The path of the cloud from virtualization to corporate private cloud

"Article abstract" Enterprise development of cloud computing process is divided into 5 stages, the general Enterprise first step into virtualization for internal integration, and then create a private cloud, the last will use a variety of public clouds. These 5 phases include server virtualization for phase 1th, decentralized virtualization for phase 2nd, private cloud 3rd, phase 4th Hybrid cloud, and the final phase, public cloud.

Gartner, an international renowned analyst, regularly surveys global CIOs every year, and CIOs think the most important technology in the 2011 is cloud computing, followed by virtualization. "Virtualization is actually the first step in a private cloud," says Wu Ruilian, vice president of research at Gartner Taiwan. ”

Wu Ruilian said that Gartner is the enterprise development of cloud computing process into 5 stages, the general enterprise first step into the virtualization for internal integration, and then create a private cloud, the end will be the use of a variety of public clouds.

These 5 phases include the 1th phase of server virtualization (server virtualization), the 2nd phase of decentralized virtualization (distributed virtualization), the 3rd-phase private Cloud (privacy Cloud), The 4th phase of the hybrid cloud (Hybrid Cloud), as well as the final phase, is the public cloud (Cloud).

According to Gartner, many foreign enterprises have developed into the private cloud stage and started to provide self-service services. However, most of the domestic enterprises are still in the 1th phase of server virtualization, a small number of virtualization depth is already in the phase of decentralized virtualization, began to evaluate the feasibility of phase 3rd.

To create a private cloud, it becomes a business unit

"To build a private cloud, it can't just be a data center, but become a customer service center and a business unit," says Wu Ruilian, vice president of research at Gartner Taiwan Branch. ”

"To build a private cloud, it cannot just be a data center, but rather become a customer service center and a business unit," says Wu Ruilian. ”

She further explained that, from an internal billing perspective, the IT department calculates the usage and billing of each department, and can increase the efficiency of the resource management by pricing, for example, a department that temporarily needs a lot of computing resources to pay a higher internal cost or offer a lower price at the server off-peak stage. Can further change the user department's usage habits, the use of off-peak time to deal with the need for computing resources of service requirements.

Wu Ruilian said: "When users are willing to use the rules developed by the IT department to transfer the usage situation, they can improve the utilization of the data center, without the need to expand the scale." "she said. Further, through cloud computing to reduce the cost of building new programs, "It can make the enterprise more groundbreaking, cost reduction is not an end, but the inevitable result of the process." ”

Package of private cloud solutions are in the oven

Currently in the market, there are many information vendors to provide a All-style cloud solution, in this scenario, including physical servers, storage space and network switching, but also provides software virtualization technology, management monitoring platform and automation tools, Almost a whole set of imports can create a private cloud.

These solutions such as HP Cloudsystem matrix and HP Insight management platform, IBM Cloudburst and IBM Tivoli Management Platform, Oracle Exalogic elastic Cloud with Oracle Enterprise Manager, as well as VMware's Vblock infrastructure Package with EMC, Cisco Alliance, with EMC Ionix Unified Manager management platform. Microsoft also provides hyper-V FCL in the McLoud solution, with System Center management platform.

Most of these products support mainstream virtualization technologies that help companies build an IaaS platform within the enterprise, but also resemble Oracle's offerings to provide PAAs platforms in the Java intermediary software layer, rather than leveraging virtualization technology.

The price of each product will be based on the specifications of the enterprise matching and different, usually can choose the specification is the memory capacity and hard disk space, etc., the whole set of prices from million to tens of millions of dollars, but all advertised the effect of optimization. OEM in advance according to the specifications of the entity server to adjust the parameters of the virtualization platform, provide the best settings, and emphasize the characteristics of fast import, so that enterprises can in a few days, or even a few hours to build a virtual environment to provide a private cloud.

However, Zhang Renquan, the manager of the Programme management Department of the China Electronic Information Engineering office, said that most companies are unwilling to invest large sums of money in a lump sum, purchasing a whole new set of products, rather than replacing them in batches, updating only the old equipment that must be replaced at a time.

As a result, companies rarely introduce proprietary cloud products, but are more willing to go to school or public institutions, such as the Asian University information Liu Jia, who decided to import the HP System Matrix Blade system to build a teaching cloud within the school, using HP BSM management platform to control the virtual execution environment of resource scheduling and settings, however, this program to start the commissioning, has not entered a mature stage of operation, follow-up results and the overall cloud products management issues remain to be seen.

However, as enterprise virtualization becomes more and more widely used, a variety of management issues and challenges are becoming more and more demanding for a variety of automation tools.

Monitoring tools are more valued by enterprises than billing mechanism and dynamic configuration

In the suite management platform, manufacturers often emphasize 3 kinds of automation tools, the first is to automate the dynamic configuration of resources, the second is monitoring tools, and the third is billing mechanism. At present, the needs of enterprises, monitoring tools The most important, followed by the billing mechanism, and the manufacturer's main flexible and rapid automatic resource allocation (auto provisioning), but not the urgent needs of enterprises.

Enterprises need to dynamically configure resources only for test environments and development environments. Most of the online will not easily change the configuration, coupled with the enterprise Development program often takes several months, the discussion of the new application needs of the computing resources to spend days to 1, 2 weeks, with 2 days to complete the virtual machine configuration and 10 minutes to complete the setting of the difference is not really. Instead, the fast-configured functionality is valuable for large enterprises that provide test environments and development environments every day, or enterprises that have to quickly deploy resources.

The highest demand for monitoring tools is because virtual machines are more difficult to manage than physical machines in the past. When the number of virtual machines more and more, want to quickly find service when the problem point is also more and more difficult, and therefore, there are enterprises to create a variety of monitoring platform, the purpose is to monitor the implementation of the virtual machine service is normal operation, Virtualization platform vendors have also introduced increasingly visual management dashboards, making it easier for businesses to spot problems, such as the Meta securities that have imported VMware's newly published vcenter operations to monitor virtual machines.

Further, the enterprise hopes that through the long-term tracking of monitoring tools, on the one hand, to find the optimization of virtual machine efficiency parameters, on the other hand can also carry out prevention management, in advance to identify possible problems or performance bottlenecks in the equipment, the first elimination to avoid when the machine occurs.

And the billing tool is a flattening management tool, on the one hand, the enterprise IT department wants to understand the cost structure of it transport through billing tools, but on the other hand, in the absence of enterprise policy and high-level support, it is difficult for IT departments to actually carry out internal billing and cost transfer, and the utility of billing tools is not as effective as monitoring tools.

In this cover, we also visited 7 companies that build private cloud scale and application experience, including High-tech manufacturing, securities, life insurance, telecom, multinational software, online gaming, etc. Some enterprises have the engine room x86 server 100% virtualization, some are in the 2004 began to invest in the application of virtualization, and even the size of the application scale of hundreds of virtual machines, there are enterprises through the virtual machine online migration function, only 3 hours to stop the entire information center moved to the new room 10 kilometers away.

The requirements and definitions for private clouds vary from enterprise to application environments, but there are common building keys that can be found in the experience of leveraging virtualization to practice private cloud.

(Responsible editor: admin)