Private Cloud Computing Service - Coursework Example

Private Cloud Cloud computing is a highly available computing environment that secures services and their data are always delivered on-demand; to particular authenticated users and devices utilizing an elastic, shared infrastructure (usually network) that supports multi-tenants. Attributes that will distinguish Surf Shoppe concept cloud computing from conventional computing include: a. Sharing by multiple tenants b. On-demand self-service c. Rapid elasticity d. Broad network access e. Measured service f. Resource pooling Three primary categories of private cloud computing service include: i. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Infrastructure like storage, servers, and network, are integrated to delivered cloud service through virtualization. ii. Platform as a service (PaaS). In this category, platforms are used to deploy or develop applications. iii. Software as a service (SaaS). There is deployment of software as a hosted service and is accessed over the Internet. “Single screen viewed” private cloud console solution will deliver Compliance as a Service (CaaS) for MegaCorp and will enable the organization align its projects with infrastructure costs. Why Deploy Private Cloud? Economically, private cloud-enabled solutions will reduce both operational costs and capital requirement. For example, MegaCorp will stop wasting storage capacity dedicated to one application and server; instead it will use pooled storage, server and networking resources when needed. This will ensure efficient utilization of resources, reduced acquisition costs and prevents over-provisioning. Consolidated resources into pools and automated tasks reduce the amount of management required operationally. Benefits of private cloud include: 1. Increased agility and reduced provisioning times. 2. High efficiency in energy savings due to well managed resource utilization. 3. Reduced incremental cost due to readily available software and standard hardware. 4. Improved capacity management by applying new business intelligence tools. The private cloud will be able of hosting highly demanding business applications for MegaCorp. Increased Agility Business goals will be met more quickly. The private cloud will also make it possible for the organization to rapidly acquire or manage its own cloud capacity and application needs. The private cloud reduces provisioning time as compared to conventional computing environment. Provisioning time is further reduced using automated workflows and self-service portal. Improved Infrastructure Efficiency Shared and virtualized infrastructure is the building foundation for private cloud; computing resources are pooled to serve organization’s departments using a multi-tenant model. This will increase efficiency by allowing higher levels of resource utilization per pool, and will also enable reduced power consumption by consolidating all workloads. High Availability and Security Building a private cloud delivers the benefits of public clouds without experiencing the risks of hosting sensitive data and applications outside the firewall. Private cloud will extend levels of applications availability to all without the requirement of costly specialized software and hardware. Service Management The proposed service management framework for MegaCorp will be based on Information Technology Information Library approach, for the creation of business policies and processing of customer services, guiding manageability design for services, and receiving information about the health of services. Self-Service Portal The self-service portal will provide MegaCorp with a ‘single screen’ graphical interface that they can use in requesting, managing, tracking, and retiring private cloud capacity and services to meet their demands and business. The portal will use automated workflows for acceleration and streamlining of the provisioning process. In order to meet broader requirements for the enterprise private cloud, the portal should be enhanced to in order support the whole application life cycle. Capacity Management MegaCorp will have centralized cloud infrastructure team responsible for managing the capacity of the entire cloud, checking a buffer of idle capacity that can be directed to individual applications as required. Through the self-service portal, management capacity and business groups request for applications will be individually, up to pre-defined limits on business demand basis. Specifications of the limits will be based on policies established in service level agreements. Security The security of MegaCorp’s applications and data remains critical focus during the development and implementation of a private cloud strategy. Major security focus areas will be data segregation and encryption, virtual management isolation, security event and access monitoring, and virtual network isolation Infrastructure Capability Phasing Pragmatic approach will be the best method for MegaCorp in implementation of the enterprise private cloud. Due to limited resources, like finances, there must be prioritization in each phase for desired capabilities with time. Phasing will take advantage of major new enabling technologies-standard software and hardware. These technologies will make it possible to develop a large private enterprise cloud, with improved scalability of virtualization servers and software. Off-the-shelf virtualization software and virtualization Technology will make it possible to provide an increased application quality of service, increased virtual management isolation and cost-effective high availability. Cloud Implementation Plan Private cloud capabilities should be done in phases. As the private cloud matures, applications are progressively migrated from conventional environment to the cloud. Application Phasing Applications that are critical for MegaCorp, include sensitive data, have demanding requirements or provide competitive advantage will always be hosted within private cloud rather than outsourced to existing public clouds. As the capabilities of private cloud increase, a number of applications will be moved to private cloud from conventional computing environment. With time, the private cloud will be allowed to host production of most demanding internal applications, this includes externally facing applications. The private cloud capabilities should be delivered in phases because of the extensive scope of the initiative. More capabilities are added regularly in order for the cloud to become suitable for hosting mission-critical (highly demanding) business applications. The proposed Surf Shoppe implemented to satisfy the following in phases: a. Single Screen View There will be collection and monitoring of baseline data performance across all sources. b. Real-Time Notifications Identification of performance changes in behavior through automatic baselines across data elements before end users are impacted.  c. Fast Troubleshooting Identification of the cloud area that affects performance of major services will be fast. d. Multi-Tenancy There will be visibility to users for an enhanced value-added services provision hence can generate additional revenue streams or new sources of revenue. e. Improved Network Performance Virtualization will be possible hence prevention of degraded IT performance. Enterprise Servers Server platforms should be highly scalable and reliable designed for consolidation and critical databases and applications. Servers’ processor should accommodate more memory and threads with a regular modular in-box partitioning, and support configuration flexibility with hard-disk or solid-state drives. Servers should generally provide configuration flexibility, reliability, capacity, and availability. In addition, servers should be built with fully redundant chassis, processors. This ensures continuous availability and fast performance. There will be uninterrupted processing regardless of a host-based failure, in addition maintenance will be performed without hypervisor, application downtime or guest OS. Enterprise Storage The MegaCorp’s private cloud will balance affordability, performance, and functionality for SAN applications. The organization will implement software-defined and standard-based network. This will be possible with standardizing functions of firewalls and stream analysis. Consolidated network management will reduce power consumption and space requirements with improved resilience. There will be controller that enables multi-tenant network infrastructure to be implemented, monitored, and managed from a single screen console, hence enabling virtual machine migration, rapid scaling, and workload balancing in single screen management interface. The organization will have universal switches that provide network multi-pathing, virtualization, and security. This will enhance high availability and performance, and it will also reduce virtualizing of network services, eliminate distribution protocols, and reduce energy requirements. Enterprise Software Software that supports operation of virtualized environments will be required; configuration control function for storage, servers, virtual machines and networks, that will enable the organization integrate both clients and servers. There should be analyzing software for checking large amounts of data collected by identifying problems before system is affected. Finally, there should be software that protects virtual and physical servers and entire operating systems. This will ensure minimized downtime disruption and continuous monitoring with automated failback/failover, fast data recovery, and asynchronous and synchronous data mirroring in a single screen management console that ensures streamlined administration and improved visibility. Enterprise Cloud Management The major capabilities of Enterprise Manager will include: A complete private cloud management solution that enables quick set up, management, and support of enterprise clouds from applications to disk Better service levels for cloud and traditional applications through organization-driven application management Enterprise Cloud Architecture Enterprise Manager Cloud Control is interpreted as a single entity with the following components: Management Agent Management Service Management Repository Management Plug-ins Enterprise Private Cloud Control Console Figure 1 shows Enterprise Cloud Control architecture and how these core components fit. The multiple Surf Shoppe Management Services and load balancer indicate how the Enterprise Cloud Control architecture of the organization would look like. Management Agent Surf Shoppe Management Agent is integral software that will be deployed on monitored hosts. It will monitor all targets running on hosts, distributing information to the middle-tier Surf Shoppe Management Service and maintaining or managing hosts and their targets. Sun Shoppe Management Service This will be a Web-based application that will work with Management Agents in discovering targets, monitoring and managing those targets, and storing all the collected information for future analysis and reference. Sun Shoppe Management Service will also render the one screen user interface for the Private Enterprise Cloud Control. Single Screen Cloud Control Console The Single Screen Cloud Control Console will be the users’ interface that after an Enterprise Cloud Control is installed. From the console, it will be easy to administer and monitor the entire computing environment using one location on the network. All services and systems; inclusive of databases, enterprise application systems, middleware application servers, hosts, and so on, will be easily managed from single point (one central) location. Figure 1 Enterprise Cloud Control Architecture SAN Versus NAS There are two popular terms are referred to an externally attached storage: Network Attached Storage (NAS), and Storage Area Networks (SAN) Storage area networks (SANs) are built using storage-specific network technologies. Servers are used connected to storage devices and access data at block level. This implies that the server, usually a disk drive on a particular storage area network, is accessed through the same read and write disk block. Data and requests are usually transmitted using a secured storage protocol. These protocols are mostly tuned for low latency; these are high bandwidth data transfers that required by storage infrastructure. Figure 2 Storage Area Network SAN fiber channel technologies such as SCSI (most preferred) run over a standard IP network. SAN technologies allow pool (large number) of devices to be accessed from a specified set of servers, hence reducing the compute needs (speed) from the storage needs. Justification for SANs Factors to include in any benefit /cost analysis for SAN are: Reduced numbers of servers Saved unallocated disks spaces Reduced backup infrastructure complexity Lowered costs for server upgrades – no or little local disk are required Reduced downtime hence improved productivity In contrast, NAS (network attached storage), is built from standard network components like the Ethernet and other LAN technologies. Application servers access storage utilizing file system functions such as write file ,open file, close file, read file, etc.. Higher-level functions are encapsulated in protocols like NFS or CIFS and run across standard IP-based connections. Figure 3 Network attached storage There is to hiding of the details of how data is stored on disks and presentation of high level file system view for application servers in NAS solution. A file server provides file system with management functions like the ability to back up a file server in NAS environment. SAN and NAS are regarded as competitors, but they are complementary technologies – NAS prospers in file based input/output while SAN produces the most effective block-based input/output. MegaCorp should come up with a NAS Gateway or NAS Head; a hybrid storage device that resides in the storage arrays incorporated to a SAN but delivers file systems over LAN. An integration of a SAN and NAS Gateways will be an effective way of delivering file-based functionality. SAN technology are highly available and highly scalable storage solutions hence its advisable for Sam to take into consideration of turning to a hybrid solutions that combines a centralized file server of NAS with the scalability and availability offered by SAN. Figure 4 Hybrid NAS and SAN solution Providing SAN for applications and NAS for reduplicated backup and archiving will be suitable for MegaCorp. A single-vendor solution will provide a tight design and integrates infrastructure that will be supportable in a given viable environment, hence allowing for a more agile business. Disadvantages of Private Clouds The following issues are the negative aspects of using private clouds. a) Poorly designed cloud can lead to inaccessibility of services and large volume of data. b) Private clouds are complex in implementation and may require outside help or training for operations. c) Incompatibility issues may rise due to different hardware and Operating systems Conclusion An enterprise private cloud delivers critical business benefits, and also reduces provisioning times, ensures higher resource utilization, improved capacity management, and increases high availability. References Cisco. (n.d.). A Comprehensive Cloud Management Platform with Cisco and VCE. Retrieved December 4, 2013, from Cisco: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns340/ns517/ns224/ns955/ns964/cisco_iac_on_vblock_white_paper_final_2.pdf Oracle Cloud Computing. (n.d.). Retrieved Decemder 4, 2013, from Oracle Systems: www.oracle.com/us/solutions/cloud/overview Sandra, S. (n.d.). IBM Developers Works. Retrieved December 4, 2013, from http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/private-cloud-advantages-options/private-cloud-advantages-options-pdf.pdf Read More