private cloud revolution_white paper

8/3/2019 Private Cloud Revolution_White Paper

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/private-cloud-revolutionwhite-paper 1/5

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The Private Cloud Revolution:

Fully Utilizing Your Existing

Compute, Storage, and

Networking AssetsWhitepaper



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Introduction

As part o the never-ending battle to provide superior service to their customers and users, designers and

administrators o Web sites and applications requently ace two unpalatable choices: spend ever-increasing

amounts o money on technology inrastructure, or risk a host o service level shortalls that range rom

slowdowns all the way to complete collapse during periods o peak load.

Fortunately, Inrastructure as a Service (IaaS) on-premise cloud sotware oers a resh approach to helpingvital applications overcome these previously insurmountable hurdles. In this article, we’ll explore the

technologies that comprise private cloud IaaS, as well as describe the advantages they oer. In particular,

we’ll illustrate how Eucalyptus IaaS on-premise cloud sotware utilizes internal resources much more

eectively, thus helping your applications achieve much higher levels o scalability and elasticity, all without

requiring major expenditures or application logic modications.

The intended audience or this article is anyone tasked with running an IT organization, as well as technical

proessionals whose core job responsibilities involve providing scalable inrastructure to meet user needs.

The Perils of Misallocated Resources

It’s notoriously problematic to accurately predict demand or your inrastructure resources such as servers,

storage, network, and so on. For example, instead o a calculably smooth workload, Web sites typically

experience peaks and valleys o activity. Quiet periods are suddenly interrupted by renetic trac spikes

generated by diverse events such as holiday sales, new marketing campaigns, revised shopping carts,

promotional games, and social networking-driven occasions. These bursts o peak activity can lead to

perormance bottlenecks (at best) and site crashes (at worst). Meanwhile, other assets within your data

center may be relatively underutilized.

Unortunately, your customers are remarkably unsympathetic to these types o disruptions. Instead, they’ve

come to expect sub-second responsiveness at any time o the year, regardless o whether an extraordinary

event is underway or not. I your site is sluggish, they’ll take their business elsewhere. Magniying this sad

reality is the act that once a prospect is lost, they may never return, even ar into the uture.

Since it’s traditionally been very dicult to dynamically reallocate untapped computing resources, designers

and developers have either over-provisioned, or gambled that existing inrastructure will be up to the

task. The drawbacks o excessive investments are myriad. First, these expenditures can be tremendously

expensive, especially when conducted at the last minute or during a crisis. Next, since orecasting demand

is extremely imprecise, there’s a good chance that the procured resources won’t even be used. It may take

a long time to recoup the investment in these idle assets. Meanwhile, other parts o the business are starved

or cash.

On the other hand, attempting to service customers with insucient resources means that your applications

may ail in a crunch. In the case o a Web site, a complete crash during peak load is possible. Even i the site

is able to stay on its eet, it will certainly bog down and cause prospects to seek alternatives. What’s worse

is that many customers will broadcast, via blogs, reviews, and other media, their bad experience with you. These reports tend to persist, and may negatively impact business or years to come.

What’s particularly ironic is that many enterprises already have sucient capacity to meet their needs.

However, ne-tuning the allocation o these assets has been problematic until now.



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Virtualization and Cloud Computing to the Rescue

Fortunately, the past ew years have seen the advent o two major technology trends that go a long way

toward addressing the problems we just described. First, virtualization optimizes utilization o physical

servers, making it possible to do more with ewer computers. It’s ideal or ully exploiting inexpensive,

commodity hardware. This makes better use o scarce nancial and operational resources while diminishing

energy consumption. On top o these monetary and environmental advantages, sotware developers are

able to realize vastly enhanced productivity rom separate virtualization and scaling o compute, storage, andnetwork resources. Virtualization has also served as one o the essential building blocks o cloud computing.

Just like virtualization, cloud computing has gained tremendous traction in recent years, with diverse oerings

such as Sotware as a Service (SaaS), Inrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Platorm as a Service (PaaS) all

winning new adherents. Core cloud computing underpinnings such as multi-tenancy, open source sotware,

and leveraging commodity hardware are all made more easible by virtualization. In turn, cloud computing

helps shield sotware developers and end users rom the underlying complexities o a virtualized environment.

By delivering more scalable, elastic resources, cloud computing is a major aid that helps enterprises become

service providers and deliver well-perorming yet cost-eective applications.

Originally, cloud computing was synonymous with public clouds: computing resources that are hosted by

third party providers and accessible to all. However, a number o concerns have arisen about public clouds,

including privacy, condentiality, interoperability, and the potential or cost overrun. Plus, employing public

clouds oten wastes already-available internal computing resources. This has led to the rise o private cloud

IaaS, with technology rom Eucalyptus making these environments secure, ast, and aordable.

Eucalyptus Infrastructure as a Service On-Premise Cloud: Get the Most out of Your

Resources

Private clouds deliver many o the same benets as their public siblings, yet are better equipped to take

advantage o your already-existing hardware while remaining rmly under your control. Eucalyptus is the

most widely used open source private cloud sotware, relied on by organizations in industries as varied

as government, media/entertainment, and high-tech. It uses existing IT inrastructure without needing any

modications, special hardware, or other costly and time-consuming alterations. To maximize portability, it

works with hypervisors rom all major virtualization platorms, including Xen, KVM, and VMware ESX/ESXi.

To urther enhance interoperability and protect you rom lock-in, Eucalyptus automatically converts virtual

machine images to dierent hypervisors including Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Storage

technologies such as iSCSI, Storage Area Networks (SAN), and Network Attached Storage (NAS) are all

capable o being managed rom within the Eucalyptus IaaS on-premise cloud. In keeping with the theme

o fexibility combined with proper security, administrators are able to assign ne-grained control over key

resources, at the user, group, and role levels. In recognition o Eucalyptus’ power and portability, a diverse

ecosystem has arisen to provide users and administrators with numerous value-added products.

Thousands o customers use Eucalyptus IaaS on-premise clouds to dynamically allocate Inrastructure as a

Service – whether in a single data center or globally distributed – without requiring excessive eort rom eithersotware developers or administrators. This provides much more ecient utilization o computing, storage,

and networking assets. In contrast with public clouds, private clouds are under your control, making it much

easier to ensure compliance with your organization’s internal policies and procedures. It’s also easier to

determine cost outlays and budgets or private clouds.

To bring these concepts to lie, consider an Internet-based retailer with data centers in North America,

Europe, and Asia. Over time, its portolio o hardware and sotware has grown to be both varied and



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complex. It supports a collection o applications, with its catalog, recommendation engine, and order

processing systems requiring the most horsepower. To make matters more complicated, the workload or

each o these applications varies according to the time o year. During the spring, the catalog is heavily

utilized while the recommendation engine sees its prime period during summer. Naturally, the order

management application is extremely popular between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Given the distributed and complex nature o their technology inventory, IT management ound it dicult, i notimpossible, to ne-tune the compute and storage resource pool to prioritize assets or each o these major

subsystems. Consequently, it was common to experience slowdowns and crashes or one application, while

each o the other two had ample excess capacity. Private cloud inrastructure represents an excellent way

to apply scalability to leverage additional data center resources while employing elasticity to dynamically and

fexibly allocate resources as services.

Eucalyptus provides an IaaS cloud deployment architecture, exposing virtualized resources including compute,storage, and networking via a well-dened API. This allows or sel-service and dynamic requests o IT resources and

end-to-end automation o IT resource provisioning. Eucalyptus has been designed as a modular, scalable systemthat can be installed in various environments and architectures, and the system can be managed using your existingdatacenter automation, security, monitoring, and management tools. Some tools might need custom integrations.Eucalyptus implements Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) unctionalities including Amazon Security Groups,Elastic Block Storage (EBS), and Elastic IPs. The Eucalyptus Cloud Controller component implements the EC2Compute-as-a-Service unctionalities. Eucalyptus Walrus is equivalent to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3),which provides Storage as a Service cloud or Eucalyptus users. Eucalyptus provides several levels o abstraction:the system is hypervisor-agnostic and can manage Xen, KVM, and VMware- based virtualization environments usingthe same API. We currently support the Amazon AWS API or compute, network, and storage, and potentially other

APIs as the need arises.



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In this case, private cloud inrastructure sotware makes it easy to adjust the balance during periods o peak

activity, thus supplying each application with sucient resources to do its job. When the workload returns to

equilibrium, these compute, storage, and networking ingredients revert to their original usage.

The retailer achieves three primary operational objectives by deploying a Eucalyptus IaaS on-premise cloud:

• Fully utilize all relevant IT infrastructure resources. Administrators use Eucalyptus to make all compute,

storage, and networking resources available to the private cloud, no matter where these components may

physically reside.

• Dynamically assign resources to help control costs. Once these infrastructure services have been placed

into the private cloud, Eucalyptus manages the process o allocating them or maximum benet.

• Minimize administrative overhead. By enabling self-service private cloud management for authorized users,

Eucalyptus minimizes unnecessary bottlenecks and streamlines optimal resource allocation.

Conclusion

IT inrastructure demands and workloads are likely to be less predictable than administrators would preer.

When trying to cope with these unoreseeable circumstances, it’s equally unwise to either overspend on

resources that may never be used or gamble that you’ll have sucient assets to address periods o peak

activity. A smarter approach is to employ Eucalyptus IaaS on-premise cloud technology to ensure that you

make the most o what you already have. This oers much better elasticity and scalability, and ensures that

your applications will be able to satisy their responsibilities without burdening your developers with special

requirements.

Get Started with Eucalyptus

Visit www.eucalyptus.com and click on “Free Trial” so you can see how you can quickly benet rom

cloud technology while getting the most ecient use rom your existing IT inrastructure.

About Eucalyptus Systems

Eucalyptus Systems provides IT organizations in enterprises, government agencies and Web and mobile

businesses with the most widely deployed cloud software platorm or on-premise Inrastructure as a

Service (IaaS). To date, over 25,000 Eucalyptus clouds have been started all over the world, including more

than 20 percent o Fortune 100 companies. Eucalyptus is specically designed or enterprise cloud use,

and the sotware platorm is uniquely suited or private cloud or hybrid cloud computing. Built as an open

source cloud product, Eucalyptus supports the industry-standard Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud

APIs, as well as all major virtualization platorms including Xen, KVM and VMware vSphere, ESX and ESXi.

The company has an active and growing ecosystem o customers, partners, developers, and researchers

that benet rom Eucalyptus’ open, ast, and standards-compliant path to cloud computing. For more

inormation about Eucalyptus, please visit www.eucalyptus.com.

© 2011 Eucalyptus Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. Eucalyptus is a registered trademark o Eucalyptus Systems, Inc.

Eucalyptus Systems, Inc.

6755 Hollister Ave, Goleta, CA 93117

1 (866) 456 3822 (EUCA)

www.eucalyptus.com

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