Navigating the Cloud: Empowering Enterprises with Cloud Solutions
- 1. Stonefly is the innovator of worldwide storage standard protocol White Paper Operational Optimization with Private Clouds for Enterprises Stonefly Inc. 26250 Eden Landing Hayward, California, USA
- 2. Enterprise Private Cloud With the cloud revolution facilitating enterprises to improve flexibility, automate processes and increase productivity and profitability; every enterprise is now considering cloud deployment. However, when considering cloud services, some concerns require attention. The major concern that enterprises must address is that which deployment model is best for them and how best can they utilize it? One way enterprises attend to this is by acquiring backup infrastructure and deploying their own private cloud. The Private cloud is a computing model that nurtures agility while expedit- ing enterprises to maintain control of their local infrastructure and securing their sensitive data as well. The cloud in general offers a number of features that are beneficial for the enterprise. Private cloud deployment delivers several advantages to the enterprise. Here are some of them: Security: Several enterprises are experiencing data leaks simply because their data was incorrectly classified in public clouds. Sensitive information was publicly available to everyone, as long as they had the link to those folders. Even the U.S Government had to endure this kind of data leakage because government contractors did the same thing. In Private clouds, this is easily avoidable as only the permitted accounts are facilitated access to data. 1 Private Cloud Advantages
- 3. Enterprise Private Cloud Cloud Connect One™ (Microsoft Azure, VMware vCloud, and so forth) can be used for extending the storage, elasticity, provide higher business continuity, lower CAPEX (Capital Expenses) and OPEX (Operating Expenses), and adhere to the principles of software-defined provisioning of resources. Multi-tenancy: Multi-tenancy implies that an application can utilize all available resources. In other words, it’s not necessary to coordinate resource changes with other application development teams. This access to resources facilitates application development teams to restate and make alterations independently of one another and independently of the infrastructure team. Scalability: Another advantage of Private cloud is its flexible nature. If you have additional compu- tational requirements, you can deploy additional infrastructure; the same applies for storage space requirements. There’s no delay in the process of adding resources, it’s usually a plug and play scenar- io. Self-Service: This is one of the key drivers for enterprises when considering private cloud. If the nature of the enterprise requires monitoring and control, then they simply cannot trust third party service providers to do the work for them. This is the benefit with Private cloud. Enterprises can deploy applications using their available local infrastructure without installation of additional physi- cal hardware. They can request resources and have them provisioned immediately without physical intervention 2
- 4. Enterprise Private Cloud With virtualization of physical infrastructure, development teams are able to provision their own computation, storage and networking through Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). This facilitates the entire development process and increases the overall speed of operations. Self-service enables the availability of virtual infrastructure and resourc- es on demand as opposed to physical infrastructure availability. 1) Data Center Deployment Application deployment in a data center is a time and labor intensive procedure. The application developer has to understand the requirements and then work to modify an existing application or introduce an entirely new one. After the development and testing process, an IT analyst prepares a set of changes for introduction into the infrastructure. Most changes involve sharing resources, OS instances, application instances, firewalls and storage space. To alleviate unnecessary implications of the changes, a Change Advisory Board (CAB) exists to manage and approve all changes to the infra- structure. Once the approval is acquired, the infrastructure team makes the changes. That is just a specific instance of a single application. Enterprises tend to have numerous IT opera- tions running simultaneously. So the CAB has hundreds of requests that they need to manage. For instance, suppose a set of firewalls are becoming an obsolete model and need replacements with newer models. Simultaneously, a group is changing an application to a different set of protocols because a vendor is removing support for the existing protocols, requiring a set of firewall configura- tion changes. At the same time, a client is changing IP addresses, requiring a set of firewall configura- tion changes as well. Safety procedures dictate that all three requirements cannot be addressed simultaneously. Therefore, the changes have to be sequential. These are the changes that the CAB has to regulate. 2) Private Cloud Deployment Utilization of the Private cloud streamlines the entire change process due to the virtual elements involved; changes can be made to computation, storage space and the network efficiently and easily. Once the changes are determined, using APIs and GUIs they can be implemented easily. As the infrastructure involved is virtual, the components are separate which implies one application can be changed or added without affecting other applications. This translates to the parallel operation of procedures as opposed to the aforementioned sequential working. The inclusion of automation 3 Applica�on Provisioning: Data Center versus Private Cloud
- 5. Enterprise Private Cloud tools can further facilitate development teams to utilize their resources without including the infra- structure team. 3) Self-Service Provisioning Self service provisioning facilitates applications, the security and application delivery services provided by an Application Delivery Controller (ADC) to be initiated and deleted without the inclu- sion of the infrastructure team. As each team can operate independently, it isn’t necessary to coordi- nate the changes through a CAB. Instead, policies govern deployment practices in instances where teams acquire their virtual infrastructure from operations and then deploy at their own pace. Further automation of the process of self-service provisioning, the entire collection of resources including compute, network, storage and ADC settings can be stated as a template in a text file that can be stored in a source code repository. A template contains the definitions of a collection of resources and their settings, known as a stack. This“infrastructure as code”ensures that all deploy- ments are facilitated and easily repeated. Using templates speed up deployments and reduces errors. It also simplifies testing since the stack is accessed as a unit in a test environment. 4) Improved Scalability Scalability is an inherent attribute of all cloud services and StoneFly’s products. Using Private cloud, automation can be introduced with soft provisioning of resources without any human intervention. Depending on the data, the computational capability can be scaled up or down automatically with the traffic and load. The private cloud’s elasticity takes soft provisioning to a level where resources can be provisioned and removed automatically using APIs. Similar to an elastic material, the resourc- es required will expand and contract depending on the application. The flexibility will improve the enterprise’s operational efficiency, expediting performance at peak levels without overprovisioning. 5) Elastic Multi-tenancy Traditional infrastructures have many components and resources which are dependent on one another. The advantage of a private cloud is the ability to make changes quickly and independently of other teams. It is possible for all the resources to be dedicated to one application, and the applica- tion team can take complete control without the fear of impacting other applications. This is made possible with Virtualized computation, network, storage, and ADC. The cloud creates the illusion that the resources are immediately available and dedicated to the application. A CAB is not necessary nor is there a need to coordinate configurations and settings with other teams and 4
- 6. Enterprise Private Cloud current applications. Multi-tenancy allows each application team to manage their own application and resources at proficient speeds for the enterprise; decoupling them from the efficiency and initiatives of other data and applications. The market has numerous private cloud environments ranging from pure open source to proprietary systems. Which private cloud is the right choice for your enterprise depends on a number of factors including budget, internal expertise in cloud management, integration concerns, maintenance issues and comfort level with transition. What’s the right kind of Private Cloud for my enterprise? 5
- 7. Enterprise Private Cloud 1. Open Source Private Cloud The pure open source can be deployed with no upfront acquisition license costs, other than hard- ware and labor costs. OpenStack is a leading open source private cloud environment that can be downloaded and installed for free. The challenge is that the group installing and maintaining it must acquire and maintain expertise in OpenStack; which has matured rapidly but is still complex to deploy. The requirement for technical expertise remains constant regardless of which pure open source offering you choose. In order to reduce the workload of maintaining in-house expertise, some enterprises provide support for open source projects. These commercial offerings have a financial cost, which may be offset by the vendor ensuring integration, testing, and validation issues have been addressed and that there is someone to contact in case of an issue. 2. Proprietary Private Cloud An alternative to this is the proprietary private cloud platform. These platforms provide fully inte- grated and tested stacks with dedicated support; however, they typically cost more than OpenStack supported solutions. The upside is that if your enterprise is familiar with the vendor’s technology and interface, using one of these platforms can reduce the learning curve. Some vendors also provide hosted services facilitating an enterprise’s to take advantage of the open source private cloud (or of proprietary offerings) without acquiring hardware or data center space. These services usually have the highest cost but require the fewest in-house resources. Besides finding a private cloud that is right for your organization, you should also make sure that the solution you acquire offers appropriate level of support. Choosing a private cloud is maintaining the perfect balance between internal expertise and the acquisition and maintenance costs. 6
- 8. Enterprise Private Cloud © Copyright StoneFly Inc. 2017 StoneFly Inc. Corporate Office 26250 Eden Landing Rd Hayward, CA 94545 USA Produced in the United States of America October 2017 StoneFly offers your organization a fortune of cloud related insights and services, covering all phases of transition to an environment in which cloud services and legacy systems co-exist. Our deep experience combined with our business process and technology knowledge allows us to help you navigate your options successfully. In StoneFly, we worked with thousands of customers on cloud-related projects and have brought cloud services to clients worldwide. We help businesses identify the breakthroughs that the cloud can enable as well as the guidance to migrate, integrate, optimize and manage hybrid models. We have honed and tested our priority offerings, methodologies, tools and assets through real world experience on thousands of client-projects. Our guidelines, implementation-frameworks and indus- trialized-approaches to solution delivery help our customers minimize risk, reduce costs and take full advantage of the cloud based development platforms and applications at their disposal. Talk to us about how your business can move to the cloud: Sales@stonefly.com For more information, visit StoneFly.com & follow us on Twitter @StoneFlyInc 7 About StoneFly