The Private Cloud Revolution: Fully Utilizing Your Existing Compute, Storage, and Networking Assets

Whitepaper

Introduction As part of the never-ending battle to provide superior service to their customers and users, designers and administrators of Web sites and applications frequently face two unpalatable choices: spend ever-increasing amounts of money on technology infrastructure, or risk a host of service level shortfalls that range from slowdowns all the way to complete collapse during periods of peak load.
Fortunately, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) on-premise cloud software offers a fresh approach to helping vital applications overcome these previously insurmountable hurdles. In this article, well explore the technologies that comprise private cloud IaaS, as well as describe the advantages they offer. In particular, well illustrate how Eucalyptus IaaS on-premise cloud software utilizes internal resources much more effectively, thus helping your applications achieve much higher levels of scalability and elasticity, all without requiring major expenditures or application logic modifications. The intended audience for this article is anyone tasked with running an IT organization, as well as technical professionals whose core job responsibilities involve providing scalable infrastructure to meet user needs.

The Perils of Misallocated Resources Its notoriously problematic to accurately predict demand for your infrastructure resources such as servers, storage, network, and so on. For example, instead of a calculably smooth workload, Web sites typically experience peaks and valleys of activity. Quiet periods are suddenly interrupted by frenetic traffic spikes generated by diverse events such as holiday sales, new marketing campaigns, revised shopping carts, promotional games, and social networking-driven occasions. These bursts of peak activity can lead to performance bottlenecks (at best) and site crashes (at worst). Meanwhile, other assets within your data center may be relatively underutilized.
Unfortunately, your customers are remarkably unsympathetic to these types of disruptions. Instead, theyve come to expect sub-second responsiveness at any time of the year, regardless of whether an extraordinary event is underway or not. If your site is sluggish, theyll take their business elsewhere. Magnifying this sad reality is the fact that once a prospect is lost, they may never return, even far into the future. Since its traditionally been very difficult to dynamically reallocate untapped computing resources, designers and developers have either over-provisioned, or gambled that existing infrastructure will be up to the task. The drawbacks of excessive investments are myriad. First, these expenditures can be tremendously expensive, especially when conducted at the last minute or during a crisis. Next, since forecasting demand is extremely imprecise, theres a good chance that the procured resources wont even be used. It may take a long time to recoup the investment in these idle assets. Meanwhile, other parts of the business are starved for cash. On the other hand, attempting to service customers with insufficient resources means that your applications may fail in a crunch. In the case of a Web site, a complete crash during peak load is possible. Even if the site is able to stay on its feet, it will certainly bog down and cause prospects to seek alternatives. Whats 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 for years to come. Whats particularly ironic is that many enterprises already have sufficient capacity to meet their needs. However, fine-tuning the allocation of these assets has been problematic until now.

Virtualization and Cloud Computing to the Rescue Fortunately, the past few years have seen the advent of two major technology trends that go a long way toward addressing the problems we just described. First, virtualization optimizes utilization of physical servers, making it possible to do more with fewer computers. Its ideal for fully exploiting inexpensive, commodity hardware. This makes better use of scarce financial and operational resources while diminishing energy consumption. On top of these monetary and environmental advantages, software developers are able to realize vastly enhanced productivity from separate virtualization and scaling of compute, storage, and network resources. Virtualization has also served as one of the essential building blocks of cloud computing.
Just like virtualization, cloud computing has gained tremendous traction in recent years, with diverse offerings such as Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS) all winning new adherents. Core cloud computing underpinnings such as multi-tenancy, open source software, and leveraging commodity hardware are all made more feasible by virtualization. In turn, cloud computing helps shield software developers and end users from the underlying complexities of a virtualized environment. By delivering more scalable, elastic resources, cloud computing is a major aid that helps enterprises become service providers and deliver well-performing yet cost-effective 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 of concerns have arisen about public clouds, including privacy, confidentiality, interoperability, and the potential for cost overrun. Plus, employing public clouds often wastes already-available internal computing resources. This has led to the rise of private cloud IaaS, with technology from Eucalyptus making these environments secure, fast, and affordable.

Eucalyptus Infrastructure as a Service On-Premise Cloud: Get the Most out of Your Resources Private clouds deliver many of the same benefits as their public siblings, yet are better equipped to take advantage of your already-existing hardware while remaining firmly under your control. Eucalyptus is the most widely used open source private cloud software, relied on by organizations in industries as varied as government, media/entertainment, and high-tech. It uses existing IT infrastructure without needing any modifications, special hardware, or other costly and time-consuming alterations. To maximize portability, it works with hypervisors from all major virtualization platforms, including Xen, KVM, and VMware ESX/ESXi.
To further enhance interoperability and protect you from lock-in, Eucalyptus automatically converts virtual machine images to different hypervisors including Amazons Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Storage technologies such as iSCSI, Storage Area Networks (SAN), and Network Attached Storage (NAS) are all capable of being managed from within the Eucalyptus IaaS on-premise cloud. In keeping with the theme of flexibility combined with proper security, administrators are able to assign fine-grained control over key resources, at the user, group, and role levels. In recognition of Eucalyptus power and portability, a diverse ecosystem has arisen to provide users and administrators with numerous value-added products. Thousands of customers use Eucalyptus IaaS on-premise clouds to dynamically allocate Infrastructure as a Service whether in a single data center or globally distributed without requiring excessive effort from either software developers or administrators. This provides much more efficient utilization of 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 organizations internal policies and procedures. Its also easier to determine cost outlays and budgets for private clouds. To bring these concepts to life, consider an Internet-based retailer with data centers in North America, Europe, and Asia. Over time, its portfolio of hardware and software has grown to be both varied and
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complex. It supports a collection of applications, with its catalog, recommendation engine, and order processing systems requiring the most horsepower. To make matters more complicated, the workload for each of these applications varies according to the time of 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 of their technology inventory, IT management found it difficult, if not impossible, to fine-tune the compute and storage resource pool to prioritize assets for each of these major subsystems. Consequently, it was common to experience slowdowns and crashes for one application, while each of the other two had ample excess capacity. Private cloud infrastructure represents an excellent way to apply scalability to leverage additional data center resources while employing elasticity to dynamically and flexibly allocate resources as services.

Eucalyptus provides an IaaS cloud deployment architecture, exposing virtualized resources including compute, storage, and networking via a well-defined API. This allows for self-service and dynamic requests of IT resources and end-to-end automation of IT resource provisioning. Eucalyptus has been designed as a modular, scalable system that can be installed in various environments and architectures, and the system can be managed using your existing datacenter automation, security, monitoring, and management tools. Some tools might need custom integrations. Eucalyptus implements Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) functionalities including Amazon Security Groups, Elastic Block Storage (EBS), and Elastic IPs. The Eucalyptus Cloud Controller component implements the EC2 Compute-as-a-Service functionalities. Eucalyptus Walrus is equivalent to Amazons Simple Storage Service (S3), which provides Storage as a Service cloud for Eucalyptus users. Eucalyptus provides several levels of abstraction: the system is hypervisor-agnostic and can manage Xen, KVM, and VMware- based virtualization environments using the same API. We currently support the Amazon AWS API for compute, network, and storage, and potentially other APIs as the need arises.

In this case, private cloud infrastructure software makes it easy to adjust the balance during periods of peak activity, thus supplying each application with sufficient 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 of allocating them for maximum benefit. Minimize administrative overhead. By enabling self-service private cloud management for authorized users, Eucalyptus minimizes unnecessary bottlenecks and streamlines optimal resource allocation.

Conclusion IT infrastructure demands and workloads are likely to be less predictable than administrators would prefer. When trying to cope with these unforeseeable circumstances, its equally unwise to either overspend on resources that may never be used or gamble that youll have sufficient assets to address periods of peak activity. A smarter approach is to employ Eucalyptus IaaS on-premise cloud technology to ensure that you make the most of what you already have. This offers much better elasticity and scalability, and ensures that your applications will be able to satisfy 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 benefit from cloud technology while getting the most efficient use from your existing IT infrastructure. About Eucalyptus Systems Eucalyptus Systems provides IT organizations in enterprises, government agencies and Web and mobile businesses with the most widely deployed cloud software platform for on-premise Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). To date, over 25,000 Eucalyptus clouds have been started all over the world, including more than 20 percent of Fortune 100 companies. Eucalyptus is specifically designed for enterprise cloud use, and the software platform is uniquely suited for 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 platforms including Xen, KVM and VMware vSphere, ESX and ESXi. The company has an active and growing ecosystem of customers, partners, developers, and researchers that benefit from Eucalyptus open, fast, and standards-compliant path to cloud computing. For more information about Eucalyptus, please visit www.eucalyptus.com.

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