Hybrid Clouds: are we there yet?
by Johan De Gelas on October 18, 2010 2:05 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
Telecom finally enters the 21st century
Telecom devices used to belong to a dark world where the vendors still rule and customers have to cope with their wims. Although modern telecom software is interfacing with mailboxes, VOIP and web conferencing, most telecom vendors force upon the sysadmins proprietary boxes which are completely closed. The vendors felt they could ignore the evolution towards modern flexible virtualized clusters. The motto was "We can only support you if you use our software on our hardware with specialized firmware". The "it will not work otherwise" smokescreen needed to hide the fact that vendors made customers pay premiums for outdated hardware.
Mitel put a cat among the pigeons by offering their software a virtual appliance, i.e. an OVF image. The Virtual Mitel Communications Director (VMCD) does not demand its own server like the rest of the haughty telco software, but humbly installs itself on the virtual layer of your datacenter.
Click to enlarge
It only requires that you reserve 2 to 4 cores and 2 to 4 GB of RAM so it can do its work for up to 1000 active users. Those cores must be an 2 GHz EPT (Hardware MMU) enabled Nehalems or better. The only supported hypervisor so far is VMware's vSphere 4.0 update 2.
Summary
It is pretty clear: advanced virtualization technology brings the advanced capabilities of the "public clouds" inside the datacenters of many enterprises. The virtual intelligent cluster is not going away, especially now that even the most "stubborn" applications such as OLTP databases and telco software are being virtualized.
New "hybrid cloud" management software (vCloud Director, openQRM) will allow the sys admin people to offer the users an easy self service portal. At the same time the sys admins get a single pane to control both the public as the private cloud resources. We are not there yet. More advanced "cloud" networking software and storage migration tools will make it a lot simpler to seamlessly move virtual machines from your own premisses to the large datacenters and back.
But we are getting close. At the high end, EMC VPLEX technology shows that this will become a reality even more for massive migrations that involve moving hundreds of VMs over great distances. And if you only want to move a few VMs from time to time, that is already possible with some careful tweaking, although not fully supported. Just take a look at the benchmark below, done by the EMC lab.
Click to enlarge
VMware vSphere build-in Storage vMotion does the job of moving a complete VM + datastore to another datacenter a lot slower than the VPLEX setup (option 2) but it works without disruption. It won't take long before the Hybrid Cloud will also arrive in the smaller and medium IT business too.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
26 Comments
View All Comments
HMTK - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
Well you don't NEED cutting edge storage for a lot of things. In many cases more cheap(er) machines can be interesting than fewer more expensive machines. A lower specced machine in a large cluster of such machines going down might have less of an impact than a high end server in a cluster of only a few machines. For my customers (SMB's) I prefer more but less powerful machines. As usual YMMV.Exelius - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - link
Very rarely do people actually need cutting edge. Even if you think you do; more often than not a good SAN operating across a few dozen spindles is much faster than you think. Storage on a small scale is tricky and expensive; storage on a large scale is easy, fast and cheap. You'd be surprised how fast a good SAN can be (even on iSCSI) if you have the right arrays, HBAs and switches.And "enterprise" cloud providers like SunGard and IBM will sell you storage, and deliver minimum levels of IOPS and/or throughput. They've done this for at least 5 years (which is the last time I priced one of them out.) It's expensive, but so is building your own environment. And remember to take into account labor costs over the life of the equipment; if your IT guy quits after 2 years you'll have to train someone, hire someone pre-trained, or (most likely,) hire a consultant at $250/hr every time you need anything changed.
Cloud is cheaper because you only need to train your IT staff on the cloud, not on whatever brand of server, HBAs, SAN, switches, disks, virtualization software, etc... For most companies, operating IT infrastructure is not a core competency, so outsource it already. You outsource your payroll to ADP, so why not your IT infrastructure to Amazon or Google?
Murloc - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
I love these articles about IT stuff in large enterprises.They are so clear even for noobs. I don't know anything about this stuff but thanks to anandtech I get to know about these exciting developments.
dustcrusher - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
"It won't let you tripple your VM resources in a few minutes, avoiding a sky high bill afterwards."Triple has an extra "p."
"If it works out well, those are bonusses,"
Extra "s" in bonuses.
HMTK - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - link
I believe Johan was thinking of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TripelJohanAnandtech - Sunday, October 24, 2010 - link
Scary how you can read my mind. Cheers :-)iwodo - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
I admit first i am no expert in this field. But Rackspace Cloud Hosting seems much cheaper then Amazon. And i could never understand why use EC2 at all, what advantage does it give compare like RackSpace Cloud.What alert me was the cost you posted up, which surprise me.
iwodo - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
Arh.. somehow posted without knowing it.And even with the cheaper price of Racksapce, i still consider the Cloud thing as expensive.
For small to medium size Web Site, Hosting still seems to be best value.
JonnyDough - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
...and we don't want to "be there". I want control of my data thank you. :)pablo906 - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
Metro Clusters aren't new and you can already active active metro clusters on 10MB links with a fair amount of success. NetApp does a pretty good job of this with XenServer. Is it scalable to extreme levels, well certainly it's not as scalable as a Fiber Channel on a 1GB link. This is interesting tech and has promise in 5 years. American bandwidth is still archaically priced and Telcos really bend you over for fiber. I spend over 500k /yr on telco side network expenses already and that's using a slew of 1MB links with fiber backbone.1GB links simply aren't even available in many places. I personally don't want my DR site 100km away from my main site. I'd like one on each coast if I was designing this system. It's definitely a good first step.
Having worked for ISP's I think they may be the only people in the world that will find this reasonable to implement quickly. ISP's generally have low latency multi GB link Fiber Rings that meshing a storage Fabric into wouldn't be difficult. The crazy part is it needs nearly the theoretical limit of the 1GB to operate so it really requires additional infrastructure costs. If a Tornado, Hurricane, or Earthquake hits your datacenter 100km away will likely also be feeling the effects. It is nice to replicate data with however in hopes that you don't completely loose all your physical equipment in both.
How long lasting is FC anyway. It seems there is a ton of emphasis still on FC when 10GB is showing scalability and ease of use that's really nice. It's an interesting cross roads for storage manufacturers. I've spoken to insiders at a couple of the BIG players who question the future of FC. I can't be the only person out there thinking that leveraging FC seems to be a loosing proposition right now. iSCSI over 10Gb is very fast and you have things like Link Aggregation, MPIO, and VLANS that really help scale those solutions and allow you to engineer some very interesting configurations. NFS over 10GB is another great technology that makes management extremely simple. You have VHD files and you move them around as needed.
Virtualization is a game changer in the Corporate IT world and we're starting to see some really cool ideas coming out of the big players.