Portable Datacenter - Cloud Datacenter

What if you want to use the cloud for a DR site? What are the security issues? Some quick thoughts:

Document your own security requirements and audit yourself (do you live up to your own standards?), and publish your security requirements to see if a “cloud” or even hosted solution will be able to meet your requirements.

I think that virtualized networking and security tools should allow one to build a self-contained virtual infrastructure that can be portable: move it from one site to another and preserve a secure perimeter, regardless of the physical infrastructure provider (another private datacenter, a managed hosting operation or a “cloud”). If that is the case, the security SLA of the cloud provider becomes less of an issue.

An example is a new technology for storage that encrypts the data written to the storage, regardless of the encryption offered by the storage provider (e.g. What if the provider key is compromised? No problem if the data is encrypted as it is written to “cloud” disk…).

I am thinking about a vision of a fully virtualized datacenter, including networking and security, that would allow it to be moved from site to site and preserve all elements no matter where it was moved to. This would be a sort of virtualized “pod” or “datacenter on wheels”. The wheels, in this case, would be the internet.

The portable (or virtualized) datacenter has its routing, switching, firewalls, IDS, load balancing, servers and storage self-contained in the “trailer”. All  the owner of this mobile datacenter would need is a place to park it (the Cloud), a connection to the internet and power.

So, if Altor (or something competitive), in combination with Cisco/Juniper virtual switches and VMware tools (vShield?), can provide that capability, does it matter (as much) about some of the detail about the Cloud hosting provider? When I deployed infrastructure building blocks to AT&T datacenters, I built my own network and firewall, and didn’t rely on AT&T to do that for me. What is the difference here? All I was concerned with in Secaucus or Watertown, with AT&T, was physical security. All datacenters meet that basic requirement, and all the tenants use the POP at the datacenter, but they all have separate self-contained networks for the applications.


Agree, disagree?

EMC Unisphere Quick Notes

EMC is announcing a new management interface for its mid-tier storage line, that sounds and looks very promising.

Unisphere is a complete integration with vCenter, along with consolidation of management of CLARiiON and Celerra. This is intended to replace Navisphere and Celerra Manager. This framework also manages RecoverPoint/SE and will include PowerPath and is linked to Replication Manager. It also integrates Analyzer and Quality of Service Manager. It is integrated into lots of support, including PowerLink, without having to log into it separately.

This is Adobe Flex-based, so pretty light weight (not Java). There is a client for Windows, and a server, like off-array Navisphere. This is helpful with geographically dispersed infrastructure It is web-enabled. You don’t have to upgrade to FLARE 30 by using the server client, which is the other way to start using Unisphere.

I will elaborate on this know when I know more.

Here are some links to whitepapers, flash demos and videos.

http://www.emc.com/products/technology/unified-storage.htm?pid=Cloudcampaign-unified_campaign-070610

http://www.emc.com/collateral/software/white-papers/h8017-unisphere-element-manager.pdf

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mACVdai9YwE (Unisphere demo)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKubyt6XBcI&NR=1 (vCenter plug in demo)

On another topic, quickly...

EMC is also building in compression on the CLARiiON to reduce capacity, in the 2:1 range, intended for use in production. Technically, this isn’t deduplication, but more like white space reduction. FCoE support will be included in Unified Storage, to be announced this fall.

Defining the Cloud: Litmus Test

Here is a collection of thoughts I pulled together from recent conversations with colleagues and customers, about what constitutes a "cloud solution" or whether an application is a "cloud application". I'd love to have some comments on this.

Cloud Storage
I have been working on uses cases for one aspect of the cloud, storage (besides backup). There are four that seem to make sense. Can anyone think of anything else?

1. Archival
o Geographic dispersal
o Data stored on low cost media
o Apply WORM policy for compliance
2. Web Content
o Content stored on low cost media
o Use polices to position data
o Users access data directly
3. Disaster Recovery
o Replicate Data into the Cloud
o Apply polices to geographically disperse data
o Production data can be recalled when disaster strikes
4. Dynamic Data Allocation
o Directed at dynamic content such as video and delayed live feed
o Data replicated in geo-specific clouds (i.e. NA, SA, EU, Africa)
o Rapid rollout and tear down required


Some other thoughts from a recent presentation I made:
1. Remember principles of data management
o Performance
o Capacity
o Workflow
2. Cloud Storage works when
o Performance is not an issue
o Capacity is needed
o It fits the workflow
3. Cheap storage is easy, we all can do this, but…
o Geographically replicated, efficiently managed, AND cheap?
4. A useful archive or deep storage tier
o Data mining & re-analysis done in-situ with local cloud server resources if needed
5. “Downloader pays” good model to offset costs

Is the Cloud "right" for you?
As we (data storage architects) attempt to design and implement solutions, we are trying to solve a customer’s business problems while setting them up with a foundation for “smart growth” in technology. We should be thinking about these questions:
1. Will the customer benefit from a self-provisioning architecture that allows business users to set up their own servers/applications/storage/networking, and does that make sense from a business perspective??
2. Will the customer’s business benefit from IT that grows and shrinks in performance and capacity as needed?
3. Will the business benefit from “pay for use” by the end user, as a way to track investment and IT resource utilization?
4. Does the customer need to allow access to its business from anywhere, at any time?
5. Should the customer IT infrastructure be rebuilt so that it consists of “pools” of virtualized computing, networking and storage; and does that make sense from a business perspective?

The answers to these questions are not always “Yes”. Most companies do not need to build a private cloud now, or in the immediate future, but they need to understand what these changes could mean to them, both as IT professionals and as business enablers.

By Who and When will the Cloud be Adopted?
As has been pointed out by others, adoption of cloud-like computing will likely take place within IT and at the consumer and small-business level first, although latency issues will remain for business computing in the public cloud until the technology finishes maturing and content can be made ubiquitous (cheaply pushed out to the edge where it is needed). IT staff at larger companies will want cloud-like computing in the datacenter to ease power and space crunches and make them more efficient with a self-provisioning, elastic, network-based infrastructure, but as EMC has noted, it is a bit harder to push the enterprise business applications into a cloud. That will come with time, as power, cooling and staffing resources force efficiency on small business and datacenters alike. It will enabled by the successes we can make happen now and as the “hump” of the bell curve moves closer to the elastic infrastructure and virtualized computing environment we now call the Cloud.

The Litmus Test
Ask yourself if any technology fits most or all of these requirements? If not, it is not a cloud technology.
• Elastic?
• Self provisioning?
• Pay as you go?
• Pooled resources?
• Ubiquitous network access?

Example: SharePoint
SharePoint would be a great application to have in the cloud, but the resource pooling and provisioning would be infrastructure based, and that is where the cloud technology surfaces.
A service provider could allow you to request what is needed to deploy or scale SharePoint, but what is the technology behind the portal? BMC? Surgient? Something else? What is the storage behind it? How will the content and computing be geographically dispersed so that latency won’t be an issue?

I think any web-based interface to an application can be considered “enabling”, since that meets the “ubiquitous access” criteria. What will it be used for? How will it enable self-provisioning? Is what is being done through the interface able to scale?

Ask yourself (or your customer) this:
It all comes back to the same thing…what are you moving (and why) from the old paradigm of datacenter computing and moving to the new paradigm, regardless of whether it is private, public or federated?