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Private Clouds: Efficiency and Agility inthe Next Generation Data Center

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Private Clouds: Efficiency andAgility in the Next GenerationData CenterBy Andrew Mazer

Moving Past VirtualizationOnly a few years ago, virtualization was the latesthot technology for the data center. With itspromise of improving asset utilization, simplifyingmanagement, and enabling faster provisioningand workload balancing, virtualization waseagerly adopted by enterprises looking to gaingreater IT efficiency, agility and responsiveness.

Today, it’s rare to find an enterprise that’s notrunning at least some virtual machines in its datacenter. Most large organizations have extensivelyvirtualized their application servers, and many havevirtualized their storage environments.

Yet virtualization hasn’t fully delivered on itspromise; in many cases, server sprawl has simplygiven way to virtual machine sprawl. In fact,industry studies have found that the typical ITgroup still spends about 80 percent of its operat-ing budget on routine maintenance instead ofstrategic initiatives.

At the other end of the spectrum, enter-prises whose data centers act as their factories(including social networks, online gaming busi-nesses and scaled-out Web farms) have turnedthis equation upside down; these companiesspend 80 percent or more of their budgets onstrategic projects that drive their business. Thekey to this accomplishment? Leveraging theconcepts behind the cloud.

Although cloud computing leverages virtual-ization for the ability to provision and scalequickly to meet constantly changing businessneeds, cloud goes far beyond that. Public andprivate clouds use a virtualized pool of computeresources to efficiently deliver applications,

information and computing services over theInternet to PCs and mobile devices using Web-based interfaces.

Adopting the Private CloudWith the advent of cloud computing, IT adminis-trators will soon find themselves managing aportfolio of compute models made up of tradi-tional, virtualized, and public and private cloudenvironments, with each model matched to anappropriate set of applications. Although themajority of computing today falls within thetraditional and virtualized models, private cloudswill grow to be the largest component in theportfolio over the next three to five years.

Cloud computing provides IT with a new wayof addressing business users’ needs; at the sametime, it gives IT consumers access to computingand storage resources on demand. Businessgroups that require scalable computing resourcesto quickly roll out new applications and servicesmay be tempted to turn to public cloud offeringsif their IT department doesn’t respond quickly totheir needs. Given the security and compliancerisks, having internal groups take their businessdirectly to the public cloud is a situation to avoid.

That’s why private clouds are an increasinglyimportant component of enterprise IT portfolios.Private clouds enable IT departments to retaincontrol of corporate data while remaining respon-sive to user needs. Yet whether they’re locatedon- or off-premises, private clouds are protectedby the corporate firewall, enabling greater securityand control for applications that face both internalusers and the public.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Andrew Mazer has writtenextensively about the high-technology industry for morethan 20 years, covering cloudcomputing, green IT, data centeroptimization, business intelli-gence and other topics thatinvolve using IT as a strategicenabler for business initiatives.

Evolutionary vs. Revolutionary PrivateCloud ComputingEnterprises are currently using two approachesto establishing a private cloud: an evolutionaryapproach and a revolutionary approach. An evolu-tionary approach is centered on the idea of invest-ment protection and is based on adapting existing

traditional applications and leveraging currentinfrastructure. A revolutionary approach is appro-priate for greenfield opportunities that allow anapplication-centric approach. The evolutionaryapproach dominates today, but the revolutionaryapproach will continue to gain traction over thenext several years, eventually taking the lead.

Traditional evolutionary environments achieveavailability and resiliency with tools such asVMotion that shuttle workloads among virtualizedservers. These tools perform independently ofapplications and require significant infrastructureresources — including a dedicated SAN on theback end — to operate. This approach, in whichthe infrastructure is the focus of providingresiliency, is best for running traditional applica-tions in a virtualized environment that consolidatesresources.

In the revolutionary approach, the applicationis front and center. Cloud-native applications aredesigned to run on virtualized machines acrosslarge numbers of servers, delivering performanceand resiliency that can’t be matched by retrofittedtraditional applications.

To optimize performance and scaling, forexample, a developer would design an applicationto exploit the cloud’s virtualized load balancers —there is no need for a SAN or extensive infra-structure overhead. Instead, the applicationsthemselves support resiliency and redundancy.Of course, load balancing is not a new tech-nology, but adapting applications to utilizevirtualized load balancers is a new approach formany developers.

A revolutionary cloud is optimized to quicklyprovision new applications and services. Instead ofrunning operating systems with application stacksand requiring IT staff to compile revisions on aregular basis, the cloud supports open sourceframeworks such as Ruby on Rails and Java, whichenable developers to write and deploy code

directly to the cloud. By using these frameworks,developers can take advantage of free, opensource solution stacks such as LAMP, whichprovide all the components needed to roll outWeb applications.

The application-centric private cloudprovides self-service portals through whichadministrators can monitor and manage thecloud. Developers can also use portals to access acatalog of software services for creating anddeploying applications and services quickly.Chargeback structures are typically integratedwith the portals so that enterprises can billbusiness groups and keep employees responsible.

Dell’s Next-Generation Architecturefor the CloudThe architecture behind a revolutionary approachis a scale-out architecture, which attains resiliencyand availability as a result of the application’sawareness of the architecture and virtualized loadbalancing rather than from the highly redundant

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Enterprises whose data centers act as their factories

spend 80 percent or more of their budgets on strategic projects — not

maintenance. Their secret? Leveraging the concepts behind the cloud.

SERVICES TO GET STARTEDAND BUILD CLOUDS

Dell’s IT Consulting Services can helpenterprises plan and execute theirstrategies for cloud computing. Theycan evaluate your organization’sapplications and infrastructure andwork with you to develop a roadmapfor building a private cloud thatreducesoperational costswhile improv-ing agility. Dell’s IT consulting servicesfor the cloud include the following:

• Cloud Workshop, a compli-mentary, half-day, on-site workshopon cloud computing, including itstechnical and cultural challenges

• Cloud Assessment, a two- tofour-week, on-site engagement dur-ing which a Dell consultant catalogsand categorizes your applications,and sorts them into one of threegroups: those that are best suited fora private cloud, for a public cloud, orfor the existing virtualized or physi-cal infrastructure.

• Cloud Enablement, an on-siteproof of concept engineered aroundidentified services.

hardware itself. This design enables IT administra-tors to deploy optimized servers that reduce theneed for costly systems management, enterprisestorage, hardware redundancy and same-daysupport. Instead, these servers are tuned for theirenvironments with the density, power efficiencyand high-speed memory subsystems that cloudcomputing requires.

Dell’s new PowerEdge C servers are applica-tion-centric platforms built expressly for the high-performance and highly dense computing needsof cloud computing. They are based on provenpurpose-built designs from Dell’s Data CenterSolutions group, which for the last three years hasbeen providing custom servers for some of theworld’s largest Internet and cloud providers. Theseservers are optimized for the homogenous hard-ware deployments of private clouds, as well as thepublic clouds built by telcos, ISPs, SaaS providersand gaming companies.

Although they can be used for evolutionaryenvironments, these PowerEdge C servers arespecially designed for revolutionary deployments.Enterprises on an evolutionary path to cloudcomputing can deploy PowerEdge C servers togain excellent performance and low TCO withintheir virtualized environments. Organizationsseeking to exploit the benefits of private cloudswill find PowerEdge C servers to be cost-effectiveplatforms for adding capacity and runningmemory-intensive applications for databases,Web analytics, business intelligence and clus-ter computing.

The new PowerEdge C servers include:• PowerEdge C1100: high-memory, power-efficient, cluster-optimized compute nodeserver

• PowerEdge C2100: high-performancedata analytics, cloud compute platformand cloud storage server

• PowerEdge C6100: 4-node cloud andcluster-optimized, shared-infrastructureserver for HPC environments

Turnkey Cloud Solutions and CloudPartner ProgramTo reduce the complexity of building private andpublic clouds, Dell is introducing turnkey solutions

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OPTIMIZED FOR THECLOUD: THE INTEL® XEON®

PROCESSOR 5600 SERIES

Powering Dell’s new PowerEdge Cservers is the cutting-edge Intel XeonProcessor 5600 series, delivering 30percent greater power efficiency andup to 60 percent faster performancethan the previous generation.

These enterprise-class processorsincludenewtechnologies that enhancethe security of transactions in publicand private clouds:

• Intel AES-NI is a new instruc-tion set that accelerates data encryp-tion and decryption over a range ofapplications, including databases andInternet transactions.

• Intel TXT enhances the secu-rity of clouds by ensuring that everyelement of the software stack (BIOS,hypervisor, applications) is accreditedand safe to use. It also prevents appli-cations frommigrating to servers thatare not approved to host them.

• Hardware-based security shieldsagainst malicious software.

The 5600 series processors reducevirtualization overhead by automati-cally off-loading platform resourceman-agement to hardware, and enablingI/O to be optimized for the cloud.

The PowerEdge C servers are IntelIntelligent Power NodeManager-com-pliant. Intel Power Node Managerprovides instrumentation at the serverlevel, enabling administrators to pre-cisely limit power usage, monitorperformance and enforce policies viaan interface that connects to a man-agement console.

The Intel Xeon 5600 processordelivers “performance on-demand”to clouds with Turbo Boost, allowingIT administrators to increase clockspeeds when there is thermal head-room. When demand ebbs, individualcores that are not being utilized canbe idled, delivering greater energyefficiency to the cloud data center.

Private clouds will grow to be the largest com-

ponent in the enterprise IT compute-model portfolio over the next

three to five years.

comprising pretested hardware, software andservices. The first of these is the Dell CloudSolution for Web Applications, a platform as a

service (PaaS) solution designed to facilitate Webapplication development and deployment.

With the framework needed to deploy Webservices, this “cloud in a box” enables enter-prises to quickly leverage the benefits of cloudcomputing. The Dell Cloud Solution for WebApplications is ideal for private clouds that needto quickly scale to meet online demands, requireapplication performance and bandwidth scalingbehind a load balancer, or that commonly deployapplications built on LAMP stacks.

This turnkey solution supports developmentlibraries (including PHP, Ruby on Rails, Perl,Python, Java EE, and C#), Web applicationservers such as Apache Tomcat, lighttp andGlassfish, and databases such as MySQL andOracle, creating a robust platform for develop-ing, deploying and hosting applications. Theopen source tools and libraries in the Dell CloudSolution for Web Applications let developers

write code that exploits the advantages of publiccloud services such as Google and Amazon.

In addition to turnkey cloud solutions, to helpin cloud building, Dell has launched a CloudPartner Program. The first solutions offered in thisprogram tap the expertise of best-of-breed infra-structure as a service (IaaS) and data analyticsvendors to offer customers certified and validatedprivate cloud solutions.

These new partners expand Dell’s cloud soft-ware ecosystem, which includes long-standingrelationships with leaders such as Microsoft andVMware:

• Aster Data offers a massively parallel datacloud solution for big data warehousingand deep analytics.

• Canonical with Eucalyptus provides acomplete private IaaS solution that offersimmediacy and elasticity in your own ITinfrastructure.

• Greenplum offers an integrated solutionfor analytics, data mart consolidation andlarge-scale data warehousing.

Dell works closely with its partners to ensurethe interoperability and optimization of their soft-ware on Dell PowerEdge C servers and providesblueprints and deployment guides to ensure asuccessful launch. With one-stop Dell shopping,you can get optimized cloud solutions backed byDell-coordinated service and support. �

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ABOUT DELLDell Inc. listens to customers and delivers innovative technology and servicesthey value. A leading global systems and services company uniquelyenabled by its direct business model, Dell is No. 33 on the Fortune 500 listof America’s largest companies. For more information, visit www.dell.comor to communicate directly with Dell via a variety of online channels, goto http://www.dell.com/conversations. To get Dell news direct, visithttp://www.dell.com/RSS.

In the revolutionary approach, cloud-native

applications deliver performance and resiliency that can’t be matched

by retrofitted traditional applications.