Naveen Noel Sr. Solutions Architect

(Sep 8th 2011)

Introduction to ZSL

Explore a clear definition for Cloud Computing

Discuss ZSL’s 8-phased approach to Enterprise Application

Migration to the cloud.

Cloud Services offered by ZSL

Share 2 Case Studies

Work out of Edison, NJ.

Practice Lead of the Enterprise Computing Competency (IDEA Lab)

Handle Cloud Computing Competency – Applications

Pre-Sales and Projects

Bring in new clients

Key focus areas: Value Added R&D, Product Development, Product Engineering

Have been working on Cloud Technologies since early 2007

15+ years Global Technology Integrator & Business Solutions Provider,

Headquartered in Edison, NJ

State-of-the-art Technology Research & Development Centers in US, Canada and

India

4000 employees with offices in US, UK, Canada, France, Germany, Malaysia,

Singapore, Middle-East and India

Dedicated R&D Division to Offer Value Added R&D Services & Product

Development Services to the ISVs and SPs

Emerging Technologies Specialization with the leading technology vendors

alignment

Pioneer in Industry Solutions Development (Insurance, Finance, E-Governance,

Consumer Electronics, Pharmaceutical & Telecom)

Award Winning & Proven Partnership Program “Get IT Together” Partnership for

ISVs, VARs, SPs and SIs

ISO and CMM Certified Solution Provider

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) provides a

definition:

Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand

network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources

(e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be

rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or

service provider interaction.

In simple words: Flexible hosted resource pools delivered on the internet

On-demand Self Service – Ready to use services; minimal intervention from provider.

Broad Network Access – Access wider network services.

Resource Pooling – Pool resources on demand like Compute, Memory, Storage/disk etc.

Rapid Elasticity – Scale up and down, out and in with demand.

Measured Service – Metered Usage & Billing – Pay as you go and only for the what is used; “Opex vs. Capex.”

Multi-tenant – Usually share the platforms with others; but not always.

Public Cloud – External premises, multi-tenant, self-provisoned public service over the internet offered by vendor, available to all. Utility Computing Model.

Private Cloud – Internal or external premises, single-tenant, tightly controlled access.

Hybrid Cloud – Combination of the above – some resources private, others public; or public during heavy load, etc.

Community Cloud – A cloud infrastructure shared by similar organizations for mutual benefit. Popular with Universities and Governments.

The challenges with migrating applications to a cloud infrastructure are plenty

and range from security, to SLA management, to regulations, to fear of vendor lock-in,

to lack of any standards.

Many businesses are looking for better ways to migrate their existing

applications to a Cloud-based infrastructure so that they can enjoy advantages seen

with the cloud like flexibility. It gives businesses the freedom of choice to choose the

programming models, languages, operating systems and databases they are already

using or familiar with. As a result, many organizations are moving existing applications

to the Cloud today and most applications, data or IT assets within an organization can

be moved to the Cloud today with minimal effort.

Application migration is the process of redeploying an application, typically on newer

platforms and infrastructure. The process involves the staging of the new environment

before the actual cutover and requires coordination of IT teams at the time of cutover.

1. Discovery and Assessment

2. Proof of Concept

3. Design

4. Host and Application Migration

5. Data Migration

6. Testing and Rollout

7. Leveraging the Cloud

8. Optimization

Need – We need to clearly identify the business Need for the ‘cloud’.

Cloud Assessment questionnaire – ZSL sends out a Cloud assessment questionnaire which helps in assessing the client’s specific cloud needs.

On-site visit – Sometimes, an onsite visit and assessment may be required.

Cloud Platform – Identifying the right cloud platform is very critical. Each cloud has a niche and we find a way to exploit it.

Security – Address security concerns. You own the data, decide geographic location, encryption etc.

Cloud Candidates– Identifying cloud candidates. Identifying cloud candidates. which applications are typical candidates to move to the cloud and which are no.

Classifying IT assets

◦ Applications with sensitive data.

◦ Applications with low, medium, high compliance requirements.

◦ Applications that are external facing, customer facing, internal only, partner facing.

◦ Applications with low, medium, high coupling.

◦ Applications with different licensing models.

Licensing – Identifying licensing contracts for OS, products.

Estimate – Ball-park estimate.

Proposal – Submit proposal – subject to change.

Suitability – Gauge suitability of the cloud provider. Which cloud suits you the best?

Identify Applications for POC – Identify few applications that could be probable for a POC.

Validate technology – Validate the latest and the greatest technology

Validate assumptions – Ensure that our assumptions regarding the design of equivalent Cloud infrastructure are accurate.

Verify estimates and costs – Verify your estimates and cost.

Benchmarks – Perform necessary benchmarks and set expectations.

Identify bottlenecks – Identify bottlenecks and overcome them.

Design for the cloud – The POC gives us a fairly good understanding of the design. Just like all applications need to be designed before they are developed, similarly for applications to work efficiently in the cloud, using cloud features, we need to first design for the cloud? Be sure you fully understand the ‘cloud specific requirements’ before designing.

Cloud Services – Understand different cloud services and value-add offered from a specific cloud vendor. At the same time, the cloud is evolving, this comes with certain limitations, consider them when designing.

Technology Stack – Make sure you consider the technology stack (OS, Applications, servers etc) before when designing. Each stack may require specific requirements.

Work-around – If a specific feature/service is not available in the cloud, have a work-around or try to leverage a different cloud and/or hybrid cloud. You may need to develop some custom script/code.

Design for failure – Design for failure and nothing will fail.

Design for security – Data is private to us and we need to secure it. Based on your security level, keep in mind cloud security services offered by the vendor and leverage it when designing.

Control Costs – Cloud costs can vary a lot, a best design will lower your costs a lot.

Host to Virtual environment map – Map physical resources like RAM, CPU, storage, network, RAID etc to equivalent virtual environments?

Convert P2V and V2V – If feasible, identify and convert physical and virtual hosts to virtual machine images supported by the cloud provider. Use import images option from the cloud provider if required.

Migrate VMs to the cloud – Migrate all the VMs to the cloud through the internet or ship the disks to the cloud provider (if cloud provider supports it).

Manual Migration – If P2V or V2V is not feasible, then create the virtual environment on the cloud, basically cloud specific images.

Migrate applications – If P2V or V2V is not feasible, then install the database(s), all applications like web servers, application servers, home grown, third party into the cloud. There are 2 ways to do this. Forklift applications – Migrate all applications at once. Hybrid migration – phased it out, move applications in batches.

Launch Instances, Create Images – If P2V or V2V was successful, then launch equivalent instances and creates respective images specific to the cloud provider.

Identify data size – First, identify the data size to be migrated.

Identify different RDBMS’s – Identifying the different RDBMS. (commercial and open source) options available in the Cloud today.

Effort estimation – Identifying the effort (in terms new development, one-off scripts) required to migrate all the data to the Cloud.

Trade-offs – Take right tradeoffs among various dimensions - cost, durability, query-ability, availability, latency, performance (response time), relational (SQL joins), size of object stored (large, small), accessibility, read heavy vs. write heavy, update frequency, cache-ability, consistency (strict, eventual) and transience (short-lived).

Identify and choose storage options – Identifying different storage options available in the Cloud and choosing the best option. Options like data mirroring, replication etc should be considered here.

Prepare the cloud environment – Create the cloud environment. Options like data mirroring, replication etc should be considered here.

Data Migration – Consider your trade-offs and migrate the data from the datacenter to the cloud through the internet or ship the disks to the cloud provider (if cloud provider supports it).

Verify data integrity – Check for data inconsistencies and ensure the migration is successful.

Testing – Test how the cloud is treating you. Check applications, data, network to see if everything fits well.

Cloud testing – Apart from normal application testing, cloud specific features like elasticity

(scale-up, scale-out), auto-scaling, network, BDR, etc., are tested to make sure everything is working as per the requirement and expected.

Other features – If there are any other vendor specific cloud features being used, then employ the right tools to test these features out.

Identify services – After migrating the applications to the Cloud and running necessary tests, and analysis confirms that everything is working as expected.

Leverage benefits – It is advisable to invest time and resources to determine how to leverage additional benefits of the Cloud like auto scaling, edge caching your static web content, auto-recovery and most importantly, elasticity.

BDR – Data has to be secure and safe. So, by leveraging the cloud features implement a backup and disaster recovery strategy.

Under utilization – Terminate under-utilized virtual instances,

Correct instance types – Use the correct instance types where applicable. Using too large or too small instance types could cost you $.

Spot and reserved instances – If Amazon cloud is platform of choice, then explore options for spot and reserved instances.

Usage Patterns – Understand usage patterns, find out better ways to design, adapt it and improvise.

New Features – Keep a continuous check on new features emerging from the cloud vendor and see how you can leverage it.

Application Performance – Improve efficiency of the application architecture by implementing caching wherever applicable. Use the caching service of the cloud if provided as a service.

Monitoring – Monitor your cloud and its applications. Know whats going on, fix anything if required. Deal with mis-behaving applications.

Strategy Workshops – Study and review existing business direction and IT strategy. Recommend future alignment of both with Cloud Computing services.

Readiness Assessments – Inventory, review and assess current IT applications, policies and resources, and check readiness for migration to Cloud.

Consulting – Consulting services to build, operate and manage Private and Hybrid Clouds.

Migration and Integration – Migrating applications to the Cloud. Legacy modernization, integrating public cloud services with in-house apps and services.

Support Services – Supporting, managing and administering customer’s infrastructure and applications in the Cloud.

SmartPrise Cloud Business Continuity Suite – Cloud-based Backup, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Services. Silver, Gold and Platinum level services to serve organizations of varied sizes and with varied requirements.

SmartPrise Data Center as a Service – ZSL will “build” your next Data Center in the Cloud. And we will provide the support, management and administration to run it for you.

SmartPrise Dev/Test Cloud – A Development and Test environment that scale up and down according to demand. Performance, security and automated testing from the Cloud.

CRN Magazine names ZSL as one of the “30 Cloud VARs that GET IT.”

ZSL debuts in the Top 250 of InformationWeek 500 Top Technology Innovators Across America in 2010

SocNet wins NJTC’s 2010 Mid-Atlantic Technology Innovation Award in the IT Industry Category

PowerCube DaaS is recognized at IBM’s Lotus Awards 2010

Use Case

Application Migration, Application Scalability, reduced Infrastructure costs

Key Challenge

Our client, a leading Radio service provider, required 15+ applications running across several servers to be migrated to the cloud with high security. Reason for migration was scalability.

Our Solution

Migrated all servers and 15+ applications to the OpSource cloud.

Security provided with Virtual Private Cloud, VPN used to access instances. Web Application security firewall installed and configured.

Dynamic load balancing configured for upscaling and downscaling.

CDN used to deliver content across all portals/applications.

Business continuity DR setup.

Use Case

Application Scalability, Growing Infrastructure demands, availability.

Key Challenge

A leading online Media service provider, required ZSL to build and deploy a Video Player application (similar to youtube.com) which could stream video and scale massively with high security.

Our Solution

Developed and deployed the application on amazon cloud using Amazon’s Elastic Compute Service (EC2)

Data (videos) stored on Amazon’s S3 Service

Security provided with Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud, VPN used to access instances. Web Application security firewall installed and configured

Dynamic load balancing configured for upscaling and downscaling using Amazon’s ELB and Auto Scaling

CDN used to deliver content across all portals/applications using Amazon’s Cloud Front Service

Detailed Monitoring provided using Amazon’s Cloud Watch

All emails are handled through Amazon’s SES Service

Other Amazon services used: SQS, Route 53.

Size: Portal currently services more than 200 clients with over 10000 videos streamed online.

www.zslinc.com | info@zslinc.com