Top 4 considerations for choosing a converged infrastructure for private clouds Organizations are increasingly turning to private clouds to improve efficiencies, lower costs, enhance agility and address new business initiatives. Private clouds enable organizations to build secure infrastructures to enable the sharing of resources via a services-driven approach that can accelerate time to value and bolster the performance and availability of key applications. IDC has projected that the market for private cloud infrastructure will grow from about $12.3 billion in 2012 to more than $22.2 billion by 2017, noting that: Private cloud is increasingly seen as an important option for controlling cost and business risks as corporate computing and storage requirements continue to escalate in the era of mobility, analytics and big data. 1 While there are many reasons to deploy a private cloud and many applications that can be supported and delivered via the private cloud, there are certain characteristics necessary to enable every private cloud initiative. One of these is the very foundation that makes the private cloud possible the servers, storage, networks and management platform that make up the private cloud infrastructure. A converged infrastructure platform provides a coordinated and holistic approach to deploying private clouds, enabling you to manage all aspects of the infrastructure from a central pane of glass using the same set of tools. A converged infrastructure platform should significantly speed up and simplify cloud deployments; reduce total cost of ownership; improve agility and flexibility; and establish a foundation that will support future cloud growth and expansion. In deploying a converged infrastructure for private cloud initiatives, you want a platform that maximizes flexibility and freedom of choice. Deploying a new management platform for the 1 Worldwide Private Cloud IT Infrastructure 2013-2017 Forecast, IDC, April 2013
infrastructure should not mean that you have to create another new silo that doesn t take advantage of the investment you ve already made in your server, storage or network platforms. You also want to make sure your platform supports open standards and heterogeneous environments, particularly since your private cloud deployments are likely to expand and could potentially evolve into hybrid clouds. In looking at a converged infrastructure platform for the private cloud, here are four of the top issues to consider: No. 1: Converged infrastructure should maximize agility not lock you into another standalone silo. One of the reasons you are likely utilizing the private cloud is to enhance business agility. The private cloud gives you a platform under which you can pool a wide range of compute resources and establish policies, processes and controls by which these resources are allocated to support business objectives. The converged infrastructure of the private cloud must be an enabler of agility. It should also fit in as much as possible with your existing infrastructure so you don t have to abandon solutions in which you may have already made a major investment not just in money, but also in knowledge, experience and expertise. Examples of these would be your existing network or storage platform. In building a converged infrastructure for private cloud, there are several approaches you can take. One is to buy a fully pre-integrated solution that combines all of the hardware servers, networks and storage with a platform that centralizes and converges the management of the infrastructure for this particular package. There are circumstances where this type of approach makes sense: For example, if you have a very targeted and specific use case, such as SAP HANA for big data or a new Oracle database that you want to put into the private cloud. These integrated, application-centric solutions make sense because they address the specific needs of the workload. For the most part, however, a pre-integrated solution will be limiting and will not give you the agility and flexibility you will want to achieve with your private cloud deployment. A preintegrated solution locks you into a specific vendor s hardware and software which is great for the vendor, but not necessarily for you. You will also be locked into whatever preconceived notion that vendor has for how much storage you might need, or how much bandwidth without taking into consideration what you already have in place or how you can leverage existing investments. A much better approach is to deploy a management platform that gives you all of the benefits of a converged infrastructure centralizing management to lower costs, improve efficiencies and orchestrate resource deployment while also leveraging the infrastructure you already have in place. 2
With this more modular approach, you become an enabler of choice and flexibility particularly if you go with a management platform such as Dell Active System Manager, which supports open standards and heterogeneous environments. You will also find that a modular converged infrastructure management platform is easy to install, manage and scale, which negates the presumptive advantage of using a pre-integrated solution. A modular approach will also provide a common platform to build additional private cloud solutions using the same infrastructure without creating separate silos. If you go with preintegrated private cloud solutions, each private cloud will be a silo unto itself of networks, servers, storage and a management platform. That is not the best way to maximize your overall investment in infrastructure. With a modular approach, you can optimize your environment at your pace according to your schedule, while meeting your specific requirements for size and scale. No. 2: Converged infrastructure should simplify deployments and improve quality-of-service delivery. In considering a management platform for converged infrastructure for private clouds, there will be certain criteria that will be important to you. You want a platform that reduces management complexity, enables simple scalability, improves operational efficiencies and, of course, drives down costs. When it comes to features and functions, there are certain characteristics that will enable agility and responsiveness, while also driving down costs. These include: Template-based provisioning: This will automate many of the functions involved in provisioning resources throughout the infrastructure. It will remove many of the manual burdens placed on IT personnel, while improving accuracy and dramatically speeding up time to value. For example, deploying a complex virtual cluster with a solution such as Dell Active System Manager requires 99% fewer steps compared with manual processes. Centralized control: The management platform should give you a centralized view of the entire infrastructure, so you can automate and simplify the processes involved in discovery, inventory and configuration. From an automated central platform you should be able to pool server, storage and network resources so they can be allocated on demand to the appropriate users, departments, workgroups, etc. Integrated lifecycle management: You should be able to deploy and monitor all aspects of the infrastructure throughout every stage of the lifecycle, from discovery and inventory, through configuration and provisioning, ongoing management, and, eventually, decommissioning. With integrated lifecycle management, you will know when to add resources without overprovisioning, saving you money and optimizing your legacy infrastructure. No. 3: Converged infrastructure should leverage virtualization, interoperability and flexible form factors. To leverage the benefits of a converged infrastructure in private cloud environments, you must also have key building blocks in place. One of these is virtualization, which most 3
organizations have implemented to some degree. For private cloud deployments, companies are looking for a flexible, modular approach to virtualization that supports, among other functions, self-provisioning of compute resources the ability to simply shift workloads across machines on demand, and automated launching of new servers. Pre-integrated turnkey systems may offer the advantage of a quick initial deployment, but these solutions come at the cost of openness, interoperability and expansion opportunities. That s a price few companies can afford certainly not when tight IT budgets demand cost-effective ways to expand virtual infrastructures. IT must focus as much attention on leveraging industry-standard architectures that support advanced virtualization as it does on breaking down silos of complexity to aggregate pools of heterogeneous resources. Interoperability is also critical. Open network strategies and the implementation of software-defined networks via open standards enable component interoperability and agility in a virtualized network infrastructure. Interoperability must be a key piece of holistic private cloud strategies, both for cost savings and to enhance network functions for scalable services. In addition, a business must plan its virtual infrastructure in the context of the virtual computing environment sized for its specific needs whether that s a small, shared infrastructure platform or a huge, scalable enterprise-class blade server environment. One-size, preconfigured virtual computing platforms do not, in fact, fit all. Dell PowerEdge VRTX, for instance, offers streamlined shared infrastructure, enabling a virtual cluster-in-a-box solution that appeals to smaller businesses because of its capabilities, officefriendly design and simplified management. It also meets the needs of large companies that want to run high-performance applications in departmental or workgroup environments, or at remote branches. It supports the same blade servers and management tools as big brother solutions, such as the Dell PowerEdge M line, and combines server, shared storage and networking in a sleek form factor. As a more scalable option, Dell s PowerEdge M1000e blade chassis provides the broadest range of blade server options, the industry s most efficient chassis for power and cooling 2, and a wide range of networking, storage and management options. The M1000e blade chassis gives customers unmatched flexibility in configurations that deliver 100% more computational nodes 3 than other blade infrastructures to provide the density needed in massively scalable virtual environments. Choosing flexible and powerful solutions, with innovative form factors as your computing platform, is an important consideration. No. 4: Converged infrastructure should support open standards and provide a growth path to the future. Cloud computing is one of the most important technology developments of this century, and it is a driving force behind many next-generation business and IT initiatives. In deploying a private cloud, you can t necessarily be sure what the future will bring, so you want to design 4 2 The PowerEdge M600 (10th Generation), The PowerEdge M610 (11th Generation) and The PowerEdge M620 (12th) Generation, all held the highest SPEC_power scores for their given life cycles. 3 The M1000e can deploy 32 M420s in 10u, which is double any previous individually serviceable blade server. This doubles the amount of nodes per chassis from 16 to 32.
your cloud with maximum flexibility. Perhaps today s private-cloud solution will be part of a hybrid cloud solution a few years down the line. You don t want the choices you make today to limit what you may need to do tomorrow. Therefore, the converged infrastructure platform you choose should support a multi-vendor, heterogeneous environment utilizing open standards wherever possible. One of the biggest advantages of Dell Active System Manager is that it fully integrates open-source automation technologies from Puppet Labs to enable customers to support existing heterogeneous environments and not be limited in the choice of vendors for building new, next-generation cloud solutions. Conclusion Private clouds enable a new way of securely sharing compute resources to drive new business initiatives. Managing private clouds with traditional legacy management tools that address separate platforms for servers, storage and networks is no longer efficient or cost effective. Converged infrastructures provide a platform for management that was designed to meet the demands of cloud environments. Not all converged infrastructure platforms are the same, however, and vendor approaches can vary greatly. You want a platform that gives you maximum agility and flexibility, while addressing your needs for simplified, automated and centralized management. You also want a platform that supports open, heterogeneous environments so you have maximum freedom to take advantage of future innovations, wherever they may be within the infrastructure. In choosing a converged infrastructure platform for today, make sure you also have your eye on tomorrow. With technology advancing so rapidly, the future, in many cases, is now. For more information, please visit Dell s website. 5