Hybrid Clouds: are we there yet?
by Johan De Gelas on October 18, 2010 2:05 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
The best of two worlds
Most existing companies have already invested quite a bit of money and time in deploying their own infrastructure and building up expertise. Also, thinking smartly out of the box in infrastructure land pays off in most cases. And lastly, few people will place their sensitive IP related data somewhere in an external datacenter.
It will be no surprise that the "hybrid cloud" is the ideal model for most companies out there. Just like in the business world, you outsource some of your processes (HR, Facility management etc.) but things related to your core business stay inside. If you are an engineering company, your engineering data should stay inside the walls of your own datacenter.
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vSphere 4.1 and vCloud Director, one of the possible building blocks of a hybrid cloud"
The Hybrid cloud model means you should be able to move VMs from your own datacenter to a public cloud and back. The reality is that it is not that simple to upload a VM to a public cloud service, and that it pretty hard to import the work that you have done in a public cloud back in to your own datacenter. If you want to get idea what it really involves, look here and here.
Many public cloud vendors, formely hosting providers, are now adding up and download capabilities to their self service portals. Being able to quickly download and upload virtual machine between your own infrastructure and that of a hosting provider is the first step towards the "hybrid cloud". Let it be clear: the fully automated hybrid cloud where you manage all your VMs through one interface, moving VMs easily and quickly from your private to a public cloud is not here yet.
So what do we need besides management software such as vCloud Director? You have probably guessed it already: a storage and networking bridge between datacenters.
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pjkenned - Monday, October 18, 2010 - link
Stuff is still new but is pretty wow in real life. Clients are based on Android and make that Mitel stuff look like 1990's tech.Gilbert Osmond - Monday, October 18, 2010 - link
I enjoy and benefit from Anandtech's articles on the larger-picture network & structural aspects of contemporary IT services. I wonder if, as Anandtech's readership age-cohort "grows up" and matures into higher management- and executive-level IT job positions, the demand for articles with this kind of content & focus will increase. I hope so.AstroGuardian - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
FYI it does to some extent... :) "You can't stop the progress" right?JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
While we get less comments on our enterprise articles, they do pretty well. For example the Server Clash article was in the same league as the latest Geforce and SSD reviews. We can't beat Sandy Bridge previews of course :-).And while in the beginning of the IT section we got a lot of AMD vs Intel flames, nowadays we get some very solid discussions, right on target.
HMTK - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
Like back then at Ace's? ;-)rbarone69 - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
You couldn't have said it better! As an IT Director find information that this site gives invaluable to my decision making. Articles like this give me a jumping off point to thinking outside the box or adding tech I never heard of to our existing infrastructure.What's amazing is that we put very little in new equipment and are able to do what cost millions just 10 years ago. We can now offer 99.999% normal availability with only a maximum of 30minutes of downtime during a full datacenter switch from Toronto to Chicago!
The combination of fast multi core processors, virtualization tech and cheaper bandwidth have made this type of service availalbe to companies of all sizes. Very exciting times!
FunBunny2 - Monday, October 18, 2010 - link
The problem with Clouding is that systems are built to the lowest common denominator (which is to say, Cheap) hardware. The cutting edge is with SSD storage, and it's not likely that public Clouds are going to spend the money.Mattbreitbach - Monday, October 18, 2010 - link
I actually see this going forward. I would put money on public cloud hosts offering different storage options, and pricing brackets to match. I also do not believe that many of the emerging cloud environments are being build with the cheapest hardware available. I would be more inclined to think that some of the providers out there are going for high-end clients who are willing to shell out the cash for performance.mlambert - Monday, October 18, 2010 - link
3PAR, HDS (VSP's) and soon EMC will all have some form of block/page/region level dynamic optimization for auto-tiering between SSD/FC-SAS/SATA. When the majority of your storage is 2TB SATA drives but you still have the hot 3-5% on SSD the costs really come down.HDS and 3PAR both do it very well right now... with HDS firmly in the lead come next April...
The problem I see is the 100-120km dark fiber sync limitation. Once someone figures out how to be sync with 20-40ms latency (or the internets somehow figure out how reduce latency) we will have some pretty cool "clouds".
rd_nest - Monday, October 18, 2010 - link
Not willing to start another vendor war here :)Wanted to make a minor correction - EMC already has dynamic sub-LUN block optimization..Also called FAST - fully automated storage teiring like you mentioned. This is in both CLARiiON and V-Max...the implementation is different, but works almost same.
Don't you feel 20-40ms is bit too much?? Most database applications/or any famous MS applications don't like this amount of latency. Though quite subjective, I tend to believe that 10-20ms is what most people want.
Well, I am sure if it is reduced to 10-20ms, people will start asking for 5ms :)