'Treat 'Cloud' as a service apartment'

BANGALORE, INDIA: Cloud computing and virtualization are the oft repeated buzz words in the wide spectrum of the IT community.

Enterprises today are driven to adopt new ways to reduce costs, increase business agility and improve data centre efficiency. I keep meeting customers, industry peers who are ecstatic about cloud computing but yet sceptical of how it will pan-out for them (organisation).

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And I try to elucidate in a very simple manner - using an analogy of a “Service Apartment”.

Yes, that’s right — a service apartment.

We all live in a house which belongs to us - own or rented. But whichever the option, we are responsible for its maintenance and enhancement. Treat “Cloud” as a service apartment, which is managed and run by an organization and it makes it available to users as and when required.

This organization is akin to “Cloud Provider”. Let's extend this analogy further, the “Service Provider” will need to provide various services as part of the offering and these could be — options of apartment size, security, housekeeping, maintenance, flexibility to hire additional room for few days, capability to bill, broadband, TV  etc.

In addition, the service provider may also provide option to user to choose the type of broadband (WiFi, wired, speed), TV (Flat screen, how many, what size) , TV transmission (cable or DTH) music system (which brand and fidelity).

Various options thus made available by a service provider can be equated to “Cloud Service Offerings”.

In order to provide customers the flexibility and comfort, the service provider will need to work with a whole lot of partners (security and housekeeping agencies, service providers, white goods providers etc.) to make this work.

These in cloud world can be likened to “Ecosystem” of partners which a “Service Provider” will need. In this analogy, the assumption is that the service apartment is available to be rented by anyone.

This can be called as “Public Cloud”. It has been very common in India for Government to provide accommodation to its employees or industrial houses to run townships for employees. It is analogous to “Private Cloud”.

Innovations such as virtualisation and cloud computing allow greater sharing of IT resources and enable them to be deployed as a service. The IT industry has worked towards a vision of delivering IT-as-a-Service for years and we are already seeing an explosion of web-based-services.

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This vision has gained momentum on the back of recent advances in security, virtualization and multi tenancy.

Given the dynamic business needs, new business models are emerging and everyone is talking about moving to the cloud.

Virtualization of the server, network and storage infrastructure is radically reshaping the data centre of today. The maturity of virtualization technology has accelerated the adoption of cloud computing and organizations are gearing up to move towards a data centre that is 100 percent virtualized.

The new dynamic data centre model offers streamlined operations and improved business resilience by introducing secure multi-tenancy, to offer enhanced security for shared virtual and enterprise cloud environments.

The vision here is to deliver new design architectures that help customers evolve their virtualized data centres to become more efficient, dynamic, and secure. Secure multi-tenancy design architecture enhances security when sharing data centre resources across virtualized and enterprise cloud environments.

The rising importance of the information itself has made storage management a key focus for IT. Amidst massive data growth, physical data centre limitations, combined with increasing network complexity, it is no secret that data centre economics are fast changing.

In the face of these pressures, traditional approaches to storage expose limitations in scalability, performance, availability, and perhaps most importantly–manageability and flexibility.

The concept of scale-out storage is now a reality. The feasibility of these innovative storage technologies has been repeatedly acknowledged by the strong traction within the networked storage segment in the broader enterprise storage market.

Since customers no longer have direct control of the infrastructure, vendor choice is critical. It is imperative that security is as tight as it can be without sacrificing efficiency. The big question here is whether organizations should access computing resources remotely, over the Internet. 

However, whether a cloud is public or private, the key to success is to create an appropriate infrastructure to deliver each cloud service, whatever it might be, as efficiently as possible. It is important that the technology ecosystem and delivery partners enable a non-disruptive, safe journey to a truly dynamic data center that offers extreme flexibility and outstanding efficiency.

The idea is to facilitate “anywhere, anytime” (remember service apartments) data access, integrated data protection and security, multitenancy and instant delivery and capacity elasticity required to deliver on aggressive service-level agreements.

However, the extent to which this technology is able to deliver such benefits will depend upon the completeness of the storage virtualization solution and how well it is integrated into the core data management architecture.

Storage technology has undergone a rapid transformation producing a steady stream of technical progression. With each successive wave comes a valuable application with disruption to the old practices.

I strongly believe that the future of enterprise storage is a scale-out architecture that enables secure multi-tenance, levearages the superior price and performance of clustered components; provides a dynamic, virtualized storage service infrastructure for non-disruptive operations; and employs policy-based management for improved efficiency and agility.

Virtual data storage is the present and the inevitable future!

(http://blogs.netapp.com/musings/2009/10/index.html)

The author is President- India & SAARC at NetApp.