Always On Infrastructure for Software as a Ser vice

Transcription

1 Solution Brief: Always On Infrastructure for Software as a Ser vice WITH EGENERA CLOUD SUITE SOFTWARE Egenera, Inc. 80 Central St. Boxborough, MA Phone:

2 Introduction In the world of cloud computing there are many different types of as a service offerings, and new ones have emerged as more companies have adopted cloud computing. However, the biggest driver of growth of cloud services has been the acceptance and rapid adoption of Software as a Service (SaaS). SaaS has become a common delivery model for many business applications, such as messaging software, accounting, collaboration tools, customer relationship management (CRM) enterprise resource planning (ERP), and HR systems. Today SaaS has been incorporated into the strategy of most leading enterprise software companies and the market is still experiencing rapid growth. In fact, Gartner Group estimates that SaaS provider revenue will more than double from 2010 to 2015 and reach a projected market size of $21.3bn. To be successful, SaaS companies must ensure that their application the software as a service is always on and available to their customers. This solution brief will discuss some of the business and technical challenges that need to be overcome in order to meet the highest service level agreements (SLAs), and how the Egenera Cloud Suite can deliver the mission critical infrastructure required. Business Needs For many applications, enterprises have shifted from in-house deployment to SaaS offerings as it reduces software support and administrative costs and shifts the burden of owning and managing hardware to the SaaS provider. Companies expect their SaaS provider to provide a high level of service which is increasingly laid out in an explicit service level agreement. This means that SaaS providers need to deliver cost efficient services with very high levels of reliability and availability to their customers. SaaS providers also need to implement an infrastructure that is extremely flexible, scalable and secure to meet the ever changing demands of their user base and to effectively handle business growth. To keep their internal costs down, these providers also need to minimize administrative costs while maximizing the utilization of their hardware across many customers. With the number of SaaS providers increasing on what seems like a daily basis, customer experience and provider reputation are key to both attracting new users and to satisfying current customers. In this environment, security, service levels, reliability of service and ease of use will be some of the most important competitive differentiators. The Technical Challenges The technical challenges of providing a SaaS offering with a high SLA are very similar to those in an enterprise data center. Both environments must support mission critical workloads with high levels of availability, have the flexibility to scale computing resources up and down on demand, and do so cost effectively. SaaS providers need to consider: How do we deliver high availability? Do we need to protect a single server or an entire environment? How do we enable secure multi-tenant environments? What s our SLA to get back on line? How do we remain open at the hardware layer? How can we address HA and DR given the diverse infrastructure landscape?

3 While many of these requirements may seem to be at odds, the key to overcoming these challenges is to pick the right agile and automated management software - one that includes all these capabilities. The software should support many different technologies, such as different hardware platforms; both physical and virtual operating environments; different hypervisors; and have the ability to manage a distributed infrastructure from a central location ideally from one place or one console. The same management layer must also provide the high availability and disaster recovery capabilities needed for these mission critical services. The Egenera Solution Egenera Cloud Suite software, composed of PAN Cloud Director, PAN Manager software and PAN Domain Manager, delivers a scalable and resilient platform that is simple to design and deploy, yet inherently protects against single server failure or an entire data center outage. Cloud Suite also provides secure multi-tenancy, which is ideal for service providers who need to support multiple customers on the same infrastructure while ensuring isolation from each other. PAN Cloud Director PAN Cloud Director (PCD) is a full cloud management platform that makes it simple for both IT organizations and service providers to design, request, provision, protect and manage IT as a service. With PCD you can deploy and manage infrastructure as a true end-to-end service by building service PCD coupled with Egenera PAN Manager creates a highly scalable cloud platform for deployment of SaaS applications to end users. For service providers the management of these environments becomes far simpler, allowing dynamic design and deployment of infrastructure resources on demand. Business functions for billing, SLA processes and ticketing are also part of the integrated solution.

4 PAN Manager Software While SaaS users see only the software application, service providers must contend with all the hardware (servers, storage and networks) required to run these services. Given that hardware is typically static in its nature, how can service providers ensure the flexibility and availability that is so essential in hosting SaaS? PAN Manager lets you build a highly resilient and flexible computing infrastructure on which to host your SaaS applications. It provisions, manages and protects IT infrastructure with unique virtualization capabilities, powerful management software and policy-based automation. PAN Manager includes N+1 high availability and verifiable disaster recovery as integral parts of the solution. Based on the patented Processing Area Network (PAN) technology, PAN Manager s unique approach works by abstracting IT infrastructure to create manageable resource pools of servers, I/O, networking, and storage. This enables workloads to be dynamically allocated on demand. Rapid Deployment for Dynamic Scalability Using the PAN Manager GUI, individual resources from these pools can be assigned a profile or personality. Each profile contains the application configuration and service level requirements. Unlike products that limit you to virtual machines, PAN Manager provisions both physical servers and/or virtual host servers so you can allocate the ideal resource for any application. What s more, PAN Manager s VMI feature enables the provisioning, management and protection of virtual resources without the need to license or pay for a hypervisor or third party management system. VMware and Hyper-V are also supported within PAN Manager. Using the PAN Manager graphical user interface (GUI), you can pre-define entire physical and virtual servers, or mixed server configurations (including I/O, network and storage). Individual servers, or complete networked environments, can be provisioned as needed in minutes using just a few mouse clicks.

5 N+1 High Availability With PAN Manager s N+1 high availability you can allocate a server to take over the workload from any failed server. This could be a virtual or it could be a physical server it makes no difference to PAN Manager. All that is required is the CPU and memory resources from that server. This feature allows for automatic and seamless failover from one server to another without manual intervention. Verifiable Disaster Recovery With the DR functionality built into PAN Manager Enterprise you can failover entire environments, whether that is between racks in the same datacenter or across geographically dispersed datacenters. By having this level of abstraction, the server definitions can quickly be applied to the resources wherever they are located. This also makes it easy to test, and verify, DR plans. As the process can be automated and initiated very quickly, those servers can be running other workloads and applications when not needed for DR, which eliminates the need for expensive idle hardware resources. Facilitating Multi-Tenancy and Secure Boundaries with Logical Environment Definitions PAN Manager software includes a feature called LPANs (Logical Processing Area Networks). This allows the computing resources (server, storage, network and more) to be grouped together for one particular customer or for administrative purposes.

6 For SaaS providers this enables multi-tenancy, with the ability to host multiple customer environments securely on the same hardware platform and still deliver high availability and DR services. LPANs can specify common failover servers which reduces infrastructure overhead, allowing customers to have high SLAs at lower cost a distinct competitive advantage for SaaS providers. PAN Domain Manager PAN Domain Manager (PDM) takes DR functionality to the next level by allowing hardware platforms from different server vendors to be brought together as a single pool of resources within a PAN Manager environment. This capability enables server profiles to be moved transparently between different platforms allowing you to capitalize on the openness and flexibility of mixed vendor environments. This is particularly useful if you failover into the cloud you do not need to worry about what platform you are failing to, or that it matches production platforms. For example you could be running HP servers in your environment, while the disaster recovery platforms use IBM servers. For a DR environment this gives you the added benefit of being able to mix hardware and still deliver enterprise-class infrastructure. As environments need to scale, hardware choices don t become a limiting factor, allowing you to purchase the most suitable platform for the use case. For example, you could use one vendor s hardware, configured at a lower specification, for the development platform, and then have the ability to move the application to the production-ready tier 1 hardware platform for testing and deployment. Solution Summary With Egenera Cloud Suite, you can implement a flexible, highly available infrastructure for Software as a Service. Egenera Cloud Suite provides unmatched flexibility in terms of supporting both physical and virtual servers, different hypervisors and hardware from all of the major server vendors. Its integrated N+1 high availability and verifiable disaster recovery simplify the usually complex process of implementing and testing HA and DR, and reduce costs significantly compared to other approaches. Copyright 2014 Egenera Inc. All rights reserved. Egenera, Egenera stylized logos and PAN Manager are trademarks or registered trademarks of Egenera, Inc. All other company and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. The information in this document is subject to change without notice. 0814