Cloud Infrastructure Services for Service Providers VERYX TECHNOLOGIES
Meeting the 7 Challenges in Testing and Performance Management Introduction With advent of the cloud paradigm, organizations are transitioning towards a cloud-based model to realize substantial cost savings, greater flexibility, improved scalability, and business continuity with hosted cloud solutions for some or all of their business needs. As a result, the cloud computing and infrastructure provider needs to support various cloud deployment and service models while ensuring that its infrastructure is reliable for rolling out cloud services and meets the SLA requirements. This document highlights example cloud infrastructure use cases and the challenges of deploying them and explains how the Veryx solution could help infrastructure providers to overcome those challenges and accelerate their cloud deployments. Cloud Infrastructure: Example Use Cases 1. Distributed workload Processing Cloud-based applications are being increasingly developed based on multi-tier architecture, to take the advantage of distributed cloud computing for speed and agility. But this trend raises significant challenges to the Cloud Service Provider in managing user experiences in terms of responsiveness and performances of Figure 1: Multi-Tier Web Application Deployment applications. 2. Application Load Balancing With more applications being transitioned to the cloud, the demand for high availability of cloud based applications has grown dramatically. This has increased the pressure on cloud service providers to support load balancing services for applications hosted in their cloud. Further, the service is also required to support automatic scaling of resources based on the usage. The challenge is to ensure that the resources (server and network) are optimally utilized without being Figure 2: Web Application Load Balancing over/under utilized while handing dynamic workloads. Copyright 2014 Veryx Technologies Page 2
3. VM Live Migration A common requirement in a data center is the ability to bring a server down for maintenance, for hardware replacement or upgrade, or for change of location. In most cases, the user is unaware of such activity, as the instances running in the impacted server are migrated to another active server, while the applications are live. The challenge is to ensure that the active sessions are not disconnected and the performance is not degraded beyond the acceptable limits. Figure 4: Tenant Isolation Figure 3: VM Live Migration 4. Resource Sharing among Tenants As a competitive trend, cloud service providers are focusing more on resource optimization for cost savings. As a result, service providers are increasingly adopting virtualization technology in their infrastructure to share resources among multiple tenants at a very fine granularity. The challenge is to provide isolation for tenants traffic that traverse a single physical infrastructure. 5. Data Backup and Recovery Enterprises are looking to cloud-based storage services for storing, analyzing and easy access of data. Therefore, data backup and recovery becomes important in cloud deployments. The challenge for service provider is to securely replicate users data across multiple sites and be able to quickly retrieve the data without losses. Figure 5: Data Backup and Recovery Copyright 2014 Veryx Technologies Page 3
Cloud Infrastructure: 7 Deployment and Development Challenges 1. Longer proof of concept cycles As the Cloud Computing is still evolving, there is a dearth of tools and standards available to verify and validate the cloud infrastructure deployment. As a result, cloud service providers are spending enormous amount of time and effort in their proof of concept (POC) lifecycles, thereby facing lot of delays in marketing their cloud offerings. 2. Rapid Technology Shifts Since cloud computing and virtualization technologies are evolving rapidly, IT administrators are not able to keep up to the pace of technology growth. As a result, they are finding it difficult to understand, use and troubleshoot the solution in complex data center deployments resulting in further operational inefficiency. 3. Interoperability Issues with Multiple Vendor Solutions Often interoperability issues arise in the multivendor environment. Typical causes could be either malfunctioning of one of the device that has been deployed in the infrastructure or inconsistent network configurations. Service providers often find it difficult to narrow down the root of the problem. 4. Meeting Performance upon Network Scaling Service providers are facing network performance issues upon scaling their infrastructure, either due to poor performance of one or more devices in the infrastructure or some flaws in the design of the network. Thus, they face challenges in identifying the performance bottlenecks in the network. 5. Handling Infrastructure Security Risks With the resources being shared among multiple tenants, the challenge is to apply consistent policies to provide traffic isolation across the complex data center environment. Further, ensuring security for dynamic workloads and safe-guarding infrastructure from various threats adds more challenges to service providers. 6. Infrastructure Monitoring and Troubleshooting With modern data centers adopting virtualization technology for multi-tenant support, monitoring in the virtual environment becomes challenging. In most scenarios, VM communication happens within a server and the traffic is not visible to the standard network monitoring tool. As a result, troubleshooting issues in the virtual space becomes more complex. 7. Meeting SLAs With enterprises migrating their business critical applications to cloud, the SLAs must be kept within the agreed limits, typically 4 to 5 nines. Any violations could drastically impact users business and service providers revenues as they need to pay penalty for every violation. The challenge is to ensure that the network is fault-tolerant to support the agreed SLAs. Copyright 2014 Veryx Technologies Page 4
Veryx Cloud Infrastructure Services Overview Veryx Cloud Infrastructure Services offers independent testing and measurement services for Service Providers by leveraging its domain expertise to accelerate cloud infrastructure deployments Testing Services Example Test Topologies Veryx Testing Services use a highly structured testing approach for quick verification of the Cloud Infrastructure for their readiness to rolling out various cloud services. The approach incudes: 1. Understand the cloud deployment and derive the appropriate test strategy. 2. Analyze the required test coverage with Veryx test database 3. Adopt the existing test/develop additional tests if required. 4. Execute the test and share the results. 5. Perform knowledge transfer Figure 6: Performance Measurement Topology Test Coverage The test includes testing of both physical and virtual infrastructure for offering Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud deployments. The coverage includes: 1. Measuring infrastructure performance in delivering services 2. Determining Infrastructure Scalable Limit 3. Assessing infrastructure security risks and vulnerabilities 4. Handling infrastructure failures 5. Verifying interoperability of various vendor solutions 6. Ensuring functionalities of various network applications ( e.g. Load Balancing) 7. Verifying Infrastructure flexibility (Movement of resources) Figure 7: VM Live Migration Topology Copyright 2014 Veryx Technologies Page 5
Performance Management Services Veryx Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring Services include monitoring of both the network and server. The services include: 1. Enabling Infrastructure Monitoring and measurements (including Network and Server) with open-source and Veryx/commercial tools 2. Integrating monitoring tools with customer framework Figure 8: Server and Network TAP Deployment Solution Key Benefits 1. Quick ROI 2. Increased agility, security, high availability of cloud infrastructure 3. Assuring trusted cloud infrastructure About Veryx Technologies Veryx Technologies is an innovative enterprise providing solutions that enable companies significantly reduce their testing related investments, while simultaneously enhancing the Product Quality and Efficiency of Testing. Bringing this same innovation to SDN, Virtualization and Cloud Computing technologies, Veryx offers an increasing number of flexible, cost-effective solutions to enable quick transformation of the network. Leading equipment vendors rely on the Veryx ATTEST range of solutions for testing applications in Access, Carrier Ethernet, Data Center, Edge, Enterprise, Industrial Networking and Security. Veryx SAMTEST is a solution for service activation in Carrier Ethernet networks. Veryx TM, Veryx ATTEST TM, SAMTEST TM and PktBlaster TM are trademarks of Veryx Technologies. All other trademarks of respective owners are acknowledged.. Email : info@veryxtech.com Web : www.veryxtech.com USA : +1 267 440 0140 International : +44-203-371-8691 Copyright 2014 Veryx Technologies Page 6