Solution Brief: Building Private & Hybrid Cloud Solutions WITH EGENERA CLOUD SUITE SOFTWARE Egenera, Inc. 80 Central St. Boxborough, MA 01719 Phone: 978.206.6300 www.egenera.com
Introduction When most people talk about cloud computing, they are referring to a cloud service hosted by a third party service provider like Amazon or Rackspace. However, the term cloud can also mean building this type of infrastructure internally aka a private cloud. With either model the goals are usually to gain greater flexibility, more elastic scalability, faster time to service or lower capital or operational costs. However, many organizations choose to implement some form of hybrid cloud model, with services being consumed from both on-premise and off-premise solutions. One strategy would be to use public cloud services for development/test or less critical applications, while moving mission-critical apps to an in-house cloud. This would provide the on-demand resource availability and scalability that cloud services enable, while securing mission-critical applications and confidential data in-house. In other cases the primary motivation for a hybrid cloud approach is the augmentation of computing resources, especially when demand for resources fluctuates over time. In both scenarios organizations need to bridge on-premise and off-premise infrastructure and may need to move applications between public and private cloud environments. Business Needs The way IT is delivered today is changing, driven by new user expectations and needs. Instead of having large in-house IT teams and data centers packed with expensive hardware, companies are now looking to have IT delivered as a service with a pay as you go/grow approach. Cloud services are typically one of three environments: SaaS (software as a service), that could be a replacement for an application you currently run in-house PaaS (platform as a service) that can provide the application deployment platform an application requires IaaS (infrastructure as a service) that provides just the underlying servers, storage, and network services needed While SaaS almost always refers to a third party solution provider, both PaaS and IaaS are well-suited to private clouds, with the IT department effectively acting as the service provider. For many small organizations the public cloud model is the best solution as it negates the need to spend money on internal IT infrastructure and support services. Larger organizations with internal IT resources and staff may decide to transition some or all of their in-house computing services to an internal cloud model. Both models can deliver the enhanced flexibility and scalability users are looking for. Business Challenges One business challenge is to pick the right strategy if you plan to implement a hybrid model. This decision should be based on an assessment of which services and applications are best suited to public cloud services and which should remain in-house. Concerns about cost, security, performance and time to service will all factor in. The need to be able to
seamlessly move applications and services between a public and private cloud may be another. Consider a small company who uses a public cloud service only. As the company grows or their business evolves, they may decide to bring some of the services in-house for security reasons or if costs spiral due to increased usage. They may very well want to maintain the flexible cloud service internally. Large enterprises are also consumers of public cloud services, and they may also decide that offering an internal cloud provides the flexibility and self-service model users value, lower cost, or a more secure and reliable environment. Technical Challenges When implementing a private cloud service, companies want to be able to use their existing hardware infrastructure rather than have to purchase new equipment. Therefore you should ensure that your cloud management software does not limit your choice of hardware but rather supports a range of vendor equipment. If you plan to implement a hybrid cloud solution you will want a cloud management system that can include both internal and public cloud resources in its service catalog. That will make it easy for your users to select the best cloud resources for a particular use case. This approach also simplifies cloud provisioning by eliminating the need for multiple management tools and interfaces. Another important consideration is whether target applications can run in a virtualized server environment. Databases or applications that are performance-intensive may not run well in a virtual machine. With regards to bare metal, today s public clouds just can t handle applications that are not virtualized. However, private clouds need to be able to provision full physical servers in order to support the breadth of applications an organization needs, while still retaining the flexibility and automation that cloud services provide. Another consideration is to determine whether a PaaS or IaaS model is the best choice for an internal cloud and ensure your cloud provisioning solution accommodates it. The Egenera Solution Egenera Cloud Suite software, which includes PAN Manager, PAN Domain Manager and PAN Cloud Director software, enables enterprises to transform IT infrastructure into agile cloud services and benefit from automated, scalable, reliable and self-service infrastructure. It is a full cloud provisioning and management solution that addresses both the business and technology challenges for delivering services in public, private or hybrid clouds. PAN Cloud Director (PCD) makes it easy for IT organizations to design, request, provision, protect and manage IT as a service. With PCD you build service catalogs and design infrastructure simply by dragging and dropping components together with an intuitive GUI tool. PCD also simplifies the management of these environments, allowing dynamic design and self-service deployment of infrastructure resources on demand. Business functions for chargeback, billing, SLA processes and ticketing are also part of the integrated solution.
PAN Cloud Director includes integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide a first of its kind hybrid cloud experience for users, delivering unparalleled flexibility and the fastest time-to-value. Amazon Web Services marks the first of many public clouds that will be accessible through PAN Cloud Director. The capability to build and manage these hybrid cloud environments from within a single management interface is unique to Egenera. Design Deploy Manage Protect User Portals PAN CLOUD DIRECTOR Services Catalogs Security PAN MANAGER Public Cloud Private Cloud Any Storage Any Network Any Server Any Hypervisor Any Cloud Unlike other cloud management products, PAN Cloud Director in combination with PAN Manager, is the only product in the market that provides lifecycle management for both physical and virtual resources enabling clouds consisting of a mix of both bare metal and virtual resources. 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. This enables users to easily provison and secure the IT resources that best match their application needs and budget requirements. VMware and Hyper-V is also supported within PAN Manager. Once designed, you can deploy the solution by automatically provisioning physical servers, virtual servers, storage and networking. N+1 high availability and disaster recovery are easily implemented with PAN Manager. PCD then enables you to manage your cloud service and track usage and performance. PCD is the only cloud lifecycle management product that spans physical, virtual and public clouds or a mix of all three, and is not tied to any particular hardware vendor, allowing services to easily move across platforms.
PAN Cloud Director: Drag and drop infrastructure solution design Real-time pricing, cost modeling and quotation Provision both internal and public cloud resources Automated management of application SLAs End-to-end provisioning of IT service Active service monitoring against SLAs Easy updating and patching process Consumption-based chargeback for services PAN Manager PAN Manager lets you build a highly resilient and flexible computing infrastructure. It provisions, manages and protects IT infrastructure with unique virtualization capabilities, powerful management software and policy-based automation. PAN Manager Enterprise Edition 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. 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 virtual servers so you can allocate the ideal resource to 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. By defining a server s profile in software, you can then apply profiles to any resource, allowing workloads to be dynamically allocated on demand. This level of abstraction delivers incredible flexibility to dynamically move workloads for scalability, or in the event of an outage or resource failure. With PAN Manager everything is controlled from a single GUI. From the GUI we can create a server profile with just a few clicks, and choose whether it should be a full physical server or a virtual server. One more click enables high availability and one last click enables fully verifiable disaster recovery.
By specifying N+1 high availability you allocate a server to take over the workload from any failed server. This could be a server running a hypervisor or it could be a physical server with PAN Manager all that is required is the CPU and memory resources from that server. The DR functionality built in to PAN Manager allows you to fail over 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, which also allows you to test whenever you need to. With PAN Manager you can even have different hardware specifications in your DR site and production datacenter. As the failover process can be automated and initiated very quickly, DR servers can be used to run other workloads and non-critical applications. This eliminates the cost of idle hardware to maximize datacenter efficiency. Once a profile has been activated, PAN Manager actively monitors and automatically manages the infrastructure in order to meet the capacity, availability and response time requirements set by the business. Copyright 2014 Egenera Inc. 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 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. This capability enables great flexibility for both IT organizations and service providers. IT can use those DR resources for applications such as testing and development until they are needed for disaster recovery. Service providers can choose the most cost effective hardware platform and still be able to deliver enterprise-class availability services across different customers. Solution Summary Egenera Cloud Suite lets you implement and manage a flexible, manageable and highly available cloud service that users want, and can support the range of applications your business depends on. Whether you are building a private cloud or a hybrid model, Egenera Cloud Suite takes care of managing the underlying infrastructure while delivering high availability and DR out of the box. 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.