Prepping Data Center Infrastructure for the Cloud_hb_final

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Handbook

Prepping Data CenterInfrastructure for the Cloud

A move to the cloud has myriad implications for existing data center

infrastructure. Heres how to think strategically about the move as

well as tactics and tools for a successful transition.

1EDITORS NOTE

2PREPPING A DATA CENTER

FOR CLOUD MIGRATION

3CLOUD MIGRATION: TIPS

FOR MATURE DATA CENTERS

4RESOLVING CLOUD APPLICATION

MIGRATION ISSUES

VIRTUALIZATION

CLOUD

APPLICA

TIONDEVELOPMENT

NETWOR

KING

STORAG

EARCHITECTURE

DATACE

NTERMANAGEMENT

BUSINESSINTELLIGENCE/APPLICATIONS

DISASTE

RRECOVERY/COMPLIANCE

SECURIT

Y


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2 P RE P P I N G D AT A C E N T E R I N F RA S T RUC T URE F O R T H E C L O UD

1EDITORS

NOTE

Dont Forget Where You Came From

Making changes to entrenched, often legacy, data

center infrastructure isnt easy. IT teams have invested

hard-earned dollars in on-site resources and there are

legitimate concerns about access to sensitive data. Hy-

brid clouds can challenge existing investments and raise

concerns about loss of IT control, management, and

data and application security.So, while vendors and the industry as a whole are

atwitter about cloud computing, there are some serious

transition issues that need to be addressed. A migration

has consequences for management and monitoring sys-

tems, for networking architecture, for IT staff and for

applications. For a cloud move to be successful, all these

facets of infrastructure need to be evaluated, turned

over and, often, shored up.

This series of articles looks at some of the strategicconcerns that companies have in migrating to a hybrid

cloud and also maps out tactical considerations in get-

ting there. This package considers migration issues

through several lenses.

First, Bob Plankers dissects seven important ef-

fects of a cloud migration on existing data center

infrastructure. He walks you through some of the

questions you need to ask before making the move

as well as how to evaluate tools for your cloud

environment.

Next, Plankers weighs some of the important

questions for more advanced data center facilities,

and focuses on the key gains for centralization andautomation.

And finally, Bill Claybrook examines the effects of

a migration on applications. He considers various ap-

plication architectures that enable or discourage cloud

portability as well as standardization challenges that

can pose roadblocks.

All in all, this package helps you expand on your ex-

isting infrastructure investments and make the move

to the cloud more seamlessly. It may also provide theconfidence that you dont have to undo important in-

frastructure investments down the road.

Lauren Horwitz

Executive Editor

Data Center and Virtualization Media Group


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2HYBRID

CLOUDS

Preparing Your Data Center for Hybrid Clouds

For good reason, clouds are a popular topic in IT.

They offer numerous benefits, such as pay-as-you-go

billing models, seemingly infinite resources, and the

ability to place workloads around the globe to boost

capacity. Still, as you consider shifting workloads to

the cloud, you will likely have to make changes to your

data center and to your organization to prepare for themove. You need to think carefully about the impact

on all aspects of data center infrastructure and on IT

teams.

You also need to take a step back and evaluate the

wisdom of the move. Its critical to make the business

case for why a migration makes sensethe fact that the

cloud is en vogue is not enough. So, assuming that you

already have a private cloud, why would you want to add

public cloud capabilities? Perhaps you want to broadenyour disaster recovery (DR) options by running work-

loads from a different location. Or you may want to add

workloads but are constrained by capacity limitations at

your on-site data center. Or perhaps the move to a hy-

brid cloud model is financial. The pay-as-you-go aspect

of public clouds can shift capital expenditures to op-

erational ones and free you from unpleasant leases and

forklift upgrades.

It is critical for all levels of your IT organization to

know what the goals of this move are, so your organiza-

tion can make solid decisions. It is also important to

include all IT teamsincluding application, system,

network and storage administratorsin these plans.

Their knowledge will be key to solid preparation for and

implementing a hybrid cloud.

1. Assess Existing Infrastructure and Set Goals

As you consider moving to a cloud model, the first

step is to assess where your infrastructure is to-

day. Do you already have a private cloud and want

to bridge the gap between it and a public cloud?

Perhaps you are on the path to virtualization, but

havent progressed to a cloud. And while the term

cloudhas many meanings, it doesnt just meangreater degrees of virtualization but also a push to-

ward centralization and automation. In particular,

this move toward centralization makes the cloud

as much about people and process as it is about

technology.

2. Gather Technical Requirements

Once your organization has made its business goals


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2HYBRID

CLOUDS

for a hybrid cloud clear, develop technical require-

ments with your staff. Do the applications you

want to move need to scale? Perhaps you need load-

balancing capabilities, not just for service availabil-

ity, but also so you can distribute workloads and

automatically redistribute resources to accom-

modate the peaks and valleys of cloud demand.

Do applications require secure communication to

a back-end database that will continue to live in

your data center? Do you need services to run from

particular parts of the globe, for support or DR

reasons?

Once you have identified your technical needs,consider public cloud provider offerings objectively.

For example, perhaps some providers natively sup-

port your virtual private network concentrator or

a network tunneling technology your engineers are

already comfortable with, thereby making secure

networking easier. At this stage, its also important

to gather performance data. Knowing how much

network and storage I/O your applications generate

enables you to size network connections and virtualmachines that reside in the public cloud, as well as

select from differing service tiers offered by public

cloud vendors.

3. Select Hybrid Cloud Tools

Several self-service cloud portals can connect your

on-site infrastructure to public cloud infrastructure.

Most work with a subset of public cloud providers,

so knowing your technical requirements and or-

ganizational goals is important to match a tool set

with providers capabilities as well as with your own

infrastructure.

There are several aspects to consider. First, how

well do these tools manage existing heterogeneous

infrastructure? Do they require completely new

infrastructure, or do they plug into what you have

already built?

Where do these tools run? Do they get installed

in a legacy data center or run in the cloud? Some

tools, like VMwares vCloud Connector, plug di-

rectly into existing infrastructure, but that hasimplications for disaster recovery. You would need

to plan for your primary site becoming unavailable,

and ensure that you fully protect your management

infrastructure.

Can these tools access more than one public

cloudand what about accessing a providers dif-

ferent locations? Are these tools capable of doing

chargeback (where IT can charge back the cost of

IT resource use to the department that has used it)and real-time reporting of costs and performance

metrics across all sites? Does it help monitor and

meet service-level agreements? Does it create a

service catalog that users can choose from? How

does it help manage templates and configurations?

How does it handle authentication? Is there an

audit trail? At this stage, you need to ask all these

questions.


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4. Implement Security Safeguards

Once you have selected a cloud provider and a tool

set, you need to address various technical issues.

One major, multifaceted issue is security. To begin,

determine how the tools and the cloud provider will

interact with your data center, and grant them ac-

cess through network- and host-based firewalls if

necessary. This might be tricky with off-site, hosted

tools, as private clouds management interfaces are

often on completely internal, completely private

networks.

You need to implement authentication and access

control for the new hybrid cloud tool as well. Per-haps the tool has its own authentication systems,

so you need to recreate your users and your access

control policies in its user database. For example,

when an employee leaves the company, you need

to revoke his cloud access at the same time as you

revoke his on-site access. You also might need to

grant access to your internal help desk for password

resets. If the tool uses existing authentication sys-

tems, you may need to make those systems morerobust, especially if one of your goals is disaster

recovery. Without a robust authentication system,

consider what would happen if your primary site

went down and users were still trying to access

these systems.

If you have sensitive data that is stored in a pub-

lic cloud, investigate encryption technologies for

that data. Securing network connectivity between

sites is also important, and may require changes or

additional purchases. You also need to consider how

to store important data like cloud application pro-

gramming interface keys and encryption keys. Ac-

cess to them is important in an emergency, but they

also grant powerful access rights to whoever knows

them. This is a good time to take steps to protect

these access rights but also to make them available

when needed, protecting them as you would an ad-

ministrator password, logging access and changing

access information periodically.

5. Build Service Catalogs and Templatesand Automate Configuration

A primary benefit of public clouds is the ability to

dynamically scale systems and resources to match

workloads. This saves money, because you dont

need to size your system for a yearly peak work-

load, just for todays workload. But to rapidly scale

systems, staff will need to build and maintain good

virtual machine templates to use with these tools.

They will also likely need to explore some auto-mated configuration management.

Implementing configuration management in the

form of tools like Chef, Puppet and so forth isnt

simple. It opens the door to extreme levels of au-

tomation and change control, which saves staff

time, prevents outages and assists with security by

keeping all operating system configurations in sync.

As with authentication, you need to consider your


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goals so that you can properly design these systems

to be robust during site outages. Staff also may

need training, and you may need to build additional

infrastructure, such as separate configuration re-

positories and servers, firewall rules, etc., to support

these new tools.

6. Retrofit Networking

Networking is central to what makes the cloud pos-

sible. A successful hybrid cloud implementation is

dependent on good networking practices, excellent

and comprehensive monitoring, and rapid trouble-

shooting. Adding reliable and available connectivityto multiple sites, load balancing, dynamic scaling,

and security requires staff time and considerable

skill.

To begin, moving workloads out of a data center

to a public cloud can stress an organizations exter-

nal network connections. You may choose to make a

single network connection redundant to help guar-

antee that a problem with one provider doesnt take

all your companys products offline. These tasksarent simple and need to be planned carefully with

a network engineering team. It also is important

that the application and system administrators work

together with the network engineers for sizing and

troubleshooting.

More traffic on network connections may mean

more traffic through firewalls, intrusion-detection

devices, and intrusion-prevention devices that were

never sized for that amount of traffic. Scaling them

up and adding redundancy is a must to prevent

single points of failure from taking hybrid cloud ap-

plications offline. Likewise, intrusion detection and

prevention systems need to be configured so that

communications from white-listed remote hosts

arent interrupted.

7. Implement Service Management

A robust monitoring technology indicates the state

and performance of every system in your data cen-

ter. But as you move to the cloud, are these sys-

tems extensible and will they work for the cloud?Perhaps. The technologies for on-site virtual en-

vironments may work for off-site public cloud

environments as well. Other considerations might

emerge, such as disaster recovery. If the primary site

is down, how can you manage and monitor systems?

Perhaps you choose to replicate your management

services as well, or create a secondary monitoring

system at the alternate site.

Real-time performance metrics are also im-portant, and access to them depends on the cloud

provider you choose. Performance metrics ensure

that technical staff can troubleshoot a problem,

they help inform the automatic scaling features of

hybrid clouds, and they are often used for charge-

back, billing and reporting. Using a monitoring

tool or service that can automatically trigger scal-

ing up or down is a key part of the move toward a


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2HYBRID

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hybrid cloud but is often overlooked until later in

the process. A chargeback process that is aware of

up-to-the-minute charges from cloud providers is

also a must. Choose tools with good programming

interfaces and have IT staff that can configure and

manage those tools and integrate them into your

companys business processes.

Good service management techniques dont

stop once a service is partially or completely in the

cloud. Adapting internal configuration management

databases and other tools to the cloud is impor-

tant. Some of this work is strictly process-oriented

rather than technological, though there are likelygood integration possibilities. In some cases, track-

ing certain assets in a traditional configuration

management database is impossible given the dy-

namic nature of the cloud.

Moving from a private to a hybrid cloud requires

planning and implementation work throughout a

data center. Basic assumptions that have built up

over decades need to be rethought, tools need to be

re-evaluated and all parts of an infrastructure likelyneed to be changed in a careful way. Having clear

goals in mind informs much of this work, which is

often about communication just as it is about tech-

nical implementation.

8. Consider Storage and Backup

In the race to the cloud, IT management often

overlooks storage and backup needs. But with good

communication of business requirements and solid

work on technical requirements, these problems can

be mitigated.

First, not all cloud storage is the same. Consider

that most on-site storage is sized in two ways: per-

formance and price per gigabyte, but in the cloud

you often see only one fee: price per gigabyte. When

you select a public cloud provider, inquire about

performance options. Many inexpensive-seeming

providers use slower SATA disk arrays to drive

down costs. But if your applications require addi-

tional performance, you may find yourself without

options. Many providers have begun to add servicetiers that guarantee certain levels of storage perfor-

mance, and selecting a provider that does so allows

you to save money where performance isnt neces-

sary but spend money selectively to make perfor-

mance-sensitive applications work well. Choosing

a provider that allows you to move dynamically

between these tiers may be of interest, especially as

unanticipated performance requirements crop up.

Second, backup needs are often overlooked withhybrid clouds. First, do you plan to use your legacy

system to back up cloud-based virtual machines?

How will that affect network traffic? Just as im-

portant, how will that affect your bill, as most

providers charge fees per gigabyte of traffic moved

off the network? Perhaps the cloud provider offers

backup solutions internally that are cost-effective

but will require different processes and procedures


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for restoring data than your already-established

systems. You may also want to consider enabling

encryption for your backups, especially for third-

party shared services. Encryption of backups is not

a simple thing and will require procedural changes

to securely store encryption keys, as well as testing

of restores and encryption key changes.

The hybrid cloud puzzle involves several complex

pieces, but they are not insurmountable problems.

Instead, these problems benefit from new, better

solutions that arise every month. If you and your

organization take the nontechnical messages of

cloud computing to heart, namely centralization andautomation, you will find yourself becoming more

flexible; more able to take advantage of solutions

as they emerge; and, most likely, save money in the

process. Bob Plankers


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Cloud Migration: Tips for Mature Data Centers

In moving to the cloud, many organizations are opt-

ing for private cloud computing environments. This

model consolidates IT expenditures and bridges legacy

systems with new ways of thinking about technology.

Security presents challenges in the public cloud, but

youve probably already solved many of those challenges

in your own data center. Why not use those solutionswith centralization and automation to reduce the initial

complexity of a cloud project?

MOVING TO THE CLOUD DOESNT

REQUIRE VIRTUALIZATION

Many enterprise IT shops believe cloud computing is

all about virtualization. In many data centers, a virtu-

alization platform is central to service offerings, butclouds arent defined only by technology. Instead, they

involve people, processes, centralization and control.

Moving to the cloud promises to consolidate duplicate

services within an organization and to automate rou-

tine, mindless tasks so that employees are free to work

on difficult problems.

A cloud can be a shared infrastructure, which could

be virtualized, but it can also encompass physical

hardware. Take public cloud services such as Googles

Gmailor Microsoft SkyDrive. Those services dont use

virtualization. Instead, each is built on thousands of

physical machines. Some private cloud services are built

this way, especially for services that rely on technolo-

gies such as Microsoft Cluster Service, which can be

somewhat incompatible with how virtualization envi-ronments work.

The goal is centralization, not virtualization. If

you can consolidate 50 file-and-print servers spread

throughout an organization into three clustered physi-

cal hosts, thats a cloud win, regardless of the absence of

virtualization.

MAKING THE TRANSITION TO THE CLOUD

So how do you move from a virtual environment to the

cloud? First, standardize your data centers technol-

ogy foundations. Virtualization enables organizations

to standardize OS configurations using virtual machine

(VM) templates and to automate deployment tasks. It

also enables them to standardize on areas such as repli-

cation, firewalls and other security measures, OSes and

storage configurations.
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If you cannot create a one-size-fits-all solution, use

several sizes. The goal is to eliminate one-off configura-

tions. Having 10 different kinds of VMs is much better

than having 3,000 individual configurations.This is also a good time to think about automation,

specifically to eliminate repetitive tasks. In moving to

the cloud, could you add routinely used software to the

virtual machine templates to avoid having to install it?

Instead of creating local accounts on each server, would

a central Lightweight Directory Access Protocol or Ac-

tive Directory instance be more useful? Could you use

configuration management toolssuch as Puppet or

Chef to automatically transform and manage a serversconfiguration?

Even a script of routinely run commands helps enor-

mously. System administrators shouldnt have to type

commands more than once if possible. Avoid doing the

same task more than once without automating it.

Automation is not necessarily about self-service,

though. Too often, the cloud is cast as a self-service

offering, but data center processes run counter to this

flexibility. For good reason, IT shops have spent yearswrapping process around the act of creating and manag-

ing servers. These processes are responsible for how a

server is monitored, how documentation is created or

how licensing is handled, for example. Throwing these

tasks aside to offer self-service is a mistake.

Once youve laid a good foundation for your cloud

with standards and automation, you can begin the more

difficult work of surveying your organization for theIT services it runs. Finding the services in use can be

challenging. Even tougher is figuring out why each one

exists.

People may have good reasons to duplicate services.

For example, perhaps the companys main Web servers

didnt support a specific technology, so a department

created its own. Document these needs and work to

extend central offerings to meet them. You absolutely

have to be flexible, too. Moving to the cloud unwindsyears of work on IT infrastructure in the process of cen-

tralizing, and you will uncover things you never antici-

pated. Bob Plankers

Once youve laid a good foundationfor your cloud with standards and

automation, you can begin the moredifficult work of surveying your orga-nization for the IT services it runs.
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4APPLICATION

MIGRATION

Resolving Cloud Application Migration Issues

In the IT industry, a good deal of time and money has

been spent to make applications portable. Not surpris-

ing, the goal for migrating applications among clouds

is to somehow make applications more cloud-portable.

This can be done in at least three ways:

1. Architect applications to increase cloud portability.2. Develop open standards for clouds.

3. Find tools that move applications around clouds

without requiring changes.

Most of todays large, old monolithic applications

are not portable and must be rebuilt to fit the target

environment. Other applications require special hard-

ware, which reduces their portability, and even many of

the newer applications being built today are not veryportable.

APPLICATION ARCHITECTURE

Numerous cloud experts have indicated how important

an applications architecture reflects its ability to move

it from one cloud to another. Appropriate cloud ap-

plication architecturesare part of the solution to cloud

interoperability, and existing applications may need

to be re-architected to facilitate migration. The key is

to architect applications that reduce or eliminate the

number of difficult-to-resolve dependencies between

the application stack and the capabilities provided by

the cloud service provider.

Bernard Golden, CEO of HyperStratus, has notedthat, to exploit the flexibility of a cloud environment,

you need to understand which application architectures

are properly structured to operate in a cloud, the kinds

of applications and data that run well in cloud environ-

ments, data backup needs and system workloads.

At least three cloud application architectures are in

play today:

Traditional application architectures(such asthree-tier architectures) that are designed for

stable demand rather than large variations in load.

They do not require an architecture that can scale

up or down.

Synchronous application architectures, where

end-user interaction is the primary focus. Typically,

large numbers of users may be pounding on a Web
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4APPLICATION

MIGRATION

application in a short time period and could over-

whelm the application and system.

Asynchronous application architectures, whichare essentially all batch applications that do not sup-

port end-user interaction. They work on sets of data,

extracting and inserting data into databases. Cloud

computing offers scalability of server resources, al-

lowing an otherwise long-running asynchronous job

to be dispersed over several servers to share the pro-

cessing load.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)providers offer tools fordeveloping applications and an environment for run-

ning these applications. To deliver an application with

a PaaS platform, you develop and deploy it on the plat-

form; this is the way Google App Engine works. You

can deploy App Engine applications only on Google

services, but cloud application platforms such as the

Appistry CloudIO Platform allow for in-house private

cloud deployment as well as deployment on public

cloud infrastructures such as Amazon Elastic ComputeCloud (EC2).

Where the application is developed and where it

is to be run are factors that feed into the application

architecture. For example, if you develop in a private

cloud with no multi-tenancy, will this application run

in target clouds where multi-tenancy is prevalent? In-

tegrating new applications with existing ones can be

a key part of application development. If integration

involves working with cloud providers, it is difficult be-

cause typically cloud providers do not offer open access

to their infrastructures, applications and integration

platforms.Older applications that depend on specific pieces of

hardwaremeaning theyll want to see a certain type of

network controller or diskare trouble as well. A cloud

provider is not likely to have picked these older pieces

of hardware for inclusion in its infrastructure.

In your efforts to migrate applications, you may start

working with a cloud provider template where the pro-

vider gives you an operating system, such as CentOS or

a Red Hat Enterprise Linux template. Youll then try toput your applications on it, fixing up the things that are

mismatched between the source application environ-

ment and the target environment. The real challenge is

that this approach becomes an unknown process, com-

plete with numerous workarounds and changes.

As you move through a chain of events, fixing prob-

lems as you go, you are rewriting the application. Hope-

fully you wont have to rewrite it all, but you will surely

Cloud computing offers scalability of

server resources, allowing an other-wise long-running asynchronous jobto be dispersed over several servers toshare the processing load.
http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/tip/Choosing-from-the-major-Platform-as-a-Service-providershttp://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/tip/Choosing-from-the-major-Platform-as-a-Service-providers


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4APPLICATION

MIGRATION

change configurations and other things. You are then

left with a fundamentally different application. This

could be good or bad, but either way youll have at least

two versions of your application: the data center ver-sion and the cloud version.

If moving an application back and forth between your

data center and a cloud (or from one cloud to another)

results in two different versions of the application, you

are now managing a collection of apps. As you fix and

encounter problems, youll have to work with however

many versions of the application that you have created.

CLOUD STANDARDS AND APPLICATION MIGRATION

Open cloud standards are considered the eventual so-

lution to issues concerning application migration and

cloud interoperability. We view cloud standardsas a

collection; this one starts at the low level with some-

thing like OVF (Open Virtualization Format), which

provides a universal language for describing the meta-

data and configuration parameters of virtual machines

(VMs). At the next level, something that would describethe environmentthe connectivity between VMsis

useful. This would give you the networking between the

virtual machines and the functions and scale of the en-

vironment in which the VMs operate.

It is unlikely that cloud standards will be adopted

in the near term, for reasons that include ongoing in-

novation. Vendors such as VMware would love to just

say, We will do the whole black-box thing for you:

buy our stuff and you can put up a cloud and offer it to

your customers. Cloud providers are not thrilled with

this prospect because they want to differentiate their

services. They dont want clouds to be commoditized.Even once standards are adopted, there will likely be a

problem with how cloud providers offer unique features

on top of standards.

John Considine, the CTO of CloudSwitch, notes that

for cloud providers, a standard suits a customers needs

and is a guideline for how cloud computing should be

implemented. In the case of the VMware vCloud ap-

plication programming interface (API)which has

been submitted to the Distributed Management Task

Force for ratification as an open standard for cloudAPIsVMware dictates how cloud environments are

configured and accessed with respect to definition of

resources and catalogs of virtual machines, for example.

These mandates have a direct impact on how a pro-

vider implements its cloud.

What are some hints for architecting cloud appli-

cations? One suggestion is to design the application

and its supporting stack components not to rely on

Even once standards are adopted,there will likely be a problem withhow cloud providers offer unique

features on top of standards.
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4APPLICATION

MIGRATION

the operating system and the infrastructure. The more

you do this, the better off you will be with respect to

interoperability and application migration. If you can

use mature fourth-generation languages or interpretivesystems to build applications, then you will also have a

better chance for interoperability.

The problem you might encounter is not getting the

performance and/or the functionality you need. In addi-

tion, you may have to avoid certain performance and ca-

pability benefits that could be available with hypervisor

tools or from the specifics of an operating system. You

also might have to go for a generic operation of your ap-

plication with min-set functionality to make it portablefrom cloud to cloud.

Which existing applications are good candidates for

running in the cloud? The more generic and higher level

the application is, the greater your chances of moving

it from cloud to cloud. One of the clouds weakest areas

is in needing total control over the operating system. If

you run an old version of Linux or Windows, then you

are probably in trouble; most public clouds do not sup-

port older versions of operating systems. Applicationswritten before a certain date are not easily movable.

Migrating applications among clouds is not easy. But

open standards for cloud computing, when they ap-

pear, and the advent of tools such as CloudSwitch and

Racemi will ease the difficulty and make hybrid clouds

more of a reality. Bill Claybrook


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Cloud Migration:

Tips for Mature

Data Centers

Resolving Cloud

Application

Migration Issues


AUTHOR

BIOS

BOB PLANKERS is a virtualization and cloud architect at a ma-

jor Midwestern university. He is also the author ofThe Lone

Sysadminblog.

BILL CLAYBROOK is a marketing research analyst with more

than 35 years of experience in the computer industry. Pre-

viously he was research director, Linux and open source, at

The Aberdeen Group in Boston and a competitive analyst/

Linux product-marketing manager at Novell. He is presi-

dent of New River Marketing Research and Directions on

Red Hat.

Prepping Data Center Infrastructure for the Cloud

is a SearchCloudComputing.come-publication.

Margie Semilof |Editorial Director

Lauren Horwitz |Executive Editor

Phil Sweeney |Managing Editor

Eugene Demaitre |Associate Managing Editor

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Neva Maniscalco |Graphic Designer

Rebecca Kitchens |Publisher

[email protected]

TechTarget

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