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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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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
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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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2HYBRID
CLOUDS
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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2HYBRID
CLOUDS
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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Prepping a Data
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7 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
2HYBRID
CLOUDS
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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2HYBRID
CLOUDS
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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3MIGRATION
TACTICS
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.
http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/definition/public-cloudhttp://searchcloudprovider.techtarget.com/tip/Virtualization-technology-offers-cloud-infrastructure-flexibilityhttp://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CFkQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fsearchsoa.techtarget.com%2Fdefinition%2FGmail&ei=pv7xT9C9B8Lr6wHyzLSYBg&usg=AFQjCNGiEulF4YiGmD4wdiL8csHwQC9GtA&sig2=Xbicjp-ogO4n56luYV1Zfghttp://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CFkQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fsearchsoa.techtarget.com%2Fdefinition%2FGmail&ei=pv7xT9C9B8Lr6wHyzLSYBg&usg=AFQjCNGiEulF4YiGmD4wdiL8csHwQC9GtA&sig2=Xbicjp-ogO4n56luYV1Zfghttp://searchconsumerization.techtarget.com/definition/Windows-Live-SkyDrivehttp://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wmqv7/v7r0/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.mq.amqzag.doc%2Ffa10750_.htmhttp://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/podcast/From-virtualization-to-private-cloud-Making-the-movehttp://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/podcast/From-virtualization-to-private-cloud-Making-the-movehttp://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/podcast/From-virtualization-to-private-cloud-Making-the-movehttp://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/podcast/From-virtualization-to-private-cloud-Making-the-movehttp://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wmqv7/v7r0/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.mq.amqzag.doc%2Ffa10750_.htmhttp://searchconsumerization.techtarget.com/definition/Windows-Live-SkyDrivehttp://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CFkQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fsearchsoa.techtarget.com%2Fdefinition%2FGmail&ei=pv7xT9C9B8Lr6wHyzLSYBg&usg=AFQjCNGiEulF4YiGmD4wdiL8csHwQC9GtA&sig2=Xbicjp-ogO4n56luYV1Zfghttp://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CFkQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fsearchsoa.techtarget.com%2Fdefinition%2FGmail&ei=pv7xT9C9B8Lr6wHyzLSYBg&usg=AFQjCNGiEulF4YiGmD4wdiL8csHwQC9GtA&sig2=Xbicjp-ogO4n56luYV1Zfghttp://searchcloudprovider.techtarget.com/tip/Virtualization-technology-offers-cloud-infrastructure-flexibilityhttp://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/definition/public-cloud8/12/2019 Prepping Data Center Infrastructure for the Cloud_hb_final
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3MIGRATION
TACTICS
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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Migration Issues
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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.
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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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Prepping a Data
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Cloud Migration:
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Data Centers
Resolving Cloud
Application
Migration Issues
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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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Prepping a Data
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Cloud Migration:
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Resolving Cloud
Application
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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.
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Rebecca Kitchens |Publisher
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