Module 1 VDC & Cloud Intro Flashcards
Number of Exabytes of Data Generated by Mankind from the Dawn of Civilization until 2003
5 Exabytes of Data
Number of Exabytes Now Produced Every Two Days
5 Exabytes of Data
9 IT Challenges
Acquisitions Aging Data Centers Application Explosion Complexity Cost of Ownership Globalization Security Storage Growth Time To Market
Impact of Globalization
Business at all hours 24x7x365
Impact of Aging Data Centers
Migration, upgrading technology to replace old technology
Impact of Storage Growth
Explosion of storage consumption and usage
Impact of Application Explosion
Applications can be deployed and expand their usage rapidly.
Infrastructure has not been planned to scale for rapid growth.
Impact of Cost of Ownership
Cost of the growth (i.e., equipment, power, cooling, support, licenses, etc.) to meet demand makes scaling difficult.
Impact of Security
Challenges related to governance and risk
Impact of Complexity
Lack of physical access to the environment; it may be spread across wide geographic locations. There could be globally distributed processes using content balancers to meet user demand. This can be expensive and time consuming.
Impact of Acquisitions
When companies make acquisitions, the IT infrastructures are often different due to the use of different preferred vendors.
A highly efficient and optimized data center allowing the business to do more within the confines of the available resources (servers, power, cooling, sq. ft.). It also has the agility to adapt to changes in the business and workload requirements.
Virtualized Data Center (VDC)
5 Key Characteristics of a VDC which provide the most beneficial return when moving from virtualization to a VDC
Automation Reporting for management and chargeback Resource pooling / shared resources Standardization Virtualized Hardware Stack
4 Benefits provided by secure desktops
- Central management with the use of templates.
- Gold copy patching
- Rolling upgrades
- Improved contractor / consultant control (e.g., custom template for contractors that doesn’t allow USBs)
In order to align BC requirements to business requirements, it is important to focus on what?
Application-level Business Continuity
How is the need to further optimize resources for increased availability and improved productivity realized (or accomplished)?
By continued consolidation of all the infrastructure layers: servers, storage, and networks.
6 VDC Benefits
Lower hardware, power, and space requirements.
Quickly and easily provision new servers into the environment.
Reallocate resources with no downtime.
Ensure applications remain online in a highly available architecture.
Prioritize the most important applications to ensure they receive the resources required to meet business needs.
Simplify and improve disaster recovery process.
How does a VDC simplify and improve disaster recovery processes?
By replicating VMs to another storage array, where they can be quickly started on any server.
How does a VDC lower hardware, power, and space requirements?
Due to the more efficient use of resources through server consolidation and centralization.
How can VDCs reallocate resources with no downtime?
By automatically migrating VMs with continuous load balancing.
How does a VDC ensure that applications remain online in a highly available architecture?
By migrating VMs in concert with data storage in the event of hardware failure.
How does a VDC prioritize the most important applications to ensure they receive the resources required to meet business needs?
By dynamically and intelligently allocating hardware resources.
How does a VDC enable quick and easy provisioning of new servers into the environment?
With easy provisioning and management tools.
3 High-Level VDC Business Drivers and Benefits
- Application-level Business Continuity (BC)
- Improved Productivity, Operational Flexibility, & Availability
- Secure Desktops
2 Benefits of Application-level Business Continuity (BC)
- Simplify and improve disaster recovery.
2. Ensure important applications receive resources required to meet business needs.
6 Benefits of Improved Productivity, Operational Flexibility, and Availability
- Optimize resources - consolidate servers, storage, & fabrics.
- Reduce HW, power, cooling & space requirements.
- Reallocate resources with no downtime.
- Quickly and easily provision new servers.
- Improved performance and availability.
- Simplify BC/DR strategies.
3 Benefits of Secure Desktops
- Centralize management.
- Patch gold copies once - standardization.
- Predictable change management with automated rollout.
1 Virtual Data Center Driver
Efficiency
3 Areas of Cost Savings (& Typical Amounts) in a VDC
- Hardware - 50%
- Energy - 80%
- Provisioning - 70%
Fundamentally, how is efficiency achieved in a VDC?
By consolidating the physical resources, which happens through creating resource pools that are designed to support more generalized workloads across applications.
Waste reduction translates into what?
Savings in capital expenses
How can operational savings by achieved?
By using standardized templates, reducing the number of custom configurations, and having the ability to provision more closely to actual usage.
Single use infrastructures can be collapsed into what?
Shared infrastructures with various tiers of service.
What happens with virtualization?
A subset of physical infrastructure can be configured into pools of resources, which can then be provisioned as needed. When those resources are no longer needed, they can be returned to the pool.
What can happen in 60 seconds on the Internet?
40,000+ iPhone applications downloaded. 168M emails sent. 1.5M Google search queries. 600+ new YouTube videos. 98,000+ tweets 695K Facebook status updates; 75K wall posts; 500K comments
5 Characteristics (Tenets) of the Cloud
- Rapid Elasticity
- Measured Service
- Broad Network Access
- Resource Pooling (Multi-Tenant)
- On-Demand / Self-Service
Cloud Core Models
Private
Public
Hybrid
Community
Cloud core model designed to serve a group of consumers with common interests / requirements
Community Cloud
Three Cloud Layers or Service Models
Top Layer: Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
Middle Layer: Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
Bottom Layer: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Big Advantage of Cloud
The big advantage of the Cloud is speed and agility to the business.
6 Cloud Benefits
- Self-service provisioning (minutes vs. weeks)
- App development & testing are flexible & self-service enabled.
- Relocation from test & development to production is predictable & seamless.
- Resources scale fluidly to meet growing or reduced need.
- Service level easily adjusted after the fact.
- Resources granularly metered to optimize utilization & cost.
Cloud benefits for IT
Moving toward self-service access.
Ability to align costs with use.
Greater flexibility to change.
Cloud Benefits for Business
Increase in efficiency & control from greater task automation.
Cloud Benefits for the Attention-Span-Challenged
IT has more time to focus on the strategic.
LOB has more time to focus on the business.
1 Cloud Driver
Agility
Primary Private Cloud Driver
Agility
Cloud Drivers - Gartner
Agility - 55%
Cost - 20%
Other - 15% (defend IT, enable hybrid, quality, don’t know)
Business Alignment - 10%
Phases which move from a physical infrastructure to a full IT-as-a-Service implementation
- Virtualize
- Operationalize
- IT-as-a-Service
Phase where IT is now a utility to the business
IT-as-a-Service
Phase where IT services are maintained in a service catalog that is open and easily extended as needed.
IT-as-a-Service
Phase where ownership is primarily IT, working with a high CAPEX-based budget.
Virtualize
Phase where the business and IT derive additional savings by further consolidation and by using more generalized resource pools.
Operationalize
LOB
Lines of Business
Advantages of IT-as-a-Service to LOBs
- Get resources or deploy new apps in a self-service manner.
- Have fine-grained reporting on resource utilization and costs.
- Enjoy the benefits of true business agility with the use of IT as a competitive advantage.
During this phase, the environment generally becomes on-demand, which meets or exceeds its service level targets.
Operationalize
First phase of virtualizing
To move from dedicated to consolidate resources.
The move from dedicated resources to consolidated resources includes what?
Employing server virtualization, tiered storage, and partially integrated management.
Result of move from dedicated resources to consolidated resources.
Reduced power and space costs in the DC, as well as increased storage administrator and server administrator productivity.
Benefits of Consolidated Resources
Reduced power & space costs. Reduced data center equipment costs. Increased storage admin productivity. Increased energy efficiency. Reduced CO2 footprint.
Second phase
Takes a consolidated environment and operationalizes it.
Included in operationalize phase
Employing tiered virtual servers and storage optimization structured in resource pools based on security, availability, performance, and governance requirements.
Resource pools can be based on what?
Security, availability, performance, and governance requirements.
Key enablers for the success of the operationalize phase
Integrated management and security
Benefits of operationalize phase
OPEX savings Data center equipment savings OS images virtualized Mission-critical applications include virtual components Reduced CO2
Last step in migration
Last step is to transition from a fully shared, tiered infrastructure to IT-as-a-Service.
What does transition from a fully shared, tiered infrastructure to IT-as-a-Service mean?
Both development platform and service-based software is self-service and multi-tenant.
Examples of integrated development environments
J2EE
.NET
How does IT-as-a-Service benefit developers?
Developers can choose different integrated development environments (e.g., J2EE or .NET) and deploy their applications to QA/Dev/Test and then on to production via self-service capabilities.
Benefit of IT-as-a-Service to end users
End users can potentially bind different services together from the service catalog.
For example, they can use Google Maps with Salesforce.com to generate directions to a customer site.
Part of the IT-as-a-Service phase that shows the business exactly what services are consumed and who is consuming them.
Either a full fine-grained chargeback or a showback capability
How are security and GRC handled in the IT-as-a-Service phase?
Security and GRC are embedded into the services using specific trust zones.
GRC
Governance
Risk
Compliance
New IT Focus areas
Cloud service
Operations management
New IT roles emerging
Cloud Architect
Cloud Admin
Cloud Capacity Planner
IT Automation Engineer
What happens to the role of the VM administrator in the virtualized environment?
In the virtualized environment, the role of the VM administrator evolves (as tools evolve) to include fully managing storage.
Shift in IT roles
Less time is spent performing manual tasks, such as change management, while more time is devoted to tasks that have a broader impact, such as creating templates and performing automated rolling upgrades.
What are two (2) benefits of a VDC?
- Increased security and privacy through multi-tenancy.
- Application level business continuance and resource mgmt.
- Centralized management and optimized provisioned resources.
- Near zero downtime guarantee and improved performance.
- It is a required step for cloud computing.
- Application level business continuance and resource mgmt.
3. Centralized management and optimized provisioned resources.
Simple definition of a cloud
Shared services delivered from the network to any device.
How is a VDC different from implementing virtualization?
A VDC takes virtualization to the next level by creating shared resource pools based on requirements instead of individual application needs or LOB ownership.
Steps recommended to prepare for Cloud computing
Virtualize the mission critical applications.
Retire all the non-virtualized applications.
Why resource pooling through virtualization is essential
Improves efficiency.
Creates secure and trusted environments.
More responsive to on-demand growth.
Ways the Cloud extends benefits of the VDC
Further improves cost structure.
Puts IT in the hands of the customer.
Key Driver for VDC
Effciency
Key Driver for the Cloud
Agility
What does IT need to do, at a high level?
Hyper-consolidate infrastructure
What is breaking the old IT economic model?
Information growth
Drives business growth and survival
Information usage
Best way to match the information growth rate and evolve the business to manage information instead of manage the infrastructure.
Virtualizing all the layers in the data center, creating resource pools, and driving IT to become completely services-based.