An interesting write-up from Greg Ferro at ‘Ethereal Mind’ on how a lot of what we do as a company pulls together to create cloud computing style infrastuctures for our customers. What thoughts do you all have on this - make sense, or way off base?
Posted by Douglas Gourlay at 01:22PM PST
A major benefit of cloud computing is that different parties can develop and offer services to each other. Through that we can get a rich ecosystem of services running on the cloud. So a major issue here is to have different customers running on and trying to control the same, shared infrastructure. So I think that deploying this purely through VFrame would not be sufficient. There has to be a layer on top that ensure that resources are managed, accessed and isolated appropriately, because a cloud infrastructure is a multi-tenancy platform. The cited discussion by Greg is describing more of an in-house data center solution rather than a cloud infrastructure.
Anna,
Your comments regarding the multi-tenancy requirements of “Cloud Computing” are spot on and I suggest you take a further look at VFrame specific to the Roles Based Access Controlled Interface (RBAC). This interface was specifically written for service provider, multi-tenancy provisioning environments whereby every service configured through VFrame can be assigned to specific owners, and the assigned owners can determine who can set-up the services, make changes to the service, and view the services activated. Further there is audit trail of any services configured or changes made by these assigned owners, and this audit trail can be integrated into ITIL based ecosystem change management systems, through a web services API.
Cisco agrees that a shared, multi-tenancy cloud infrastructure does require rich, secured, logical partitions on a per application/customer hosted basis. The configurations of these end to end partitions are the very essence of what VFrame offers. Each hosted application needs virtualized services including virtual machines, virtual LANs, virtual content load balancers, virtual subnets, virtual storage LUNs, Virtual SANs, and so on. VFrame offers a designer interface (an ITIL defined function) for creating the association of these services (via the RBAC interface), and a deploy function (again an ITIL defined function) based on service activation policies.
Cisco also agrees that there are layers on top of the orchestration and service provisioning capabilities of VFrame, specific to business portals including service requests, billing, chargeback and SLA reporting tools. Again VFrame offers a northbound API for the creation and integration of these portals. VFrame offers the more drill down, technical provisioning of the infrastructure, as a set of virtualized, secure, well partitioned services.
Bill Erdman, Senior Marketing Director, Cisco VFrame Data Center team
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Bill Erdman Aug 28, 2008
Greg Ferro offers a nice description on the service orchestration capabilities of Cisco VFrame DC, as one of the key enablers of ad-hoc Data Center infrastructure clouds. Any cloud computing infrastructure requires a service portal, a provisioning platform, and a rich interoperability matrix. Coupled on top of this there needs to be a set of policies they can dynamically move capacity around based upon application demands.
As Doug has requested it would be nice to hear what others think regarding the concepts of cloud computing.
Posted by Bill Erdman, Senior Marketing Director, Cisco VFrame Data Center Team