Hybrid Clouds: are we there yet?
by Johan De Gelas on October 18, 2010 2:05 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
Telecom finally enters the 21st century
Telecom devices used to belong to a dark world where the vendors still rule and customers have to cope with their wims. Although modern telecom software is interfacing with mailboxes, VOIP and web conferencing, most telecom vendors force upon the sysadmins proprietary boxes which are completely closed. The vendors felt they could ignore the evolution towards modern flexible virtualized clusters. The motto was "We can only support you if you use our software on our hardware with specialized firmware". The "it will not work otherwise" smokescreen needed to hide the fact that vendors made customers pay premiums for outdated hardware.
Mitel put a cat among the pigeons by offering their software a virtual appliance, i.e. an OVF image. The Virtual Mitel Communications Director (VMCD) does not demand its own server like the rest of the haughty telco software, but humbly installs itself on the virtual layer of your datacenter.
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It only requires that you reserve 2 to 4 cores and 2 to 4 GB of RAM so it can do its work for up to 1000 active users. Those cores must be an 2 GHz EPT (Hardware MMU) enabled Nehalems or better. The only supported hypervisor so far is VMware's vSphere 4.0 update 2.
Summary
It is pretty clear: advanced virtualization technology brings the advanced capabilities of the "public clouds" inside the datacenters of many enterprises. The virtual intelligent cluster is not going away, especially now that even the most "stubborn" applications such as OLTP databases and telco software are being virtualized.
New "hybrid cloud" management software (vCloud Director, openQRM) will allow the sys admin people to offer the users an easy self service portal. At the same time the sys admins get a single pane to control both the public as the private cloud resources. We are not there yet. More advanced "cloud" networking software and storage migration tools will make it a lot simpler to seamlessly move virtual machines from your own premisses to the large datacenters and back.
But we are getting close. At the high end, EMC VPLEX technology shows that this will become a reality even more for massive migrations that involve moving hundreds of VMs over great distances. And if you only want to move a few VMs from time to time, that is already possible with some careful tweaking, although not fully supported. Just take a look at the benchmark below, done by the EMC lab.
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VMware vSphere build-in Storage vMotion does the job of moving a complete VM + datastore to another datacenter a lot slower than the VPLEX setup (option 2) but it works without disruption. It won't take long before the Hybrid Cloud will also arrive in the smaller and medium IT business too.
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pjkenned - Monday, October 18, 2010 - link
Stuff is still new but is pretty wow in real life. Clients are based on Android and make that Mitel stuff look like 1990's tech.Gilbert Osmond - Monday, October 18, 2010 - link
I enjoy and benefit from Anandtech's articles on the larger-picture network & structural aspects of contemporary IT services. I wonder if, as Anandtech's readership age-cohort "grows up" and matures into higher management- and executive-level IT job positions, the demand for articles with this kind of content & focus will increase. I hope so.AstroGuardian - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
FYI it does to some extent... :) "You can't stop the progress" right?JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
While we get less comments on our enterprise articles, they do pretty well. For example the Server Clash article was in the same league as the latest Geforce and SSD reviews. We can't beat Sandy Bridge previews of course :-).And while in the beginning of the IT section we got a lot of AMD vs Intel flames, nowadays we get some very solid discussions, right on target.
HMTK - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
Like back then at Ace's? ;-)rbarone69 - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
You couldn't have said it better! As an IT Director find information that this site gives invaluable to my decision making. Articles like this give me a jumping off point to thinking outside the box or adding tech I never heard of to our existing infrastructure.What's amazing is that we put very little in new equipment and are able to do what cost millions just 10 years ago. We can now offer 99.999% normal availability with only a maximum of 30minutes of downtime during a full datacenter switch from Toronto to Chicago!
The combination of fast multi core processors, virtualization tech and cheaper bandwidth have made this type of service availalbe to companies of all sizes. Very exciting times!
FunBunny2 - Monday, October 18, 2010 - link
The problem with Clouding is that systems are built to the lowest common denominator (which is to say, Cheap) hardware. The cutting edge is with SSD storage, and it's not likely that public Clouds are going to spend the money.Mattbreitbach - Monday, October 18, 2010 - link
I actually see this going forward. I would put money on public cloud hosts offering different storage options, and pricing brackets to match. I also do not believe that many of the emerging cloud environments are being build with the cheapest hardware available. I would be more inclined to think that some of the providers out there are going for high-end clients who are willing to shell out the cash for performance.mlambert - Monday, October 18, 2010 - link
3PAR, HDS (VSP's) and soon EMC will all have some form of block/page/region level dynamic optimization for auto-tiering between SSD/FC-SAS/SATA. When the majority of your storage is 2TB SATA drives but you still have the hot 3-5% on SSD the costs really come down.HDS and 3PAR both do it very well right now... with HDS firmly in the lead come next April...
The problem I see is the 100-120km dark fiber sync limitation. Once someone figures out how to be sync with 20-40ms latency (or the internets somehow figure out how reduce latency) we will have some pretty cool "clouds".
rd_nest - Monday, October 18, 2010 - link
Not willing to start another vendor war here :)Wanted to make a minor correction - EMC already has dynamic sub-LUN block optimization..Also called FAST - fully automated storage teiring like you mentioned. This is in both CLARiiON and V-Max...the implementation is different, but works almost same.
Don't you feel 20-40ms is bit too much?? Most database applications/or any famous MS applications don't like this amount of latency. Though quite subjective, I tend to believe that 10-20ms is what most people want.
Well, I am sure if it is reduced to 10-20ms, people will start asking for 5ms :)