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What steps should businesses take before implementing a private cloud architecture?
What steps should businesses take before implementing a private cloud architecture? What are your top private cloud implementation tips? High quality answers will be considered for an open research piece and will be given significant promotion across the Focus network.
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6 Answers
Step 1: determine scale: Take a good look at all of the systems you will be moving into your private cloud. Take into account any planned sprawl of these and add a fudge factor of 20% or so and add this all up to determine what resources you should be starting with.
Step 2: determine supportability: Verify every OS and application that you will be running in this infrastructure is supported in a virtual/cloud environment.
Step 3: system compatibility check: Check how your systems are currently used to ensure they will work in a cloud environment. Points to look out for are systems that use dongles, anything requiring USB connection to the physical server or any other type of direct physical attachment.
Step 4: storage compatibility check: Moving to a cloud generally means using SAN storage. Compile a list of all methods and protocols you use to attach to storage as well as all file systems that are used. Verify that the storage solution you have chosen will support all of these or plan your changes to maintain functionality.
Step 5: POC and lab: Verify all of your system compatibility and storage compatibility on a proof of concept system and a lab. Use this time to identify issues and find solutions. You will only get one chance to cut over to your new solution. No matter how well it works on day 100, if it didn’t work well on day 1 it will be seen by many as a failure.
Fundamentally it starts with an analysis project that needs to assess all the options, current state vs private cloud, vs hybrid cloud vs public cloud. This would be a fairly intensive study where you would need to assess the people, process, technology and ROI impacts of the various options. A private cloud often sounds good at first blush but the people and process impact can be too much as you are changing aspects of people's jobs/role and the culture of the infrastructure, etc., team so that can be confusing and change is hard. You also need to analyze the compute work loads that make sense (currently) to move to the cloud - it's not everything. Assuming you have the right "use case" than you need to ask the question: why would it be better for us to manage this infrastructure vs a 3rd party. The answer will depend on the people, process, technology and ROI factors mentioned above.
Phil Clarke
This is a great question that many businesses are asking. @Phil makes a good point about people, process and technology. Full disclosure here, I'm the tech evangelist for GoGrid (a Public and Hosted Private Cloud company) and obviously this is something that we think about each and every day. I like what @Steve says above, but an important thing to remember is that you simply cannot port existing infrastructure "to the cloud". It's important to remember that to really be effective (and efficient) with your cloud infrastructure rollout that you architect to take advantage of the qualities of cloud computing (e.g., scalability, on-demand, flexible payments/pay-as-you-go, and delivered via Internet technologies).
Back in February, I posted an article "10 Things To Consider When Purchasing Cloud Computing Infrastructure" (article link: http://bit.ly/hrvYef) which outlines some additional questions to consider when you approach cloud vendors. Your business is unique and your infrastructure equally so - it's important that you don't get strong-armed into choosing a provider that isn't flexible and can't help you grow towards success.
In the article is a link to a white paper that I authored that (hopefully) helps people get a better understanding for the type of cloud they should use (public, private or hybrid). Would love to get some feedback on that.
First off, you need to understand what aspect of the cloud is actually being considered: Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Implementing SaaS may have the least planning impact, as many online services are as simple as signing up, paying for it with a credit card, and using the (typically consumer-based) service. Think Hotmail or GoogleApps. PaaS is a bit more involved, as there can be much more admin control, and may involve end user accounts. Think hosted Exchange or SharePoint. IaaS can be even more complex, as it tends to be treated as an extended IT wing of your own business where you may have limited to complete control of the servers/hardware.
Depending on what you are planning to do, I agree with Steve's basic approach.I also think Phil is spot on with his use case modeling approach -- its always good to start with a clear picture of the business problem in mind.
Isn't this so called "Private Cloud" just what we have today? As in any large company has a connected network and also offer in some form or other offer applications and services hosted on the network to the companies users? Maybe I am missing something here with everyone debating about the different types of 'cloud' and if companies should build a private 'cloud' which essentially is a connected network + storage? All the points that @Steve make is relevant to any IT infrastructure project as any decent infrastructure architect would know - whether it's 'clouded' or 'not clouded' :-)
ITIL, ITSM, and so on
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