BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE/APPLICATIONS

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APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT

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CLOUD

Prepping Data Center Infrastructure 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.

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EDITORS NOTE

PREPPING A DATA CENTER FOR CLOUD MIGRATION

CLOUD MIGRATION: TIPS FOR MATURE DATA CENTERS

RESOLVING CLOUD APPLICATION MIGRATION ISSUES

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Prepping a Data Center for Cloud Migration

Cloud Migration: Tips for Mature Data Centers

Resolving Cloud Application Migration Issues

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. Hybrid 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 systems, 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 strategic concerns that companies have in migrating to a hybrid cloud and also maps out tactical considerations in getting there. This package considers migration issues through several lenses. First, Bob Plankers dissects seven important effects 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 and automation. And nally, Bill Claybrook examines the effects of a migration on applications. He considers various application 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 existing infrastructure investments and make the move to the cloud more seamlessly. It may also provide the condence that you dont have to undo important infrastructure investments down the road.
Lauren Horwitz Executive Editor Data Center and Virtualization Media Group

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Preparing Your Data Center for Hybrid Clouds

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For good reason, clouds are a popular topic in IT. They offer numerous benets, such as pay-as-you-go billing models, seemingly innite 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 the move. 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 broaden your disaster recovery (DR) options by running workloads 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 hybrid cloud model is nancial. The pay-as-you-go aspect of public clouds can shift capital expenditures to operational 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 organization 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 rst step is to assess where your infrastructure is today. 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 cloud has many meanings, it doesnt just mean greater degrees of virtualization but also a push toward 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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for a hybrid cloud clear, develop technical requirements with your staff. Do the applications you want to move need to scale? Perhaps you need loadbalancing capabilities, not just for service availability, but also so you can distribute workloads and automatically redistribute resources to accommodate 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 identied your technical needs, consider public cloud provider offerings objectively. For example, perhaps some providers natively support 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 virtual machines 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 organizational 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 directly into existing infrastructure, but that has implications 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 different 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 congurations? How does it handle authentication? Is there an audit trail? At this stage, you need to ask all these questions.

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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 access through network- and host-based rewalls 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. Perhaps 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 systems, you may need to make those systems more robust, 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 public 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 programming interface keys and encryption keys. Access 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 administrator password, logging access and changing access information periodically. 5. Build Service Catalogs and Templates and Automate Conguration A primary benet 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 workload, 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 automated conguration management. Implementing conguration management in the form of tools like Chef, Puppet and so forth isnt simple. It opens the door to extreme levels of automation and change control, which saves staff time, prevents outages and assists with security by keeping all operating system congurations in sync. As with authentication, you need to consider your

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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 conguration repositories and servers, rewall rules, etc., to support these new tools. 6. Retrot Networking Networking is central to what makes the cloud possible. A successful hybrid cloud implementation is dependent on good networking practices, excellent and comprehensive monitoring, and rapid troubleshooting. Adding reliable and available connectivity to 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 external network connections. You may choose to make a single network connection redundant to help guarantee that a problem with one provider doesnt take all your companys products ofine. These tasks arent 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 trafc on network connections may mean more trafc through rewalls, intrusion-detection devices, and intrusion-prevention devices that were

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never sized for that amount of trafc. Scaling them up and adding redundancy is a must to prevent single points of failure from taking hybrid cloud applications ofine. Likewise, intrusion detection and prevention systems need to be congured 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 center. But as you move to the cloud, are these systems extensible and will they work for the cloud? Perhaps. The technologies for on-site virtual environments 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 important, 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 chargeback, billing and reporting. Using a monitoring tool or service that can automatically trigger scaling up or down is a key part of the move toward a

Editors Note

Prepping a Data Center for Cloud Migration

Cloud Migration: Tips for Mature Data Centers

Resolving Cloud Application Migration Issues

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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 congure 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 conguration management databases and other tools to the cloud is important. Some of this work is strictly process-oriented rather than technological, though there are likely good integration possibilities. In some cases, tracking certain assets in a traditional conguration management database is impossible given the dynamic 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 likely need 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 technical 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: performance 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 additional performance, you may nd yourself without options. Many providers have begun to add service tiers that guarantee certain levels of storage performance, and selecting a provider that does so allows you to save money where performance isnt necessary but spend money selectively to make performance-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 with hybrid clouds. First, do you plan to use your legacy system to back up cloud-based virtual machines? How will that affect network trafc? Just as important, how will that affect your bill, as most providers charge fees per gigabyte of trafc 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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Prepping a Data Center for Cloud Migration

Cloud Migration: Tips for Mature Data Centers

for restoring data than your already-established systems. You may also want to consider enabling encryption for your backups, especially for thirdparty 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 benet from new, better solutions that arise every month. If you and your organization take the nontechnical messages of cloud computing to heart, namely centralization and automation, you will nd yourself becoming more exible; more able to take advantage of solutions as they emerge; and, most likely, save money in the process. Bob Plankers

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Prepping a Data Center for Cloud Migration

Cloud Migration: Tips for Mature Data Centers

In moving to the cloud, many organizations are opting 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 solutions with centralization and automation to reduce the initial complexity of a cloud project?

Resolving Cloud Application Migration Issues

MOVING TO THE CLOUD DOESNT REQUIRE VIRTUALIZATION

hardware. Take public cloud services such as Googles Gmail or 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 technologies such as Microsoft Cluster Service, which can be somewhat incompatible with how virtualization environments work. The goal is centralization, not virtualization. If you can consolidate 50 le-and-print servers spread throughout an organization into three clustered physical hosts, thats a cloud win, regardless of the absence of virtualization.

Many enterprise IT shops believe cloud computing is all about virtualization. In many data centers, a virtualization platform is central to service offerings, but clouds arent dened 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 routine, mindless tasks so that employees are free to work on difcult problems. A cloud can be a shared infrastructure, which could be virtualized, but it can also encompass physical

MAKING THE TRANSITION TO THE CLOUD

So how do you move from a virtual environment to the cloud? First, standardize your data centers technology foundations. Virtualization enables organizations to standardize OS congurations using virtual machine (VM) templates and to automate deployment tasks. It also enables them to standardize on areas such as replication, rewalls and other security measures, OSes and storage congurations.

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If you cannot create a one-size-ts-all solution, use several sizes. The goal is to eliminate one-off congurations. Having 10 different kinds of VMs is much better than having 3,000 individual congurations. This is also a good time to think about automation, specically 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 Active Directory instance be more useful? Could you use conguration management tools such as Puppet or Chef to automatically transform and manage a servers conguration? Even a script of routinely run commands helps enormously. 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 exibility. For good reason, IT shops have spent years wrapping process around the act of creating and managing servers. These processes are responsible for how a server is monitored, how documentation is created or

Once youve laid a good foundation for your cloud with standards and automation, you can begin the more difcult work of surveying your organization for the IT services it runs.
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 difcult work of surveying your organization for the IT services it runs. Finding the services in use can be challenging. Even tougher is guring out why each one exists. People may have good reasons to duplicate services. For example, perhaps the companys main Web servers didnt support a specic technology, so a department created its own. Document these needs and work to extend central offerings to meet them. You absolutely have to be exible, too. Moving to the cloud unwinds years of work on IT infrastructure in the process of centralizing, and you will uncover things you never anticipated. Bob Plankers

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In the IT industry, a good deal of time and money has been spent to make applications portable. Not surprising, 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 t the target environment. Other applications require special hardware, which reduces their portability, and even many of the newer applications being built today are not very portable.

Prepping a Data Center for Cloud Migration

Cloud Migration: Tips for Mature Data Centers

Resolving Cloud Application Migration Issues

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 difcult-to-resolve dependencies between the application stack and the capabilities provided by the cloud service provider. Bernard Golden, CEO of HyperStratus, has noted that, to exploit the exibility 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 environments, data backup needs and system workloads. At least three cloud application architectures are in play today:
Traditional

APPLICATION ARCHITECTURE

application architectures (such as three-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. application architectures, where end-user interaction is the primary focus. Typically, large numbers of users may be pounding on a Web

Numerous cloud experts have indicated how important an applications architecture reects its ability to move it from one cloud to another. Appropriate cloud application architectures are part of the solution to cloud

Synchronous

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application in a short time period and could overwhelm the application and system.
Asynchronous

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application architectures, which are essentially all batch applications that do not support end-user interaction. They work on sets of data, extracting and inserting data into databases. Cloud computing offers scalability of server resources, allowing an otherwise long-running asynchronous job to be dispersed over several servers to share the processing load.

involves working with cloud providers, it is difcult because typically cloud providers do not offer open access to their infrastructures, applications and integration platforms. Older applications that depend on specic 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.

Prepping a Data Center for Cloud Migration

Cloud Migration: Tips for Mature Data Centers

Resolving Cloud Application Migration Issues

Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers offer tools for developing applications and an environment for running these applications. To deliver an application with a PaaS platform, you develop and deploy it on the platform; 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 Compute Cloud (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? Integrating new applications with existing ones can be a key part of application development. If integration

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.
In your efforts to migrate applications, you may start working with a cloud provider template where the provider gives you an operating system, such as CentOS or a Red Hat Enterprise Linux template. Youll then try to put your applications on it, xing up the things that are mismatched between the source application environment and the target environment. The real challenge is that this approach becomes an unknown process, complete with numerous workarounds and changes. As you move through a chain of events, xing problems as you go, you are rewriting the application. Hopefully you wont have to rewrite it all, but you will surely

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change congurations 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 version 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 x and encounter problems, youll have to work with however many versions of the application that you have created.

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.

Prepping a Data Center for Cloud Migration

CLOUD STANDARDS AND APPLICATION MIGRATION

Cloud Migration: Tips for Mature Data Centers

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 application programming interface (API)which has been submitted to the Distributed Management Task Force for ratication as an open standard for cloud APIsVMware dictates how cloud environments are congured and accessed with respect to denition of resources and catalogs of virtual machines, for example. These mandates have a direct impact on how a provider implements its cloud. What are some hints for architecting cloud applications? One suggestion is to design the application and its supporting stack components not to rely on

Resolving Cloud Application Migration Issues

Open cloud standards are considered the eventual solution to issues concerning application migration and cloud interoperability. We view cloud standards as a collection; this one starts at the low level with something like OVF (Open Virtualization Format), which provides a universal language for describing the metadata and conguration parameters of virtual machines (VMs). At the next level, something that would describe the environmentthe connectivity between VMsis useful. This would give you the networking between the virtual machines and the functions and scale of the environment in which the VMs operate. It is unlikely that cloud standards will be adopted in the near term, for reasons that include ongoing innovation. Vendors such as VMware would love to just say, We will do the whole black-box thing for you:

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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 interpretive systems 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 addition, you may have to avoid certain performance and capability benets that could be available with hypervisor tools or from the specics of an operating system. You also might have to go for a generic operation of your application with min-set functionality to make it portable from 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 support older versions of operating systems. Applications written before a certain date are not easily movable. Migrating applications among clouds is not easy. But open standards for cloud computing, when they appear, and the advent of tools such as CloudSwitch and Racemi will ease the difculty and make hybrid clouds more of a reality. Bill Claybrook

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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 of The Lone Sysadmin blog.
BILL CLAYBROOK is

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a marketing research analyst with more than 35 years of experience in the computer industry. Previously 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 president of New River Marketing Research and Directions on Red Hat.

Prepping Data Center Infrastructure for the Cloud is a SearchCloudComputing.com e-publication. Margie Semilof | Editorial Director Lauren Horwitz | Executive Editor Phil Sweeney | Managing Editor Eugene Demaitre | Associate Managing Editor Laura Aberle | Associate Features Editor

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