Integration: The Key to the Cloud
Over the past two years virtualization technologies have firmly taken hold in the data center by proving their value and worth as production capable application and server platforms. This migration has occurred in the enterprise space as companies virtualize their infrastructure from the network through the application stack to storage. It has also been seen in the service provider space as hosting providers leverage virtualization's natural isolation and mobility to provide customers a sandboxed, yet fluid application delivery environment.
The infiltration of virtual platforms in the data center has also made access to cloud computing, the next step in data center evolution, much more attainable. Running applications in the cloud is a concept that's firmly planted in technologies such as grid computing, however the implementation that we're seeing today is a new architecture for applications in the data center designed from the ground up to facilitate cloud computing. Enterprises and service providers are implementing some type of cloud-based, application-running environment. They are also delivering on virtual infrastructure by implementing virtual technologies in their own data centers, such as Virtual Machines (VMs) instead of traditional physical machines, and looking at virtual platforms to provide the mobility and stability required for cloud computing.
Cloud Infrastructure: Internal and External
Full-service cloud computing providers have a great opportunity to offer an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) to companies looking to leverage the mobility and dynamic/elastic provisioning of a virtual platform. IaaS is a method for providing on-demand x86 computing-the most fluid, yet stable and continually available computing environment for most of today's application environments. By relying on cloud computing providers to build the application delivery infrastructure, customers do not have to undergo the capital expense of building out their own complete virtualized infrastructure.
A virtualized infrastructure is critical to cloud computing. In order to deploy applications remotely and in the cloud, portions of the internal customer infrastructure first need to be virtualized. For example, if storage is fixed in one single data center or isolated to one physical network, the applications that use that storage must also be a part of that same physical group. Virtualizing all parts of the application infrastructure-virtual platforms such as VMware ESX, virtual network delivery with Application Delivery Controllers such as F5® BIG-IP® Local Traffic ManagerTM (LTM), and virtual storage with products such as HP's LeftHand SANiQ-is the key to enabling managed cloud computing. This architecture enables cloud computing providers to provide a dynamic and elastic infrastructure for the customer's hosted virtual machines and applications.
"Warm" Virtual Machines
