On (Private) Cloud Nine
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in operating systems, Cloud, virtualisation, Enterprise, Windows, Microsoft on
Microsoft’s Management Summit isn’t your usual IT conference. It’s a gathering of the unsung heroes of the IT pro world, the system administrators and the system managers who run the networks that keep businesses of all sizes running. They’re here in Las Vegas to understand Microsoft’s server management roadmap, and get training with the latest tools.
It’s a long road from SMS to System Center, but it’s one that Microsoft has been diligently treading for a decade now. What started as a tool for managing updates and software installs is now a complete suite of system management tools, covering everything from data protection to virtualisation to service level agreements to Linux (yes, Linux). It’s now a set of tools that will help run all aspects of a heterogeneous business network, with hardware and software from many different vendors.
One of the underlying themes of this years event is The Cloud. Not just the public cloud of Azure, but the scale-up scale-out elastic business networks that are starting to appear in private data centres. Even though they’re private, the automated, virtualised workloads they host share in many of the features of public cloud services - and they will even migrate from one to the next.
Tools like System Center Virtual Machine Manager and System Center Operations Manager help define just where virtual servers can be placed, and rules and policy can manage live migrations from server to server (if you’re using the next version of Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor) - along with application and storage virtualisation tools.
Bob Kelly, Microsoft VP Server and Tools, drilled down into this in his MMS 2009 keynote, calling the private cloud “Reliable, Predictable, Automated”, which he described as a long term investment for Microsoft as part of its Dynamic IT programme. Clouds are platform as a service, designed to scale up and out, and for reuse. They’re reliable highly available systems built for redundancy - which you need to deliver IT as a service.
One example of this is Hotmail, where server failures are replaced on a monthly schedule (the engineers go round the racks swapping out the boxes with the red lights). There’s no rush to make fixes, the load just moves transparently as soon as a problem occurs - what Kelly calls a “self healing system”, where the network has been automated for cost and reliability, reducing the number of people per server and removing the risk of errors. By building this type of infrastructure you do the work up front, so the network is knowledge-based, model oriented, and you can provide remediation in minutes, not days or hours.
It’s all part of the evolution of IT, from mainframe to client server to web to cloud. There are two models:
- A public cloud - very few companies delivering the data centres for this, so there will only be two or three or four public clouds.
- A private cloud - business enterprises will want the same features as the public cloud for their own data centers.
So how do we get there? Kelly talked about the path to cloud computing, which he said was “Virtualise, automate, deliver.” The most important part of the path is virtualisation, as you can’t do any of the rest without it. Once you’ve virtualised, automate what you can and move to service level management with policy control - and finally make sure the business understands what you’re doing and howto take advantage of it.
Private clouds are here to stay - they’re the new mainframe, only this time built on commodity hardware, general purpose operating systems, and open management standards.
Rated: 20% (1 votes)
Loading ...Comment by - May 2, 2009 on 4:39 pm
Glad you could attend MMS 2009 and am glad the conference provided value to you! Don’t let the “learning” end. Drop out to www.myITforum.com to keep in touch with the System Center community.
Comment by - May 5, 2009 on 12:47 am
Make your own private cloud using WorkXpress. We allow hosting behind a business firewall. www.workxpress.com
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