Top 4 questions about managing a cloud data center

Tags: data center, Juniper Networks, private cloud, public cloud, vendor interview

Sharing of infrastructure resource in a cloud environment is an intriguing topic of cloud computing today. How does a cloud computing facility differ from a traditional computing environment? What kind of stress can cloud computing bring to the network? What kind of knowledge should network administrators equip themselves with? And interestingly, what happens when a business transforms its private cloud to a public cloud? CK Lam, Juniper Networks' enterprise solutions marketing manager, APAC, addresses these top questions about managing a cloud data center.

How does a cloud computing data center differ from the traditional computing environment? What impact do they have on the existing network appliances and architecture?

CK: In the traditional computing environment, many software components and processes reside in the local machine. In a cloud computing environment, almost everything is run from a server or servers in the data center where you typically interact with it via a browser. This places a lot more demand on the existing network and security infrastructure. 

One of the key principles of cloud computing is the idea of sharing resources like computing, storage, applications and even development platform, where they are heavily shared among many users either in the company in the case of private clouds or by users globally in the case of public clouds. 

Sharing is made possible due to virtualization and a heavily virtualized data center in a cloud computing environment, which requires the network infrastructure to be able to support the added requirements. For example, in the past, a physical server used to run a dedicated task, but today, a single physical server can be running as many as 20 virtual servers—placing 20 times more demand on the network. Virtualization allows for elasticity and agility where servers can be quickly redeployed by moving virtual machines from one physical server to another, in turn impacting the network.

Does cloud computing cause stress to network architectures? What are the available solutions to these problems?

CK: Cloud computing will put stress on the network architecture to its limit, impacting end users ultimately. 

With the introduction of virtualization, storage traffic, converged networking like FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet), blade servers, and more demanding applications like video and unified communications, network bandwidth will be in heavy demand and oversubscribed switching solutions will become bottlenecks to the network traffic. 

High-performance switching solutions with scalability, reliability and low latency can help alleviate the problems. The network architecture must also be simplified to enable higher-performance, lower latency, and easy network management.

What knowledge should network administrators have to sail through the age of cloud computing?

CK: Network administrators need to understand that, in a cloud computing environment, the utilization of network bandwidth is constantly reaching its highest limit. 

Network administrators should be aware of the challenges in managing a highly virtualized environment and it’s impact on network architecture. They should plan to simplify their network architecture, share the network infrastructure using virtualization, secure their environment and deploy tools that can help automate the process of managing a virtualized data center environment.

What are the likely challenges that a business will face when transforming its private cloud to a public cloud? 

CK: There is usually very little reason to transform from one private to a public cloud unless the company wants to make business out of it. 

Most businesses that deploy private clouds wish to tap the benefits of cloud computing such as cost savings as a result of shared applications and infrastructure. 

If a company wishes to provide public cloud service, they will need to possess the necessary software which provides a front-end user-interface, billing backend, monitoring tools, databases and middleware, as well as the hardware infrastructure such as servers, storage and networking. One of the key issues to keep in mind is security, which becomes even more critical in a public cloud environment. 

CK Lam is enterprise solutions marketing manager, APAC, Juniper Networks

 Facebook  Linkedin  Twitter Digg  Email Print

0 reader's comment