The Modular Approach to a Scalable Cloud

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Arthur Cole.

Following up on my previous post regarding hyperscale infrastructure, I feel I should point out that once the decision to go hyperscale has been made, it will most likely take place in a Greenfield hardware environment. Unless you are already working with a state-of-the-art data facility, any attempt to convert complex, multiformat legacy environments will almost certainly lead to a morass of integration issues.

The key benefit to hyperscale is that it is both large and flexible, allowing data executives to craft multiple disparate data architectures completely in software. This is why current hyperscale plants at Google and Facebook rely on bulk commodity hardware. But as I mentioned last fall, the average enterprise does not have the clout to purchase tens of thousands of stripped down servers and switches at a time, and besides, all those components still need to be deployed, provisioned and integrated into the cluster, which takes time, effort and of course, money…

It is for this reason that many CIOs are starting to look at converged infrastructure (CI) as an answer to their cloud and hyperscale needs. British research firm Stratecast recently issued a report on CI and the private cloud and concluded that so-called “cloud-in-a-box” platforms can in fact deliver a pre-configured, plug-in cloud solution that enables rapid and extensive scalability. At the same time, integration and management overhead are reduced because the primary computing elements – the servers, storage and networking components – are already integrated. While it is true that most of the complexity in converged environments is pushed to the backplane, this is no longer the burden it once was now that new software-defined networking tools are entering the channel…

Read more from the source @ http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/infrastructure/the-modular-approach-to-a-scalable-cloud.html