Cloud Computing: Data Center-On a Cloud
August 30, 2011
Cloud has always been associated with flexibility and economic viability. Cloud has successfully shrugged the hype factor and has over the years grown well in India. Currently most of the cloud market is addressed by Indian data center service providers and global cloud service providers. However telecom companies are taking significant share in overall cloud opportunity with strengths like broad network reach and wide customer access. From the time, telecom companies have started considering cloud as a serious business concept, storage companies have been their ‘friend in need’. While storage has been a de-facto component of the cloud architecture, telcos have been leveraging the relationship for the best business advantage…
An effective combination of storage companies and telcos are bringing the great ‘cloud dividend’. Telcos have a unique standing to provide managed cloud services. The telecom companies have networks and long-term relationships with their customers, which the competitors don’t have. Combining a teleco’s knowledge of customers with a service offering of storage companies makes a good business value proposition. Cloud can have a major impact on the digital assets by scalability and flexibility to develop cost-effective test systems, at the same time allowing enterprises to rent infrastructure and develop applications. It is the wireless cloud, with its gamut of services like storage, security, etc, that is having a huge impact on uptake, and in turn digital assets. The Symbiosis
Storage vendors have been working relentlessly to make alterations to fit in the cloud model that is being structured by the telecos. Telcos’ inclination to rope in the storage vendors can never be underestimated by any accounts. Storage is not simply about about the physical capability of storing bits. It is usually the central enabler of a business. Storage can be aptly seen as the lifeline of an organization and has come far from containing customer records, financial records, and the intellectual property of the company. They are the backbone of an enterprise.
Infrastructure services that are one of the popular cloud services, are becoming cloud based which includes storage, content management, conferencing, processing bandwidth, and network connectivity. Cloud platforms are being scaled to accommodate the growth in the network traffic levels.
Enterprises across the region have very different requirements when they look for the latest cloud solutions because of local market conditions. The Hitachi Data Systems’ cloud approach is unique in allowing organizations in Asia Pacific to build, scale and deploy agile cloud services and solutions at their own pace to meet existing needs, says Kevin Eggleston, senior vice president and general manager, Asia Pacific, Hitachi Data Systems.
Rajesh Awasthi, director, telecom and cloud service provider, NetApp, says, Telcos with their intrinsic networks and the storage companies with their expert domain knowledge are helping the telecom companies to serve the best breed of cloud services.
Technology Beckons
Let us have a look at the innovative new offerings made by the storage companies. HP has invested with telecom companies in delivering various workshops which helped telecom companies in defining their cloud strategy and cloud services delivery roadmap. The company has also put in R&D investments in building an integrated solution for telecom providers to enable them to become cloud service providers. The company has also built a program called CloudAgile, which will help in building GTM for the cloud services, in turn helping telecom providers achieving quicker RoI for their cloud investments.
Another storage company, Oracle recently announced 2 models of Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud-Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud X2-2 with 64-bit x86 processors and a choice of Oracle Solaris or Oracle Linux, as well as Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud T3-1B with SPARC servers running Oracle Solaris. The offerings are engineered for large-scale, mission-critical deployments, Oracle Exalogic Elastic cloud provides the foundation for enterprise-class multi-tenancy or cloud applications and can support thousands of applications. All Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud models are hardware and software systems that leverage an InfiniBand based I/O fabric and solid-state storage with the market-leading Oracle WebLogic Server and other enterprise Java Oracle middleware products, which are assembled, tested, and tuned at the factory to dramatically reduce the time from machine delivery to being fully-operational for application deployment.
IBM also designed IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage (SONAS) to embrace cloud storage and the petabyte age. It can meet today’s storage challenges with quick and cost-effective IT-enabled business enhancements designed to grow with unprecedented scale.
For EMC, the company designed Atmos to manage information for content-rich high-scale infrastructures and cloud service provider environments. Its flexible architecture adapts easily to run in virtualized environments, or within an EMC purpose-built, low-cost, high-density hardware system. The new Atmos 2.0 is armed with brand new features for managing big data.
NetApp along with telcos also work in partnership with cloud vendors like Oracle on Demand and SAP by Design, for providing cloud services to the telecom companies.
Innovations Galore
Most of the data centers for storage built by current telecom service providers are typically made considering telecom requirements. However cloud services’ data center have typical requirements like higher power and lower opex.
Explains Venkatesh Iyer, head, VCE, India & Saarc, EMC, As organizations expand server virtualization to include mission-critical applications, ongoing VM creation, movement and use of virtual networking introduces new challenges for data center managers when they need to isolate and resolve infrastructure issues.
There have been innovations made to suit the requirements of the enterprise by scaling up the capacity of the data centers. Telecom companies have been, of late, also gone for data centers meant especially for cloud services. BSNL, last year announced plans to build 6 data centers across India to sell cloud storage services in the country. Going by the agreement, BSNL will partner with Datacraft Asia to build, operate and manage 6 data center facilities. BSNL and Datacraft will jointly sell the managed hosted and cloud ‘IT-as-a-Service’ from these facilities under the brand ‘onecloud’.
Indian cloud service providers also have to compete with global service providers on commercials, this demands lowest possible operating expenditure for delivering cloud services.
Security as a Priority
Security and privacy of data are the most important concerns, the reason why some users are fence-sitting before migrating to the cloud. Pratik Chube, country general manager, product management & marketing, Emerson Network Power (India) says, A clearly defined SLA and strict adherence to it can minimize the risk posed by the pilferage of sensitive data. Depending on the SLA signed and the domain expertise of the third party host, it is fairly safe.
Supports Santanu Ghose, country head, Converge Infrastructure Solutions, HP India, Security is the most important consideration for cloud service providers and cloud consumers.
Security has been constantly an area of concern especially for the companies that decide to go on the public cloud. It is mostly the bigger enterprises that are able to go for hosted private model.
Way to Go
If supported by the right management and vendors, cloud services can help in giving a manifold growth to the enterprises. Better management of data storage within cloud services can not only make data access and retrieval simpler and quicker, it has the capability to reduce the demand on storage space within the cloud, reduce the demand on data transmission and therefore negate many of the concerns over bandwidth demand that currently is holding up the broader adoption of the cloud on a wider scale.
Experts and analysts believe that the cloud services will help in bringing better revenues to the telecom companies. While both the segments, the storage companies and telcos, gain profit from the venture, cloud services are here to stay and grow.