Cloud Cover
Recent news here in Ireland announced that IBM was launching their first European Cloud Platform in their first ‘Cloud Computing Centre‘ in Dublin. Subsequent coverage revealed a 100 CPU compute grid which IBM are using to test and develop their cloud offering.
In the last few days, Google have ‘entered the cloud scape’ with their new Application Engine, joining the likes of Salesforce.com who offer application hosting clouds, and competing (a little indirectly) with Amazon and their EC2/S3 Cloud services.
What does it all mean?
In simple terms, ‘clouds‘ are the new ‘grids‘ 
But fundamentally it’s all built on virtualisation.
- Cloud Grid Platfoms in a few simple steps:
- Build a big pile of servers, with lots of CPU’s and RAM
- Hang a big heap of storage off the back and hook everything up
- Put a network connection in front of the whole thing (maybe some load balancing or firewalls)
- Run a virtualisation platform (like VMware) on top
- (Optional) Replicate all of the above in multiple physical locations
You now have a ‘virtual’ datacentre full of servers and storage that, with the virtualisation, can be chopped into pieces appropriate for the users requirement.
So, you need 4x 2.33Ghz Xeon processors, 8GB of ram and 100GB of fast storage – no problem – click- there you go.
You need 16x 2.33Ghz Xeon processors, 32GM of RAM and only 10GB of storage for a super database – click – no problem.
Virtualisation means you can treat the cloud/grid/blob of resources like an empty framework, and run your services on top, with full flexibility in terms of all the key metrics (cpu power, ram and storage). You can move all the metrics around in near real time, without having to stop the ’server’ running (try adding a CPU to a traditional running server with the power still on and the server running? Ouch!)
Here at Hosting365, I’m happy to report our Cloud is even bigger than IBM’s!
Here’s the spec:
- 128 HP BL460C Blade Servers
- 256 Physical Intel Xeon Processors
- 1024 CPU Cores (2.33Ghz, 1666Mhz FSB, 4MB cache per core) (Or roughly 2,385.92Ghz!!)
- 4TB RAM Capacity
- EVA 8100 Redundant SAN Cluster
- 20TB Fitted Capacity (in 146GB 15k FC drives)
You can see a photo here (apologies for the otherwise lovely shot being ruined by Ed Byrne, our General Manager) 
Our cloud lives within a network architecture which includes HP Virtual Connect Modules (switches) for SAN and Ethernet, meaning all WWID’s, MAC addresses, etc, are all virtualised and portable within the cloud (providing immunity from hardware failure of individual nodes). These switches are uplinked to two Cisco 6509 switches, providing full redundancy, and are in turn uplinked to our Network Core. There are also Cisco boxes performing Firewalling and VPN Termination and F5 boxes for Layer-7 Load Balancing.
The real magic though, is in the VMware layer. Running VMware as our virtualisation platform of choice was the logical option for such a high performance, highly resilient grid / cloud platform.
Vmware’s maturity and robustness, allows us to provide real-time node High Availability (no impact to users if there are hardware failures or issues), dynamically move resources around the grid, again in real time and without downtime, to ensure there are always maximum resources available for all users. In addition, the snap shotting and management features of VMware Infrastructure tools mean we can deliver a truley enterprise experience.
In short, we spent a lot of money on a platform, so our customers don’t have to compromise.
For the same price as a basic dedicated server, you get access to everything above in terms of reliability, scalability, flexibility and security. To achieve an ‘apples with apples’ comparison, you would need to buy two, highly spec’d dedicated servers, a layer 7 load balancer (HA Pair) to ensure a server failure wont take you down (or a load balancer failure) a HA Pair of Firewalls to ensure security, and a small SAN. Traditionally, we’ve built many such platforms at costs into the tens of thousands of euros per month – now you can achieve the same business objectives from €99.95 per month!
Welcome to the world of tomorrow! (for hosting anyway )