Enterprise Cloud

Let's have a look at enterprise cloud.

Enterprise Cloud Framework

The large majority of IDC's 2nd and 3rd Platform capabilities can be run and managed within the enterprise virtualization framework.

Built primarily on commodity x86 components, the financial model for this type of service closely follows the price-performance curve within the consumer virtualization industry (read "consumer cloud").  Built on vertically scaled systems, it'll vary considerably.

Cost per workload starts to flatten out at somewhere between 300 and 700 workloads, referenced to a 2 vCPU/2 GB vRAM reference unit virtual machine.  Storage as a mix of DAS (solid state and/or spinning) and archival as needed to service the application requirements.  Cost of storage is technology and size dependent.

It can be located nearly anywhere that has suitable power, cooling and data access.  This provides the business with options to utilize cloud capabilities without any of the concerns arising from a multi-tenant solution (read "consumer cloud").

Disaster recovery can be any similarly constructed system with the typical limitations of application and storage latencies along with appropriate data access to service the workload DR requirements. Ideally the "similarly constructed" DR locks in control plane and hypervisor type.

It can support, in bare metal delivery, the interconnection to applications that have requirements above the application virtualization maximums and/or alternative bare metal operating systems.

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Where things get "interesting"….

     For Network, please review blog entry http://www.abusedbits.com/2015/11/spine-and-leaf-nodes.html for some of the concepts.  Consider that the network above the "logical rack", that supported by a ToR switching pair, really needs to have horizontal scale, it needs to be extremely robust and support significant potential East-West traffic.  It also needs to support bare metal integration and containers, in addition to the virtual hosts.

     Enterprises should be mindful of the Operations Management requirements of their enterprise cloud service, particularly as it pertains to DevOps in the management and lifecycle of the infrastructure and application.  Lower in the visibility, but enormously valuable to the enterprise, things like directory services, host security, scanning and platform overlay need to be considered. That combined with normal enterprise functions of backup, DR, monitoring and administrative access really should be looked at from a cohesive set of feature-function requirements.  Monitoring, well, un-monitored cloud is simply frightening.

     Lastly, the APIs.  Adoption of a modern infrastructure or platform initiative, which this directly relates to, is all about access to the APIs.  There are APIs for the hardware at the point of management.  APIs for the control(s) plane capabilities, and not all or well integrated without development, as the control plane functions may be separate or standalone.  APIs for any platform substrates. APIs for software defined networking.  Then, to top it all off, multi-vendor cloud services that deliver Hybrid Cloud capability across disparate systems, will have APIs.  Read this as "you'll need programmers" OR a vendor that provides these capabilities prepackaged.