Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Traditional Data Center
Cloud Data Center
Multiple supported management tools
Few standard management tools
A lot of application updates and patching
Minimal required patching and updates
Multiple supported software and hardware
architectures
Single cloud architecture
Complex workloads
Simple workloads
There is an inherent simplicity to the cloud architecture. It might look complicated on
paper, but in essence its homogeneity and scale make it simpler if planned right. This means
that it's easier to put in more of the same, and with multitenancy, a lot of people will be shar-
ing in the expenses, which will make everything cheaper. It's simple and so it scales well.
Determining Cloud Data Center Hardware
and Infrastructure
A cloud data center may not be as different in terms of the look of the infrastructure and
the hardware used, but it is the architecture of the system, down to the software installed
in the servers, that separates cloud computing from traditional on-premises data centers.
Cloud computing is defined by data centers, large data centers that made cloud computing
viable in the first place. Before the advent of the modern, extremely large and modular data
centers, which require little to no maintenance, selling or sharing computing resources with
others would have been next to impossible.
While on-premises and cloud data centers serve similar purposes, there is a much larger
audience for cloud computing data centers. They offer so much more to users and so therefore
require substantial planning, especially for future trends and to keep up with technology and
additional capacity.
The major selling points of cloud computing are also the main source of complexity
when it comes to data center planning and design. Scalability, resiliency, availability, and
security are all features that need to be incorporated into the design of your cloud data
center in order to actually call it a cloud data center.
In the following sections, we will look into a few factors that should be considered when
you're planning to set up your own cloud data center. These factors may also help in the
selection of a proper colocation provider or a cloud service provider.
Designing for Cloud Functionality
The definition of cloud computing and the factors that make it what it is has been discussed
and debated and run into the ground on the Internet for a decade now, not to mention in
many parts of this topic, so it would be redundant for us to discuss them in this chapter.
Instead, we'll look at three of the most important aspects, which may not completely define
Search WWH ::
Custom Search