Cloud Silos?
By: Momchil Michailov
Silos, or portions of IT infrastructures or applications that exist on their own, have long been a headache for IT professionals as separate management, back up and maintenance tasks are often necessary to support each silo due to their lack of integration with the rest of the IT process. Deploying a new server and/or application is relatively easy (just like it is to add new VMs) and before you know it, your datacenter is inefficient, expensive and extremely difficult to manage. These are the difficulties virtualization promised to address and now, so too does the “cloud.”
What users don’t quite understand is that the cloud provides an excellent platform for better utilization, application integration and data sharing. But unless it is planned well, it could end up being just as complex as your standard datacenter – with lots of individual silos.
One of the big issues we often hear from customers is that they have to pay a lot of maintenance fees to keep their applications and silos alive under the presumption “why fix something that is not broken?”, as well as the current need to move to a proprietary cloud platform and port their applications.
The reality is… customers could realize significant cost savings by utilizing cloud infrastructures, while reducing management costs by optimizing their applications to take advantage of the liquid cloud platform vs. the silos they have today.
Sanbolic offers organizations the ability to create highly scalable, highly available public/private cloud infrastructures build on Microsoft Windows Server platforms. This allows customers to take their existing applications such as SQL, SharePoint, Web serving, File Serving, and VDI, and optimize their IT operations, integrations and data sharing by moving them to the cloud using their native OS.
By utilizing Sanbolic’s cluster file system Melio FS , LaScala Volume Manager, and AppCluster users can provide high availability and consolidation for SharePoint 2010. An update for AppCluster to be released in the next coming weeks will add a new feature that allows for grouping of databases (SharePoint requires that all the primary databases be located on the same server). This resource group can then be automatically failed-over to another SQL server in the event of a failure without the need for Microsoft Failover Clustering. For non-primary content databases AppCluster can provide this same capability as well as load balancing by distributing the different content database across different servers. AppCluster’s use of virtual IP’s allows this all to be done without requiring reconfiguration on the SharePoint server in the event of a fail-over. Additionally by using the Melio file system all SQL servers supporting SharePoint can utilize a single file system for database resources without the need for storage migration. Also Melio FS provides QoS components that allows users to allocate specific bandwidth guarantees to specific databases. These can be either the primary databases, additional content databases, or both. By using the LaScala volume manager users can expand their SharePoint database volumes on the fly without IO interruption and also mirror the data across multiple storage arrays allowing for a complete failure of a storage array while still providing access to the data. All of this comes in a single simple to install package and allows for quick deployment and simple administration.