Internal compute clouds

Internal compute clouds

Customer Problem

Financial service firms, biomedical, pharmaceutical, and media companies, educational institutions, research facilities, and government agencies need to balance the dynamic needs of elastic compute farms with the equally dynamic need to run more traditional IT applications for lines of business. In these times of economic uncertainty, this balance needs to be achieved without massive overprovisioning of datacenter resources.

Benefits

• Lower capital and operational expense by hosting business applications, development environments, and batch/compute work on the same private cloud
• Deliver secure multi-tenant isolation between the users of each workload type
• Associate usage with internal customers for showback or even chargeback so that costs can be compared with value to rationalize growth of the cloud
• Respond quickly to changes in business needs whether cyclical or unexpected events by repurposing equipment between workload types
• Make sure that limited resources are used for the most important work

Key Functionality

• Massive scalability without bottlenecks or single points of failure
• Security lists for multi-tenancy enforcement on the network
• Collaborative permissioning ffor multi-tenancy enforcement on storage, compute, and network resources in the cloud
• Programmatic control of all aspects of compute, storage, and networking allocations
• Options for both ephemeral and persistent storage via the Nimbula Disk Service
• Metering for cost transparency chargeback to the end user departments as the load goes up and down

Solution Details

Nimbula Director delivers a highly scalable elastic private cloud with programmatic controls. Applications and compute instances can allocate and release resources on demand as needs shift throughout the day. For example, line of business applications can receive more compute capacity during the daytime
and release that capacity in favor of batch processing at night.

This elastic control can be completely automated via programmatic cloud interfaces using tools that monitor and manage the competing demands within the cloud without any need for IT intervention and keeping cloud operations costs well in hand.

Proper multi-tenancy isolation is ensured both by protecting the objects in the cloud and by a distributed firewall that prevents unauthorized communication between tenants and applications. Nimbula Director keeps costs down by delivering both cheaper ephemeral storage for temporary calculations and more expensive persistent storage for end results.

Costs are kept transparent as all resource utilization is recorded so that there is no tension created by sharing the costs between users of the cloud – each department can be charged for their use and their use only.