Software-Defined Cloud Centers

There is an overwhelming recognition that IT is the real game-changer not only for worldwide businesses but also for the total humanity. The world is investing its talents, treasures, and time on IT, and therefore, there are several noteworthy advancements and accomplishments emerging and evolving in the hot IT field. By sagaciously leveraging those praiseworthy innovations and inventions, business houses across the globe are keeping up the edge earned. All kinds of business acceleration, augmentation, and automation get done through the bevy of IT improvisations. In the recent past, there is a tectonic twist. That is, IT is being adeptly enabled to empower people. All sorts of decision-making, deals, and deeds are being facilitated by IT systems. We can safely anticipate that IT is going to be hugely people-centric hereafter. IT is being tuned for performing not only informational, commercial, and transactional services but also for context-aware, cognitive, and physical services. Humans individually and collectively are getting immensely and immeasurably benefited out of the enigmatic IT. Thus, there is a pioneering and path-breaking impact on people by various evolutions and revolutions in the IT landscape. The disruptions and transformations being brought in by IT are simply incredible. In short, all kinds of industry verticals accelerate their operations, offerings, and outputs through the consistently growing power of IT. Besides IT systems, our everyday devices, machines, instruments, equipment, utensils, wares, consumer electronics, drones, robots, etc., are adequately and adroitly enable to be distinct in their actions and reactions. Physical, mechanical, and electrical systems are IT-enabled to exhibit adaptive behavior in their activities.

There is an executive’s guide to the software-defined data center (SDDC) published by TechRepublic, USA. This document details and describes the nitty-gritty of next-generation Cloud centers. The motivations, the key advantages, and the enabling tools and engines along with other relevant details are being neatly illustrated there. An SDDC is an integrated abstraction layer that defines a complete data center by means of a layer of software that presents the resources of the data center as pools of virtual and physical resources and allows their composition into arbitrary user-defined services. A modern SDDC deployment is defined by virtualized, software-defined resources that can be scaled up or down as required and can be deployed as needed in a number of distinct ways. There are three key components to the SDDC: (1) software-defined computing, (2) Software-Defined Network, and (3) software-defined storage. This chapter is to describe how the tools-assisted and automated software-defined environments are going to be the game-changer for businesses and governments.

The proliferation of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication is exponentially increasing the amount of unstructured data that is generated in the digital universe. It is estimated that face book generates roughly about 1 TB of data every day and most of it is unstructured data. The storage infrastructures like Storage Storage Area Networks (SAN) and Network-Attached Storage (NAS) are not designed to store and process unstructured data. Hence, it is the need of the day to design storage devices and networks which are robust enough to scale and accommodate huge amount of unstructured data without causing any performance impact. However, any present-day storage infrastructure like software-defined storage uses the traditional storage technologies like NAS and SAN as their underlying foundation. Hence, it is impossible to understand software-defined storage platforms without proper understanding of underlying technologies. In this chapter, we are explaining the foundations of storage technologies in the beginning and, later on, we are doing a deep dive to understand how their design has been transformed in such a way that they can store and process huge volumes of data in the present-day data centers using the concept of software-defined storage. In most of the scenarios, multiple storage platforms are combined and then some kind of enhancement is added to make them compatible to handle large volumes of data. In the first half of the chapter, we are examining the storage technologies like Direct-Attached Storage (DAS), NAS, and SAN. Software-defined storage refers to the use of storage virtualization and policy-based provisioning techniques to ensure that data storage is done in a cost-optimized and performance-optimized manner. One of the main reasons for the evolution of software-defined storage is the necessity to store and process big data. In the second half of the chapter, we discuss and focus on all techniques related to software-defined storages like Cloud storage and storage tiering and we also cover latest storage technologies which have been designed and optimized for big data processing like PANASAS, GFS, and HDFS

The core elements of any data center are: compute, network, and storage. These elements operate in silos which had led to many operational inefficiencies in data centers. This has forced organizations to relook at ways in which the various infrastructure elements can be utilized in an optimal manner. Virtualization technology has proved very handy to ensure that all infrastructure components of the data center are used in an efficient manner. The various flavors of virtualization which are possible in the infrastructure components of the data center are the following: (1) compute virtualization, (2) network virtualization, (3) storage virtualization. In this chapter, we have focused exclusively on network virtualization technology and also the various network virtualization techniques. The various network virtualization techniques which are covered in this chapter are the following: (1)network functions virtualization, (2) Software-Defined Network

The Cloud paradigm is definitely journeying in the right direction toward its ordained destination (the one-stop IT solution for all kinds of institutions, innovators, and individuals). The various stakeholders are playing their roles and responsibilities with all the alacrity and astuteness to smoothen the Cloud route. Resultantly, there are a number of noteworthy innovations and transformations in the Cloud space and they are being consciously verified and validated by corporates in order to avail them with confidence. There are IT product vendors, service organizations, independent software vendors, research laboratories, and academic institutions closely and collaboratively working to make the Cloud idea decisively penetrative and deftly pervasive. In this chapter, we are to describe the various unique capabilities of hybrid Clouds and how the feature-rich and state-of-the-art hybrid Cloud offerings from various Cloud service providers (CSP) are resulting in scores of innovations, disruptions, and transformations for the ensuing Cloud era.

The software-defined data center infrastructure in its entirety contains a wide gamut of technologies like Cloud, big data, mobile devices, and Internet of things. Each of these technological components is susceptible to various types of security vulnerabilities and threats which can render them ineffective. It is very important to ensure that the infrastructure components are adequately safeguarded from various security breaches. The crux of the lesson is the techniques to be adopted for securing the platforms and technologies which form a part of the software-defined data center ecosystem. The first section of the lesson examines the various security requirements for the software-defined data center infrastructure. From the next section of the lesson onwards, we focus on the security threats which exist in each component. Starting with Cloud platform, the threats which exist for each of the underlying platform of like big data and mobile devices are examined in detail. The various ways and means to tackle the security challenges are also discussed elaborately in the chapter.

Organizations across the world are now moving toward a model in which they are using a combination of on-premise and cloud-based services to manage their infrastructure and application components. This has led to evolution of a new paradigm which is called Hybrid IT. In this chapter, we propose a framework which can be used by organizations for managing their Hybrid IT infrastructure components. Some of the key characteristics which need to be kept in mind while designing such frameworks are also discussed in this chapter. In the second half of the chapter, we have focused on a set of tools which have evolved as a part of Cloud service management to manage the Hybrid IT infrastructure components. These tools are commonly referred to as Cloud management platforms (CMP). Some of the tools which we have discussed in this chapter are the following: (1)Enterprise Application store, (2) Self-service catalog, (3) Unified Cloud management console, (4) Cloud governance, (5) Metering and billing. Finally, we concluded this chapter by discussing some leading vendors in the CMP space.

Due to a large number of connected, clustered, and centralized IT systems, the heterogeneity and multiplicity-induced complexity of Cloud centers have risen abnormally. However, a bevy of tool-assisted, standards-compliant, policy-centric, and template-driven methods have come handy in moderating the development, management, delivery, and operational complexities of Clouds. Precisely speaking, converged, virtualized, automated, shared, and managed Cloud environments are the result of a stream of pioneering technologies, techniques, and tools working in concert toward the strategically sound goal of the InterCloud. The results are all there for everyone to see. IT industrialization is seeing the light, the IT is emerging as the fifth social utility, and the digital, insightful, idea and API era is kicking in. Brokerage solutions are being presented and prescribed as the most elementary as well as essential instrument and ingredient for attaining the intended success. In this chapter, we are to discuss the significance of Cloud broker solutions for the increasingly multi-cloud world.

As inscribed a couple of times in this book, the Cloud phenomenon is really rocking and rewarding. The Cloud idea has penetrated deeply and decisively across. The worldwide enterprises are so keen on embracing the bevy of game-changing Cloud technologies, tools, and tips in order to bring in a variety of rationalization and optimization in their IT environments. The IT product vendors, system integrators, academicians, and research laboratories have been working overtime to bring forth newer products, optimized processes, best practices, architecture, design, deployment, operation and integration patterns, performance-enhancement techniques, state-of-the-art infrastructures, etc., in order to make the Cloud idea viable, venerable, and visible. The emergence of multi-cloud environments is one such innovation in the Cloud landscape. Establishing and managing multi-cloud environments is not without challenges and concerns. Cloud brokerage solutions and services come handy in realizing multi-cloud facilities. Cloud migration solutions and services are being rolled out in order to speed up the process of Cloud adoption. Cloud operations, as enunciated in earlier chapters, are automated through toolsets. Most of the Cloud operations are integrated together in order to facilitate the orchestration. This chapter is specially prepared and presented in order to explain the growing significance of the orchestration capability for efficiently and elegantly operating multi-cloud environments.

The future clearly beckons and reckons for hybrid Clouds. The Cloud journey thus far is simply a roller coaster ride. Clouds are typically online, on-demand, and off-premise/on-premise. There are public, private, and community Clouds in plenty to comfortably cater to different regions and requirements. There is a number of purpose-specific Cloud environments catering to different communities. Precisely speaking, there are environment-specific, organization-wide, business-centric, private, and localized Clouds comprising bare metal servers, virtual machines, and containers. In the recent past, there are edge or fog device Clouds emerging an evolving fast with the maturity and stability of edge or fog computing. That is, multi-faceted devices are being meticulously clubbed together to form powerful and pioneering device Clouds to attend environment-specific and time-sensitive tasks. On the other hand, there are massive public Clouds by various providers to meet their clients’ computing, networking, and storage needs. Thus, the Cloud evolution and revolution are definitely and decisively amazing. The next innovation, disruption, and transformation in this mesmerizing journey is to form and leverage hybrid Clouds. Many kinds of distributed Cloud environments are to be connected with one another to achieve bigger and better things for the IT, which is invariably mandated to do more with less. This chapter is dedicated to conveying what and why hybrid Clouds and how the hybrid Cloud management tasks are being meticulously accomplished through integrated management tools.