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Taking Information Technology Infrastructure to the Clouds

By Gregory Smyth
Aug 18, 2009
Virtualization has provided one simple answer to a hundred different Asian network infrastructure dilemmas. Where there were once a multitude of physical servers in discrete special-purpose environments, each amazingly underutilized and creating their own reliability, availability and serviceability issues, with no end in sight, a solution has come out of 'thin air'.

Cloud computing is the Asian communications solution and network infrastructure development that will have the biggest impact on the IT landscape in the immediate future. We look at the specifics of how virtualization will affect the information technology consultant's traditional tools and equipment, like servers, storage, backups and networks.

With the widespread advent of virtualization, an organization's choice of servers will be different than in a physical server environment. Since up to 15 virtual servers can be hosted on the one physical machine, there is the potential for only one or two servers in the chain to be the cause of network performance management and data security issues for all.

Asian network integration experts will recommend the use of resource pools, grouping virtual servers into application groups in order to maintain some boundaries between them. This will help minimize the impact of a temporary high resource demand by one application, on the other applications hosted by the servers.

Storage is one aspect of information technology infrastructure that will significantly change when organizations move towards a virtual environment. Virtual servers require external storage, where physical servers utilize only their internal storage.

Your Asian data storage solutions expert will need to strike a balance between performance and capacity, ideally, creating a tiered structure in the platform that serves the virtual environment. Performance and cost can be better predicted with a tiered model, also.

When it comes to networks, IT consultants recognize that although network technology has matured over a long period of time, there are changes needed within both the virtual and physical network architectures. As virtualization becomes more common, Asian network integration experts will be looking towards architecture that allows third-party software switching products to be used.

The essential ingredient for good network performance is the knowledge of each virtual machine's characteristics in the policy definition phase of the project. Network change implementation is one part of a virtualization project where companies can most benefit from outsourced help to build a converged network which is scalable, stable and sectional.

Backups are another area that information technology consultants will see change drastically when the virtual environment is implemented. Traditional backups do not work in large-scale virtual environments - the system is huge, and the performance required is at is peak when a full-system backup is performed.

Daily backups are simply no longer possible. Backup software needs to be installed in each virtual machine, and can be run onto any traditional media. However, congestion and chokes are likely. An off-host backup of viral machines running any supported OS, from a central backup tool can be considered by your Asian network infrastructure expert, but should certainly be planned with caution.
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