1. Cloud Ready: an example based discussion
Neil S. Stein
January 2013

2. Design Considerations
 Infrastructure capacity needs to be easily scalable
both vertically and horizontally
 Management overhead should not scale with it
 Very resilient with no single points of failure
 Multiple site architectures leverage best-of-breed
virtualization and replication technologies
 Extendable from private to: public and hybrid cloud
models (federated)
 Components sized for expansion and growth
2

3. Design Considerations:
Hot / Warm
 Provide multi datacenters with capability for failover in
either direction
 Run production at each site or use secondary for test/dev
 Easily perform DR testing and failover
 Lower cost while still providing excellent resiliency
 Components
 Storage – EMC Storage, Data Domain /Avamar
 Replication – RecoverPoint/SE
 Compute – Cisco UCS
 Management – vCenter Operations, CapIQ, Chargeback

4. Hot / Warm (discussion example only)

5. Design Considerations:
Continuous Availability
 Provides multiple active datacenters with full
production capabilities and HA resiliency
 Continuous Availability more than Disaster Recovery
 Allows for horizontal / vertical scaling
 Components
 Storage – EMC Storage, Data Domain/Avamar
 Replication – VPLEX
 Compute – Cisco UCS
 Management – vCenter Operations, CapIQ, Chargeback

6. Continuous Availability (discussion example only)

7. Storage
(discussion example only)
 VNX 5500 or 5700
 Maximum Cap: 250 or 500 Drives
 Proposed:



200 GB EFDs for FAST Cache or Tier 0
300 GB & 600 GB 15k SAS for Tier 1
2TB NL-SAS for Tier 2/Archive
 Connectivity = Any protocol desired
(FC, FCoE, iSCSI, NFS, CIFS)
 Software licensing




FAST VP
FAST Cache
Local and Remote Protection
Application Protection

8. Compute
(discussion example only)
 Cisco UCS
 Maximum Cap: ~160 Blades (Current)
 Proposed: ~24 Blades Future State
 Each blade is 12-cores and 96GB of RAM
 Benefits = Density, Service Profiles, Management.
 Connectivity


Network – 10Gb to Network Core
Storage – 8Gb FC to FC Core
 All Compute running vSphere 5

9. Replication RecoverPoint
(discussion example only)
 RecoverPoint provides replication and journal rollback
capability far exceeding other replication technologies
 Proposal for Hot/Warm – RecoverPoint CRR (Continuous
Remote Replication) at both sites
 Implementation will include 2-4 appliances at each site
utilizing the simple array splitter technology
 No invasive FC fabric configuration needed
 Also proposed are application plugins allowing for
application consistent rollback, if desired.
 Integration with Site Recovery Manager

10. Replication – VPLEX
(discussion example only)
 VPLEX provides for active/active storage
 Combine that with vSphere or other cluster-aware
applications and you have a very resilient
environment
 Allows for easy horizontal scaling of arrays once you
reach capacity
 Future solution is single-engine (dual storage
processor) VPLEX Geo at each location

11. Backup/Recovery
 Data Domain/Avamar
 Multiple central tier
 Remote capabilities

12. Additional Tools
 From VMware
 vCenter Operations – Provides sophisticated, but very
easy to use, virtual environment performance
monitoring and prediction
 vCenter Capacity IQ – Allows for trending and “what if”
analysis
 vCenter Chargeback – or “showback”
 vCloud Director – enable cloud self-service from
internal customers.
 Multi-level monitoring, alerting capabilities
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13. Team Knowledge
 Technology areas: VMware, EMC, Cisco UCS
 Implementation in Healthcare
 Compliance focused

14. Ongoing Services Portfolio
Health Checks
Trend Analysis
Capacity/Utilization Reporting
Continuous Monitoring
Proactive
Maintenance
Engineering
and
Administration
Day to day management
Operational tasks
Patching, code revisions
Reactive
Support
On demand support
Ticketing
Escalations
Severity Levels
Root Cause Analysis
On-going
Architecture
and Advisory
Services
Continued consulting,
design and architecture services
Implementing recommended
changes

15. Open Discussion