Unbearable server burden: to the issue of transition to the IaaS model
In 2010, Forbes magazine published an interview with John McCool, vice president of Cisco, in which he talks about the near future of virtual data centers and gives a surprisingly accurate forecast for 2015. Indeed, the tendency to transfer serious processes to virtual servers continues to grow, despite the constant replication of myths about the danger of storing data in the clouds. The reasons for this growth lie not only in the factors described by McCool (the growth in consumption of video content, the proliferation of new types of devices, and the desire of companies to choose only the necessary capacity for applications) - there are equally interesting components of the success of virtualization.
Cloud technologies have penetrated into all areas of business, including the activities of data centers. If earlier virtual machines were used by experts to create test patterns and deploy the developer infrastructure, now they are leased to create corporate infrastructure, including office applications, CRM customer accounting systems and complex ERP management accounting systems. Such an allocation of a logically isolated set of computing resources with a decoupling from the hardware implementation is called virtualization. Like any process in technology, virtualization has its advantages and limitations, which can be related to human factors or strictly engineering-based.
The virtual environment does not give anything new in terms of the tasks of working with servers: the issues of resource allocation, configuration selection, problem fixing, and installation of updates remain. Another thing is that in a virtual environment, these issues are solved easier and faster than on physical machines. The popularity of virtual servers is due to a number of undeniable advantages.
')
Thus, virtualization adds to the information technologies a new layer of management with dedicated capacities. It is convenient, fast, scalable and not so expensive. But nevertheless, there are situations in which virtualization is not only not justified, but also dangerous.
The growth of infrastructure services in the cloud began after the active spread of SaaS, but also had its own growth drivers.
IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) is popular with companies with a distributed management structure (networks, branches), online stores, banks, IT companies. According to a study by J'son & Partners Consulting, the IaaS market in Russia is undergoing a period of development and expects a much larger annual growth rate. According to experts, the volume of the IaaS market in 2014 in monetary terms amounted to 2.6 billion rubles, having exceeded the similar indicator of 2013 by 26%.
The volume of 2014 forms about 10% of the total consumption of physical and virtual servers in Russia in monetary terms in 2014. The current trend of growth drivers makes it possible to predict that the development of the IaaS market will be non-linear in nature: moderate linear growth of 25% per year for the period 2015-2017, and the transition to accelerated growth in the period 2018-2019.
There are three main types of virtualization that companies use. The choice depends on the security policy, the requirements of the project load, the availability of qualified personnel, as well as the planned infrastructure cost.
Public cloud - infrastructure for public access, located at the data center or other organization. In public clouds, in general, simple cloud-based CRM, collaboration tools, etc. are stored ... As a rule, users get access to a set of ready-made application configurations and use it as is. Considered the least secure.
Private cloud - resources belong to one company, they are distributed in it and are provided as a service via the Internet or local network. As the holder of resources can act both digging, and the third party (DPC). They are used to securely build an IT infrastructure, high-load projects and ensure the operational activities of branches or a distributed network of departments. Most of the services of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS just use private clouds.
Hybrid cloud - a combination of public and private cloud based on the needs of the company, structure and security requirements. Considered the most sensible form of cloud infrastructure organization in terms of cost management and scalability.
There is no single advice on which cloud to choose, there is a lot that depends on the characteristics of the project. However, a hybrid cloud that combines the efficiency of public and private security for the corporate sector looks the most attractive.
The information in this section is not at all like a boring accounting task. Each business owner (developer, integrator, provider of virtual PBX, etc.) seeks not only to minimize costs, but also to release additional financial resources in order to reinvest them into other projects or promising developments. I must say, nothing better cope with the task of saving on servers than virtualization.
The cost of owning a physical server (or several servers) is made up of capital costs (CapEx) and operating costs (OpEx). CapEx includes the cost of actually purchasing a server and components, as well as the cost of designing. OpEx includes the cost of maintenance, labor, equipment upgrades, and operating costs (electricity, cooling systems). At the same time, it often happens that operating expenses exceed capital costs, they are often estimated at 58% of total costs. Therefore, before purchasing server hardware, you need to correlate the cost of the entire project and the needs - it is likely that the project does not need large-scale resources, and security issues can be solved on the side of the data center by choosing the desired virtual configuration.
As a matter of fact, the economic sense of virtualization and rent of capacities consists precisely in reducing the redundancy of the system and the cost of its acquisition (CapEx) and maintenance (OpEx). Using these solutions helps free CapEx in order to redirect capital costs to high-value projects. In case the company does not purchase the server, but uses virtual capacities, it simply does not bear the capital costs, since they completely fall on the server's holder - the data center. Therefore, to avoid unpleasant expenses and imbalances in the company's budget, you need to follow simple rules:
Reasonable savings and cost management can free up significant funds that can be spent on developing the project itself, rather than the surrounding infrastructure. There are always ways to optimize costs - it is important to approach them critically and choose the one you need and justified in the context of the business process.
At SAFEDATA, we always offer our users solutions that would not only become part of the infrastructure, but also solve business problems. Today, one of our advanced services is VDC (Virtual Data Center). The client is provided with a pool of virtual resources (Virtual Data Center), on the basis of which the customer can independently create an IT infrastructure of any complexity, completely analogous to solutions on physical equipment. The VDC service is built on the IaaS model and is included in the SFCLOUD cloud service package.
In the process of using virtual capacity, the client not only manages the server, but can also make a flexible distribution of the cloud resources allocated to it among the infrastructure elements depending on the load on one or another element. In addition, in the process of using the cloud service VDC, the customer can change the amount of resources allocated to him, both up and down, and also apply different pricing models. Due to this, it receives all the benefits of scalability and savings, which we described at the beginning of this post.
There is no universal server solution for any project and any company; for a precise choice, too many factors should be taken into account. The choice is always left to the company and is determined including the security policy and the resource management model. The modern market guarantees safe, fault-tolerant solutions, so at the initial stage it is worthwhile to correlate the cost of ownership and performance metrics and save, if that’s reasonable.
Cloud servers vs physical servers
Cloud technologies have penetrated into all areas of business, including the activities of data centers. If earlier virtual machines were used by experts to create test patterns and deploy the developer infrastructure, now they are leased to create corporate infrastructure, including office applications, CRM customer accounting systems and complex ERP management accounting systems. Such an allocation of a logically isolated set of computing resources with a decoupling from the hardware implementation is called virtualization. Like any process in technology, virtualization has its advantages and limitations, which can be related to human factors or strictly engineering-based.
The virtual environment does not give anything new in terms of the tasks of working with servers: the issues of resource allocation, configuration selection, problem fixing, and installation of updates remain. Another thing is that in a virtual environment, these issues are solved easier and faster than on physical machines. The popularity of virtual servers is due to a number of undeniable advantages.
')
- Starting a virtual machine takes much less time than starting a physical server. In fact, a company experiencing the need for virtualization refers to a data center or to an internal service department and receives the selected configuration (set memory size, number of cores, operating system image, etc.) of the virtual server based on real needs. In contrast, a physical server can work only for a few percent of its load and not recoup the cost of its capacity. In addition, the physical server requires complex settings, a qualified administrator and incurs certain operating costs for electricity, cooling system, replacement of hard drives.
- Contrary to common judgments, virtual servers as a whole, without taking into account work with overloaded projects, are more fault tolerant. This is due primarily to the guarantees of the data center, which provides the maximum level of availability and stability due to the rapid response to emergency situations in 24/7/365 mode.
- Virtualization is changing approaches to problem fixing, backup and disaster recovery. Solving these problems requires new skills from specialists, but in general it is much easier than for a physical machine.
- As already mentioned, virtual capacity can be reserved exactly for the needs, without overpaying for excessive resources. This also implies another advantage - flexibility and scalability. In the event that an application or project begins to require a larger resource, you can easily expand or reduce the power of the virtual machine, even with peak demands of an extreme increase or decrease in resource.
- Separately, it is worth mentioning a completely new approach to Patch Management - the software update management process. Managing updates (patches) for a physical server was always fraught with difficulties: first it was necessary to evaluate the update, test its operation in conjunction with the existing infrastructure, and only then upload it to the server. You can patch a virtual machine image even without first stopping it.
Thus, virtualization adds to the information technologies a new layer of management with dedicated capacities. It is convenient, fast, scalable and not so expensive. But nevertheless, there are situations in which virtualization is not only not justified, but also dangerous.
- Server virtualization today is so advanced that it is possible to output even resource-intensive projects to virtual machines. The main message of virtualization is that virtual machines share the hardware resource of the server. Extremely loaded processes can use so much power that switching to another server in the event of a system crash becomes impossible. Therefore, for bigdata projects and resource-intensive technologies it is better to use physical servers. This is especially important in industries with critical requirements for sustainability: medicine, high-precision manufacturing, energy, etc.
- Another problem that may be rarely encountered in virtual machines is non-standard or unsupported operating systems that make it difficult to use a hypervisor. In such cases, it is better to deploy the necessary configuration on a physical server.
- It so happens that a project or software is tied to hardware. There are applications that use physical hardware binding as part of a security policy, in particular, copy protection. The basis of the protection mechanism of such software can be based on the processor's serial number or check for the presence of a flash disk in the required port. Some software is tied to the bus host adapter (HBA). It is logical that in such cases about any virtualization is out of the question.
- There are also cases when virtualization encounters licensing barriers: software is either not licensed to virtual machines in principle, or requires participation in special vendor licensing programs (an example of this is Microsoft SPLA, which is required for licensing the same Microsoft Server, Share Point, MS Office and etc. on virtual machines).
IaaS market in Russia: growth despite the crisis
The growth of infrastructure services in the cloud began after the active spread of SaaS, but also had its own growth drivers.
- Companies seek to save on the purchase and maintenance of technologies, including servers and licensed software. These savings are often based on an understanding of infrastructure redundancy — for example, when only some of the licenses purchased are used.
- Companies are trying to take software out of capital expenditures and transfer them to operational ones, mainly for the purpose of more flexible business scaling in constantly changing conditions.
- During the crisis, new companies are created that have seen their niche in the market. For a quick start, they need to quickly deploy all the necessary corporate software.
- Finally, SaaS growth continues and more and more representatives of the B2B sector are adopting cloud technologies: from office suites to databases and serious ERPs.
- Of course, the law on the storage of users' personal data on Russian servers (which we have already written about ), which came into effect on September 1, 2015, cannot be discounted.
IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) is popular with companies with a distributed management structure (networks, branches), online stores, banks, IT companies. According to a study by J'son & Partners Consulting, the IaaS market in Russia is undergoing a period of development and expects a much larger annual growth rate. According to experts, the volume of the IaaS market in 2014 in monetary terms amounted to 2.6 billion rubles, having exceeded the similar indicator of 2013 by 26%.
The volume of 2014 forms about 10% of the total consumption of physical and virtual servers in Russia in monetary terms in 2014. The current trend of growth drivers makes it possible to predict that the development of the IaaS market will be non-linear in nature: moderate linear growth of 25% per year for the period 2015-2017, and the transition to accelerated growth in the period 2018-2019.
There are three main types of virtualization that companies use. The choice depends on the security policy, the requirements of the project load, the availability of qualified personnel, as well as the planned infrastructure cost.
Public cloud - infrastructure for public access, located at the data center or other organization. In public clouds, in general, simple cloud-based CRM, collaboration tools, etc. are stored ... As a rule, users get access to a set of ready-made application configurations and use it as is. Considered the least secure.
Private cloud - resources belong to one company, they are distributed in it and are provided as a service via the Internet or local network. As the holder of resources can act both digging, and the third party (DPC). They are used to securely build an IT infrastructure, high-load projects and ensure the operational activities of branches or a distributed network of departments. Most of the services of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS just use private clouds.
Hybrid cloud - a combination of public and private cloud based on the needs of the company, structure and security requirements. Considered the most sensible form of cloud infrastructure organization in terms of cost management and scalability.
There is no single advice on which cloud to choose, there is a lot that depends on the characteristics of the project. However, a hybrid cloud that combines the efficiency of public and private security for the corporate sector looks the most attractive.
The economic meaning of virtualization
The information in this section is not at all like a boring accounting task. Each business owner (developer, integrator, provider of virtual PBX, etc.) seeks not only to minimize costs, but also to release additional financial resources in order to reinvest them into other projects or promising developments. I must say, nothing better cope with the task of saving on servers than virtualization.
The cost of owning a physical server (or several servers) is made up of capital costs (CapEx) and operating costs (OpEx). CapEx includes the cost of actually purchasing a server and components, as well as the cost of designing. OpEx includes the cost of maintenance, labor, equipment upgrades, and operating costs (electricity, cooling systems). At the same time, it often happens that operating expenses exceed capital costs, they are often estimated at 58% of total costs. Therefore, before purchasing server hardware, you need to correlate the cost of the entire project and the needs - it is likely that the project does not need large-scale resources, and security issues can be solved on the side of the data center by choosing the desired virtual configuration.
As a matter of fact, the economic sense of virtualization and rent of capacities consists precisely in reducing the redundancy of the system and the cost of its acquisition (CapEx) and maintenance (OpEx). Using these solutions helps free CapEx in order to redirect capital costs to high-value projects. In case the company does not purchase the server, but uses virtual capacities, it simply does not bear the capital costs, since they completely fall on the server's holder - the data center. Therefore, to avoid unpleasant expenses and imbalances in the company's budget, you need to follow simple rules:
- estimate the capacity required for the project
- in case virtualization is possible, take advantage of it
- to change the power limits only in case of a real need - as a rule, idle power “in reserve” does not bring any benefit.
Reasonable savings and cost management can free up significant funds that can be spent on developing the project itself, rather than the surrounding infrastructure. There are always ways to optimize costs - it is important to approach them critically and choose the one you need and justified in the context of the business process.
Safedata solves virtualization issues
At SAFEDATA, we always offer our users solutions that would not only become part of the infrastructure, but also solve business problems. Today, one of our advanced services is VDC (Virtual Data Center). The client is provided with a pool of virtual resources (Virtual Data Center), on the basis of which the customer can independently create an IT infrastructure of any complexity, completely analogous to solutions on physical equipment. The VDC service is built on the IaaS model and is included in the SFCLOUD cloud service package.
In the process of using virtual capacity, the client not only manages the server, but can also make a flexible distribution of the cloud resources allocated to it among the infrastructure elements depending on the load on one or another element. In addition, in the process of using the cloud service VDC, the customer can change the amount of resources allocated to him, both up and down, and also apply different pricing models. Due to this, it receives all the benefits of scalability and savings, which we described at the beginning of this post.
There is no universal server solution for any project and any company; for a precise choice, too many factors should be taken into account. The choice is always left to the company and is determined including the security policy and the resource management model. The modern market guarantees safe, fault-tolerant solutions, so at the initial stage it is worthwhile to correlate the cost of ownership and performance metrics and save, if that’s reasonable.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/268093/
All Articles