Cloud Technology Myths. Part 3: Talking about "iron"
Today you are waiting for the continuation of a series of posts in which we, using our own experience of developing a virtual infrastructure provider 1cloud.ru , debunk the most popular myths about the cloud. In the second part, we talked about the quality of the services provided, and today we will touch on the topic of hardware.
/ photo Dennis van Zuijlekom CC
The roots of cloud computing go back to high-performance computing. Previously, to deploy any application, you had to buy and configure your own physical servers. Such an approach had a large number of shortcomings, for example, if for the normal operation of the application it lacks "one and a half servers", all the same it was necessary to pay for two - the costs of maintaining and maintaining the infrastructure were high.
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Today we have such services that allow you to customize a virtual server and data storage for your own needs. By turning to cloud computing, an organization gets the opportunity to customize the infrastructure at its discretion, spending less funds and effort. In other words, this model is aimed at increasing the availability of computing resources and combines on-demand self-service, pooling resources, and the ability to adapt quickly.
Cloud technologies have a lot of various formats: some of them solve specific business problems (MS Office or 1C cloud service), some form the infrastructure for solving them (Google cloud, which provides the company's services). The virtualization technologies used are the same as in conventional data centers. You can say, cloud computing is not only built on proven virtualization technologies, but also eliminates some of their drawbacks.
Nowadays, it is impossible to imagine a large bank or a cameraman who does not need to store and process huge amounts of data. Modern data centers consist of many thousands of servers that process confidential user information. To fit this amount of equipment, companies take unexpected steps, for example, build data centers underground. An example of an underground data center is the brainchild of Iron Mountain - the center is located at a depth of 67 meters in an abandoned 145-acre mine.
Also worth noting is the decision of Microsoft - Natick's underwater data center. The development team is confident that the mass introduction of such technologies will reduce the time to deploy new data centers from 2 years to 90 days. Moreover, such capsules can be placed closer to cities that are located near water bodies, which will speed up the work of web services, reducing the delay that gives users a lot of inconvenience.
Work on the creation of such solutions and their testing requires a large amount of time and money, but this is done only to push the development of cloud technologies. If clouds were just a fashionable fad, then the world's leading IT companies would not have invested so much effort in the development of data centers. However, it is worth noting that this myth has almost become obsolete, which is good news: as Cisco notes , by 2018 78% of all workloads will be processed by cloud-based data centers.
The legs of this myth grow out of beliefs about the unreliability of cloud technologies in general, when management is concerned about the safety of data. However, if you trust files and applications to trusted and reliable providers, then they [data] do not fall into the “student residence”, but into modern data centers, which can be called the most resource-intensive buildings of our time. Each of them is a “fortress” with servers, which sometimes consumes as much energy as a small city.
As for the equipment of 1cloud, it is located in the SDN data center in St. Petersburg, one of the largest and most modern data centers in the country, and the Dataspace data center in Moscow, whose services are available in trouble-free mode for more than three years.
If you look at the SDN data center, then with the naked eye it becomes clear that the computer rooms are completely different from the "hostel". The total area of ​​the SDN technological premises is 6,500 square meters. At the same time, the design capacity of the data center is 1476 racks with a load of 6.3 kW per rack and a total capacity of 14 MW.
The SND data center corresponds to the Tier III level, therefore it has its own distribution substation, the voltage from which is supplied to the transformers included in the uninterruptible power supply units: the data center has eight dynamic uninterruptible power supplies with direct diesel support of 1600 kVA.
The cooling equipment of the data center is presented in the form of rotary heat exchangers distributed throughout the complex. Their location and quantity is determined according to the needs for heat removal from server racks. At the same time, if there is a need for additional cooling, the possibility of using freon circuits of heat pumps is provided for in the SDN. Such an approach saves energy, which has a positive effect on the cost of services.
All these technologies are used to ensure maximum comfort for customers and low risk of data center malfunctions, including due to the human factor. If you are wondering what kind of equipment 1cloud is located in the racks of data centers, you can view the photo report, which is available here .
There is nothing supernatural in the cloud technologies - this is the term that means virtual hosting. Virtual machines are located on the physical equipment, which is powered by electricity and is serviced by people, sometimes (which is no secret) making mistakes. Also, any unforeseen events such as a hacker attack or natural disasters can disable the equipment and make your data inaccessible. As an example, we can recall the large-scale accident in the Amazon data center, when due to a thunderstorm, entire services were disconnected: Netflix, Instagram and Pinterest.
The biggest obstacle to achieving 100% availability of equipment remains the definition of the term “accessibility”. 100% uptime is physically impossible, regardless of the hosting platform, but most providers offer a figure equal to or greater than 99.9%.
As for the company 1cloud, then in our service level agreement, published on the website, the availability of equipment is set at 99.9%. And this implies real financial guarantees from our side: if our services do not correspond to the specified indicator, we pay cash compensation to the client (5-100% of the cost, depending on the actual availability indicators).
It is worth noting that hosting providers and manufacturers of network equipment are doing everything to get as close as possible to the ideal, adding more and more nines after the comma, investing in infrastructure and maintenance. For example, to avoid unwanted downtime, spare cluster machines are configured, to which the load switches in case of anything. Also used duplicate tools at the hardware level.
For example, 1cloud virtual servers are located on NetApp V6240 / FAS8040 disk arrays. The photo above shows the NetApp storage controller - FAS 8040. FAS8000 guarantee availability not less than 99.999%. Each controller has an integrated service processor, isolated from the logic of the main controller, which will retain its functionality even in case of failure of the rest of the board.
Thus, it is not necessary to look for providers with 100% uptime. Instead, when choosing a platform on which you intend to host your virtual servers , you should pay attention to other things: how often failures happen, for what reasons it happens (personnel errors or due to irreversible power), how they are processed, how many data centers are located equipment and so on.
This concludes the third part of the analysis of myths about cloud technologies. If you like it, subscribe to our blog, in which we not only share our own experience of developing IaaS-provider 1cloud, but also tell about new interesting technologies that change the idea of ​​data centers. Subscribe to our blog , not to miss, friends!
PS We are in a hurry to announce that 1cloud has a new service - the purchase of SSL certificates . From today, the service is officially transferred to the status of industrial testing and is available in the control panel to all registered users.
/ photo Dennis van Zuijlekom CC
Myth # 1: The cloud is just a fashion fad.
The roots of cloud computing go back to high-performance computing. Previously, to deploy any application, you had to buy and configure your own physical servers. Such an approach had a large number of shortcomings, for example, if for the normal operation of the application it lacks "one and a half servers", all the same it was necessary to pay for two - the costs of maintaining and maintaining the infrastructure were high.
')
Today we have such services that allow you to customize a virtual server and data storage for your own needs. By turning to cloud computing, an organization gets the opportunity to customize the infrastructure at its discretion, spending less funds and effort. In other words, this model is aimed at increasing the availability of computing resources and combines on-demand self-service, pooling resources, and the ability to adapt quickly.
Cloud technologies have a lot of various formats: some of them solve specific business problems (MS Office or 1C cloud service), some form the infrastructure for solving them (Google cloud, which provides the company's services). The virtualization technologies used are the same as in conventional data centers. You can say, cloud computing is not only built on proven virtualization technologies, but also eliminates some of their drawbacks.
Nowadays, it is impossible to imagine a large bank or a cameraman who does not need to store and process huge amounts of data. Modern data centers consist of many thousands of servers that process confidential user information. To fit this amount of equipment, companies take unexpected steps, for example, build data centers underground. An example of an underground data center is the brainchild of Iron Mountain - the center is located at a depth of 67 meters in an abandoned 145-acre mine.
Also worth noting is the decision of Microsoft - Natick's underwater data center. The development team is confident that the mass introduction of such technologies will reduce the time to deploy new data centers from 2 years to 90 days. Moreover, such capsules can be placed closer to cities that are located near water bodies, which will speed up the work of web services, reducing the delay that gives users a lot of inconvenience.
Work on the creation of such solutions and their testing requires a large amount of time and money, but this is done only to push the development of cloud technologies. If clouds were just a fashionable fad, then the world's leading IT companies would not have invested so much effort in the development of data centers. However, it is worth noting that this myth has almost become obsolete, which is good news: as Cisco notes , by 2018 78% of all workloads will be processed by cloud-based data centers.
Myth number 2: "Iron" is placed "anywhere," even though the student under the bed
The legs of this myth grow out of beliefs about the unreliability of cloud technologies in general, when management is concerned about the safety of data. However, if you trust files and applications to trusted and reliable providers, then they [data] do not fall into the “student residence”, but into modern data centers, which can be called the most resource-intensive buildings of our time. Each of them is a “fortress” with servers, which sometimes consumes as much energy as a small city.
As for the equipment of 1cloud, it is located in the SDN data center in St. Petersburg, one of the largest and most modern data centers in the country, and the Dataspace data center in Moscow, whose services are available in trouble-free mode for more than three years.
If you look at the SDN data center, then with the naked eye it becomes clear that the computer rooms are completely different from the "hostel". The total area of ​​the SDN technological premises is 6,500 square meters. At the same time, the design capacity of the data center is 1476 racks with a load of 6.3 kW per rack and a total capacity of 14 MW.
The SND data center corresponds to the Tier III level, therefore it has its own distribution substation, the voltage from which is supplied to the transformers included in the uninterruptible power supply units: the data center has eight dynamic uninterruptible power supplies with direct diesel support of 1600 kVA.
The cooling equipment of the data center is presented in the form of rotary heat exchangers distributed throughout the complex. Their location and quantity is determined according to the needs for heat removal from server racks. At the same time, if there is a need for additional cooling, the possibility of using freon circuits of heat pumps is provided for in the SDN. Such an approach saves energy, which has a positive effect on the cost of services.
All these technologies are used to ensure maximum comfort for customers and low risk of data center malfunctions, including due to the human factor. If you are wondering what kind of equipment 1cloud is located in the racks of data centers, you can view the photo report, which is available here .
Myth number 3: Normal hoster provides 100% availability of equipment
There is nothing supernatural in the cloud technologies - this is the term that means virtual hosting. Virtual machines are located on the physical equipment, which is powered by electricity and is serviced by people, sometimes (which is no secret) making mistakes. Also, any unforeseen events such as a hacker attack or natural disasters can disable the equipment and make your data inaccessible. As an example, we can recall the large-scale accident in the Amazon data center, when due to a thunderstorm, entire services were disconnected: Netflix, Instagram and Pinterest.
The biggest obstacle to achieving 100% availability of equipment remains the definition of the term “accessibility”. 100% uptime is physically impossible, regardless of the hosting platform, but most providers offer a figure equal to or greater than 99.9%.
As for the company 1cloud, then in our service level agreement, published on the website, the availability of equipment is set at 99.9%. And this implies real financial guarantees from our side: if our services do not correspond to the specified indicator, we pay cash compensation to the client (5-100% of the cost, depending on the actual availability indicators).
It is worth noting that hosting providers and manufacturers of network equipment are doing everything to get as close as possible to the ideal, adding more and more nines after the comma, investing in infrastructure and maintenance. For example, to avoid unwanted downtime, spare cluster machines are configured, to which the load switches in case of anything. Also used duplicate tools at the hardware level.
For example, 1cloud virtual servers are located on NetApp V6240 / FAS8040 disk arrays. The photo above shows the NetApp storage controller - FAS 8040. FAS8000 guarantee availability not less than 99.999%. Each controller has an integrated service processor, isolated from the logic of the main controller, which will retain its functionality even in case of failure of the rest of the board.
Thus, it is not necessary to look for providers with 100% uptime. Instead, when choosing a platform on which you intend to host your virtual servers , you should pay attention to other things: how often failures happen, for what reasons it happens (personnel errors or due to irreversible power), how they are processed, how many data centers are located equipment and so on.
This concludes the third part of the analysis of myths about cloud technologies. If you like it, subscribe to our blog, in which we not only share our own experience of developing IaaS-provider 1cloud, but also tell about new interesting technologies that change the idea of ​​data centers. Subscribe to our blog , not to miss, friends!
PS We are in a hurry to announce that 1cloud has a new service - the purchase of SSL certificates . From today, the service is officially transferred to the status of industrial testing and is available in the control panel to all registered users.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/309364/
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