Case Study

Rapid service delivery with IBM Smart Cloud Provisioning

Cloud Business Benefits

Our Customer’s Business The Business Challenges

What Did We Do?

• Rapid deployment of new services in seconds rather than hours. (Deployed 100’s of new VM instances in under 5 minutes).

• No/low maintenance, minimised operational administration, and no outages required for upgrades.

• Changing the delivery of DR services from cold-standby (capital intensive) to rapidly deployed (utilisation efficient) and significantly more cost effective for customers and CSPs.

• XXX is a leading ISP based in XXX, focused on SME customers in a few key industries (Healthcare, Electronics).

• A Cloud service provider offering a range of Cloud based services from fully managed IaaS through to disaster recovery solutions.

• Customers select XXX for the quality of service delivered and its service assurance.

• XXX have been looking for some time for a light-weight highly functional solution for core cloud service delivery.

• Current challenges are to improve the delivery of Cloud services in terms of cost, speed, agility, minimised operations and industrial strength solutions.

• Scale delivery costs to business volumes.

• Support delivery through a Reseller model.

• Implementation of IBM SmartCloud Provisioning as the core delivery platform across multiple compute and storage nodes.

• KVM hypervisor delivery for VMs supporting minimised license cost (likely to support a mixed KVM and ESX deployment going forward).

• Customer, management, and VLAN separation for multi-tenant isolation at the network and presentation layer.

• Integration with IBM V7000 Storwize storage and SmartCloud Provisioning to offer customers variable SLAs for storage.

XXX’s requirements

• Rapid service delivery with high degrees of automation.• Customer isolation for multi-tenancy.• Customer and management traffic separation.• Integration with IBM V7000 storwize for non-local storage.• Easily extensible platform, supporting simple customisation.• Highly scalable and able to recovery autonomously from failures

without interruptions to the service (no outages).• Ability to “brand” the portal/UI for specific customers.• Ability to support a reseller model, and segregate resources.• It works…consistently, reliably, quickly, and with minimal

administration.

Benefits from IBM SmartCloud Provisioning

Rapid service delivery•Obvious agility benefits, but opens new possibilities for changing processes. Moving from static models to highly dynamic delivery (for instance changing how cold-standby DR services can be provided).•Pilot provisioned 200 VMs in under 5 mins.

High scale, low touch•Absolutely minimised administration, through high levels of automation, and automatic management and self healing.•Highly distributed architecture enables better utilisation and no outages to operations within the cloud.•Failures are automatically detected, and easily recovered.

Supports “Reseller” model•Segregated resources and branding of portal allows delegate control of resources to Cloud partners.

Open Standards•Hypervisor and hardware agnostic – can even support mixed hypervisor environments.•Talks directly to the hypervisor negating the need for licenced management components (eg. vCenter)•Easy to extend, using commodity skills, with low effort.

Solution Overview

5

PXE ServerPersistent Storage

IBM V7000

Compute Nodes

x3650 M3

x3650 M3

Storage Nodes

x3650 M3

x3650 M3

WebConsole Web Services Zoo Keeper HBase

ResellerUsers Cloud

Admin

Linux VM

Solution Overview – Customer IaaS request

6

PXE ServerPersistent Storage

IBM V7000

Compute Nodes

x3650 M3

x3650 M3

Storage Nodes

x3650 M3

x3650 M3

WebConsole Web Services Zoo Keeper HBase

ResellerUsers Cloud

Admin

1

Customer logs into the web portal to request one or many VMs from the master images in the catalog.

(The management components run distributed on the storage nodes).

Solution Overview – Customer IaaS request

7

PXE ServerPersistent Storage

IBM V7000

Compute Nodes

x3650 M3

x3650 M3

Storage Nodes

x3650 M3

x3650 M3

WebConsole Web Services Zoo Keeper HBase

ResellerUsers Cloud

Admin

2

IBM SmartCloud Provisioning load balances the VM creation across all the compute nodes. The VM’s are read into the hypervisor memory (KVM in this instance) on the compute nodes for rapid instantiation.

Solution Overview – Customer IaaS request

8

PXE ServerPersistent Storage

IBM V7000

Compute Nodes

x3650 M3

x3650 M3

Storage Nodes

x3650 M3

x3650 M3

WebConsole Web Services Zoo Keeper HBase

ResellerUsers Cloud

Admin

Linux VM

3

The VMs are created in just a few seconds, with the non-persistent (image) data held in memory.

Solution Overview – Customer IaaS request

9

PXE ServerPersistent Storage

IBM V7000

Compute Nodes

x3650 M3

x3650 M3

Storage Nodes

x3650 M3

x3650 M3

WebConsole Web Services Zoo Keeper HBase

ResellerUsers Cloud

Admin

Linux VM

When the VM is available, the user can access the provisioned service using their key credentials (public / private keys) for IaaS or at the application layer (PaaS)

4

Solution Overview – Customer IaaS request

10

PXE ServerPersistent Storage

IBM V7000

Compute Nodes

x3650 M3

x3650 M3

Storage Nodes

x3650 M3

x3650 M3

WebConsole Web Services Zoo Keeper HBase

ResellerUsers Cloud

Admin

Linux VM

5

Any changes to the VM are written to local storage (in a smaller delta file) held on the compute node, or can be held on non-local storage for greater resilience / performance.

Solution Overview – Customer IaaS request

11

PXE ServerPersistent Storage

IBM V7000

Compute Nodes

x3650 M3

x3650 M3

Storage Nodes

x3650 M3

x3650 M3

WebConsole Web Services Zoo Keeper HBase

ResellerUsers Cloud

Admin

Linux VMPersistent data is managed through the storage nodes with either locally attached volumes or network / SAN attached storage. This storage is mounted within the VM.

6

Solution Overview – Reseller IaaS request

12

PXE ServerPersistent Storage

IBM V7000

Compute Nodes

x3650 M3

x3650 M3

Storage Nodes

x3650 M3

x3650 M3

WebConsole Web Services Zoo Keeper HBase

ResellerUsers Cloud

Admin

1Reseller logs into the web portal to request one or many VMs from the master images in the catalog.

Solution Overview – Reseller IaaS request

13

PXE ServerPersistent Storage

IBM V7000

Compute Nodes

x3650 M3

x3650 M3

Storage Nodes

x3650 M3

x3650 M3

WebConsole Web Services Zoo Keeper HBase

ResellerUsers Cloud

Admin

Or..this can be a branded instance of the Web Console for the Resller

WebConsole

1a

Solution Overview – Reseller IaaS request

14

PXE ServerPersistent Storage

IBM V7000

Compute Nodes

x3650 M3

x3650 M3

Storage Nodes

x3650 M3

x3650 M3

WebConsole Web Services Zoo Keeper HBase

ResellerUsers Cloud

Admin

1b

Or..the Reseller can access from their own portal calling the Web Services layer

Solution Overview – Reseller IaaS request

15

PXE ServerPersistent Storage

IBM V7000

Compute Nodes

x3650 M3

x3650 M3

Storage Nodes

x3650 M3

x3650 M3

WebConsole Web Services Zoo Keeper HBase

ResellerUsers Cloud

Admin

2

IBM SmartCloud Provisioning load balances the VM creation across all the compute nodes.

Compute Nodes can be dedicated to specific reseller needs, to isolate capacity and workloads.

Solution Overview – Reseller IaaS request

16

PXE ServerPersistent Storage

IBM V7000

Compute Nodes

x3650 M3

x3650 M3

Storage Nodes

x3650 M3

x3650 M3

WebConsole Web Services Zoo Keeper HBase

ResellerUsers Cloud

Admin

Linux VM

3

The VMs are created in just a few seconds, with the non-persistent (image) data held in memory.

Solution Overview – Reseller IaaS request

17

PXE ServerPersistent Storage

IBM V7000

Compute Nodes

x3650 M3

x3650 M3

Storage Nodes

x3650 M3

x3650 M3

WebConsole Web Services Zoo Keeper HBase

ResellerUsers Cloud

Admin

Linux VM

When the VM is available, the user can access the provisioned service using their key credentials (public / private keys) for IaaS or at the application layer (PaaS)

4

Solution Overview – Node failure or new hardware added

18

PXE ServerPersistent Storage

IBM V7000

Compute Nodes

x3650 M3

x3650 M3

Storage Nodes

x3650 M3

x3650 M3

Linux VM WebConsole Web Services Zoo Keeper HBaseLinux VMLinux VM

Boot Image

ResellerUsers Cloud

Admin

1

The Cloud administrator removes a physical node from SmartCloud Provisioning, simulating a hardware failure.

Solution Overview – Node failure or new hardware added

19

PXE ServerPersistent Storage

IBM V7000

Compute Nodes

x3650 M3

x3650 M3

Storage Nodes

x3650 M3

x3650 M3

Linux VM WebConsole Web Services Zoo Keeper HBaseLinux VMLinux VM

Boot Image

ResellerUsers Cloud

Admin

2

When the node is replaced or fixed, SmartCloud Provisioning attempts to restart the node.

Solution Overview – Node failure or new hardware added

20

PXE ServerPersistent Storage

IBM V7000

Compute Nodes

x3650 M3

x3650 M3

Storage Nodes

x3650 M3

x3650 M3

Linux VM WebConsole Web Services Zoo Keeper HBaseLinux VMLinux VM

Boot Image

ResellerUsers Cloud

Admin

3If the node cannot be restarted cleanly, the PXE server will load a boot image of the node and automatically reconfigure it for the cloud.

Solution Overview – Node failure or new hardware added

21

PXE ServerPersistent Storage

IBM V7000

Compute Nodes

x3650 M3

x3650 M3

Storage Nodes

x3650 M3

x3650 M3

Linux VM WebConsole Web Services Zoo Keeper HBaseLinux VMLinux VM

Boot Image

ResellerUsers Cloud

Admin

4

Any running VMs will need to be re-instantiated, but there will be no data loss because the partial files are applied over the master images to return them to their original state.