My first Magazine Nutanix Flash Forward | Page 28

24 Enterprise Cloud For Dummies, Nutanix Special Edition The enterprise cloud is a model for IT infrastructure and platform services that delivers the advantages of public cloud services for enterprise applications without compromising on the value provided by private datacenter environments. Think of it this way: You get the best of both worlds! Understanding Historical Private Cloud Roadblocks If private cloud — upon which enterprise cloud is based — carries with it such benefits, why hasn’t it been done before? Well, others have tried . . . and they have failed, or at least their efforts have not proven completely successful. In general, it’s the fault of storage as a resource. The vision of private and hybrid clouds is not new. Businesses have tried to deploy private clouds using cloud management platforms, such as OpenStack, that deliver self‐service provisioning, monitoring, billing, and chargeback. However, the underlying infrastructure is still based on scale‐up storage accessed over a storage network that is deployed and scaled in big chunks. What’s needed is a re‐platforming of the enterprise datacenter. You cannot build cloud capabilities on traditional three‐tier infrastructure with scale‐up storage. Scale‐up storage has hard limits. At a certain point, the shared components — controllers and the network fabric — get overwhelmed. It’s inevitable. The question is not if this will happen, but when. As a result, many scale‐up storage systems are bundled with spec sheets that tell customers that they can grow only so far before they have to add more shared components. Adding these components adds complexity to the system. The end result is unpredictability, a scenario that cannot be tolerated in the modern datacenter. Businesses must be able to operate with the expectation that their workloads will operate continuously at predictable levels. In scale‐up, as you add more burden to the shared resources, performance levels can be affected. These materials are © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.