Maximizing the performance of your enterprise cloud
Cloud computing is becoming ubiquitous within IT departments, and efforts to drive greater adoption of cloud technology is delivering increased efficiencies and cost savings to the enterprise. With so much attention focused on the benefits of automation and scalability provided by cloud orchestration, it's quite easy to overlook some basic infrastructure principles that might negatively impact the performance of your cloud. Whether implementing a private or hybrid cloud architecture, it's important to understand and avoid the common pitfalls of cloud design in order to optimize the performance of your enterprise cloud.
The network is a fundamental conduit for transferring data in, out of, and between clouds. It is the primary mechanism that connects users to the cloud. Cloud applications with high-bandwidth or low-latency requirements will perform poorly without the correct network infrastructure. Combining advanced software-defined networking principles with Intel's 10 Gigabit Ethernet Unified Networking solutions will not only simplify your cloud networking, but also deliver the high performance necessary to support the demands of cloud-based application delivery models.
Cloud-based storage solutions built with OpenStack have been receiving a lot of attention recently. Software-defined storage promises to revolutionize the traditional enterprise storage model by unifying management and control. As a critical component of any cloud environment, it's important to choose appropriate storage hardware, since bottlenecks caused by slow disk transfers can have serious performance implications for your system. Intel's range of enterprise-grade SSDs provides a cost-effective way to eliminate transfer bottlenecks and turbo-charge your cloud storage performance.
A commonly held cloud misconception holds that applications running on traditional non-virtualised platforms can be efficiently moved to the cloud without significant re-architecture. While it may be possible to migrate applications with minimal alterations, this approach ignores potential cloud-based optimisations such as service decoupling and elastic provisioning. Separation of the data layer from the application layer is a prominent pattern in cloud architecture that allows the fine tuning of infrastructure resource allocation. Optimising application components for the cloud will result in faster overall performance and a reduction in operating costs.
There is little doubt that cloud computing can provide significant benefit to business. Companies such as Red Hat have made cloud technology accessible and affordable, and building a private or hybrid cloud with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform has never been simpler. Architecting applications to take advantage of cloud design patterns and employing high-performance Intel networking and storage infrastructure will deliver optimisations allowing your cloud to realise its full potential.
