I just finished a conference call with a vendor who built and uses their own “cloud” to host applications for their customers. There were several lessons they learned along the way. Without comment, here are some of the lessons they mentioned:
- XEN works great for building internal clouds. They tried VMWare, which worked, but was far too expensive
- Building an internal cloud was far more work than they thought.
- Sizing an internal cloud is tricky. By the time you complete an internal cloud build – which will be longer than you think, the technology will have shifted significantly and become much cheaper
- They used a SAN for storage in the cloud
- The cloud has changed their business – they used to run hosted services (the ASP model), but were always suffering because every customer wanted customization. They now deal with that via virtualization – they just run, say, customized versions of Exchange in multiple VMs
- The recession helps cloud companies – because companies don’t want to spend on IT but are willing to spend “operational” costs.
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I’ve seen essentially the same thing. The interesting detail for me is to see how they dynamically provision storage to a server. Providing storage from a SAN just tells me where the spindles are. Do they present LUNs to a storage server and then ping the storage server with a storage request? If so, what technique do they use to carve up the LUN? Or do they automagically configure a LUN from the SAN storage pool? Either way, how do they present the storage to the server? Is it using iSCSI? Or do they have something like VMWare’s VMDK? Details, I need input!