The Cloud Provider's Infrastructure - AND - Apple's New Data Center
Once again Thomas Trappler has come up with a very informative piece and at a very opportune time (Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, just announced its iCloud featuring its state-of-the-art iDataCenter – more on that later in this posting). Trappler’s article in COMPUTERWORLD entitled “The Cloud Contract Adviser: Know your provider's infrastructure” deals with the importance of knowing your provider and their ability to meet your need for availability (i.e. “uninterrupted service”). As Trappler points out, Service Level Agreements are just part of the equation (see April 30, 2011 posting in this Blog entitled Importance of Service Level Agreements for the Cloud). What should really matter is the ability for the Provider to manage its Cloud and he ponders if perhaps the technology to provide Cloud Computing is ahead of the skill to manage the data center that will be providing the cloud services. In a nutshell Trappler lays out the complexity facing the operations management team:
“In addition to general computing components such as virtual machine monitors, data storage and associated middleware, a public cloud infrastructure has to deal with things like workload management, data replication and recovery, and resource metering. And to make matters worse, all of these have to interact effectively, while they change over time as feature improvements and bug fixes are continuously rolled out.”
Trappler suggests that you develop a set of questions to ask the Cloud Provider and he assists in this endeavor by positing a few vital points that need to be covered in order to educate yourself on the infrastructure of the Could Provider, such as:
* Capacity and resource planning
* Data replication, storage, distribution and recovery
* Change management policies and procedures
* Virtual server provisioning and management
* Asset inventory and management policies and processes
*Software development quality assurance
Apple’s iCloud and its Suite of Services
Derrick Harris reports in his article in GIGAOM entitled “Apple launches iCloud; here’s what powers it” that just this week, Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, announced the launching of its iCloud and their infrastructure that will make it all happen.
Apple’s iDataCenter is in Maiden North Carolina:
It is 500,000 square feet, cost $1billion to build, uses clustering technology from IBM, Veritas and Oracle, and a second data center is planned for the same site:
Apple ordered 12 petabytes of Isilon file storage from EMC:
