A customer recently asked me, can we virtualize our Tier 1 App that receives 7Billion requests per day? My initial response was, on how many servers? Their answer was 15. This is quite a shocking set of numbers to consider. Add into this numbers such as 150K sessions per second, the need for a firewall, and sub-second response time and you end up with a few more shocking numbers. So could such workloads be virtualized? or is it too big for Virtualization?
TVP Tag Archives
Migrating to the Cloud: OpenStack or vCloud?
We, here at The Virtualization Practice, are getting ready to have a cloud presence. Since we ‘eat our own dogfood’ with a 100% Virtual Environment, we are gearing up to move some of those workloads into a hybrid cloud. We already use some cloud resources, but now is the time to look at other workloads. Why we are moving to the cloud is three fold: how can we write about various aspects of being a tenant in the cloud, if we are not one; a recent power outage at the grid level; and a upcoming data center move. Two of these reasons are all about business continuity with the first being what we do. While we already have a cloud running within our own environment, it is time to branch out.
RackSpace calls Citrix’s Bluff over CloudStack. Citrix Folds.
Citrix has given up Project Olympus which was based on the Open Source OpenStack platform in favor of its own Open Source CloudStack initiative (formerly known as Cloud.com), which it is contributing to the Apache foundation and has re-licensed under the partner-friendly Apache Open Source license (rather than the GPL).
Nimbula 1.5 delivers federated IaaS
Nimbula is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) software stack analogous in its target market and its business model to commercial software like vCloud. It sits alongside a number of open source software products like Eucalyptus, Cloud.com (Citrix) and OpenStac k(Rackspace et al.) as well as the Amazon Web Service, and other hosted services.
Cisco, Intel, and Citrix Re-invent OpenStack Networking for the Enterprise
Over the last few months an additional subproject codenamed Quantum has emerged which deals explicitly with networking and has particpation from networking giants Intel and Cisco as well as from Citrix. It’s a mechanism for defining network topologies aimed at providing Layer-2 network connectivity for VM instances running in clouds based on the OpenStack cloud fabric. It is designed to be extensible to allow higher-level services (VPN, QoS, etc) to be built on top, and to cleanly handle the “edge of network” problem (i.e. the binding of the cloud into the internet).
News: Citrix Acquires Cloud.com
Citrix has purchased Cloud.com and this poses some interesting changes to the overall virtualization and cloud markets. One also has to wonder about the timing of the announcement to coincide with the same day as the big announcements coming out of VMware. I see this purchase as a mixed blessing to the market place, but also a renewal for Citrix.