Is your network an asset or the Achilles heel of your Private Cloud?

IT organisations are increasingly looking to deploy private clouds for IT agility and cost efficiency. Many, after having experienced the benefits of public cloud services such as Amazon EC2, are looking to create similar services inside their own data centres, and why not? Their budget calculations show they can deliver similar services at a comparable or lower cost than what they would pay public cloud providers. And, as the technology matures, it’s becoming easier to find the skilled workers they need to build and maintain such an environment. According to Gartner, 44 percent of enterprises have embarked on such a path – but be forewarned, the journey can have perils and pitfalls.

One of the central benefits of a private cloud is agility. Done the right way, enterprises that need infrastructure for their applications would be able to provision it in a “self-service” manner. The goal is to minimise administrator involvement in the laborious process of procuring resources, setting them up, installing the right software, configuring the network resources and so on. Said another way, automation is the key enabler to achieving the agility promised by private clouds. And the key is to automate ALL workflows. Herein lies the problem: while server and storage automation has become relatively easy (enabled by mature server and storage virtualisation technologies and cloud orchestration solutions), network automation has lagged behind. So it’s not uncommon for many organisations to automate private cloud processes from a server and storage perspective, but still manually handle network services; complicating and slowing down private cloud operations.
What are the drawbacks of manual network processes?

Lack of scalability
Networking in cloud environments relies on a number of management processes, which are laborious and time consuming when completed manually. For example, manually provisioning IP addresses and setting up Domain Name Server (DNS) entries forces administrators to focus on routine tasks, rather than concentrating on other important business functions. One of the key benefits of the cloud is its ability to expand and contract with the needs of the enterprise. Core services such as DNS and IP address management need to be able to support this dynamic structure. Smooth and rapid scalability is impossible when relying on manual, labour-intensive processes.

Risk of Human Error
After migrating to the cloud, server administrators are required to manage significantly more virtual machines (VMs). Managing hundreds or thousands of VMs at a time, which are created, provisioned and taken down constantly, requires an agile network infrastructure. Manually completing tasks such as provisioning IP addresses, setting up DNS entries, and configuring VLANS for VMs can take hours or sometimes even days and manual entries can lead to human error. Duplicate entries, conflicting address space, incorrect DNS records – these can all cause system errors and possible downtime and service disruptions, none of which are desirable outcomes.

Silos of point solutions are not an effective way of managing a complex modern datacentre, which is often a mix of physical, virtual and cloud elements stretched across multiple geographies. Such complexity needs a holistic management approach which offers centralised network control, yet with visibility across distributed environments. Network control solutions need to integrate with popular cloud orchestration technologies so network automation works in concert with other elements of the infrastructure. This system serves the needs of the production private cloud – as such, it needs to deliver the performance and resilience that the business requires.

Don’t Let the Network Become the Achilles Heel of Your Private Cloud
The migration from physical to virtual to cloud can be costly and time-consuming. As such, it is important that enterprises ensure they are getting full return on investment as they move into the private cloud. While private clouds can bring huge benefits to businesses, relying on manual network provisioning of the private cloud can cost a company time and money, as staff labour is wasted on routine tasks, which are prone to human error. To make sure you’re not hampering your private cloud efforts, look at all possible workflows and assure automation at every layer from server to storage - including the network, to avoid it becoming the weak spot in your private cloud deployment.