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Evolving options for on-premises data centers

Ever since cloud computing became a realistic option for large operations, it has dominated the data center conversation. Efforts to consolidate data centers and cut the related operations and maintenance costs have pointed to cloud as a potential option. There are, however, instances when using on-premises computing can be beneficial and necessary. And the terminology in the space has so much overlap that agencies operating an on-prem site often call it a cloud.

So what, exactly, defines a data center? Cameron Chehreh, Dell Federal CTO, said the federal government will often call a couple of servers in a closet a data center, but that skews the more commercial definition: A centralized location that houses an organization's computing, storage and applications. David McClure, chief strategist at Veris Group, said a simple definition is a big building full of servers.

A cloud, meanwhile, might be described as someone elses servers. There's significantly more to it than that, but it is a remote data center that is usually managed by someone other than the organization or agency storing its data there. This is the space filled by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google and many others. I think of cloud as locationless computing, McClure said. It is on demand, as needed and priced according to use.

Blurring the lines further is private cloud, which can mean a few different things. If you put three cloud specialists in the room you may get twelve separate answers on what a private cloud is, Chehreh said. Christian Heiter, CTO of engineering at Hitachi Data Systems Federal, agreed with the lack of agreement on what exactly private cloud is. This is where the definition gets a little fuzzier -- it's a term of art, he said.

The glib definition is that private cloud is just a data center with a fancy name to make it sound like whoever is building it is hip to the trends. McClure, however, said that isnt necessarily accurate. For an on-premises data center to truly be considered a private cloud, it must implement modern technologies like virtualization and scalability, he said. A private cloud could also be a remote data center with a single tenant.

The Army, for example, has recently begun working with IBM to build a consolidated private cloud solution at Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, Ala. IBM is building and will manage the facility, but it will be an on-premises facility devoted to the Army's needs. The first phase of the project aims to put 38 applications into the cloud and meet the Defense Information Systems Agencys Impact Level 5 -- the highest security level for unclassified data.

McClure was working in the federal government during the Obama administration when the first push to cloud began. Federal officials, including then-federal CIO Vivek Kundra, recognized the opportunity to lower operations and maintenance costs by consolidating on-premises data centers and moving some operations to the cloud. Yet a decade later, were still in the crawl-walk phase of cloud computing, McClure said.

Efforts are being made to make the switch, though, and Dave Powner, director of information management and technology resources issues at Government Accountability Office, is a longstanding proponent of that effort. It is really contingent on how well agencies can optimize what they have, Powner said about the move to cloud.

In Powner's view, however, that optimization has been fairly limited. An Office of Management and Budget memo said the average government server is utilized at just 9-12 percent of its capacity. That was really the impetus to start this data center consolidation effort, he said. The goal is to get that number up to 65 percent.

A 2014 GAO report on the governments consolidation efforts estimated that the Treasury Department avoided more than $577 million in costs through consolidation between 2011 and 2013. Other agencies have also seen tens of millions in savings, the report said.

Some agencies have made big strides, he said. The Departments of Agriculture, Treasury and Justice; the General Services Administration; and NASA have all closed 50 percent of their data centers. The Defense Department has not yet hit 50 percent, but it has closed 700 facilities, Powner said.

I think there is more of an acceptance that you can meet some of the security requirements through cloud offerings, Powner said, attributing that shift to the examples set by early adopters, which have allowed others to see implementations that actually work.

Yet while cloud promises cost savings and flexibility, the future of a government without data centers is nowhere in sight. I dont necessarily see everything moving to cloud," said Sophia Vargas, an infrastructure analyst at Forrester. "I think it's kind of stuck -- potentially for a long time -- in more of a hybrid, multistate.

That seems to be the consensus. At least for the foreseeable future, hybrid solutions will define the data center, and the inner workings of those data centers are changing accordingly.

How hybrid helps

Vargas colleague Richard Fichera, Forrester's vice president and principal analyst of infrastructure, said the simple definition of a hybrid data center is exactly what is sounds like: using both enterprise and cloud solutions for data storage. Using a local data center and one or more cloud services can provide a best-of-both-worlds scenario that can reduce cost and lead to the consolidation that Powner seeks.

People are starting to find balance, Chehreh said. There is nothing but a bright future for hybrid moving forward.

Originally posted here:
Evolving options for on-premises data centers - GCN.com

+Comment Say hello to hyperdense server and NVMe storage startup Aparna Systems and its Cloud-in-a-Box system.

Originally named Turbostor and founded in February 2013, the company has emerged from stealth with the Orca Cloud, a 4U enclosure that converges compute, storage and networking, and offers, Aparna claims, up to 10,000 cores in a rack. The 4015 version has 15 Servers and the 4060 has up to 60. So, have ten of these in a 42U rack and that means 1,000 cores per 4U 4060 box.

The Orca Server is packaged in a box or cartridge-sized like a 3.5-inch hard disk drive, draws less than 75 watts, and comes in two variants: Oserv8 with 8-core Broadwell Xeons, and Oserv16 with 16-core ones.

Oserv16 Server

Both have DDR DRAM, and dual SATA or NVME SSDs. We're told "storage IO is non-blocking based on its support for both SATA at 12 Gbps (6 Gbps per SSD) and NVMe at 64Gbps (32 Gbps per SSD), with latencies of 100 microseconds (s) and 10s, respectively."

The Cloud systems enclosure is NEBS-compliant and features a fully fault-tolerant, non-stop, non-blocking performance, with:

It can be used as a bare-metal system or for running virtualized or containerized environments.

Orca Cloud 4060

Aparna claims its compact convergence of compute, storage and networking, when compared to existing clusters made from rack-level systems or blade servers, can mean an up to 40 per cent CAPEX and OPEX saving, lower space needs and an electricity draw reduction of up to 80 per cent.

It's marketing the Orca systems to service providers and enterprises for mission-critical applications from the edge to the core. The startup is casting its net far and wide, saying Orca's "open software architecture and non-stop high performance make the Cloud-in-a-Box suitable for virtually any networking, computing or storage application, including fog and multi-access edge computing, databases, data analytics, the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and machine learning."

CEO Sam Mathan says he expects "the Cloud systems [to be] especially popular for edge computing and aggregation applications. Of course, these same capabilities are also important in the enterprise, where the ability to scale compute and storage resources is often constrained by available data centre space and power."

Other execs are CTO Alex Henderson, a co-founder of Turbostor in March 2013, as was Ramana Vakkalagadda, director for software engineering.

Aparna investors include:

We don't know the funding amounts but Divergent reportedly put in $500,000.

Orca systems and server table

This hopeful killer whale of servers seems to rely on innovative packaging to produce its core density, high per-server bandwidth and precise event timing. It must also have ferociously efficient cooling technology in its 4060 version with 650 x 16-core Xeons milling around in there.

We don't know the storage capacity but suspect it's not much, given the space constraints inside an Orca Server. We don't know if 2.5-inch or M.2 firm factor flash storage is being used either. Aparna simply does not say how much SSD capacity there is.

Nor do we know much about its sales channel. The company has just come out of stealth, has a few customers and what looks like a hot box with neat timing features suitable for carrier types as well as dense server packaging.

We think the funding needs for such a hardware-focussed startup must in the $5m to $10m area, if not more. Aparna now has to sell a fair number of systems and get set for an A-round of VC funding. It has a mountain to climb as it establishes itself, with Cisco, Dell, HPE, Huawei, Lenovo, Supermicro and others selling servers against it. If Aparna can pack server CPUs this close together then, surely, so can they.

Orca Cloud 4015 and 4060 systems, and the Oserv8 and Oserv16 Servers are all available for customer shipment. Pricing for entry-level configurations of the Cloud model 4015 system begins at $49,500.

Read more here:
Core blimey! 10000 per rack in startup's cloud-in-a-box - The Register