CIOs have heard a lot of cloud talk lately: private clouds, public clouds, even hybrid clouds.
At the risk of clouding the topic even more, I thought it would be timely to introduce the topic of cloudbursting. No, it’s not something that will render clouds irrelevant; they’re here to stay for a long time. Instead, cloudbursting is a perfect example of why hybrid clouds are getting as much attention as they do.
To take a step back, hybrid cloud environments are intended for business applications that have elements in both private and public clouds. Why would a business want to split an application between two clouds? Well, consider one of the main reasons why you have a cloud solution in the first place: flexibility. Cloud solutions scale extremely well, but they’re not infinitely scalable. Much of that scalability occurs through virtualization, which allows processing workloads to be spread cost-effectively across multiple virtual machines (VMs). The more VMs you have running on an appliance, however, the higher the risk that spikes (or “bursts”) in a VM’s processing demands will push that appliance—and your cloud—past its maximum capacity.
This was a less likely scenario in the past, when an appliance might have run two-dozen VM instances, but today’s powerful converged infrastructure appliances may run hundreds of VMs on a single machine. Despite all of the cost efficiencies that come with higher VM densities, it also increases the chance that sooner or later you’ll “burst” your private cloud.
This presents enterprises with several choices: accept the hit in performance during bursts as the cost of running a private cloud; purchase excess infrastructure to handle peak workloads (which is what you hoped to avoid when you moved to a virtualized environment in the first place); or use a public cloud to handle the overflow when your private cloud reaches its maximum capacity. This last scenario is referred to as cloudbursting, and it’s a big reason why enterprises are interested in building their private clouds on standards-based equipment to support hybrid cloud environments.
Most enterprises probably haven’t given cloudbursting a lot of thought… yet. Fortunately, this is something that HP thought about deeply when they built their ConvergedSystems for Virtualization. The ConvergedSystem 300, 700 and 700x series for Virtualization were designed with exactly this kind of application in mind. They’re optimized for virtualized workloads to deliver higher performance along with high VM density, feature industry-leading Intel processors for easier workload sharing, support multiple virtualization platforms (including HP, VMware and Microsoft) and feature the HP Matrix Operating Environment to simplify the management of workloads across a hybrid cloud environment.
Sooner or later, enterprises that run a private cloud environment will run into a need for cloudbursting. And when they do, they’ll be glad their cloud infrastructure is running on an HP ConvergedSystem for Virtualization. ▪