Integrating Storage and Network Virtualization: A prerequisite for an effective Cloud Computing Model

Overview

Cloud computing creates a different business relationship with IT, transforming technology from a pay upfront, heavy CAPEX model to a pay-as-you-go, on-demand model. This approach can be implemented internally as a private cloud, externally to a public cloud, or as a hybrid of the two. This model brings many technical and organizational challenges, including how to share, how to secure, how to provision, and how to charge for services.

The starting point is how to share resources. Virtualization is a pre-requisite these days to leverage data center infrastructure assets, so that the same resources can be shared across multiple users, and if necessary a single user can scale workloads over multiple resources in multiple locations.

The key elements of virtualization are:
*Server Virtualization
*Storage Virtualization
*Network Virtualization

This research discusses file-based workloads and how tight integration between key infrastructure components, specifically storage and networking, allows optimization across all types of network traffic, both local and remote. In addition the integration is a prerequisite for automation of different application, server, and storage migration and the implementation of a tiered storage architecture that can span both private (internal) and external cloud resources.