31 July 2010
Saturday
Cloud alliance launch secure multitenancy
By Beth Pariseau | Feb 1, 2010
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PrintNetApp Inc., Cisco Systems Inc. and VMware Inc. are continuing the trend of vendor alliances to build end-to-end stacks in support of server virtualization and cloud storage applications. The three vendors today released a reference architecture for secure multitenancy in VMware-based virtual server environments.
The partners say they have developed, tested and validated the architecture, and have made detailed design guides available for channel partners who will take the lead in selling the stack to customers.
The design guide includes a bill of materials for creating a multitenancy environment that includes VMware's vSphere and VMware vShield Zones; Cisco's Nexus 7000, 5000 and 1000V Series Switches; Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS); and NetApp FAS storage with MultiStore.
Cisco and VMware teamed up with VMware's parent company and NetApp storage rival EMC Corp. last November to launch their own stack from what that triumvirate calls its Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition.
Ed Bugnion, Cisco's chief technology officer (CTO), said the VCE alliance is focused on server virtualization in enterprise data centers with an emphasis on scalability, while this new partnership with NetApp is specifically focused on supporting secure multitenancy in shared environments. "Our business strategy is to view our storage partners as part of an overall ecosystem," he said of Cisco's attempt to balance alliances between competing storage vendors. "This is a statement of customer choice."
Each piece of the NetApp/Cisco/VMware architecture is focused on segmenting the network, physical server and physical storage resources to give each virtual server its own segmented "slice" of the resource pool. According to the design guide document, vShield Zones provide "a centrally managed, stateful, distributed virtual firewall bundled with vSphere 4.0." The Nexus switches can be used to provide iSCSI-based Ethernet access to storage using NFS, as well as a boot-from-SAN storage architecture for virtual servers over Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), according to the document.
Cisco's UCS provides quality of service for virtual hosts on the network, dictating which hosts get precedence in network queues to match service-level agreement (SLA) policies in the data center. Cisco's virtual local-area networks (VLANs) are also a part of the package. At the bottom of the stack lies NetApp's FAS storage with MultiStore software for creating virtual filers within the same physical disk array.
This article originally appeared on SearchStorage.com
