Leveraging Converged Infrastructure To Deliver Microsoft Exchange 2010

The Critical Communications Tool
While we hear a lot about new communications technologies for most of us email is the tool that we use everyday. For end users email is still the most efficient way to communicate globally but for the IT department email can be a difficult application to deploy and manage. Guaranteeing performance and availability for an increasingly mobile workforce, while keeping costs in check is a challenge. Organizations are challenged with the time required to manage email delivery systems. Time is spent on installation and configuration of software and the supporting infrastructure. Much of an organization staff can be consumed by routine tasks driving up the cost of ownership. It can be difficult to determine what infrastructure is required to scale up as the number of users increases. As email becomes more feature rich supporting large numbers of power users creates increasing demands on the systems. Organizations want predictable operation and support for their entire solution. They want to be sure that they are maximizing system resource utilization and eliminating server underutilization while delivering a superior user experience.

Making the Move to Exchange 2010
With Exchange Server 2010, Microsoft has made significant changes in the architecture to address the growing need of businesses to increase mailbox quotas, drive down storage and IT costs, provide a high degree of availability, meet regulatory requirements for data retention and compliance, and enhance the productivity. To take advantage of the new HA, DR and archiving functionalities, IT organizations may have to look at a new platform, and re-architect the Exchange environment. Changes in how storage is managed creates the incentive to change the storage infrastructure. The new database availability group (DAG) functionality requires Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition, requiring an upgrade to 64-bit server hardware. The Single Instance Storage (SIS) feature that reduced redundancy by storing only a single copy of an email or attachment has been eliminated increasing storage requirements.

The Role of Layer 4-7 Services in Scaling Applications for the Cloud

The Cloud Challenge
Cloud computing is increasing demands on applications and the application-delivery infrastructure must change to meet the challenge. Virtualization does not solve the problems with applications scaling, in fact it adds complexity. Infrastructure alone does not solve the challenge either. You don’t want to oversubscribe or just add capacity on demand. The infrastructure needs to respond to user demand based on business value and maintain a favorable cost structure. This means that you need intelligent load processing to manage scale, especially given the evolution of applications, which now make numerous backend function calls, which create more traffic than at the front end.

The Need for Scale
Cloud-computing applications are characterized by stateful access, with differentiated service levels, charged to the end user using the pay-per-use pricing model. Implicit in this model is the assumption that a cloud application is always on. Scaling the cloud delivery model to an Internet scale (millions of users) is a challenge that next-generation Layer 4–7 infrastructure needs to overcome. Scaling a cloud application involves scaling three mechanisms: location (mobility), replication, and load balancing. Virtualization was an early catalyst for cloud computing because it substantially lowered the cost of replication and mobility of a prepackaged application. It does not, however, solve the load-balancing problem. Load balancing involves scaling the address, name space, transport, session, identity, and business logic of the application. Clustering enables scaling of application business logic but leaves the rest of the problem to a proxy infrastructure.

Getting Beyond Stateless
Traditional data center proxy infrastructure (Layer 4–7) is stateless and focuses on transport-level session and content management. The state management in these proxies is limited to cookies that hold bare-minimum identity of the application server. Further, this state is not shared across a network overlay of proxies to enable an application for multi–data center applications or to distribute the processing to edges. For example, a load balancer does not a play any role in user customization in a data center application such as encryption of private data in the response. Not having this function in the proxy infrastructure means the data center has to incur a higher cost of development of the core application and is not able to use existing proxy infrastructure to deploy this function.

Platform as a Service: The Next Big Opportunity for Service Communications Providers

The Route to PaaS
When cloud computing emerged a few years ago Communications Service Providers (CSPs) saw the opportunity to build the infrastructure layer and offer services on it. CSPs had data center facilities that when combined with their network assets created a cloud service offer with higher service delivery assurance than some alternatives. CSPs are now delivering infrastructure-based cloud services, especially Compute as a Service and Storage as a Service, to the public and to their large Enterprise customers in private cloud offers. As the cloud service model matures, providers who have invested in cloud infrastructure are finding that they are well positioned to evolve their Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings into new service delivery models by leverage their services, systems, and expertise to take on the next great opportunity in cloud services which is Platform as a Service.

The Value of PaaS
PaaS is an integral component to development and delivery of cloud-based applications delivered as Software as a Service—or SaaS. Developing a PaaS offer gives CSPs the opportunity to take advantage of the huge and growing SaaS market and help to accelerate the development of SaaS offers. CSP’s can take an active role by leveraging their assets and developing their capabilities, via a PaaS offer, rather than just hosting and transporting SaaS services. The capability they can provide is to enable development and then deploy applications that are created using tools that they support on to their cloud infrastructure. PaaS enables CSPs to carve out a new and essential role in SaaS development and delivery, situated between software developers and end users, for both business and consumers.

Routes to Market
The route to market for PaaS is complex and to reduce complexity and maximize success the CSP needs to play a major role in providing the platforms and services as well as hosting and delivery capabilities that are needed. They can facilitate SaaS development as a cloud platform provider by offering capabilities for development, enablement, and delivery of SaaS services including the components for development, billing, customer and vendor management, and customer self-servicing tools. They can also act as a SaaS aggregator by hosting a suite of SaaS applications and as a market place provider where multiple SaaS providers utilized their back-end and customer facing portals and tools to enable service delivery.

Cloud Services are a Bright Option for the Enterprise

The Cloud Opportunity
With Cisco Partner Summit happening in New Orleans this week there has been a lot of important news with the announcement of the Cloud Partner Program that enables and encourages Cisco Partners to develop and deliver cloud services being at the top of the list. You can follow the action on the Cisco Channels Facebook page. This announcement might have you wondering what the size of the market for cloud services is and what Enterprise organizations are thinking as they consider the move to services from the cloud.

At Cisco we had these same questions as we were making investment decisions in the systems and solutions that enable organizations to build a cloud service delivery architecture. As a result the Cisco® Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) conducted research that included interviews with enterprise IT decisions makers and key subject matter experts. The study showed that enterprises across many sectors are seriously considering cloud computing. Based on direct feedback from enterprise decision makers, Cisco IBSG estimates that close to 12 percent of enterprise workloads will run in the cloud by the end of 2013 and that this will yield a market for public-cloud services of approximately US$43 billion. Organizations have a few things to consider as they make this migration to the cloud.

To Cloud or Not To Cloud
The primary reason for the enterprise to adopt cloud services is to reduce costs and increase agility. The decision to migrate to the cloud hinges the how access to critical applications will be impacted and what the benefits are for running applications in the cloud when weighted against the constraints. Many factors come into account such as workload variability, the need for agility, and application functionality when run in the cloud. The applications that are most suitable for delivery from the cloud are workloads with variable or unpredictable resource requirements. For example workloads that are seasonal, such as tax season, or public-facing applications such as online sales. Since these applications must be provisioned for peak loads there is a major cost advantage to utilizing on-demand infrastructure to run them. Applications that require quick setup, such as sales-and-marketing campaigns, and application development are prime candidates to move to the cloud as well.

The Critical Role of the Network in Supporting Cloud-Based Solutions

Cloud Services
The Cloud-based service model offers the Enterprise access to a rich range of services and applications without the overhead of having to deploy and manage the underlying infrastructure. This results in much lower costs for access to services and applications. This is especially true for one time or periodic workloads where resources may sit idle for months until required. As a result Enterprises are increasingly embracing cloud services and benefiting from on-demand availability.

Delivery Models
Demand for cloud services is being met in a number of ways. Independent software vendors offer services from their data center over the Internet, such as Salesforce.com’s CRM application. Some ISVs leverage an IaaS provider such as Amazon to host their application on the Internet such as Adobe’s LiveCycle Enterprise Suite. However, since these approaches rely on the Internet it is not possible to provide end-to-end quality of service (QoS), so neither approach supports providing an SLA for network performance. This is increasingly a concern for Enterprise customers.

The Need for SLA's
The need for SLA’s for cloud services opens up an opportunity for communications service providers (CSPs) to offer a wide range of network centric solutions that are supported by an SLA. CSPs are in a unique position to offer these solutions because, unlike the Internet, the Next Generation Networks (NGNs) that CSPs have deployed, based on IP and MPLS, are capable of providing contracted levels of availability, delay, jitter and packet loss. As a result CSPs can provide cloud-based solutions with SLAs by providing these solutions to customers from their own data center and over their NGN.

Unified Network Services for Cloud Service Providers

Services from the Cloud
Services from the cloud offer cost and efficiency benefits to businesses, but until now many customers have been hesitant to buy cloud services, especially for mission-critical business applications, because of concerns about security, performance, and availability. Cloud service providers need to address these concerns by offering network services for applications hosted in the cloud. Cloud service providers can use their data center and IP NGN assets to deliver these services, however, they need a new service delivery model offering the scalability, flexibility, and multi-tenant capabilities needed for cloud service delivery. Delivering cloud services requires efficiency and agility in the data center where applications are hosted. To support on-demand delivery of cloud services, network and computing infrastructures need to be virtualization aware, especially for services that increase the availability and performance of applications.

The Cisco Solution
To meet this need Cisco is delivering virtualized versions of network services appliances as a part of our network services solution. The Cisco® Unified Network Services (UNS) solution presents a new opportunity for cloud service providers to offer security and performance services as well as reporting and monitoring for virtualized applications and other infrastructure services such as BC/DR, VDI or Hosted Communications. Cisco UNS uses a platform based on the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and Cisco Nexus® 1000V Series Switch to increase the scale and flexibility of cloud-based services and to help ensure availability and workload mobility. The Cisco UNS solution lowers the cost of deployment and enables rapid provisioning by removing the need for physical versions of these products and the requirement for racking and stacking, and power and cooling.