See why the Hybrid Cloud can offer stratospheric benefits in user experience, disaster recovery and management overhead reduction.
The cloud is comprised of a whole suite of different technologies, platforms and delivery methods. Like most new technologies, some of the early adopters embraced moving absolutely everything in their infrastructure out into the cloud, removing all on-premise equipment. Others moved private cloud workloads entirely into public clouds like EC2 or Azure. For some of them, it’s working just fine! For others, and as the technologies and applications of the cloud have settled in, it has become clear that there are many instances where a combination of private cloud, public cloud and on-premise systems can offer the most appropriate and cost-effective solution to a customer.
These solutions are known as ‘Hybrid’ cloud, and they can often be your ticket to embracing the best of all worlds.
Sounds good? Let’s look at some of the important considerations around utilising a hybrid environment. Firstly, we need to look at what types of architectures are suitable for a hybrid model. To do this, we can look at a use case of Engineering firm, or perhaps a graphic design or media organisation. Such an organisation may consist of a number of separate physical officers, rely heavily on Microsoft applications and standard on premise ERP or Accounting applications. In addition, desktop design applications are heavily used, accessing very large data files on the network. In this use case, we essentially split the applications and data into two groups: The office and ERP apps, associated documents and files can be adequately moved to the cloud and accessed via hosted applications, for example. Transferring files between local and cloud sites is also straightforward. However, the design software may be too latency sensitive to operate in the cloud. Running the application locally and accessing the large data files in the cloud would also be problematic.
So how do we solve this scenario?
The best idea here would be a hybrid configuration whereby users access hosted files and applications from the cloud, but run their design software from an on-premise terminal server, for example, or even at the desktop still. A file server could be placed on premise to store the large design or engineering files, but DFS, for example, could be synchronising those files behind the scenes to the cloud file structure as well. This way, the users are able to get the right user experience for their design/CAD applications, while the business retains the flexibility and simplification of moving all other applications, data and email into the cloud. By replicating the on-premise storage back to the datacenter, all data is then being covered by a datacenter based DR policy to ensure the security and redundancy of data. The number of servers required on-premise has reduced, as only a file server or possibly terminal server(s) is required.
In this simple example, you can see how it is possible to break down a scenario into a logical structure that involves both on-premise and private cloud infrastructure, working together to meet end user requirements, business requirements and DR/BC planning. Other common scenarios in the Hybrid space are where public clouds are utilised due to their low utility cost for storage and some compute power, but joined via VPN to a private cloud datacenter locally that is used to host much more intensive or custom applications, where performance guarantees and infrastructure not available at the public cloud can be offered.
At Hypernode, we have focussed on enabling Hybrid connectivity as much as possible to ensure our partners can take advantage of as many scenarios as possible. With various peering options and connectivity into private cloud, as well as the ability to assist with domestic connectivity to the premise, Hypernode can help make Hybrid solutions a reality.
