OpenStack and You!

[Anonymous]

OpenStack and You!

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that OpenStack adoption is on an upward trajectory—be it private or public cloud, OpenStack is getting there! Large enterprises such as BMW and eBay making the jump proves that point and clearly brings out the value that every OpenStack release brings to the table. I am more excited than ever to see the magnitude of new OpenStack deployments. Smaller enterprises can do it even faster and easier.

Every emerging technology advance, though, leads us to the golden question: Is it good enough for me? I wouldn’t be surprised to see many hands raised for OpenStack as the new technology to adopt. Sure enough, because I was in the same boat!

Today, I am going to share my thoughts on why we decided on OpenStack and how it proved to be a good choice for our business, Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS).

Imagine a virus outbreak in your IT platform disrupting your business

Your enterprise is reliant on information and your or your partners’ ability to access it through business applications. Now, imagine what happens to your organization if it suddenly loses access to your applications, valuable information, and key systems. It could be due to a major IT service outage; a catastrophic natural event, like a hurricane or a tsunami; or a man-made disaster—accidental or intentional—like a nuclear plant meltdown due to safety violations, or a terrorist or hacking attack.

Your preparedness to handle risks and your mitigation plans end up being extremely critical when such situations arise. It takes significant effort, expertise, and expense—the three Es—to build these plans. Although the three Es are meant to keep your business unaffected in adverse situations, they may not directly accelerate your business.

Wouldn’t it be ideal that you focus on your core strengths and let the recovery risks be handled by business continuity experts?

The dawn of HPE Helion and Veritas Continuity

For over 10 years, HPE and Veritas have jointly invested and collaborated on innovative solutions for our enterprise customers. The HPE Helion and Veritas Continuity (HPEHVC) managed service enables the service provider (HPE) to manage disaster recovery of your assets from your on-premises datacenter to HPE Continuity datacenters, which are based on HP Helion OpenStack®. The solution is backed by a proprietary replication and disaster recovery (DR) technology powered by Veritas to effectively move data from your on-premises datacenter to HPE Continuity datacenters.

With that context, let me delve into the key factors for choosing an OpenStack-based infrastructure for the Continuity datacenters.

To know more about the solution, see the following videos about HPEHVC:

• Solution Overview
• Technical Demo

What makes OpenStack click for HPE Helion and Veritas Continuity?

The HPEHVC solution operates on stringent service-level agreements (SLAs) for recovering mission critical servers and applications to the HPE Helion Continuity Cloud. It goes without saying that the underlying infrastructure that supports the Continuity Cloud needs to be reliable, flexible, and up-to-date to sustain the high resource needs of large enterprises.

Note: The following sections talk about the technology aspects of OpenStack. The business aspects are not covered in this blog post.

Reliability

In real life, what would you rely on the most? Typically, things that you create or control yourself give you the most confidence. Applying the same to the cloud infrastructure, the confidence on the ecosystem is inversely proportional to the number of external entities within your datacenter. Every new piece owned by an entity other than you adds a level of complexity as well as uncertainty.

Gladly, OpenStack provides the necessary ownership model for the infrastructure without needing to depend on external vendors. OpenStack being an open source project, one can fully control its capabilities—no vendor lock-in! We have full control of the infrastructure to fine-tune the software and hardware behavior to adhere to our needs.

In addition, HPE has a dedicated team responsible for reshaping OpenStack towards newer business needs. The team actively contributes upstream and also provides support to HPEHVC datacenters. With the reliability of OpenStack, we can rely on ourselves to always meet the committed SLAs!

Scale and flexibility

By virtue of being a managed service, HPEHVC caters to a spectrum of datacenters: large – small, traditional – hybrid, virtual – physical, and so on. For example, some datacenters may have a high degree of virtualization with high over-subscription ratio, while others may have virtualization with dedicated compute, and still others may have no virtualization at all. There are numerous possible combinations and the Continuity Cloud datacenter must be able to handle all of them.

By choosing OpenStack, we have been able to overcome this challenge efficiently. For example, the capability of dynamically adding or removing compute nodes to Nova allows HPEHVC to spin up or spin down the compute instances just in time. Availability Zones allow partitioning of the infrastructure based on the required provision model. Software-based networking adds tremendous flexibility to achieve the necessary network compartmentalization.

With OpenStack providing all the flexibility, HPEHVC is able to support the variations that we see in the modern-day datacenters.

Up-to-dateness

OpenStack releases follow a 6-month cycle, enabling faster technology adoption. Advances in the areas of containers, software-defined networking, cloud native applications, and so on can be brought in sooner.

Additionally, supportability acts as a tailwind! Not just net new features, but incremental features and patches make it to the mainstream in six months as well.

Considering the business use case and the value proposition that OpenStack brought to the table, it turned out to be a winning choice to tie the Continuity Cloud infrastructure technology to Helion OpenStack!

Feel free to reach out to me if you need more details on the HPEHVC managed service.

Amit Gupte
Product Manager - HPEHVC
amit.gupte@veritas.com

 

Some other reads:

End to end DR with HPEHVC managed service

Keeping your Business up with HPEHVC!