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Douglas County Private Cloud. Powering the Digital County. When Dinosaurs Ruled The earth…. In 2004 Douglas County was at maximum datacenter capacity Hundreds of servers and storage arrays crowded the aisles New components required turning something off
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Douglas County Private Cloud Powering the Digital County
When Dinosaurs Ruled The earth… • In 2004 Douglas County was at maximum datacenter capacity • Hundreds of servers and storage arrays crowded the aisles • New components required turning something off • New systems required months if not years to: • Budget for new hardware • Spec and order • Find space and power • Rack and cable • Install and configure
Early attempts… • Application consolidation reduced the server count but: • No way to track capacity/load per application • Many apps required specific host names or drive mappings • Failures effected multiple systems • DLL Hell !!! • Database consolidation reduced the server count but: • No way to track capacity/load per application • Performance problems even running management tools • Vendor naming convention restrictions • Failures effected multiple systems
Virtualization my dear watson • Implemented VMWare ESX farms and migrated physical servers to virtual • Implemented shared storage arrays • Developed standard server templates • Developed standard application stack configurations
I see your Bet and Raise….everything • Virtualized production Oracle databases • Utilized VMWare professional expertise for performance tuning • Virtualized 911 • Demonstrated to CAD vendor that our virtual environment had superior uptime to their prescribed geocluster configuration. • Virtualized VOIP system
Today’s private cloud environment • It starts with three data centers distributed across the County • The Highlands Ranch Substation is in a separate power grid and utilizes a different Internet POP
Today’s private cloud environment • Data centers are linked on our County wide fiber optic campus network • Multi-gigabit Ethernet and Fiber Channel connections link the sites
Today’s private cloud environment • Each site has CPU and Memory resources (servers) with VMWare abstracting the physical layer • Storage resources at the sites are presented to the shared environment • Data is replicated between arrays
Parts and pieces • The virtual environment supports the creation of most of the components used in traditional application stacks. These are created on the virtual platform, using only the common CPU, memory and storage resources available.
Some assembly required • We create new instances of the available components (often utilizing standard templates) and deploy them in a configuration to support specific applications • Some vendors already have virtual server “appliances” that we can deploy in their recommended configuration • An application stack can be provisioned in hours, or sometimes minutes, as opposed to the months sometimes required in the days of hardware deploys
Go forth and multiply • Multiple application stacks are provisioned across the environment • Native de-duplication technology in both the VMware platform and the storage arrays minimizes the “cost” of multiple identical components • Individual components or entire stacks can move across the private cloud and may run in any or all data centers
Doesn’t amazon or somebody do this? • Yes , there are public cloud vendors with similar infrastructure, but: • The County already has capital invested in datacenters that would not be recaptured if we moved to public cloud resources • Moving large data sets (GIS, Recording, Assessor, etc.) to the internet and back as internal users access them is expensive • Architecting the same level of BC/DR in a cloud system would be expensive (multiple zones) • Many third party applications are not fully “cloud aware” • While they are working towards it, cloud platforms can struggle with compliance obligations in regards to standards like CJIS or HIPAA
So cloud bad? • The public cloud infrastructure and specifically many Software as Service offerings can be utilized by the County to great benefit. There are also many applications and datasets that are best served, at this time, from a private cloud • Examples of systems that are currently using external/cloud resources or have proposals to do so: • Facilities Management • IT Service Management • Community Justice Services • Special Needs Registry
Douglas County Private cloud • Delivers flexible and efficient computing resources • Provides capacity and performance management per application • Allows for secure enclaves with minimal logged access • Enables superior up-time and availability • Powers the Digital County