The secret recipe of cloud computing

Businesses are becoming less and less tolerant of downtime with IT systems today. Businesses expect fault tolerance to be a standard feature of systems and zero downtime is required at many levels.

IT infrastructure approaches such as on demand and cloud computing provide an infrastructure capable of providing a reliable and scalable infrastructure at relatively low cost and complexity.

Cloud computing models provide by vendors such as Amazon and Google provide a recipe for success that can be leveraged for hosted and custom solutions. Vendors such as IBM and Microsoft are incorporating components of this into their software, but much more can be achieved and at low cost to business just by looking at some of the simple ingredients large cloud computing mix into their recipe.

Open source software and virtualization are two key driving forces behind this. Open source software has been able to be provided in the form of low-cost, pre-built and quick to deploy appliances that enable the daisy-chaining of one server to another, allowing servers to be connected to one another on-the-fly.

Combine this with virtualization capabilities that allow software deployments and operating systems to be highly malleable and fluid, flowing through hardware platforms like electricity through a wire. Using open source software in a virtualized environment allows for significant license cost reductions savings by allowing for new instances of operating systems to be deployed without licensing implications.

Lotus Domino is an IBM product that provides powerful grid computing type capabilities – allowing for redundancy at the hardware, software and infrastructure layers. When IBM in mid-2010 announced that the clustering capabilities of Domino would be extended to their express product range, this meant that small to medium size customers using Domino express products could ask for the same fault-tolerant grid-computing infrastructure.

One of the main goals of a highly available system is to provide continuous use of critical data and applications that keep businesses up and running, regardless of planned or unplanned interruption.  High-Availability refers to a system uptime that approaches 100%.  By combining Domino’s powerful replication and clustering capabilities with open source software and virtualization, high availability can be realised with minimal fuss, complexity and cost.

In part two we’ll explore in more detail how virtualization can be used to achieve high availability.

Some terms used