Private/Hybrid Cloud with Nimbula Director

Private/Hybrid Cloud with Nimbula Director

A guide to a highly automated, scalable and easy to use enterprise grade private/hybrid cloud deployment

Business Challenges

Many organizations and government agencies want the efficient resource utilization, control and security of the private cloud, with the agility of bursting to the public cloud during times of high demand, without the security concerns.

Efficient resource utilization is a perennial challenge for datacenter management. Even where virtualization is used, virtual machines are still manually assigned and tied to given, available hardware resources. Virtualization still requires a lot of configuration, administration and maintenance time.

Scalability is limited in the traditional datacenter setup. If built for peak times, most datacenter hardware sits idle most of the time while it consumes space, maintenance, power and cooling. A sparsely resourced datacenter, on the other hand, might lack the capacity to deal with utilization spikes. Bursting into a public cloud can address this, but control is a big concern for many organizations. Being able to finely manage access to data and resources is essential for many businesses who are not comfortable with the granularity of policy provided by public clouds.

Nimbula Director offers the most advanced solution for enterprises and government agencies looking to take advantage of cloud technology benefits today. Nimbula Director lets organisations build a self-service internal cloud environment for their end users with the ability to burst into the public cloud subject to the fine grained permissions set up for the private cloud. Instead of users accessing the public cloud directly, Nimbula Director’s federation service seamlessly manages all access to the public cloud via an API, ensuring strict policy adherence and creating a unified cloud experience.

The Benefits:

• Single security model: The cloud administrator sets permissions for users and groups defining who can access what and the activities allowed. These permissions are unified across public and private cloud resources, using the same identity and permission models for both. The administrator can grant public cloud access to users when they are on projects requiring public resources and revoke access when it is no longer required.
• Credentials are safe: End users never have access to the credentials of the public cloud. End users simply access the public cloud based on their permissions, without the need to deal with any access logistics. When an end user leaves an organisation or switches teams, they can simply be removed from the group with public cloud access, thereby removing access to the enterprises’ public cloud resources without the need to change the private keys or other cloud credentials.
• Single Audit Trail: Permissions and activities across the private and public clouds are available through a single audit point, making it simple for IT organizations to track who is doing what and where.
• Single Set of Workflows: End users are able to use the same workflows for maintaining and managing images, launching and deprovisioning instances, and managing public IPs and storage resources across public or private clouds. It is only a matter of changing a single flag in a command to direct the work to a different site or provider.

Solution Brief

Nimbula Director delivers a highly automated, self-service, elastic cloud platform enabling organizations to build a private or hybrid cloud in under one hour, in their datacenter, behind the firewall. Installation and cloud management require only minimal human intervention, for setup and permissions definition. Once plugged into the network, new resources are automatically discovered, installed, and added to the pool. Strong resilience mechanisms ensure the cloud is always up and running with no single points of failure (SPOF). The result is a dramatic reduction in operational costs and freeing IT to focus on other business activities.

All cloud functionality is exposed to end users through the RESTful API, CLI and GUI, providing a completely self-service cloud. With Nimbula Director’s sophisticated permissions management, all activities across private and public clouds are policy based to ensure high levels of security and control. Activity logs are kept in a single location, enabling easy monitoring. The federation engine lets end users securely use the public cloud based on their permissions, without the need to enter credentials or to handle billing. Access to the public cloud can be enabled for specific applications or for peak times, providing massive scale and a seemingly infinite pool of resources.