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Contributed article by Giridhar LV, Head - VMUnify, Mindtree

IaaS Going Beyond Virtual Server Templates

Amazon basically started the concept of IaaS, the model of requesting and delivering servers in the cloud. A number of providers followed namely Rackspace, Microsoft, Savvis, HP and most recently even Google. But have you noticed a common thing in all of these providers irrespective of when they started offering the IaaS services, at the compute level they are still only Virtual Servers or Virtual Machines. You basically get to choose from a list of available "templates" e.g., Windows Server 2008 with 2 CPU, 4 GB RAM and 50 GB of storage, you can choose different variations of these templates. Some of these variations also include applications like SQL server packaged in the basic template. This is a great model when your target audience is the Dev / Test community or an IT administrator, well what about the others.

In my interactions with a number of service providers or data centers that would like to become the next Amazon and who currently count SMBs as their primary customers, the demand is something different. These SMBs are asking the service providers to provide them a setup where they can house their websites, email or CRM servers. Well, most of these solutions require more than one type of server template to be deployed. So, how does a CSP do it? First provision the servers separately, assign them the IPs, and also connect them to the right kind of storage. What if there are multiple SMBs requesting the same thing, well there need to be a better way than always provisioning servers one by one, there can be and I call it Solution Templates.

A Solution template is basically a template to solve a business problem. The business problem could be to deliver a Web Server in three tier architecture. Let the three tiers be the presentation layer, the business logic and database layer and each of them be a different server. A solution template defined by the CSP, will have 3 servers as part of it, connected to each other so that they are all part of same IP subnet, the right kind of storage assigned to the servers, with the fastest one for the database server. The CSP will also determine a price for this template, possibly by the month.  So, if there is a request for a three tier Web server, all the CSP has to do is provision that Solution template. If there is a self-service capability, the customer can do it himself. Now imagine the possibilities, we can have solution templates for almost every business problem - an Email Solution template, a CRM solution template, a scalability testing template, a Big Data Solution template, a HIPAA compliant solution template, these are just limitless.

2013 could be the year to start moving towards Solution templates. With Solution Templates, the offerings of IaaS providers will become so much richer and relevant to folks who are just not the Dev / Test community.

Well, with VMUnify this is the next big challenge that we are addressing, and hopefully have a Solution template that CSPs can deploy in 2013, stay tuned.

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About the Author

Giridhar LV has worked in the IT industry for more than 18 years. He is currently the head of VMUnify - a solution that helps organizations build Secure Virtual Datacenters and Unified Clouds. In this role he is responsible for the Sales and Marketing of VMUnify. Prior to this responsibility he was the Account Manager for one of the largest Product Engineering Services client of Mindtree. His areas of interest include Virtualization, File Systems, Data Protection, Operating Systems and Entrepreneurship. He is also an author of two patent pending applications.