chamambom@gmail.com (0734386010)

Project Proposal for

Implementing a local based distributed SDN Public Cloud Computing

Platform

Provisioning SAAS, IAAS and PAAS cloud packages through a local based distributed

SDN public cloud computing service platform spanning across all datacenters hosted by

local ISPs.

Prepared by

MARTIN CHAMAMBO (BSc, RHCSA, CCNA, I.T.I.L, VCA-DCV, VCA-CLOUD)

W120 Charingira Flats

Cnr Tongogara and Leopold Takawira

Harare

June 23, 2015

Table of Contents

1. Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................... 2

2. Executive summary ................................................................................................................... 2

3. Project background .................................................................................................................... 5

4. Project Action Plan .................................................................................................................... 8

5. Project Costing .......................................................................................................................... 10

6. References................................................................................................................................... 12

chamambom@gmail.com (0734386010)

1. Acknowledgements

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Miss Mildred Nhidza for the thorough proof

reading of the project proposal and Promise Kumalo on the networking knowledge he provided.

2. Executive summary

Reduced operational costs , economies of scale and flexible business operating models for most

Zimbabwean companies is of paramount importance especially when starting a new business or

operating a business. Implementing on-premise business information systems to support daily

operations is proving costly and uneconomic. Cloud computing is here and it’s time local

companies embraced the idea of running their businesses in the cloud.

While many companies will easily warm up to the idea of saving costs, Government institutions

and hospitals and other existing private companies will find it difficult to quickly jump to the

idea. Various reasons exist and below are some reasons why organizations will not quickly adapt.

Most existing datacenters are not cloud ready.

No one understands the cloud computing business model.

People and culture change.

Zimbabwe has less cloud computing skilled people.

What will be our role in trying to change the business mindset towards cloud computing?

Designing and implementing a working cloud. To start with, some companies are already using

certain services in the cloud but are they really benefiting? How about Government institutions

and hospitals where data privacy and security is an issue?

Transforming businesses and Government operating models will definitely take time but that

will be our Job. Imagine all Government institutions accessing the same services from a secure

private cloud without the need for dispersed datacenters. This is where this project comes in. A

clear analysis is made ,institution by institution coming up with a working strategy for what

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needs to be done and calculating the cost savings over time not mentioning the flexibility that

cloud computing will bring.

Implementing a cloud strategy is not a day’s job given the state of our locally run datacenters, we

have to follow the right path and just to summarize analyze the datacenter ---- make decisions

based on defined metrics (e.g. critical apps) --- consolidate your servers ------ virtualize ----and

migrate to the private cloud -------and ultimately migrate to the public cloud. The audits (based

on how much money will be saved and what needs to be done) need to be done carefully in

order to realize the cloud computing benefits.

My goal is to design and implement an SDN based distributed cloud computing service platform

spanning across all datacenters hosted by local ISPs. (Utande, Africom, ZOL etc.) The service

platform will enable companies, both operating and startups to setup their businesses without

the need to worry about supporting infrastructure thereby enabling them to concentrate on their

core business, saving costs and time in the process.

We have already established ISPs with sound datacenters so why not take advantage of the

existing infrastructure and build a public cloud on top of that. Take the below scenario which

applies to our Zimbabwean setting,

Every internet customer in Zimbabwe is using Utande, Africom or ZOL (just to name a few) as

their ISP. The public cloud will consist of multiple distributed nodes on each datacenter

supported by a software defined network (SDN) which is going to help us distribute workloads

across the spanned datacenters by presenting the interconnected Openstack nodes as one big

datacenter. A customer accessing a service on the platform will not even realize where the

applications are sitting. SDN will provide the capacity of the cloud to scale horizontally even as

we add more nodes and services.

Is this the end game? Yes and no, this is why. Most operating companies right now are running

their business operations on outdated server infrastructure utilizing at most 20% of that. The

cost of running this infrastructure is not known to many but take for example any Government

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or private run institutions, all they need is basic email, internet, voice, rent for server premises

and electricity, financial and payroll services at a minimum and do they need all these services

locally hosted in their server rooms? My answer is NO. Most of the services can be run on a

shared cloud computing platform reducing cost and time spent by most of these companies in

setting up these supporting information systems.

a) Public cloud -Software as a Service (SAAS)for new startups/companies

The local public cloud is going to support on the go new startups and as I see it, it will be their

only option if saving costs and efficiency are important to them. One advantage is businesses

will realize their business objectives much faster than they ever could. The SAAS layer will

consist of most if not all business applications that most local companies use and will be

provided on a pay-as-you-go model

b) Private and Public clouds for existing organizations and companies

Gone are the days when information systems used to aid businesses. Now there are the primary

drivers behind successful businesses. Existing organizations are running “Substandard

Datacenters/Server rooms” where even I.T managers don’t have a clue on their operating costs.

So where do we come in? Using a defined cloud/virtualization migration strategy we have to

analyze currently existing systems and come up with a report on how much the company is

currently wasting ,how much the company can save and what application workloads can be

consolidated or migrated to the local cloud.

c) Private clouds for Government institutions and hospitals

Data security seems to be of concern for most government institutions and we perfectly

understand their concern, but not all applications are sensitive and when we do a consolidation

report, we identify which applications can be migrated to the cloud and which applications will

be left on premise.

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Since government institutions prefer their data to be on premise rather than the cloud, all we

need to do is prepare their local server rooms through server consolidation, virtualization and

ultimately migrate the applications to a private cloud.

3. Project background

ZOL Datacenter

Utande Datacenter

Africom Datacenter

YoAfrica Datacenter

Distributed Local Cloud integrated by an SDN Overlay

.e.g. NSX or Open Daylight

This is how users of the cloud will be seeing it ,as

just a single cloud

Diagram 01: High level architecture of the public Cloud

This is the high level architecture design of the distributed public cloud and using SDN overlay

software, the cloud platform installed in each datacenter will be presented as a single interface to

the user while deployed workloads are distributed across the 4 datacenters.

Below is the internal design of the cloud software (Openstack) that is going to be deployed

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Diagram 02: Base Openstack Architecture

OpenStack is a free and open-source cloud computing software platform. The technology

consists of a series of interrelated projects that control pools of processing, storage, and

networking resources throughout a data center—which users manage through a web-based

dashboard, command-line tools, or a RESTful API .There are 12 integrated projects in the

OpenStack platform

Nova (compute): provides virtual servers/machines for cloud users on demand.

Neutron (networking): provides networking as a service (virtual networking services).

Swift (object storage): allows storage and retrieval of data images, files and documents that are

API accessible.

Cinder (block storage): provides persistent block storage to the user’s VM.

Glance (images): provides a list of virtual disk images to the compute node, which is utilized

by the VMs.

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Horizon (dashboard): provides a web-based graphic user interface (GUI) for managing

OpenStack by the administrator and tenants (users).

Keystone (identity): stores information for providing authentication and authorization for

OpenStack services.

Ceilometer (telemetry): monitors and measures OpenStack cloud usage for the purpose of

billing, benchmarking and statistics.

Heat (orchestration): provides an orchestration service for managing cloud applications by

using appropriate API calls.

Ironic (Baremetal provisioning): aims to provision bare metal machines instead of virtual

machines, forked from the Nova Baremetal driver.

Sahara (Big Data as a service): project provides a simple means to provision a data-intensive

application cluster (Hadoop or Spark) on top of OpenStack.

Trove (Database as a service): project aims at providing Cloud Database as a Service

provisioning functionality for both relational and non-relational database engines.

Through a competent team of 1 Infrastructure Architect, 2 infrastructure engineers, 1 network

engineer and 1 Python developers, I plan on deploying Openstack controllers on each

datacenter focusing mainly on the Nova, Neutron and Storage components in architectural

considerations.

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4. Project Action Plan

Phase 1 - Pilot: 6 months

Coming up with multiple design reference architectures that will cater for the following design

constraints.

Scaling out of the L2 virtual network (SDN implementation)

Scaling out of Storage nodes

Scaling out ,failover and high availability of compute nodes

Designing of the first Openstack node(s) will cater for all the design constraints involved in

implementing a scaling-out distributed cloud platform spanning physical datacenters.

Phase 2 - Prototype testing: 8 months

Selection of the first datacenter for deployment will depend on the following metrics

Datacenters with a high capacity bandwidth network.

Datacenters with a high network uptime

Datacenters with a good support history

Installation, configuration and testing of the first standalone Openstack deployment at Utande

taking into consideration networking and storage constraints above when we scale out

Phase 3 – Extending Utande Openstack node(s) into the second datacenter

– 6 months

The extension of the Utande cloud platform into the second ISP datacenter will take 6 months

and will mark the first successful distributed local cloud computing platform spanning physically

dispersed datacenters.

chamambom@gmail.com (0734386010)

Phase 4 – Provisioning SAAS and IAAS packages to pilot customers – 3 months

"The proof of the pudding is in the eating! After successfully implementing a distributed cloud

service platform, we will solicit new customers who are going to conduct some of their

businesses using the IAAS and SAAS packages. While other companies are still warming up to

the idea, we will enhance and improve on our SAAS AND IAAS offerings adding more

products to the portfolio concentrating more on collaboration with local companies selling local

software like Belina payroll and Afrosoft to create SAAS packages

Final Phase – Sequentially extending the first Openstack controller at Utande

into other local datacenters in 3 months timelines

This is where we add more Openstack node(s) to the already existing distributed Openstack

cloud

chamambom@gmail.com (0734386010)

5. Project Costing

The project is based on an opensource cloud platform so cost of implementing the project is

mostly going to be spent on buying the necessary servers , networking hardware and hiring

experienced engineers with expertise in Openstack, Cloud computing, Virtualization, Networks

and infrastructure.

The costing is based on a resilient and highly-available Openstack deployment at Utande

datacenter before scaling out to other datacenters

Compute

Count: 1 server(s), 4 rack unit(s) total

CPU: 4 x AMD Opteron (12 cores total)

RAM: 36 x 8GB

NIC: HP Ethernet 10Gb 2-port 530FLR-SFP+ Adapter (20Gb)

Controller

Count: 3 server(s), 12 rack unit(s) total

CPU: 4 x AMD Opteron (4 cores total)

RAM: 4 x 4GB

NIC: HP Ethernet 10Gb 2-port 530FLR-SFP+ Adapter (20Gb)

Network

Count: 1 switche(s), 1 rack unit(s) total

Model: CISCO - Nexus 3064T

Ports: 48

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SDN Software

NSX Software (perpetual license starts at $5,996 per CPU)

Total Price for Compute, Network and Controller

Compute price (1 total): $22,964.00

Controller price (3 total): $36,492.00

Switches price (1 total): $20,370.00

NSX Software (1 total): Perpetual license starts at $5,996 per CPU

Total (6 items): $85,826.00

Human resources

Resource Quantity Monthly Cost

Infrastructure Architect X1 Negotiable

Infrastructure engineer X2 $4000

Network Engineer X1 $2000

Python developer X1 $2000

Total Costs $8000+

chamambom@gmail.com (0734386010)

6. References

http://docs.openstack.org/openstack-ops/content/example_architecture.html

http://docs.openstack.org/arch-design/content/technical-considerations-network-focus.html

https://www.mirantis.com/openstack-services/bom-calculator/