Information Security: VMware versus Sphere

Cloud Computing has been a buzz world in the past few years. The use of this technology increased considerably when we made huge progress in this domain, reducing the cost for everyone. Today, Cloud Computing is widely used all across the world by a lot of companies such as Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, etc…

Virtualization is a software technology that makes it possible to run multiple operating systems and applications on the same server at the same time. It’s transforming the IT landscape and fundamentally changing the way that people utilize technology. Virtualization is the single most effective way to reduce IT expenses while boosting efficiency and performance, not just for large enterprises, but for small and midsize businesses too. (Mctigue, 2013)

This business case investigation discusses in depth about the process of virtualization of servers in an organization and the various benefits of doing so. Giving a brief introduction to the concept of virtualization, it was introduced in the late 1960s when the resources of mainframe computers were divided between several applications. [1] The term virtualization has since then been expanded in terms of practical application. The conversion of the physical server into a pool containing several virtual machines which act individually as one computer is known is hardware virtualization.

Virtualization also minimizes the cost of maintaining a datacenter by reducing energy cost, minimizing server sprawl and eliminating under utilization. As BMG embarks on their expansion projects, new virtual machines can be deployed quickly to accommodate the additional capacity required to grow their infrastructure dynamically without expending an enormous amount of capital.

Purpose: The purpose of this speech is to persuade my audience that they should consider moving to cloud computing services because the cost of operating servers in the cloud offers significant savings and the ability to quickly scale is far better than traditional rack servers. I want my audience to review their datacenter infrastructure and consider the use of cloud-based servers and services over their traditional systems. My central idea is that the use of rack servers is becoming obsolete and cloud computing services is a much better solution.

As we all know virtualization is the requirement of future. We have evolved from the age of traditional environment to virtual environment.We have grown accustomed to almost all things virtual from virtual memory to virtual networks to virtual storage.The most widely leveraged benefit of virtualization technology is server consolidation, enabling one server to take on the workloads of multiple servers. For example, by consolidating a branch office’s print server, fax server, exchange server, and web server on a single windows server, businesses reduce the costs of hardware, maintenance, and staffing.

During past thirty years, the term concept of server virtualization has invoked in order to allow the large expensive main frame servers to be used and shared among the different application layered environments from various geographical locations. “Server Virtualization is a process of portioning the single main server into several server partitions”. In clear terms to state, main server is being used as many number of cloned severs where maximum programmers/users can access that cloned server in their work area location locally satisfying the user requirements reducing the cost effectiveness. Availability of hardware in market made virtualization concept to fade away. In modern era, virtualization at the different levels alike network, storage and system has gained much more importance in terms of improving the system security, reliability and availability. Server Virtualization is a gate way for the organization in order to reduce their cost efficiency compared to any other modern technologies.

Server virtualization is an environment in which there is one physical server and there is software running, called a hypervisor, which allows several independent instances of operating systems (i.e. virtual machines) to run simultaneously. Ou (2006) states the server virtualization is the best solution for “applications that are meant for small- to medium-scale usage.” If implemented properly, organizations can use server virtualization to maximize their return on investment (ROI) in server hardware. Energy costs are rising and replacing “real estate as the primary data center expense” (Overby, 2007). Therefore, utilizing server

The data being shared among the open space is less secured. Cloud computing involving different technologies like networks, databases, operating systems and many other, has enormous security issues. In perspective to the designing of a distributed operating systems that support cloud computing, resource scheduling, transaction management, load balancing, concurrency control, memory management are some of the major issues that are to be considered. Scalability, loss of data, performance also stand as the other major concerns due to the heavy growth of organizations which are using the cloud.

A typical Data Center consists of a sturdy, well-built building housing storage devices, servers, internet connectivity and extensive cabling and networking equipment. It also consists of cooling equipment and infrastructure to supply power, along with automated fire extinguishing systems. It is essential to take backups periodically to ensure operability and high availability. The more critical software and hardware, more efforts are needed for

Virtualization has reduced the overall equipment footprint of a company’s data center. This means, fewer servers, less networking equipment, hence less physical space needed. Virtualization creates a virtual version of an operating system. Virtualizing servers reduces physical hardware further reducing generation heat in the data center hence solving many issues. Many businesses have considered IT’s intensive enterprise and installed latest technologies to meet today’s and future customer requirements. Intel Virtualization Technology is the biggest advancement of enterprise information technology. Intel closely works with other softwares like VMware, XENSource, Parallels, tenAsys, VirtualIron, RedHat, Novell and other VMM developers (Burger, 2012).

The cloud computing is noting but storing the data and information n the internet, instead of saving the data on the computer hard drive. Since the data and information are stored in the cloud, it becomes easy to access the data from anywhere in the world (Griffith, 2016). Due to the data availability the data integrity is affected in the cloud. Cloud provides a flexible bandwidth, if the organization demands increases we can scale up the cloud capacity. The maintenance cost is low (cloud , 2015). Due to this reasons the organizations are moving towards the cloud.

Traditional data centers consist of a large number of physical machines, each executing a single instance of an operating system. For example, a certain group of servers supports email function and executes Linux with an appropriate set of programs for email handling. Another group of servers may run Windows providing access for remote users to office applications. Installing new application usually means purchasing a new physical server and installing a new instance of an operating system and the application. Capacity of the servers needs to be planned to handle peak loads of applications resulting in a relatively low utilization leading to wasteful power consumption and maintenance costs.

Virtualization is a proven software technology that is rapidly transforming the IT landscape and fundamentally changing the way that people compute. Today’s powerful x86 computer hardware was designed to run a single operating system and a single application. This leaves most machines vastly underutilized. Virtualization lets you run multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine, sharing the resources of that single computer across multiple environments. Different virtual machines can run different operating systems and multiple applications on the same physical computer. (Virtualization Basics)

Design resource management algorithms have been developed to run the data centers more effectively and efficiently this was due to the increasing energy costs in data centers.