EVA Florence 2012 ~ Open low-cost HA cluster cloud

In the last few years, one of the main problems of the cultural heritage institution is the progressive reduction of the investments. The hardware maintenance and licensing costs greatly affects IT budget. Virtualization addresses the need to streamline and consolidate infrastructure, even if the license costs remain high for commercial clouds. Open source solutions allow you to implement virtualization cloud which performance and functionality are suitable for the masses, without the constraints of hardware certifications and proibitive licenses costs.

Our infrastructure allowed us to build a ha virtualized environment using commodity hardware, regardless of specific products or manufacturers. Based on the interaction between a common linux kernel module and a software-based storage pool, is managed by an intuitive web interface. The system provides adequate performances provisioning services like web pages, OPAC, digital resources showcase, cataloging tools, library management, mail, etc.

Cristiano Corsani
Giovanni Toraldo

Transcript

1. Low cost cloud for BNCF EVA Florence 2012 Open low cost HA cluster cloud  Cristiano Corsani – system engineer - IT department - Florence National Library  Giovanni Toraldo – OSS solutions architect at Libersoft
2. Low cost cloud for BNCF EVA Florence 2012 BNCF services  SBN - national cataloguing system  OPAC - online public access catalogue  WWW - our web interface  Digital data access - public access to our digital storage  Internal services - library management and Intranet services Cultural Heritage Ministry has progressively reduced the investment
3. Low cost cloud for BNCF EVA Florence 2012 BNCF data center costs  Open Source – reduce costs of:  SOFTWARE: development and maintenance  LICENSING: server, apps and 250 workstation  Virtualization cloud – reduce costs of:  HARDWARE: maintenance and electricity costs
4. Low cost cloud for BNCF EVA Florence 2012 Virtualization
5. Low cost cloud for BNCF EVA Florence 2012 Commercial solutions  Hypervisor license - depends on CPU and/or memory  Orchestrator license - live migration, HA, backup, …  Certified hardware – limited hardware supported  Centralized storage system – needed for HA
6. Low cost cloud for BNCF EVA Florence 2012 Our Open solution  Open hypervisor it comes with Linux kernel in standard distro  Orchestrator live migration, ha, backup, … intuitive and web based  Commodity hardware only very low requirements needed  No centralized storage system special network filesystem is used instead physical storage
7. Low cost cloud for BNCF EVA Florence 2012 Compare Commercial Our Open Hypervisor license 4000€ + 12000€/year --- Centralized storage + FB lan 5000€ --- Hardware 20000€ << 20000€ Installation + Maintenance 500€/day 500€/day 3x Sun Fire (2 x quad-core Xeon, 24GB RAM, 2 x 500 GB SATA2) 3 HOSTS 6 CPU 72GB RAM 1TB Storage Our Open Cloud is: open, simple, easily scalable and affordable
8. Low cost cloud for BNCF EVA Florence 2012 Open details  Virtualization (OpenNebula and Proxmox)  Massive long-term storage for digitalized resources (GlusterFS)  Migration to Open Source desktop/server platforms. (Ubuntu and MooseFS) Giovanni Toraldo, OSS solutions architect in LiberSoft
9. Low cost cloud for BNCF EVA Florence 2012 Open hypervisor  Freely available: on your GNU/Linux distribution;  Enterprise-ready: powerful mix of enterprise features and a rich set of partners.  Support: widest range of hardware without hassles (Thanks Linux!)  High-performance: top-level virtualization benchmarks for Windows and Linux workloads.
10. Low cost cloud for BNCF EVA Florence 2012 Open VM management software  OpenNebula  Adaptable: highly modular.  Proven: massive scale production environments;  Interoperable: XML-RPC, EC2, OCCI  Proxmox  Easy to deploy: ISO installer or from bare Debian  Easy to use: centralized web management
11. Low cost cloud for BNCF EVA Florence 2012 Low-end hardware requirements  The simplest virtualization host is... your laptop:  CPU with virtualization extensions;  A bunch of available memory  A bunch of available disk space  Use your workstations to prepare VM before starting them in production.
12. Low cost cloud for BNCF EVA Florence 2012 Focus on storage  Shared storage is not an option for live migration and High-Availability.  A good storage solution:  Availability: the sky should not fall on our heads;  Scalability: we add new bricks when needed;  Price.  Common choice is to use a dedicated NAS/SAN (NetApp, EMC, QNAP and so on).
13. Low cost cloud for BNCF EVA Florence 2012 Our choice: GlusterFS  GlusterFS is an open source distributed network filesystem.  How it works?  Aggregate available disk space on your hosts;  Replicate data: HA and prevent data-loss;  Data available via LAN with standard protocols: FUSE, NFS, CIFS.
14. Low cost cloud for BNCF EVA Florence 2012 GlusterFS advantages  Scalability: to Petabytes and beyond!  Affordability: use commodity hardware;  Flexibility: deploy in any environment;  Linear performances: no degradation;  HA: replicate data on multiple places;  Unified namespace: like a folder on a local disk
15. Low cost cloud for BNCF EVA Florence 2012 Credits Cristiano Corsani – system engineer - IT department Florence National Library  Email: cristiano.corsani@beniculturali.it Giovanni Toraldo – OSS solutions architect at Libersoft  Email: gt@libersoft.it