Considerations for cloud data centers: Framework, architecture and adoption

Cloud computing is one of the fastest growing opportunities for enterprises and service providers. Enterprises use the Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) model to build private clouds, and virtual private clouds that reduce operating and capital expenses and increase the agility and reliability of their critical information systems. Service providers build public clouds to offer on-demand, secure, multi-tenant, pay-per-use IT infrastructure to businesses and government agencies that use cloud services to offload, or augment, their internal resources using a public cloud infrastructure. This paper starts with the cloud taxonomy and model overview. Then the paper describes the Cloud framework and architecture, with characteristics of virtualization and multi-tenancy to build an end-to-end IaaS cloud-computing infrastructure. Logical building blocks for cloud data centers including the virtualized network, compute, and storage resources, which are overlaid with Service orchestration, modular approach and service differentiation elements. The paper also describes phases of adoption of cloud data center by an enterprise.