Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 20 | Page 53

INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Cloud “In a cloud environment, tenants own and control their applications. Self-service gives tenants the control they need, enabling agility and flexibility. When it comes to differentiated services, CSPs cannot thrive on just providing basic infrastructure. They need to add value and create differentiated services to set themselves apart from competition. Automation,” Naidoo continues, “is a key requirement to enable agile processes for deploying cloud applications as well as for monitoring, chargeback and reporting.” He points out that a multi- tenant environment creates significant requirements for a storage system. www.intelligentcio.com “These requirements are often cumbersome to design and implement with legacy storage. The Tintri enterprise cloud platforms remove the complexity by aligning itself with what matters most – the tenant application,” he says. Multi-tenancy at the management layer In most cases, CSPs deploy multi-tenant services such as IaaS and DaaS by leveraging management solutions. For example, a CSP may deploy IaaS using VMware vCloud Director or OpenStack; VMware Horizon is commonly used for DaaS. “While these management packages provide the framework and tools for multi-tenant environments, Tintri surfaces specific tenant VM information to facilitate reporting and chargeback. Tintri also enables per-VM policy configuration through the Tintri REST APIs and Powershell toolkit,” says Naidoo. In some private cloud deployments, tenants are given access to the infrastructure. “Dedicated infrastructure per tenant is not cost efficient, so CSPs deploy private clouds on shared infrastructure and use multi-tenancy to isolate tenants,” says Naidoo. “Tintri supports hosted private cloud environments through: secure tenant separation, data encryption, service assurance and per-VM analytics that can be used for billing, chargeback and customisation.” ¡ INTELLIGENTCIO 53