Verizon Cloud’s Pure Virtualized Infrastructure Enables Updates to “Live” Virtual Machines
Earlier this week, Verizon Enterprise Solutions announced Seamless Upgrade capabilities for Verizon Cloud. As we mentioned in that announcement, Seamless Upgrade allows us to conduct virtually all major system upgrades without interrupting service or limiting infrastructure capacity. I wanted to provide a bit more detail on how Seamless Upgrade works and when and why it benefits Verizon Cloud enterprise customers.
First, a recap of the Verizon Cloud architecture will be illustrative. Verizon Cloud is unlike other cloud infrastructure offerings. We took a unique approach in building the core infrastructure to facilitate and enable advantages inherent to Verizon, given our history and global IP network. Verizon Cloud is a pure virtualized infrastructure. All endpoints (virtual machines, networks, storage volumes and associated snapshots) are virtualized and network addressable. The core infrastructure --orchestration, firewalls, load balancers, identity management and other subsidiary network functions -- are also virtualized. We have disassociated the customer virtual plane from the virtual runtime infrastructure and from the physical infrastructure. Additionally, the runtime infrastructure plane (orchestration) is also disassociated from the physical plane.
This focus on a pure software defined infrastructure allows the Verizon Cloud to do many things other cloud infrastructure offerings don’t do. Specifically, Verizon Cloud has granular and immediate control over availability and performance management of all cloud primitives, such as CPU performance, network bandwidth or disk throughput. Most importantly, it allows us to relocate customer resources and infrastructure services while they are running and “live.” This is the capability added with Seamless Upgrade.
This notion of live migration is not new. Certainly other virtualized infrastructures can do this with a given customer workload or virtual machine. What is different about Verizon Cloud is the depth to which this technique is used. We are able to migrate and relocate everything. We are able to complete actions like live virtual machine migration, storage replication, and network reflection for both customer and infrastructure components in a live environment. We can then upgrade the system infrastructure and deliver new functionality once customer workloads and resources have been safely moved to unaffected physical plane components.
What does this mean for our customers? Updates and maintenance, even unscheduled maintenance like those required with the Xen hypervisor security flaw last Fall, can be performed while client virtual machines continue to run, without requiring a two-zone setup or a machine reboot. It’s a little like performing brain surgery on yourself while you’re awake. Tricky? Yes, but necessary to keep our commitment to enterprise customers.
We built a different cloud to better serve enterprise customers. Our focus is on performance and availability and Seamless Upgrade was a key addition to achieve that vision. That’s why last weekend was a big deal for us and our customers. I’ll update you periodically throughout the year on our continued progress. For more information on Verizon Cloud visit, http://cloud.verizon.com/.
