At its heart, cloud computing is a new operational and business model for IT application hosting, rather than a new technology. It promises to deliver highly reliable, highly elastic services that respond quickly and smoothly to changing user demand. However, no matter what type of cloud environment you’re considering—a large public cloud, a customizable hosted cloud or a private cloud within your own enterprise—success depends on having the right technology foundation in place.

While much of the market focus has been on the service and application cloud layers, the success of any cloud implementation is built from the ground up. The infrastructure layers must be architected and implemented properly in order to support service-level expectations. If this layer is built on technology that is itself not inherently flexible or tolerant of failure, the cloud deployment will not achieve expectations.

This paper discusses:

• The requirements and properties of a robust, highly available Infrastructure-as-a-Service layer for cloud computing
• How physical and virtual infrastructure layers need to be orchestrated automatically for a successful cloud deployment
• Why traditional approaches and tools are largely unsuitable for this task

The recommended approach to constructing cloud infrastructure is to apply PAN Manager® Software by Egenera®, which inherently provides IaaS management facilities—regardless of whether the cloud service is delivered via virtualization, physical hardware, or a mixed environment of both physical and virtual servers. Using PAN Manager massively simplifies managing both physical and virtual infrastructures, eliminates the expensive and siloed approach to provisioning new services, and integrates well with cloud management, governance processes, and self-service portals.