Cloud Computing Technologies

CMS decided to move into the Cloud Technology space as early as 2007. The reasons for the move came about because we had the foresight to appreciate the immediate financial and operational benefits to our customers by using Cloud Technology. CMS recognised that the model for Cloud Technology was very scalable, cost efficient and delivered an incredibly agile platform for our customers to access their systems from anywhere in the world. That is why we have developed The CMS Private Cloud Platform. The key benefits of the CMS Private Cloud Platform are;

CAPEX CONVERTED TO OPEX
Cost is greatly reduced and capital expenditure is converted to operational expenditure therefore easing the burden on cash-flow. In other words, the hardware and software required to run any business is essentially ‘rented’ on a cost per user basis. This makes budget forecasting for the IT department both easy and predictable.

ACCESSIBILITY TO SYSTEMS
Accessibility of systems becomes much easier as they can be accessed from anywhere in the world via a web browser. This means that mobile users using laptops of handheld devices can work quickly and effectively as if they were sat at their desk.

RELIABILITY INCREASED
Reliability issues are a thing of the past as CMS upgrade our Cloud infrastructure every three years. This means that our customers always have access to the latest technology both in terms of hardware infrastructure and the latest software releases. Reliability and resilience of the CMS Cloud is substantially increased with the introduction of a second and third data centre so that failover and replication is taken care of automatically.

INCREASE IN AGILITY OF THE IT DEPARTMENT
Every organisation expands and shrinks according to business strategy and economic forces. The agility required by the IT department to therefore align themselves with these changes is both challenging and arduous. These challenges are met head on by the CMS Cloud. User growth or a decline in user numbers can be turned up or down by CMS within a day or two rather than the typical weeks and months of planning not to mention the significant capital expenditure.

INCREASED SECURITY
Security within the CMS Cloud is as good as, and more often better than under traditional systems that we encounter when we take on a new customer. This can be in part because CMS are able to devote resources to solving security issues that many customers cannot afford.

GREENER IT FUNCTION
The key principles of green computing are to reduce the use of hazardous materials, encourage the recyclability of obsolete products and factory waste, maximise energy efficiency during the products lifetime and to simplify the complicated mix of people, networks and hardware. The CMS Cloud Solution delivers these efficiencies through a mixture of the following processes and technologies;

THIN CLIENT SOLUTIONS
Thin client devices typically have no moving parts. Therefore their life span lasts beyond those of comparable PC’s. Equally impressive is their low power consumption and their low-heat output. The lack of heat means that they reduce their dependence for costly carbon-heavy air conditioning.

EFFICIENT DATA CENTRE PLANNING
Centralisation of our customer’s infrastructure into a single location helps to lower costs such as office space and utility costs. This is where the CMS Cloud encourages our customers to move to the greener option. Efficient data centre planning by CMS helps us to deliver a much greener IT proposition which in turn enables our customers to lower their carbon footprint. The techniques we employ in our data centres to efficiently power and cool them are explained below.

POWER
The power in the CMS data centre is provided by the local electrical utility provider to the facility on a dual ring from their primary substation. Floors are backed up by independent (n+1) UPS systems and two diesel generators within the onsite energy centre. Each floor of the facility manages power independently, receiving a feed direct from the mains supply. Power is then fed both to a static switch and to the UPS system. Power to the date centre floor can either be by the static switch or through the UPS, providing effective redundant power distribution to the data centre floor. Additional switchgear channels supply power to air conditioning systems and the PDUs (Power Distribution Units). The PDUs house the 32amp circuit breakers for the presentation of power to individual racks. Each rack is fed with dual power feeds from individual PDUs, and each piece of equipment contains dual power supplies connected to the individual PDUs. In the event of a mains power failure the UPS systems will seamlessly maintain power supply to the facility until the diesel generator(s) take over, with 7 days fuel supply contained on-site.

COOLING
Rack space is cooled with high capacity air conditioning systems maintaining a constant input temperature of 20oC throughout, keeping servers cool and running at the ideal temperature. Under-floor systems ensure effective distribution and management of cooling capacity, eliminating potential hotspots and controlling temperature locally as demanded by higher/lower powered equipment throughout the data centre. To avoid a cumulative heat build up, racks are arranged to face alternate directions i.e. Front to front, back to back. This creates a warm & cold air corridor layout. The front-to-front ‘cool’ row has floor tile grilles positioned to deliver conditioned air to the ‘cold’ corridor and the front of server equipment. This air is drawn in and then exhausts into the ‘warm’ corridor where it is accepted back into the air conditioning system for cooling. Positioning server rows ‘front-to-front’ ensures equipment draws no hot air in from the exhaust of other server equipment in neighbouring rows.

VIRTUALISATION
Virtualisation is one of the cornerstones of any green IT strategy. CMS customers who have adopted the virtual infrastructure solutions have reported significant improvements through:

• Server Consolidation and Infrastructure Optimization enabling significantly higher resource utilisation by pooling common infrastructure resources
• Physical Infrastructure Cost Reduction by reducing the number of servers and related IT hardware in the data centre, reducing power and cooling requirements
• Improved Operational Flexibility and Responsiveness allowing IT administrators to spend less time on repetitive configuration, monitoring and maintenance tasks.
• Increased Application Availability and Improved Business Continuity through the ability to securely backup and migrate entire virtual environments with no interruption in service.
• Improved Desktop Manageability and Security.
• Utilisation and efficiency improvements for systems that are often only 10–20% utilized.

GREATER CAPACITY FOR DR PLANNING
The CMS Cloud offers our customers the ability to completely fail over to CMS’s secondary London data centre in the event that a complete data centre failure should occur. This can operate on the basis of 100% of the live capacity can be available to our customers within 1 hour of a failure occurring. All hardware and software in the DR environment can be identical to that of the live.

Replication is performed in real time at a storage level, with SAN controllers at each site performing replication at a block level. This coupled with a flat LAN spread across both data centres ensures applications are not required to be ‘DR aware’, and therefore would continue to operate without intervention should the DR solution be initiated.

REDUCTION IN I.T. MAINTENANCE
The maintenance of our customers applications based in the CMS Cloud are easier to support, since they don't have to be installed on each user's computer. They are easier to support and to improve since the changes reach the clients instantly. Similarly, the terminals on each user’s desk are thin client solutions and therefore have a longer lifespan than PC’s as there are no moving parts. This means that maintenance of these devices is both cost efficient and timely.

ABILITY TO DELIVER IT ON A COST PER USER BASIS
The CMS Cloud has been developed to deliver computing services to our customers on a cost per user basis if required. We think that ‘metering’ cloud computing resources will help our customers to forecast IT spend and therefore help with cashflow. CMS can deliver by client or application on a daily, weekly, monthly, and annual basis dependent on the situation. This will enable clients to choose their vendor cloud on cost, flexibility and reliability.