It’s a bird… it’s a plane… it’s an Industrybuilt computing cloud!

It’s a bird… it’s a plane… it’s an Industrybuilt computing cloud!

IndustryBuilt has invested in cloud computing infrastructure for its internal systems. With the growing needs of customers, and increasing integration between Dynamics NAV ERP and the rest of the Microsoft Stack, there are a number of complex environments we need to be able to temporarily create in house for solution building. With the advent of RTC environments where extra server computing layers are required we needed a flexible way to manage these demands.
The environment includes several Dell dual quad core processing servers and a Synetic iScsi disk array for hosting enterprise data and Virtual Server Images. Software includes the latest in VMWare’s software and Citrix for hosting end user applications.

The general configuration: Each server will have VMWare ESX installed as on local hard drives, but the VM Server images will be hosted on the iScsi array. This will allow for VMWare to move images even while they are running from one physical environment to another. The iScsi array will also have dedicated raid groups for different application purposes.
RAIDGroup 1 will be used for the VM Images – using Raid10.
RAIDGroups 2-4 will be used for SQL Specific applications such as Dynamics NAV, Dynamics CRM, Team Foundation Server’s backend database and sharepoint. The three raid groups are all mirrored arrays – two for data, and one for the sql logs. After lots of research we’re going to allow SQL server to strip the data across the two mirrored data pairs. The belief here is that because SQL is multi-threaded, it will be able to load balance data to the different raid groups more quickly than a single thread for all the data where the array controller then stripes the data across a RAID 10 array. For our size company it’s probably splitting hairs, but I’m always up for trying something new, so we can recommend the best for our customers.

The last RAIDGroup will be used for our Exchange database.
We still have room for another RAIDGroup which will be a future investment when our sharepoint needs grow beyond our current capacities. We have some plans with respect to shared project management with customers that will require a more robust Sharepoint environment and could entail a lot of data. For this we will eventually create a large capacity, slower performance RAIDGroup.

There is also an interesting side effect to this type of investment. Our existing servers range from ones that have been running for 12 years, to ones that we have purchased in the last 2 years. All of them differing levels of CPU Power, RAM, HD Capacity and speed. With every technology investment, the question of what to do with aging hardware has always been part of the puzzle. Now, with cloud computing, one can take the older hardware, virtualize it, and just add it’s computing power to the cloud. While it may not be able to host the 15-18 virtualized servers that our newer hardware can, it may still be able to run one or two things, like active directory controllers, etc… When that hardware fails completely, the cloud computing power will just shrink up a little bit.

All in all, we’re excited about this investment, as it will reduce our footprint in our server room(s) and allow us to power down at least 5 pieces of older, less efficient equipment.
 

 Dan Oughton is the CTO for IndustryBuilt. 
This biologist / zoologist spends most of his spare time chasing around his 2.5 year old son and   115 lb giant schnauzer. His recent projects include installing a geothermal heating and cooling  system at his home, proving it can be retrofitted to a home in a suburban setting.
Dan loves being a dad, and enjoys playing music, running, competing in a variety of sports and watching basketball (Go Raps!)