Building a cloud

[Rickie]

I am trying to find some information needed to build and host my own cloud servers. This information includes the equipment (hardware) needed, the amount of servers, best specs, routers, firewalls, switches, etc. I am looking to have it virtualized, maybe VMware, so I may not need that much host servers. As for the OS, I may decide to use a Linux.

The key is to be able to host the servers and data at my data center, and not use a third part company. I am new at this and will appreciate any assistance.

P.S, the cloud will be use mostly for file storage, and I will like my clients to be able to share these files with partners that may or may not be on the same network.

 

[thiggins]

This is a pretty advanced topic and too broad to get any useful advice in a forum. The real question is why would you even think of doing this with so many cloud storage providers available, who would be happy to set up and run your private cloud.

 

[Rickie]

Thanks for your response, thiggins. The reason for this is, we want to offer this as a service to our clients and also want to have control over the data that is being stored in the cloud. We work for financial institutions, and the information that will be stored is very sensitive.

 

[GregN]

Not nearly enough details to assist you. Need a better picture as to why you need to do this in-house, and what you already have in-house.

Does your datacenter have the capacity to support that kind of operation? Amount of bandwidth? Need Encrypted volumes? One VPH per customer? How much storage are your clients looking for? What kind of through-put will your clients be expecting? Do the files need to survive a disaster? How quick does the data need to be available? Sharing mechanism? Sophistication of the users?

I too would generally recommend outsourcing, if sensitivity of the data is the primary concern financial data encrypts just as well as normal data. How about building client software that rides on-top of cloud storage?

The cloud storage folks have built software, tuned servers, plotted usage patterns, optimized hardware, developed disaster recovery plans, have full backup schemes. And that is just scratching the surface. It is their business, and there are alot of ins and outs to it.

The reason that people go to you or your firm is that you have years of experience doing whatever your niche is in the financial services arena is. You are the experts, that is a compelling reason. Your raison d'etre is we know what we are doing, we can do it better that you can. The same is true for the Cloud storage business, they are the experts, I'd recommend leveraging off of that.

If you are still convinced that you can do it better, or have a unique offering, google DIY Seedboxes. Since so many people are building their own, there is a wealth of information available about server architectures, hardware components, network requirements, etc.

Not much help I know, but not an awful lot to work with.

 

[stevech]

Right. Start with Jungle Disk or Amazon S3 or Rackspace or some such.
For sensitive data, merely encrypt it before storing/uploading, via Winzip or TruCrypt or SafeHouse.

 

[tipstir]

Best to go with one of the cloud service providers online do offer business rates. Unless you want this to be a business for yourself or company you own and run?

 

[Rickie]

Thanks for the responses everyone, I know if it may be easier to just sign up with an already established cloud service provider; however, we rather the information stay in house. Tipstir yes would like to have this as a business for ourselves as well. As I mentioned, I know how the cloud works and what it is all about; but I having difficult time finding definitive information on the back end of the infrastructure. I know once I find the information, I can develop what is needed.

 

[GregN]

Thanks for the responses everyone, I know if it may be easier to just sign up with an already established cloud service provider; however, we rather the information stay in house. Tipstir yes would like to have this as a business for ourselves as well. As I mentioned, I know how the cloud works and what it is all about; but I having difficult time finding definitive information on the back end of the infrastructure. I know once I find the information, I can develop what is needed.

Did you check out building a seedbox? Much in the same arena.

Many of the cloud providers offer a API to their service, you could write software that would appear to be all you, but when storing it would use a cloud provider.

 

[sfx2000]

Been tinkering with OpenStack for work stuff...

http://www.openstack.org/

 

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