Download Kahu Compute.

Kahu Compute: Make Private Cloud Painless
Kahu Compute.
Make Private Cloud Painless.
Lightcrest Kahu Compute | © 2015 Lightcrest LLC | December 2015 | www.lightcrest.com
2
Kahu Compute: Make Private Cloud Painless
Kahu Compute: Make Private Cloud Painless.
Software is eating the world, and the datacenter is next. How will your enterprise leverage the next
product cycle to reduce costs and increase efficiency? What tools do you need to run tons of compute
and storage at scale, while maximizing performance? How can you maintain your data sovereignty
requirements while gaining the benefits of elastic computing and cloud-based services?
There have been multiple attempts at private cloud productization. Design-by-committee projects
like OpenStack are struggling to bridge the gap between on-premises cloud and usability, leaving
enterprises with huge consulting costs only to end up with brittle, underperforming environments.
Firms like VMWare are gouging their customers with exorbitant licensing fees - meanwhile,
“hyperconverged” players are selling appliances at zero cost benefit to the customer.
Enter Kahu, the software stack built from the ground-up to drive the modern datacenter. Kahu allows
enterprises to drive maximum performance from their computing investment at the lowest possible
cost. By providing the infrastructure and APIs required to run hyperscale infrastructure with tiny
technical teams, Kahu serves as the technical fulcrum for the modern enterprise.
Kahu Business Highlights:
• Run hyperscale infrastructure with minimal staff
• Realize up to 60% cost reduction over public cloud at scale
• Maintain data sovereignty without network and security specialists
• Eliminate or reduce big-iron compute, storage, and networking investments
• Increase the efficiency of your technical staff overnight
• Outperform the competition by reducing time-to-deliver, shortening the provisioning cycle,
and increasing performance across your IT supply chain
Kahu Technical Highlights:
• Revolutionary API-driven cloud fabric on premium hardware
• The fastest booting VMs in the industry
• The most responsive management UI in the industry
• Software Defined Storage & Networking on every node
• Pre-integrated and optimized hardware and software stacks
So if you’re interested in working your datacenter, and not working for your
datacenter - then keep reading.
Lightcrest Kahu Compute | © 2015 Lightcrest LLC | December 2015 | www.lightcrest.com
1
Kahu Compute: Make Private Cloud Painless
Fact Vs. Fiction
Let’s get a few facts out of the way before we dive deeper into Kahu.
3
3
3
3
3
Fact: Private clouds are substantially more cost-effective at scale than public cloud alternatives.
Fact: Public clouds do not provide the enterprise with data sovereignty.
Fact: Private clouds beat public clouds in every performance metric.
Fact: You understand your architecture needs better than a public cloud provider.
Fact: You’ve done the research, and you know private clouds are cheaper, faster,
and more secure than public clouds.
x Fiction: The private cloud is hard to build and maintain.
Kahu makes private cloud easy.
3
FACT: Kahu takes the pain out of private cloud. Lower your costs. Increase performance,
and leverage the leading edge software stack for your datacenter, Kahu Compute Fabric.
See for yourself.
Lightcrest Kahu Compute | © 2015 Lightcrest LLC | December 2015 | www.lightcrest.com
2
Kahu Compute: Make Private Cloud Painless
Lightcrest Kahu Compute | © 2015 Lightcrest LLC | December 2015 | www.lightcrest.com
3
Kahu Compute: Make Private Cloud Painless
Kahu Introduction
Kahu is architected to be a complete networking, storage, and compute stack for your environment.
Instead of relying on big-iron products for core components such as compute, storage, firewalling,
and load balancing - you can deploy Kahu Compute Fabric across your datacenter environment to
handle everything from virtual switching and packet throttling, to scale-out storage allocations and
automated VM deployments.
Kahu reduces time-to-deliver and lowers costs for horizontals such as:
• Web Scale Applications
• Big Data infrastructure (Hadoop, Spark, Hive, Pig)
• Virtual Desktop
• Gaming Infrastructure
• Financial Modeling and Algorithmic Trading
• High Performance Computing
• Information Retrieval & Enterprise Search
Since Kahu is a complete stack, from the hardware to the software (Kahu Control Plane), the
time and risk associated with new hardware evaluations and refreshes are eliminated. The stack is
pre-optimized, tuned, and tested so that your organization can reduce time-to-deploy and quickly
adapt to changing capacity and provisioning requirements.
Kahu Node
A Kahu Node is an individual building-block in a Kahu Fabric. Since Kahu is software-defined, it does
not matter what the initial intent, nor ultimate use of an individual Kahu Node is. Every node has
control and data plane for compute, storage, and networking. As a result, nodes can be repurposed,
mixed, and matched to provide for everything from application clusters and scale-out storage to load
balancers, firewalls, and virtual routers.
Hardware
Kahu is a software layer, and can run on multiple architectures and hardware platforms. For
on-premises installations it is highly recommended that customers leverage pre-configured Kahu
nodes that are burned-in and optimized. Lightcrest maintains a variety of Kahu reference architectures
that are tailored for specific horizontals and SBUs throughout the enterprise.
Hardware is typically sourced from commodity vendors and includes leading edge
technologies such as:
Lightcrest Kahu Compute | © 2015 Lightcrest LLC | December 2015 | www.lightcrest.com
4
Kahu Compute: Make Private Cloud Painless
• Ultra-redundant DOMs for control plane availability
• Bonded 10G ethernet controllers
• High Density SSD/Flash Storage
• Multi-core Processors (Intel Xeon, 64-bit ARM)
• High Density DDR RAM
• Cryptographic Accelerators and Custom FPGA coprocessors.
Kahu Control Plane
KCP (Kahu Control Plane) drives each Kahu node and provides the control plane and associated
runtime for the Kahu Compute Fabric. KCP supports multiple architectures and provides for selfdiscovery once the node is brought online. As soon as a Kahu node is lit on the network, it locates its
neighbors and builds an internal map of the fabric from its vantage point.
KCP provides:
• Core hypervisor management and self-discovery
• Highly-available REST API for automation and programmatic deployment
• Ultra-fast Web UI for one-click deploys and fabric-wide administration
• Multi-tenancy and multiple Authentication/Authorization schemes
• Self-healing fabric and High Availability
KCP provides the foundational software for delivering, discovering, healing, and administrating virtual
networks, systems, and storage abstractions across the Kahu Fabric.
Kahu Compute
Kahu Compute facilities provide users with VM orchestration and granular hypervisor control. KCP
coordinates and schedules VMs on appropriate hypervisors based on a custom policies, allowing
customers to do rack-local deployments for ultra-low-latency applications. Customers gain reduced
time-to-deployment and multi-tenant capabilities that allow internal IT and development teams to
virtually eliminate the traditional procurement cycle.
Kahu Compute includes:
• Fastest VM boot times in the industry (< 10 seconds for certified images)
• Advanced scheduling and resource placement algorithms
• VM affinity for rack-local and ultra low-latency applications
Lightcrest Kahu Compute | © 2015 Lightcrest LLC | December 2015 | www.lightcrest.com
5
Kahu Compute: Make Private Cloud Painless
• VM profiling for one-click deploys of entire application and data tiers
• CPU and Memory Hotplugging
• Live VM Migration
Kahu Compute is the one of the key drivers behind the superior economics of an on-premises
Kahu Fabric.
Kahu SDN (Software Defined Network)
The Kahu SDN (Software Defined Network) makes it easy to define and deploy virtual network
infrastructure across your compute fabric. And since Kahu SDN provides Network Function
Virtualization (NFV), you can eliminate costly network appliances such as load balancers and firewalls,
and spin up the same functionality within your fabric without the marginal costs.
Key cases includes:
• Compliant and Secure Multi-tenant Clouds
• Virtual Firewalls and VPN Concentrators
• Virtual Load Balancers and Reverse Proxies
• Virtual Caching Nodes and Content Accelerators
With Kahu SDN, you can manage complex networks without networking experts. Since Kahu
encapsulate traffics at the hypervisor level, users can spin up multiple networks with overlapping IP
space, and maintain complete isolation from one another. Users never have to worry about IP conflicts
or maintaining IP inventory. Anyone with authorized access and a web browser can immediately
deploy multi-VLAN, multi-net environments with specific QoS policies. Once the networks are brought
up, virtual network devices such as Load Balancers and Firewalls can be spun up on an ad-hoc basis.
And since Kahu offloads network complexity to the hypervisors (and away from the switch fabric),
customers need less expensive switching and can avoid vendor lock-in at the access layer. As Kahu
is deployed throughout the environment, network costs drop both in terms of equipment capex and
operational maintenance.
Kahu Nodes are architected for usability in any network, immediately upon turn-up. If your order from
Lightcrest included a prefabricated network, your Kahu cluster will ship with a redundant Layer 2
fabric that is pre-integrated.
Lightcrest Kahu Compute | © 2015 Lightcrest LLC | December 2015 | www.lightcrest.com
6
Kahu Compute: Make Private Cloud Painless
Kahu Storage
Kahu Nodes are packed with redundant SSD storage, allowing you to architect your cloud
without the constraints of ephemeral storage or networked block devices. Self-healing scale-out
storage can be deployed on top of the Kahu Fabric, leveraging Kahu Nodes as redundant storage
pools that can be used for virtual disks and network attached storage for standard protocols such
as iSCSI, NFS, and CIFS.
The storage implementation in the Kahu Fabric allows for:
• Ultra-redundant control plane. Control plane stays up regardless of disk failures
• High-performance SSDs for non-ephemeral virtual disks
• Quick shipment of storage and snapshots from one Kahu Node to another
• Dead-simple management of VM snapshots
By leveraging storage in Kahu, you can maintain your storage infrastructure via the same UI and REST
APIs as your compute infrastructure, increasing efficiencies and reducing or eliminating the need for
costly SAN infrastructure.
Kahu provides immediate leverage.
Leveraging Kahu can reduce your datacenter TCO by upwards of 60%, and increase operational
efficiency by empowering your staff to spend less time managing infrastructure and more time
building product.
If your technology infrastructure is critical to your business, you need a platform that empowers
your team to outperform the competition. So get rid of the cloud consultants; slash your costs, and
transform your datacenter from a cost center to a profit center with Kahu Compute Fabric.
Contact Us Now.
Sales: [email protected] | Web: www.lightcrest.com | Tel: 1-888-320-8495 Ext #1
Lightcrest Kahu Compute | © 2015 Lightcrest LLC | December 2015 | www.lightcrest.com
7