Cisco Cisco Intercloud Fabric for Provider Libro blanco
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Switches the network traffic between cloud virtual machines and the private cloud network
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Applies network policies and collects and reports VEM-related statistics
Intercloud Fabric Agent
The intercloud fabric agent (ICA) provides the network overlay for the virtual machines in the cloud. The agent is
deployed in the provider cloud virtual machines as a secure tunnel driver.
The agent provides the following functions:
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Establishes a secure tunnel to connect cloud virtual machines to the intercloud fabric switch
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Collects secure overlay-related statistics
E-Business Application Overview
Rapid changes in e-commerce application requirements make designing a data center to meet these requirements
a challenge. Several factors influence capacity planning decisions, but the following two factors make determining
the amount of capacity needed almost impossible:
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Unpredictable seasonal increases in customer load: for example, increased load during holiday seasons
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Unexpected product successes, resulting in unforeseen increased customer demand
Although not an optimal approach, increased seasonable demand can be managed by overprovisioning the
computing and storage resources to handle the projected load spikes. Unanticipated customer demand due to
factors such as product success, however, requires the IT department to not only acquire but also configure and
deploy computing and storage resources in a very short time, making the deployment financially stressful and
potentially prone to operational errors.
Both these aspects of e-commerce make an e-business application an excellent candidate for a hybrid cloud
environment. An e-business application can be deployed on premises with adequate resources to support typical
customer demand. For occasional (seasonal or otherwise) and unexpected load spikes, one or more tiers of the
application can be deployed (or burst) in the public cloud. To make this solution operationally viable, you can use
Cisco Intercloud Fabric to provide the communication between the various application tiers.
To demonstrate the applicability of Cisco Intercloud Fabric in an e-commerce environment, an open source
application called osCommerce Online Merchant was configured and deployed across private and public clouds.
osCommerce is an open-source e-business application providing customers with the features and tools required to
setup an e-commerce site in a short time. osCommerce contains both a catalog front end and an administration
tool back end that can be installed and configured through a web-based installation procedure (Figure 2).
osCommerce Online Merchant is built with the PHP web scripting language and uses the MySQL database server
for storing data.
Although osCommerce Online Merchant can be installed on any web server with PHP installed and with access to
a database server, a typical installation includes the following:
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One CentOS server running Apache and PHP modules acting as a web front end and catalog server
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A second CentOS server running the MySQL database and used for authentication and as a data source