Cloud Computing:
Theirs, Mine and Ours
Belinda G. Watkins, VP EIS - Network Computing
FedEx Services
March 11, 2011
Cloud Computing: Definitions
• Wikipedia: computation, software, data access, and storage services that do not
require end-user knowledge of the physical location and configuration of the system
that delivers the services.
• Robert Carter, CIO of FedEx:”general purpose computing”. The ability to connect
servers, networking, and storage that are “workload agnostic”
– Jobs can shuffled around among company computers so machines are used as efficiently as
possible
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Cloud Computing: Public
Cloud Computing:Theirs, Mine and Ours
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Cloud Computing: Theirs
Benefits
• Generally lower cost for smaller footprints
• Speed to implementation
• Minimizes development and operations staff
• Allows IT to focus on company differentiators
• Standardizes business process with best in class approaches
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Cloud Computing: Theirs
CloudX.com
• FedEx Use
– Customer Relationship Management
• Single interface for:
– Sales Contacts
– Sales Calls
– Sales Pipeline
– Sales Leads Status
– Opportunities
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Integration of Global CXDC with FedEx
Global access is secure via VPN from within FedEx thru regional proxy servers
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Integration of Wireless CXDC with FedEx
Wireless and BB access and synchronization leverages the existing infrastructure.
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Data Movement Design
CLOUD
Hot Side Firewall
HTTPS Encrypted
Common Cloud
System Interface
(CCSI)
Cold Side Firewall
Firewall & proxy
SFTP
From/To IT File Servers
Batch
Interface
ETL Server
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Overall Project Timeline
The global rollout will service 7,700+ users.
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Cloud Computing: Theirs
Considerations:
• Community involvement during vendor evaluation
• Get Business, IT, InfoSec, Sourcing and Legal engaged as early as possible
• Understand what technology will be used in the cloud
• Identify system limitations, particularly our volumes and their capabilities
• Be firm with the Service Level Agreement
• Throttles are imposed in a multi tenant environment.
• Everything has a cost, regardless of location
• Plan on spending more resources on infrastructure and development than you think
• The cloud tests environment capacity limits
• Understand how much data transformation the vendor is capable of performing
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Cloud Computing: Theirs
Advise:
• Approach a cloud solution like a major ERP implementation
• Understand Legal and Information Security requirements
• Validate SLAs in terms of performance and uptime
• Question maturity of Data Exchanges between clouds
• May require ETL efforts for Integration with other systems or cloud
solutions
• Forced upgrades exist in most cloud solutions
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Cloud Computing: Mine
HDS
FedEx’s Hosted Database Services (HDS) is a set of standard
hardware, software, and processes that provide OLTP database
functionality that is:





Homogeneous and predictable
Low cost
Pre-provisioned
Highly available and scalable
Able to support 90% or more of FedEx Services’
OLTP database needs
We will re-host approximately 400 databases in 5 data centers onto this
standard architecture.
Cloud Computing:Theirs, Mine and Ours
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Slide 12
Approach
Migrate OLTP database workloads onto Oracle RAC (Real Application
Clusters) running on Red Hat Linux v5.4
Scale out large workloads by expanding clusters to more nodes
Stack smaller databases together to achieve economies of scale
Take advantage of this extreme standardization to provide better service
at a lower cost
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HDS is based on the RAC Database
Architecture
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Overall Technical Architecture
Thin JDBC
connections
from apps are
first routed
through an OID
layer which
directs the
connection to
the proper
cluster and
node
Small DB
schemas
stacked on
4-node
clusters
Application server layer
Oracle Internet Directory (OID)
High-volume apps use
connections with node
affinity, making
maximum use of local
cache
Larger DBsCloud
on 15
Slide
Computing:Theirs, Mine and Ours
their own 4-to-8
node clusters
HDS DB clusters
SAN uses Oracle’s ASM for
03/11/2011volume management
Cloud Computing: Mine
Design Features

Automated Service Level Agreements



HDS provides agreed-upon throughput and storage to the
application
The application does not exceed transaction rates,
connection, or storage requirements
Stacking of Multiple Schemas per Cluster



Security, space, backup, and recovery all managed at the
Schema level
Enabled by the use of Oracle Services
One database per cluster; multiple schemas per database
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Cloud Computing: Mine
Design Features


Connection Abstraction

The application need not know where the DB server is located,
who he is stacked with, how many nodes he is running on

Enabled by Oracle Internet Directory (OID)

“Private cloud” computing
Rehosting

By use of DB replication (Oracle’s Goldengate), schemas can be
relocated

Maintenance and upgrades can be done with near-zero downtime
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Cloud Computing: Mine
What’s Different for the Developer?
• Application will connect to the database using Oracle
Services
• The HDS database clusters will use GMT time
• We need to test failover in the clustered environment
• Larger database workloads will perform better if using
node affinity
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Cloud Computing: Mine
Results To Date
• 70 database schemas migrated onto 17 RAC clusters
• Our default cluster size is 4 nodes
• We will be stacking deeper, as our utilization on these 17
clusters is below 20%
• COTS software remains a challenge
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Cloud Computing:
Theirs, Mine and Ours
Thank you!