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(iomart) has made every effort to ensure the accuracy of all
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This Document is Copyright © 2013 iomart Group Plc
Prepared for: GCloud
Organisation: GCloud
Prepared by:
Contact Telephone:
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Author: Anne Bennett
Email: anne.bennett@iomart.com
Contact Telephone: 0207 448 4602
Anne Bennett
0207 448 4602
anne.bennett@iomart.com
11-21 Paul Street, London, EC2A 4JU
March 2013
IOM/AHB/GCloud - vCloud
2
Contents
Overview – iomart vCloud ............................................................................................................ 4
Iomart vCloud Features ................................................................................................................ 4
Technical Features ....................................................................................................................... 5
Security ................................................................................................................................................ 6
vShield Edge ........................................................................................................................................ 7
Storage ................................................................................................................................................ 8
Cloud Backup ....................................................................................................................................... 8
Bandwidth ........................................................................................................................................... 8
Licensing...................................................................................................................................... 9
Connectivity ................................................................................................................................ 9
Iomart vCloud Control .................................................................................................................. 9
Service Management Details ...................................................................................................... 10
Pricing ....................................................................................................................................... 11
Monitoring & Support ................................................................................................................ 12
Information Assurance ............................................................................................................... 13
Ordering and invoicing process................................................................................................... 13
Service lead time ....................................................................................................................... 13
On-boarding and Off-boarding ................................................................................................... 13
Termination terms ..................................................................................................................... 13
Service Credits ........................................................................................................................... 13
Service migration ....................................................................................................................... 13
Consumer responsibilities .......................................................................................................... 14
Trial Services.............................................................................................................................. 14
Author: Anne Bennett
Email: anne.bennett@iomart.com
Contact Telephone: 0207 448 4602
3
Overview – iomart vCloud
Iomart vCloud is a hosted environment which offers ‘commodity’ infrastructure services with clear,
transparent pricing, flexibility and elasticity. The service is centred around provision of a VMware
vCloud environment hosted in iomart’s London data centre. This environment gives customers the
flexibility to scale services up and down, paying for agile, commodity hosting that is capable of
supporting a full range of high volume customer-facing online applications.
Iomart has created the virtual environment using vCloud technology from VMware– we have found
that the functionality and resilience of this leading virtualisation technology offers a well-defined
path to future technology improvements and innovation, which our customers can benefit from.
The vCloud service is based on the premise that the customer has the resources and ability to
manage the environment themselves. If required, Iomart can provide management of the
environment, as we do for all our ‘private cloud’ environments - management fees would be
chargeable in addition to the costs for the ‘raw’ computing service that is proposed and costed in
this document.
Iomart vCloud Features
When you want more control of your infrastructure, but don’t want either the expense of building
your own platform, or the hassle of managing the underlying architecture, vCloud provides the
answer. vCloud bridges the gap between providing your own infrastructure and simply purchasing a
number of virtual machines; quite simply, with Iomart’s vCloud service, you purchase infrastructure
to build your own cloud solution.
Adopting our vCloud proposition allows you to be more agile, with a flexible approach, providing
“resources on demand”. You have the choice to place any of your workloads in the optimal location
(a private or compatible public cloud) while fully retaining the ability to move workloads between or
Author: Anne Bennett
Email: anne.bennett@iomart.com
Contact Telephone: 0207 448 4602
4
across private and public cloud infrastructure—leveraging a hybrid cloud environment to achieve
improved business agility and cost control.
Technical Features
The vCloud platform is architected from a number of components which include:
VMware vSphere:
VMware vSphere has set the standard as the most robust, reliable and complete virtualisation
platform. Deployed in the most demanding data centres around the world, VMware vSphere now
forms the foundation for building cloud infrastructures for customers across all industries and
service providers alike.
VMware vCloud Director:
VMware vCloud Director builds upon the VMware vSphere foundation and exposes virtualised
shared infrastructure as multi-tenant virtual data centres that are completely decoupled from the
underlying hardware and isolated from one another. This enables you to access the cloud service in
a cost-effective way, leveraging self-service catalogues to deploy and consume pre-configured
services with the click of a button.
VMware vShield™:
VMware vCloud Director also leverages VMware vShield security technologies, which allow you to
maintain security and control over your cloud services with policy-based user controls and network
security that scales dynamically across your cloud environment.
You can leverage the benefits of vCloud Director and vShield in a vCloud Powered cloud service even
if you have not yet deployed it in your on-premise data centre.
The bottom line is spare infrastructure and capacity, without the expense, complexity, and risk of
physical infrastructure, and scalable without practical limit.
Author: Anne Bennett
Email: anne.bennett@iomart.com
Contact Telephone: 0207 448 4602
5
Security
With VMware solutions, the virtual infrastructure can be secured and continuously monitored for
compliance drift. The “vShield App” enables security-trust-zone policies to be applied on the vCenter
clusters backing vCloud to protect and control traffic to governed groups of virtual machines.
VMware vCenter Configuration Manager also enables continuous monitoring of the virtual
environment to detect potential incidents and failures that can take the environment out of
compliance.
VMware builds security and compliance solutions deep in the foundation of the hypervisor and
management solutions:
Simplicity – VMware gives one security and compliance framework, consistent across your own
environment and the cloud. Reduce the number of firewall policies you need to manage, and assign
management teams based on their training, not the location of the resources they manage.
Strength – VMware security and firewall protection is built into vSphere and vCloud infrastructure from
the hypervisor level up, with agentless solutions that let users focus on trust zones and applications, not
applying policies server by server, or coping with storms of Antivirus alerts.
Automation – VMware automates compliance processes for simplicity and ease of management,
constantly checking for exceptions – like a protected workload moved to a non-compliant environment –
and applying policy-driven, automated remediation
Author: Anne Bennett
Email: anne.bennett@iomart.com
Contact Telephone: 0207 448 4602
6
vShield Edge
vShield Edge is an edge network security solution for virtual datacentres. It provides essential
security capabilities such as network security gateway services and Web load balancing for
performance and availability. The solution plugs directly into vSphere and leverages built-in features
such as fault tolerance and high availability for unparalleled resilience.
vShield Edge integrates seamlessly with vCenter to facilitate unified security management for virtual
data centres. vShield Edge also works in concert with vCloud™ Director to automate and accelerate
the secure provisioning of virtual data centres in multitenant cloud infrastructures. Separation of
duties for security and virtual infrastructure administrators limits access only to authorised
resources.
Deployed as a virtual appliance, vShield Edge provides firewall, VPN, Web load balancer, network
address translation (NAT) and DHCP services to monitor packet headers for source and destination IP
addresses. Depending on policy, it can deny or allow connections, initiate and terminate VPN
sessions, perform network address translation, or inspect data by source or destination port and
protocol type (TCP or UDP).
 Consolidate edge security hardware – vShield Edge allows customers to provision edge security
services using existing vSphere resources, eliminating the need for edge security hardware to
“air-gap” vSphere hosts.
 Rapidly and securely provision virtual data centre perimeters – vShield Edge allows organisations
to easily create secure, logical, hardware-independent perimeters (“edges”) around virtual data
centre environments, making it easier to leverage shared network resources in multitenant IT
infrastructures.
Author: Anne Bennett
Email: anne.bennett@iomart.com
Contact Telephone: 0207 448 4602
7
 Protect data confidentiality over shared networks – vShield Edge provides site-to-site VPN with
256-bit encryption to protect the confidentiality of all data transmitted across virtual data centre
perimeters.
 Ensure performance and availability of Web services – vShield Edge efficiently manages inbound
Web traffic across virtual machine clusters and includes Web load balancing capabilities that
customers can deploy with edge security, or separately.
Storage
Ensuring that the processing power and memory is available addresses part of the problem, but a
major bottle neck with most cloud offerings is the disk performance. Iomart has addressed this issue
by investing in a high performance Virtual SAN. All physical machines are attached by Fibre Channel
to an EMC “VNX” SAN fabric utilising EMC’s Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST).
This system automatically moves active data to high performance storage tiers and inactive data to
low cost/high capacity storage tiers. The result is higher performance, lower costs, and a denser
footprint than conventional systems. With FAST, enterprise flash drives increase application
performance by up to 800 per cent, and SATA disk drives lower costs by up to 80 per cent. The SAN
also uses advanced striping and caching techniques to ensure all attached Virtual Machines receive
the maximum performance with no impact from other machines in the cluster.
There is also the provision for dedicated 7,200rpm storage when disk speed is not essential. Storage
will be allocated as required.
Cloud Backup
The backup requirement will be met by the use of iomart Cloud Backup. Iomart Cloud Backup is an
intelligent solution for both physical and virtual environments with application aware agents
deployed to each server backing up centrally to a secure system. The key difference is that each item
of data is only backed up once. This means that during the backup window only changes are stored.
Each item of data that is backed up is written to an array of storage servers that ensure fault
tolerance, reliability and performance.
This approach allows for both granular and full backups and restores of critical data with the ability
to restore either individual files or entire systems. Cloud Backup never backs up the same data twice
allowing a highly efficient and scalable solution to meet the customer’s needs.
This cost effective solution is charged on a ‘per GB protected’ basis.
Bandwidth
Flexible Bandwidth will be provided on a fully burstable basis via a 100Mbps port to iomart’s
redundant Gigabit network. This means that at peak times a customer can burst above any
bandwidth provision ensuring that there are no delays for users.
Author: Anne Bennett
Email: anne.bennett@iomart.com
Contact Telephone: 0207 448 4602
8
iomart provides fully burstable fixed bandwidth in 1Mbps increments, and the competitive pricing of
this option means that a customer can have ample bandwidth to account for spikes in traffic.
Bandwidth usage is charged on the 95th percentile basis, whereby we take off the top 5% of traffic
(burst) across the month prior to measuring bandwidth utilisation.
.
Licensing
If required, iomart can provide Operating System licences and a wide range of other licensing under
our Service Provider Licensing Agreement (SPLA). This allows us to provide licences on a ‘rental’ basis
with fixed monthly charges.
Connectivity
Connecting the iomart data centres is a 20 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) fibre ring which provides
resilience and diversity to minimise the impact of a single transit failure. Three peering sites across
this ring provide 10Gbit uplinks to our transit providers; Tiscali, Interoute, Cogent, and Teleglobe and
iomart also maintains private peering connections with LONAP and LINX.
All of our networking exchange hardware is housed in on-site dedicated cabinets. Each data centre
network hub houses a Cisco Catalyst 7600-series modular switch, dual power supplies and a range of
7600-series fabric-enabled line cards to support both multiple fibre and copper gigabit connections.
Automatic systems constantly monitor our entire network, transit links and servers. In the event of
any problem, our data centre NOC teams are on site 24 hours a day. iomart holds on-site spares for
critical equipment which powers our network to assist us in ensuring that we maintain our 100%
uptime guarantee.
Iomart vCloud Control
The iomart vCloud harnesses the power of vCloud Director to leverage a policy-driven approach to
provisioning that embeds software-defined security and resource consumption controls so that preconfigured IT policies are automatically enforced. vCloud Director integrates network edge security
into virtual data centres so that organisation administrators can directly configure and deploy
gateway security services. Single-Sign-On enables SAML tokens generated by any identity provider to
be used to login to vCloud Director.
Beyond security, vCloud Director enables authorised consumption using a flexible role-based access
control model that enables different users to have different levels of functional access within vCloud
Director. Quotas, leases, and limits can also be set to limit consumption that exceeds prescribed
boundaries. Integration with VMware vCenter Chargeback Manager enables consumption within
vCloud Director to be fully accounted for both showback visibility and chargeback billing.
VMware vCloud Director pools infrastructure resources across clusters into policy-based virtual data
centres, integrating with existing vSphere deployments and extending capabilities such as VMware
Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch. VMware vCloud
Author: Anne Bennett
Email: anne.bennett@iomart.com
Contact Telephone: 0207 448 4602
9
Director provides elastic compute, storage and networking interfaces across clusters and by logically
pooling infrastructure capacity into virtual data centres. Service Management can manage resources
more efficiently by separating the consumption and delivery of IT services.
Service Management Details
iomart assigns an Account and Technical Manager to each client. Our approach to Account
Management has been developed to provide a value added service to our customers. Account
Managers are focused on developing relationships, understanding each customer’s strategic goals
and supporting them in the achievement of their objectives. By understanding the demands placed
on the organisation and the business drivers we are able to identify and recommend solutions that
support customers in the achievement of those objectives.
The Account Manager is also a single point of contact for any requirements or escalations, ensuring
any issues are dealt with seamlessly and effectively.
Author: Anne Bennett
Email: anne.bennett@iomart.com
Contact Telephone: 0207 448 4602
10
Pricing
The following costs will apply:
Item
Description
Cost per
month (£)
Core vCloud costs
vCloud Service
Processor/CPU per GHz
15.00
vCloud Service
RAM per GB
10.00
Storage – Fast (SAS)
Per GB
0.70
Storage – Standard (SATA)
Per GB
0.35
Bandwidth
Provision
of
fully
burstable
bandwidth, via 100Mbps port
Per 1Mbps
20.00
0.70
Management & Monitoring
Iomart Cloud Backup Service
– per GB
Tier 1
Management & Monitoring
Tier 2
65.00
Operating System
Linux CentOS
0.00
Operating System
10.00
Operating System
Microsoft Windows Server – Std
Edition.
Red Hat – Small Virtual (Up to 4vCPU)
Operating System
Red Hat – Large Virtual (Over 4vCPU)
80.00
Software
Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Std
Edition (min 4 Core)
130.00
Additional Services
Backup
Incl
35.00
Iomart vCloud - One off Provisioning Fee
Full deployment of the iomart vCloud environment in conjunction with
the customer requirement.
£249.00
All costs are based on a minimum one month contract.
All costs exclude VAT
Author: Anne Bennett
Email: anne.bennett@iomart.com
Contact Telephone: 0207 448 4602
11
Monitoring & Support
Support is offered on a 24x7 basis by technical staff who are located in iomart data centres in
London, Nottingham, Glasgow and Maidenhead.
The following table outlines the structure of the iomart Support team.
Role
Typical Skills
NOC Engineers
All NOC requests. Server deployments, data centre
maintenance and monitoring, client and contractor access
requests and supervision, Remote Hands tasks. Attending to
all Iomart internal monitoring and maintenance systems
relating to client service delivery and data centre
management.
Experience of Windows, Linux and Network Administration.
Systems Engineer (Level 1)
1st line support escalations and customer deployments.
Significant Microsoft and Linux system administration
experience. Progress to vendor specific experience and
qualifications such as Microsoft MCE program, Cisco CCNA,
VMWare etc.
Systems Engineer (Level 2)
2nd line support escalations and bespoke customer
deployments/service migrations.
Microsoft, Linux and Network Systems Administrators with
certified professional qualifications. Additional vendor
specific experience and certifications including Solaris, Cisco,
VMWare, EMC, Hitachi and others.
Technical Support Managers
(Level 3)
Level 3 escalations and principal contacts for supplier,
incident, change, and problem management. Role also
includes project management of complex deployments and
pre-sales/ongoing consultancy.
iomart offers two layers of engineering support. The first layer covers generic system administration
skills with the second layer covering specialist areas such as VMware, Network Security and SAN
Administration. These two layers are book-cased by on-site data centre engineers at one end
offering Remote Hands services and a Senior Technical Management team at the other. iomart
ensures that key members of each support service layer are trained and certified via official vendor
courses.
Network Operation Centres in London, Glasgow and Maidenhead cross monitor all data centres and
hosted infrastructure.
Author: Anne Bennett
Email: anne.bennett@iomart.com
Contact Telephone: 0207 448 4602
12
Information Assurance
Impact Level (IL) at which iomart vCloud is accredited to hold and process information - Suitable for
IL0, IL1, IL2 data.
All iomart data centres are located in the UK and are ISO9001 and ISO27001 accredited.
Ordering and invoicing process
Upon receipt of a completed Sales Order form, iomart will deploy the required service.
Billing for the service is monthly, with a minimum contract term of one month.
Payment can be via Direct Debit or BACS transfer.
Service lead time
New iomart vCloud customers are typically deployed within two working days from order. Shorter
deployment times may be available and prioritised upon request.
Existing customers are able to deploy additional resources via the Cloud Control Panel.
On-boarding and Off-boarding
Once the deployment is completed, account and access details are sent to the Account contact
nominated by the customer. The service will then be ready for configuration and deployment by the
customer.
When use of the server ends, the customer will be able to export the data before the service is
terminated.
Termination terms
At the point of termination, all data, accounts and access will be permanently deleted, and will not
be able to be recovered or restored.
It is the responsibility of the customer to remove all data prior to termination..
There are no termination costs for this Service.
Service Credits
iomart offers guaranteed service levels on network availability, power, data centre environmental
conditions and support. In the unlikely event that we do not meet our stated levels we will credit
your account.
Service migration
iomart allows existing virtual machine images built using VMware to be migrated to the platform.
Author: Anne Bennett
Email: anne.bennett@iomart.com
Contact Telephone: 0207 448 4602
13
Consumer responsibilities
The control and management of access is the responsibility of the Customer Administrator.
Some elements of billing (based on usage) may be variable.
The customer is responsible for ensuring only appropriate data is stored and processed by
applications on this environment and that they abide by iomart’s Acceptable Usage Policy.
.
Trial Services
Iomart offers customers a one month free trial of the service prior to contract.
__________________________________________________________________________________
Author: Anne Bennett
Email: anne.bennett@iomart.com
Contact Telephone: 0207 448 4602
14