Deutsche Bank awarded cloud computing prize
Deutsche Bank awarded cloud computing prize
A private cloud system designed for Deutsche Bank has won the Open Data Center Alliance's 'Conquering the Cloud' competition.
The Ultra Low Cost Developer Service is built inside a shipping container and the initial hardware consists of just four server racks, but together they have the potential to host up to 2,000 virtual machines.
This infrastructure-as-a-service platform will allow system administrators to easily adapt the IT networks for individuals and groups with relative easy thanks to its integration into the bank's Active Directory identity management system. Through this, administrators can manage individual's access rights with minimum effort.
Alistair McLaurin, lead cloud computing architect at Deutsche Bank's competition submission, observed that this design is “a huge aid to reducing the system administrators overhead”.
He added: “The fact that users have one centrally managed account for all systems means that only one account needs to be disabled when they leave. For audit log monitoring, one single identity means a user's activity can be easily tracked across many systems, even short lived virtual machines.”
The competition judges noted that the design and method of the bank's system deserved to win because they “not only demonstrate true innovation, but also provide a clear and concise approach to deploy and measure cloud success”.
They added that the most important factor in its achievement was that it could be “emulated by other organisations looking to implement effective cloud computing solutions”.
When Deutsche Bank's system goes live later this month, it will be able to run up to 2,000 VMs at any one time, each of which is available for development in Microsoft, Unix, Solaris and Linux environments.
In addition to streamlining the bank's IT, the new cloud system will cut costs. This is done by having flexible data repositories to protect and manage applications, rather than providing automated backup. The end-user costs are also cheaper than running a dedicated PC for development for each developer.
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