Automate to dramatically reduce private cloud deployment

Infoblox has found that automation of core network services such as DNS, DHCP and IP addresses, can reduce the deployment time for virtual machines in a VM private cloud by 62%.

Private cloud growth is being seen as organisations move mission-critical applications to private cloud solutions. However, network setup can be hindered by manual processes, which may cause delays.

Research commissioned by Infoblox and conducted by the Tolly Group, measured the time required for discovering, tracking, provisioning and destroying VMs with IP addresses and DNS records in VMware private cloud, comparing manual processes to Infoblox’s automated solution.

Kevin Tolly, founder of Tolly Group, said: "Today, network configuration tasks for private cloud are labor intensive, prone to error, and ultimately don’t keep pace with other cloud automation tasks."

"Simply put, manual tasks and processes such as creating networks, assigning and tracking IP addresses, and provisioning DNS records is a major bottleneck."

"While server and storage parameters can be configured and spun up in minutes, network setup tasks can take hours or days."

"Solutions such as Infoblox Cloud Network Automation close the gap to enable faster, more reliable deployment of cloud environments and overall improvement in IT agility."

Using the automated process showed that the time to inventory, create, and destroy 500 VMs per week, dropped from 42 hours to 16.

Discovering network information for 20 existing VMs dropped from 17 minutes to 45 seconds, while finding available IP addresses when all addresses in a typical subnet are taken dropped from 2 minutes to 30 seconds.

Arya Barirani, vice president of product marketing at Infoblox, said: "While many organizations understand the value of network automation in private cloud deployments, it’s been a challenge to quantify the benefit."

"Tolly Group did an excellent job in conducting a set of sophisticated tests to show the time and cost impacts and how network automation is essential to private cloud and next-gen data center deployments."