Availability considerations for mission critical applications in the cloud

Cloud environments offer flexibility, elasticity, and low cost compute infrastructure. Enterprise-level workloads - such as SAP and Oracle workloads - require infrastructure with high availability, clustering, or physical server appliances. These features are often not part of a typical cloud offering, and as a result, businesses are forced to run enterprise workloads in their legacy environments. To enable enterprise customers to use these workloads in a cloud, we enabled a large number of SAP and Oracle workloads in the IBM Cloud Managed Services (CMS) for both virtualized and non-virtualized cloud environments. In this paper, we discuss the challenges in enabling enterprise class applications in the cloud based on our experience on providing a diverse set of platforms implemented in the IBM CMS offering.