Key product concepts

ThinkAgile CP provides access to the virtual representations of your tightly integrated compute, storage, and network hardware components in the cloud; it enables you to provision, manage, and control your hardware. You easily and securely connect to the ThinkAgile CP Cloud Controller (web portal) by logging in with two-factor authentication. You do not need to connect to the hardware stack directly, only to the portal.

Before you begin using ThinkAgile CP, it is important that you understand key product concepts, which will help you to organize and properly allocate resources for deploying your applications and virtual datacenters (VDCs).

• Storage concepts
  In the ThinkAgile CP Cloud Controller, storage consists of storage blocks and storage pools.
• Compute concepts
  Compute resources include compute nodes, which are housed in compute blocks. Compute nodes can be filtered through compute categories and tags. They can also be grouped into migration zones for use by application instances.
• Networking Concepts
  When creating and deploying applications, you will select the network mode as either VLAN or VNET. ThinkAgile CP allows infrastructure admin users to take advantage of existing virtual LANs (VLANs) or create new VLANs for use in the ThinkAgile CP stack. They can also set up virtual networks (VNETs) for deploying applications. Each vNIC on an application instance can be configured to use any VLAN or virtual network that has access to the virtual datacenter where the application instance is deployed.
• Application concepts
  Application instances are deployed to provide functions for a user. The instances can be generated from templates, which can be downloaded from the Lenovo Cloud Marketplace and stored in a template store (at the organization level or at the VDC level).
• Virtual datacenters
  In your ThinkAgile CP infrastructure, applications are deployed in virtual datacenters. A virtual datacenter (VDC) is a logical grouping of compute and storage resources allocated from one or more migration zones and one or more storage pools, usually to a business unit in an organization. In the ThinkAgile CP environment, the virtual datacenter is the ultimate organizing construct to manage allocations and give you visibility into your infrastructure.
• User roles
  ThinkAgile CP offers role-based access control and access management for administrators of the ThinkAgile CP Cloud Controller. ThinkAgile CP uses the construct of virtual datacenters as partitions to abstract away hardware, networks, storage, and capacity into logical groups of resources. VDC manager users and VDC viewer users are granted access to resources in each virtual datacenter. Infrastructure admin users can apportion resources of the private cloud into virtual datacenters and delegate administration rights and privileges to those virtual datacenters.
• Security and compliance
  Security is a critical integral component of ThinkAgile CP. Our security approach helps our customers alleviate the burden of worrying about security so that they can focus on creating and consuming applications that drive business strategy.