Subscribe


White Papers

Free IDC Vendor Spotlight

Converged Infrastructue And Today's Buisness Needs

download now
Demo & Video
Untitled Document

Introduction to Converged Infrastructure Video

Product Overview

On The Virtues of (IT) Simplicity
Posted October,07,2009 by Ken Oestreich
Everybody's talking about IT infrastructure/operations simplification, but only a few are taking concrete action to do something about it. So consider two views of simplification: (1) simplification at the "modular building-block" scale, and (2) simplification at the management/operations scale. Egenera's customers have been driving us on both of these issues, hence our announcement of a number of recent wins -- across a variety of industries -- which endorse our chosen approach. Follows are some concrete areas where we've focused our energies: On simpler modular building blocks: Working alongside Dell, we recently announced the Dell PAN Datacenter-in-a-Box. While I admit the name may not be as elegant as the product, it takes the most frequent configuration needs, and bundles them all with a mission-critical level of availability.  It's essentially a standard blade enclosure with standard networking HW and standard SAN storage... complete with embedded virtualization (if you choose to use), fast server provisioning, and N+1 high-availability for any blade running any workload. And it takes < 1 day to install and have up-and-running. So if you're installing, say, an ERP system, here's what you should think: I'll run my scale-out DBs native, I'll virtualize app servers and other services (using the VM of your choice), and I'll wrap the entire environment (Including VLANs, embedded Load Balancing etc etc) with an N+1failover safety-net.  And you only have to buy a single item. Or, for example, if you're rolling-out a new VDI environment, you'll want to run controllers, presentation servers and virtualized O/S instances all within a highly-available environment with local storage and HA. Again, a perfect use for a building-block approach to adding new services to your datacenter. Elegant idea you say? But isn't this just the equivalent of throwing a bunch of piece-parts together with a bow? Nope. Read on.... On Simplification of management & operations So the next challenge is to simplify the more granular aspect of datacenter management - all of those pesky point-products you have to integrate, page between, and keep updated.  The diagram here illustrates what I'm talking about... as many as 13 products are needed if you're in a reasonably sophisticated org managing both physical and virtual servers in a production environment. The approach customers tasked Egenera with is to simplify operations and to make architecture more elegant.  So we sought to understand why these 13 products have been traditionally needed, and then how we can re-design providing these in a simplified, holistic, and unified manner.  The solution was our PAN Manager software that allows configuration and deployment of all of these functions in about 6 steps.  That's essentially 1 product with 1 window to provide these 13 functions. Don't believe things could really be this simple?  Just read about our customers, the value they've derived, and what they have to say. They're running production data centers in every industry, worldwide.

Leave a Reply