Egenera Blog

Yogi Berra said it, Cisco just reconfirmed it.

Reviewing Cisco’s much-leaked, and much hyped announcement of Project California was like a trip down memory lane.

Blade Form Factor - Check!

Unified Fabric for IP and Storage traffic - Check!

Management Console - Check!

Integration with Virtual Machine Management - Check!

Sounds oh so PAN like to me. If imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery, then we at Egenera feel very flattered.

OK, so I’m being a bit facetious today, but can you blame me? Cisco is bringing to market the very architecture that Egenera created over 8 years ago. In some regards, it’s great to see Cisco validate the PAN architecture and put their muscle behind pushing this in to the enterprise. It is the right architecture and the right way to solve the complexity problem that been plaguing the data center since the migration away from mainframes.

We at Egenera have been pushing this message for years and if you’ve read this blog, you know that it’s been a core part of my message since I started writing a couple of years ago. Complexity is the biggest issue facing data centers and technologies like converged fabrics or methodologies like cloud computing were invented to solve complexity.

Cisco bringing a PAN-like product to market will no doubt help reduce complexity in the data center. However, this is only part of the solution. It will be interesting to see if Cisco can also be a trusted server partner and help customers through their day-to-day issues that span servers, networks, storage, application, HA, and management. If so, then this will truly be a transformational product for Cisco.

But, it will take time for Cisco to hone these skills and for their product to mature to the point where it makes an impact. If you don’t have the time (who does?), you should check out the original Processing Area Network product at Egenera. Talk to our 1400+ installations and see how they’ve already reduced their data center complexity.

It appears the Egenera/Dell deal is moving forward with velocity. A first joint customer was announced today, the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Corporate Data Center Operations (CDCO).

This is the first of a pipeline of customers buying-into Infrastructure Orchestration (also referred to as Fabric Computing or Unified Computing) - first offered in 2001 by Egenera with their high-end BladeFrame + PAN Manager software, and now being mainstreamed by combining PAN Manager with Dell hardware.

The VA’s CDCO is really a hosting facility - much the way an xSP hosts applications for third-parties. In this case, they’re hosting a mission-critical application for an influenza early-warning system. I’ve met with their CTO, who’s a pretty forward-thinking guy. He recognizes the fact that his “customers” frequently change requirements, and computing demands frequently change too. So, for an environment comprising physical databases and virtualized instances, the Egenera/Dell system provided significant agility (ability to re-provision quickly) while maintaining a mission-critical level of availability.

The Dell/Egenera deal has been getting some profile lately - as it takes on similar technologies such as IBM’s Open Frabric Manager, and HP’s Insight Orchestration products. Stay tuned for some more juicy news.

Last year, Egenera announced support for Dell rack mount servers, extending the Processing Area Network architecture to off-the-shelf, industry standard servers. This combination joins the best-in-class Unified Fabric architecture (PAN) with the best-in-class industry standard hardware from Dell. The solution earned early praise from customers and has proven to be a terrific offering for the market.

Now, Egenera is supporting Dell blade systems. This capability allows the PAN to be extended to blade servers from Dell and is the first and only solution on the market that spans rack and blade servers, while at the same time, leveraging only commodity components. No special hardware, no special switches. Everthing is COTS based.

PAN on Dell blades leverages Ethernet as the fabric and standard servers as the processing nodes, providing a cost effective yet highly dynamic environment for the data center.

Our ability to quickly support different classes of servers is a testatment to the PAN architecture. PAN is now running on Egenera BladeFrame EX and ES systems, Dell rack mount, Dell blades, and Fujitsu-Siemens BX600 blade systems. It’s a truely heterogeneous platform that allows the user to choose the best hardware option for their data center, but still enjoy the power of PAN, regardless of that choice.

That’s pretty powerful, and in my mind, exactly where the data center is heading.

Wow, everyone is talking, blogging, writing about Cisco’s potential entry in to the server market. Cisco’s CTO blogged about it recently, and while there are no specifics, she certainly made it clear that Cisco will enter new markets and compete with current partners. James Staten of Forrester took a stab at defining what the new product might look like. Guess what? It looks like a PAN.

Processing blades, Unified fabrics, Virtualization, and Infrastructure management… Sounds pretty familiar.

It’s great to see a company like Cisco validate the architecture that we invented almost 9 years ago. Our customers have been reaping the benefits of this type of solution since we installed our first production systems in 2001. It really is the right architecture for the Dynamic Data Center, and as I’ve blogged many times before, the combination of converged fabrics, commodity processing, and virtualization is extremely compelling, especially in a world where Cloud Computing and other Real Time Infrastructures are gaining traction.

However, what I see happening in the market is the formation of proprietary RTI management stacks and a land grab for to be the manager of the Dynamic Data Center. Cisco will announce their offering; HP has taken their proprietary Unix offering - VSE, and brought it to the x86 platform, though still in a propritary way. Same with IBM and others. All of these offerings require <inserve vendor name>  hardware to be part of the solution.

It’s ironic, but Egenera is the only heterogeneous solution on the market. It’s ironic because we’re often pegged as “proprietary” by the other guys, but in fact, PAN Manager runs across multiple hardware platforms. This is significant because the winner in this market will be the vendor who can manage a heterogeneous environment.

VMBlog’s David Marshall has begun a series titled “Prediction 2009: The future of Virtualization” and has been polling industry representatives on their perspectives.

In my contribution to the series I believe that during 2009, we will see the market for virtualization finally evolve. It will expand from the current myopic perspective of hardware virtualization to include realizations that:

• There are many types of hardware and OS virtualization, each appropriate for different uses and environments
• For true flexibility, IT operations will also need to leverage virtualization of I/O, networks and storage.

Ergo, we’ll see many more attempts to orchestrate infrastructure, chasing Egenera’s approach where the underlying HW, Network, I/O and storge is part of a highly-reliable fabric — on top of which virtualization (or, simply native HW/SW) can be placed.

We all knew it had to happen at some point. You had the old guard running servers on physical platforms, sprawling through the data center, using more and more power generating more heat. Then came virtualization via the hypervisor, condensing the many physical servers into a few. This, of course, could not take care of the whole. Far too many business- and mission-critical applications were just not right for a hypervisor.  Other software applications wouldn’t even support hypervisors and don’t to this day.

The real problem was not recognized at first. Most just took it in stride that there would be a virtualized infrastructure and a physical infrastructure. But this means that you have two distinctly different infrastructures - two separate silos - to manage and maintain. At some point, that causes manageability issues, especially for companies wanting to reduce complexity, thus cost.

Some of you are starting to think, wait a minute I can provision much faster now. Sure to virtual server, but what about physical?  Now you have a different process for managing physical that has to be maintained separate of the virtual environment. So, instead of creating a less complex environment, in many cases virtualization has made it more complex.

What is happening now is companies like Egenera, who saw this problem coming, have brought the ability to merge the two silos and manage them as one. Bringing the benefits of a virtual environment into the physical world, allowing users to have a single DR solutions for both, a single HA for both, a truly lights-out management system for both. This is welcome news to the CIOs, CTOs, directors, etc. - that there is a solution to help combine the strengths of both sides of the data center.

Virtual and Physical are both here to stay and you’ll see that orchestration is needed more than ever.

Tags: Data Center, Egenera, orchestration, Virtualization

The promise of reinvigorating the economy through strategic government investment is appealing.  Obama’s economic recovery plan is deeply rooted in leveraging technology; there hasn’t been this much talk about driving technology adoption since Al Gore.   The plan put forth by Obama’s team centers on two main themes:  green our economy and redefine our industries by integrating them.  Upgrading schools and hospitals to be more energy efficient means more than just changing to those curly-q light bulbs; it means retrofitting and building with low- to zero-carbon emission drywall and windows.  And that same technology is needed in the national infrastructure overhaul.  This theme will drive a new wave of innovation across a number of sectors in our economy.  On the second theme, the boundaries around and between businesses, customers and partners have been melting for some time.  Not because of globalization but because the velocity and volatility of the global economy demands organizational processes and systems that can predict, manage and respond to co-opetition while sustaining customer delight and new sources of revenue.  This theme will fuel not only the expansion of internet infrastructure but will also drive innovation in the systems and applications needed to effectively ‘bind’ companies together into a new generation of digital keiretsu networks.

Both themes depend on technology and lots of it. What kind of technology?  The industrial strength enterprise kind - software applications, systems management, hardware and communications – used to perform complex modeling, resource-based management, customer management, and security. More importantly, this will drive new innovation and force out current inefficiencies in data center infrastructures.  The data center needs to be far less complex in order to meet the needs of the fast-moving, interconnected, digital economy.   And we need this new economy to take hold so that we can grow out of our current situation.  Today’s high levels of data center complexity comes from physical and virtual machines being managed differently, piecemeal-fashion disaster recovery, absence of standards to enable true heterogeneity interoperability, and the lack of integrated holistic frameworks for managing the whole data center, to name just a few.   Data centers are rapidly coming to the conclusion that they can’t stand still, virtualization-only solutions add to complexity, and buying more pizza boxes isn’t the answer.  Infrastructure orchestration solutions, like PAN Manager Software by Egenera, based on logical abstractions of all data center assets enable easy and automated provisioning and management of physical and virtual assets deliver the foundational step in reducing complexity and increasing agility, responsiveness and reliability.

The quest to capitalize on the new digital economy will see new ways of solving new and old problems.   And we should see rapid maturation of emerging technologies and their business models like cloud computing.   And that means jobs.  According to the Business Software Alliance, we could see a 10 percent increase in technology jobs if Obama can operationalize his plan early in the term.  But only if the economic recovery plan is funded and companies proactively act on streamlining their data center to get ready for the new digital age economy.

Today Egenera & Dell announced the start of shipping their Dell / PAN system. I believe this marks a new strategic direction for the company, and hopefully, a new set of infrastructure management options for mission-critical users of any kind of physical/virtual environment.

Egenera has been best known for combining its high-performance BladeFrame hardware with its PAN Manager (Processing Area Network) software. This duo has historically been used by hundreds of customers to create very high-performance, highly-reliable, and instantly-reconfigurable compute environments. The system essentially virtualizes and orchestrates pools of servers, networks (including I/O) and SANs to create scalable & flexible assets. But let me be clear: this is an infrastructure play, not a virtualization play. The technology works on servers whether-or-not virtualization is present. More on that later.

What’s nifty about today’s announcement (the deal was originally announced back in May) is that it’s the first time that the PAN software is being delivered (actually, OEM’d) on third-party equipment, specifically Dell PowerEdge servers. That means that if you’re building a mission-critical environment or one that’s being repurposed frequenty, or one that’s mixed physical/virtual, the Dell / Egenera System can support it all on standard Dell hardware.

“The Dell / PAN System by Egenera is a highly available and flexible computing platform that eliminates the need to dedicate servers to applications. Instead, the Dell / PAN System creates a processing area network (PAN) that connects and centrally manages multiple Dell PowerEdge servers together with standard network and storage resources. The Dell / PAN System delivers rapid server provisioning and re-deployment in minutes, plus high availability and site recovery at lower total cost than competitive offerings. The fully-integrated solution enables customers to measurably simplify operations by creating a single resource pool and management tool for both physical and virtual servers, resulting in rapid response to organizational changes and heightened business agility.”

Egenera & Dell’s “big bets” on the market here are clear:

• More companies are going to want to buy standard, off-the-shelf servers, especially as the economy slows
• More IT staffs will find they have mixed physical and virtual environments, and at least two distinct management systems for them. Somehow this will need unification
• More IT Operations groups will find it inevitable that they will have 2 or more virtualization technologies, and therefore will need a unified approach to HA, DR, network and storage management to support these systems as well.

In general, this form of infrastructure management is highly complementary (and mostly transparent) to users of virtualization. And *I’m* betting that we see more of it in use.

Virtualization cuts across just about all of what you might find in the data center. Clients, servers, applications, storage systems, data networks, and security can all be virtualized to one degree or another. And chief executives are discovering that virtualization has the potential to not only improve the balance sheet, but strengthen competitive advantage and put a shine on the corporate brand. Despite the bluster coming from vendors and analysts, data suggests that this generation of virtualization is still in its formative years. CIO.com, for example, found in its 2008 survey that while 85 percent of the respondents have virtualized at least some of their servers, just over one-third have virtualized other aspects of their data centers, like storage systems and desktops.

We can expect to see the emphasis on virtualization itself diminish. Like all disruptive technologies, virtualization is really an enabler – a means to an end rather than the end itself. CIOs and CTOs know this. Analyst and consultant Dan Kusnetzky succinctly summed up the sentiment when he blogged, “no one starts down the path toward a more virtualized environment by saying ‘I want virtualization.’” Instead, they want increased IT flexibility and more responsive customer service.  What companies really want is a way to orchestrate their infrastructure assets and achieve a reliable dynamic data center.

Understanding the reliable dynamic data center requires a different way of thinking about how classes of resources are related to one another. Application services, for instance, need CPUs, memory, operating systems, storage, network connections, and security. In the dynamic data center, these are logical relationships. The physical elements are completely fungible. This means that functions such as application deployment, capacity allocation, backup and restore, high availability, and disaster recovery are more integral to the system. Consequently they are less labor intensive, less intrusive, and less costly.

So how does a comprehensive infrastructure orchestration solution address these shortcomings?  By horizontally extending virtualization and creating pools of server, storage, and network capacity that can be shared among all applications. Second, it replaces the static bindings between hardware and software with logical associations. Finally, it provides workload management capabilities that enable rapid application deployment and server repurposing in response to fluctuations in demand, scheduling priorities, or system outages.

This result is a level playing field that brings scalability, reliability, high availability, and disaster recovery to all applications while lowering the aggregate number of servers needed to keep the business running. Infrastructure orchestration empowers IT administrators to reassert management control over resource capacity. Within the dynamic environment, IT becomes a fundamental element of the business process - responsive to organizational needs instead of being overburdened by increasing demand for data center services.

The reliable dynamic data center exists today in many enterprises around the globe. Infrastructure orchestration is the key technology force behind the movement that enables enterprises to realign their organizations in order to increase competitiveness and become more responsive to the needs of business and customers in today’s changing world.

What is a utopian data center? It has always been desired for obvious reasons, but has never really been attainable. Data centers have become overly complex over the last decade due to so many different levels of management to keep up with the growing demand of servers and trying to keep it from getting out of hand. What was a simple idea of distributed systems has become a reality of dysfunctional systems due to all of the different layers needed to handle ideas like high availability, disaster recovery, provisioning, etc.

Virtualization technologies like the hypervisor were supposed to help solve these problems and to some degree they have. In other cases, they have merely moved the problem from the physical world to the virtual world. Although many issues have been helped by the hypervisor, it has not been able to solve them all. With support issues, performance limitations, and management overhead there is still many layers of complexity to beat.

Egenera’s focus has been to bring calm to the chaos, simplicity to the complexity, orchestration to the data center. PAN (Processing Area Network) has been able to bring true DR, HA, and management to the virtualization world and the physical world alike. For a long time this has been by using a combination of the Egenera BladeFrame and PAN, which is a powerful combination in its own right.

Dell’s focus is simplifying the data center, which is why Dell and PAN were such a great fit. The Dell machine has an amazing reach with its line of products and services that delve into data centers everywhere. They have a great focus on the idea that a data center does not have to be complex to be powerful.

The Dell / PAN System by Egenera is a great step to bringing the utopian data center to life. The ability to run mission- and business-critical applications on x86 platforms and provide the security blankets of high availability and disasters recovery. The ability to have a true lights-out management of the environment keeping System Administrators at home at those early hours of the morning, sleeping soundly knowing that their critical systems are fine.

What is a utopian data center? I think we have found it!

Tags: datacenter, Dell, Egenera, PAN, Virtualization