I’ve finally put my virtual pen to paper to contribute to our growing blog! I’m Vern Brownell, the founder of Egenera. I was an IT infrastructure customer eight years ago when I decided to create Egenera.
The inspiration for our technology was the frustration that I had with the complexity and brittleness of the computing infrastructure that had been built up in our data centers. The incumbent vendors seemed to lack interest in reducing complexity and were quite happy to sell more servers and infrastructure to exacerbate the problem. A light bulb went off for me and I decided that there was an opportunity to build a company around an architecture that would use virtualization and abstraction to simplify and dramatically improve the agility of data center infrastructure.
My view was that the server environment and the associated infrastructure needed to be simplified first. We took a clean sheet of paper design approach and set out to build the PAN Manager architecture that our customers use today.
I’ve been following the news from LA regarding the Chino Hills earthquake story. Events like this remind of how fragile our lives are. And how fragile our systems and infrastructure can be. Thankfully, this earthquake seems to have been of limited impact, but our thoughts and prayers go out to those who have been effected.
Last month I was in China and was impressed by the universal support and sympathy that poured out from around the world for the victims in Wenchuan, southwest China. Compared to the tragic loss of over 69,000 lives, the loss of infrastructure and systems seems trivial. Nonetheless, it was another stark reminder of what can happen.
I recall that in data center threat analysis that I participated in years ago, earthquakes always seemed to rank as one of the most probable disaster events in earthquake prone areas followed by floods, fires and terrorist events. USGS reports that so far for 2008, there have been 269 earthquakes per month measuring 2.0-5.9 in magnitude in the US. Worldwide, there have been 2261 per month of the same magnitude.
As a former customer, I found providing adequate Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning to prepare for events like earthquakes to be one of the hardest parts of running an enterprise IT shop. There are, of course, many issues which are not technology related, but technology is always an important part of business continuance planning. The classic rapid recovery method that most people seem to use is to provide duplicate hardware at two geographically diverse with some sort of data mirroring between sites. This method can work very effectively, albeit at significant cost and complexity. The lesson that I learned is the frequent testing is absolutely necessary and in fact in many or perhaps even in most cases the tests will not complete flawlessly.
Many of my friends and colleagues in IT in NYC and DC had to exercise their BCP plans with the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Although I was no longer in the IT business in NYC and I did not experience this tragedy first hand, I’ve heard that most firms that had this style of DR did quite well with their recoveries. So what’s the problem? It really comes down to expense, complexity and power.
The classic method requires a significant duplication of hardware, furthermore each time a system is changed in the slightest way, the backup system must also be updated. This is error prone. Most of the failures that I have seen were the result of misconfiguration of infrastructure or applications. It takes tremendous effort to keep two systems in complete sync. It’s always a tough investment to prepare for something that hopefully will never happen. And given the nature of the costs and effort, this type of backup is almost certainly only done for the most critical of applications.
Imagine a solution that would allow for automated synchronization of hardware, network and application changes. Imagine a solution that would allow for the backup of multiple sites with one set of backup hardware. Imagine a solution that could provide this type of automated recovery for applications which are both physical and virtual (running with or without a hypervisor). Egenera PAN customers can do this today and are able to test their recovery with frequencies that provide a much better guarantee that things will work in the event of a real disaster.
Some of our customers back up all of their applications regardless of their criticality, just because they find it can be a small incremental cost to add full DR to a broader spectrum of apps. It’s really the PAN architecture that makes this a simpler, faster and more reliable process.
On a totally unrelated note, I’d like to make a quick comment on Diane Green’s departure from VMware. I think Diane and her team have done a fabulous job of building a great software company in record time. She has been an inspiration to many of us in the technology business and I wish her the best of luck in whatever she decides to do next. I’m a big fan of hers and I look forward to seeing what’s next for her.
Thanks for listening. In further posts, I’d like to explore some of the data center trends and challenges that I hear from our customers and partners all the time. I’d also love to know what’s on your mind!
Tags: Disaster Recovery, Egenera, Vern Brownell
