It's no secret that IT managers are under pressure to increase service levels while decreasing operational costs. But over the past decade, data centers have grown in complexity to support business demands, so addressing the cost/service challenge has become ever more complex. To that end, companies are increasingly turning to software-based productivity tools to manage their operations.

Such software is big business. In July 2007, HP paid $1.6B to acquire Opsware and in March 2008, BMC acquired Bladelogic for $800M. But despite the more than $2B changing hands, and the major companies involved, surprisingly few members of the IT industry can pinpoint exactly what Opsware and Bladelogic do.

Can you?

The answer is that both provide aspects of data center automation software: software designed to increase operational efficiency in the data center. But what exactly is data center automation, where does it fit into my data center, and what's still missing?

Simply put, data center automation is the ability to replace manual processes by automating tasks such as provisioning, patching, and software distribution on a single server or multiple machines. Important functionality includes configuration management and the ability to model complex services and application environments.

Examining the existing offerings, we can see that they're not off to a bad start. The technology certainly beats manual process for tasks such as patch management on multiple machines. But most offerings are based on custom scripts, and all the scripts are still statically tied to the underlying infrastructure. The result: two significant problems emerge.

The first problem is that of (in)flexibility. Many of the automation providers show a surprising inability to handle changes in the IT environment. If you're using data center automation to automate tasks, then you have to capture all the actions that fully correspond to the particular configuration or fault recovery event. But what if one of the steps requires configuration changes to the server, OS, network, or storage? Or what if an IT administrator changes a switch port, IP address configuration on the subnet, network booting, power management tool, or WWN? Unfortunately, you'd have to address any of the changes manually. If you run an old automation script in an environment that has changed, you'll actually create some unintended consequences. So, data center automation is dependent on the current and the expected static state of your infrastructure.

Scripting is a DIY approach to automating static elements in your data center. Scripting is great for automating a single problem once. But, your IT administrators would have to determine the state of the data center and also set up the logic for changes in the environment. The result is that your IT administrators have to become programmers. It's not efficient for IT staff to become programmers when what you really want is a software solution.

The second problem is the need for component administration. Your company still needs to manage every component for every vendor in the IT environment and change scripts whenever the company makes a new vendor choice. If the script is set up to do remote management on HP blades today and tomorrow you buy Dell blades, then you need to change the scripts. There's no abstraction between the physical hardware layer and the scripts. This results in more manual script configuration to add to the many manual processes already in place.

So what's the missing component needed to successfully deploy and meld the current offerings into flexible, adaptive, real-time data center automation? The answer is Infrastructure Virtualization.

As the older automation space is consolidating, the infrastructure virtualization space is emerging. The leading candidates include software from Scalent Systems V/OE (Virtual Operating Environment) or Unisys's uAdapt, and hardware-based solutions from Egenera. Infrastructure Virtualization solutions are geared to supporting the existing systems deployed in the data center, this includes x86 and SPARC servers running Windows, Linux, and Solaris on bare metal as well as VMware ESX, Xen, and Microsoft hypervisors.

The upside of Infrstructure Virtualization is that it takes a bare metal environment, manages it, and publishes a consistent view regardless of the make and model of the underlying servers, switches, and storage arrays so that companies can achieve a truly dynamic data center. This is data center nirvana because changes can be made without modifying preconfigured scripts due to the abstraction layer these technologies leverage and present.
Infrastructure Virtualization software also provides increased operational efficiency and flexibility for repurposing physical or virtual machines. IT administrators can move server images between physical and virtual machines and back again. Sometimes it may be desirable to run an image on its own bare metal, but other times, it may be preferable to run the image within a virtual machine. Infrastructure virtualization software facilitates these changes without the need for physical intervention.

The key point to remember is that many of the tools that purport to do data center automation are geared to static environments. There's a big difference between a scripted approach for static data centers and an abstraction layer approach to managing dynamic data centers. So, check out real-time data center automation solutions. Research Egenera, test out Unisys uAdapt. Give Scalent a call to learn more about how to gain scalability and efficiency by creating a dynamic IT environment. Your data center is ready - are you?

Alana Achterkirchen, Director of Marketing, May 2008

The management of virtualized IT environments has become the latest technology issue due to the added burden of managing physical and virtual machines. In addition, each machine needs network and storage resources, and they may be part of a greater virtualized environment leveraging I/O virtualization, infrastructure virtualization, application virtualization and grid computing as well as umbrella management software orchestrating the various components into action.

There are a number of virtualization solutions which individually provide great flexibility, but a tradeoff of management complexity emerges, especially when these solutions are used together. It is useful to have a framework to think about these capabilities and map them to what you might need in your data center. We propose the following virtualization stack:

Server Virtualization:

Let's start at the beginning with an analogy of physical servers and a family residence to illustrate the power of server virtualization.

Server Virtualization is somewhat like moving from a home into a condo. If you own ten physical servers in your data center and want to consolidate down to one physical server, server virtualization software allows you to do just that. Companies including VMware, Xen/Citrix and Microsoft all provide solutions that allow a physical server to run multiple operating system instances and resulting families of applications. IBM, Oracle, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, and Symantec are all invested in the open-source Xen hypervisor project.

For many companies, server virtualization has been the first big step into data center virtualization. It put VMware on the map with their IPO in August 2007, and has yielded cost savings and consolidation benefits over non-virtualized environments. When you enable multiple virtual servers and their associated applications to be consolidated onto fewer physical servers, you can more efficiently leverage a smaller number of machines, resulting in decreased expenses

Infrastructure Virtualization:

While server virtualization's hypervisors allow for a single physical machine to host multiple virtual machines, infrastructure virtualization reaches beyond the server into the data center resources outside of the control of server virtualization solutions.

Infrastructure Virtualization's emergence as a category is an acknowledgement by the industry that servers (virtual and physical) are not stand-alone resources, but rather require the leverage of network and storage resources from throughout greater data center.

Infrastructure Virtualization software products on the market today include Scalent Systems V/OE and Unisys's uAdapt. The purpose of Infrastructure Virtualization is to ensure that a server is given its required network and storage resources as needed based on the company's business requirements and strategy. The solutions support existing bare-metal servers running Windows, Linux, and Solaris as well as full hypervisors such as VMware ESX, Xen, and Microsoft Hyper-V - with their VM load.

One effect of deploying Infrastructure Virtualization in your environment is that bringing a server on-line can be coordinated against the automated provisioning of network and storage resources to support that server. Boot storage can be allocated for diskless hosts and virtual network connectivity (VLANs) can be dynamically created to enable appropriate servers to connect with each other. This frees data center managers from having to pre-provision static associations of storage and network to servers, and breaks down silos of resources into freely available pools as needed.

Comparing server versus infrastructure virtualization reveals that the two solutions provide distinct and complementary functionality in the data center. Going back to our original analogy, server virtualization creates condos out of servers, and infrastructure virtualization dynamically moves families into and out of the appropriate units, and sets up the utilities required for occupancy, in real-time - connectivity to the network and storage. Depending on the number of physical and virtual servers that you manage, you probably need both server virtualization and infrastructure virtualization.

I/O virtualization:

I/O Virtualization consolidates the number of physical I/O connections to a given server, and also allows I/O and multiple virtual connections to tunnel through to network and storage resource across a consolidated physical infrastructure. The promise of I/O virtualization includes condensing network and storage connectivity with fewer physical cables to manage, fewer network interconnect cards deployed, and fewer switch ports consumed for the same amount of computer power.

Players in this space include Nuova, 3leaf, and Xsigo, and there is additional software specific to each solution which assigns SAN and network connectivity back to a given server. From an administrative standpoint, the physical layer becomes much easier to manage with fewer cables while the management of the virtualized connectivity to given machines becomes more complex as the virtual resources increase.

I/O virtualization complements server virtualization and infrastructure virtualization by aggregating the path to network and storage resources so that fewer components need to be touched overall. Using the condo analogy, I/O virtualization ensures that when the utilities leading to the complex become overloaded, certain tenants get priority use of those resources.

Infrastructure Virtualization software dynamically provisions a new I/O resource when bringing up a machine, and provides coordination between server virtualization and virtualized I/O resources.

Application Virtualization:

Gaining momentum but not widely deployed yet, application virtualization technologies help package, store, and distribute end-user software in an on-demand fashion across a network. This goes hand-in-hand with many of the standardized web services initiatives making waves in the tech world today.

Virtualized applications use a common abstraction layer, which defines a protocol, allowing them to communicate with one another in a standard messaging format. Thus, applications can invoke one another in order to perform requested functions. A virtualized application is not only capable of remotely invoking requests and returning results, but also ensuring that the application's state and other data are available and consistent on all resource nodes executing the application across a grid.

Application Virtualization vendors include Citrix Presentation Server, Microsoft SoftGrid, AppStream, and DataSynapse, to name a few. These solutions can run incompatible applications side-by-side at the same time, allow applications to run in environments that do not suit the native application, and improve overall security by isolating applications from the operating system. It may surprise you to find that application virtualization consumes fewer resources than deploying individual applications into separate virtual machines.

Again, Application Virtualization is complementary to the other forms of virtualization, running at the application layer on the others' virtualized infrastructure and OS.

Data Center Orchestration:

Data center orchestration provides an overarching category for coordinating the deployment of resources with the service level required by the business. If you're interested in learning more about data center orchestration, or want to learn more about how to gain efficiency in your data center via Infrastructure Virtualization, come talk with us!

Alana Achterkirchen, Director of Marketing, April 28, 2008

You feel it at the gas station, see it in the housing crisis, and hear about the losses hitting the biggest banks on Wall Street, so don't ignore the current state of the economy. The government will most likely declare a recession, which sometimes occurs after the worst is over. A recent example was the recession in the 1990's which started in July 1990, but wasn't declared until April 1991, ended in March 1991 but wasn't declared over until December 1992 (Source: National Bureau of Economic Research). Don't wait for a recession notice before you look at ways to cut IT costs in a tight economy.

There are ways for companies to cut IT costs while gaining efficiencies and come out with a much more flexible IT environment. Let's consider a comparison between cars and data centers. There are a lot of Hummers and Land Rovers on the highway these days, which makes sense if you're always driving through the African Serengeti or are fully-burdened with kids, dogs, and camping equipment for a weekend getaway. But much of the time, large SUV owners are simply over-provisioned due to the cost-prohibitive nature of trading in and out from one vehicle to another. Similarly, data centers have big footprints and consume power at rates sized for peak, which more often than not delivers underutilized and inefficient results.

Further exacerbating the problem, many companies have deployed Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) software as their solution for server availability. VCS leverages a two or more dedicated servers to replace a single server, each with their own operating environment, applications, and resulting infrastructure, services, licensing, power and real estate consumption to go with it. With this solution, data center costs can double, but your service stays up in the event of a failure.

So, the question of the day is how many servers do you have doubled up right now?

At Scalent we have taken a different approach, one that does not require the static association of dedicated hardware to enable server failover. Scalent's infrastructure virtualization, applied to server fail-over, essentially allows for any production server to be replaced in boot time, or about 5 minutes. Rather than relying on static, pre-deployed backup machines, Scalent can failover your production servers, moving the storage and network from a failed server to a replacement server automatically, which eliminates the need for VCS licenses as well as the multiple copies of OS and applications being leveraged.

What about servers for which 5-minute replacement is not good enough?

Simple. Keep using your current HA solution for these servers. When failures actually occur, the service will keep running and Scalent V/OE can replace the failed server in boot time, which limits the time you are exposed to running in a degraded mode to about 5 minutes. You might be surprised looking through your deployed services to find that the vast majority of these services fall into the category of store-and-forward applications, for which boot time replacement is good enough.

Want to decommission a few servers with their associated software and support costs? Call us.

Alana Achterkirchen, Director of Marketing, Spring 2008

In an interview with Ben Liner, CEO and Co-Founder of Scalent Systems, this month we'll explore some of the traditional challenges that Test and Development labs face and how Scalent V/OE (Virtual Operating Environment) can help you build an automated, virtual test lab environment.

Alana Achterkirchen: Let's start off with a basic question. Tell us about the fundamental challenges that Test and Development labs face?

Ben Linder: Talking with our customers every day, there's some interesting facts that we observe. One thing is the preponderance of servers, the sprawl of servers, in the enterprise. An interesting factoid is that for every single production machine there are typically four other servers in the enterprise that are there in support of that machine.

So for every machine in production, there's usually one in development, there's usually one in test and QA, there's usually one pre-production, and there's another one in disaster recovery. So a very simple application can drag behind it tens if not hundreds of servers, and that's a huge challenge for our customers.

It's widely known that test and development processes are inefficient with regard to the number of systems. Once engineers set up a test cluster, they don't ever want to tear it down. As a result, you wind up with more and more test rigs being set up and they just never go away. Some of our customers have tens of thousands of servers in test and development. The old way of doing things is too inefficient: you'd install and configure everything directly onto each server, everything onto the local hard disk of the server. You'd install and configure all the network topologies and switches, and all of the access to storage. Once it's all done, nobody ever wants to take it down even if that application is only tested once every six months.

These underlying inefficiencies and the requirement of dedicated systems which are incredibly underutlized - sometimes less than 1% - is a huge contributor to waste in the enterprise and sprawl of servers. That's the issue that Scalent is set out to solve with creating higher efficiencies in test and development environments.

AA: Let's drill deeper into this problem. How would Test & Development labs benefit from infrastructure virtualization technologies?

BL: It's very simple: when you use systems, you use them, and when you're done, you can release them back into a shared pool. It's the concept of turning test and development labs from captive, static resources that sit around doing nothing most of the time to shared pools of infrastructure that can be effective used by whatever groups need them. So when a test is underway, machines are being used. When testing stops for an application, those machines can be returned to a pool of machines that can then be made available on a shared basis to any other application group.

The net result is that virtualization technology allows consolidation of test and development labs so you need fewer servers, it allows rapid reuse of the existing servers so you get higher utilization, and it lowers the overall cost and increases the overall reliability of test and development processes.

AA: How does Scalent specifically address Test and Development lab automation?

BL: We're able to come in and install our software in a shared test and development infrastructure, and create a pool of resources that are available to any group within the enterprise.

The beauty of this is that servers aren't statically assigned to application groups. Instead, servers are reserved by application groups. They're repurposed and provisioned by the Scalent Virtual Operating Environment into whatever role they need to be for that period of time. So, an application group might request 10 servers for 2 weeks and Scalent automatically provisions those as well as the network and storage connectivity for those servers. When the development group is done, they release those resources back into the pool.

The Scalent Virtual Operating Environment automates the assignment of resources, the provisioning of resources, and then the release of resources back into the shared pool. The result is a much more efficient, reliable, and timely implementation of the test processes.

AA: Thanks Ben, and thanks everyone for joining us. If you're interested in learning more about how you can create a highly efficient test lab environment, give us a shout. The direct phone number to our corporate headquarters is (650) 424-1222.

Alana Achterkirchen, Director of Marketing, February 2008

Sitting in a meeting today, somebody said 'Remember when cell phones were as big and heavy as a brick?' Everyone nodded with the mutual understanding of how backwards things were in the mobile phone industry 10 years ago. We could all come up with a massive list of 'remember when's' because the world is relentlessly dynamic to the peril of those who fear change. Who can afford to ignore the plight of the T. Rex with its large, almost monolithic structure and status as king of the dinosaur world. You can be massive, fierce, and carnivorous, but you'll perish if you fail to adapt to your surroundings. The business world isn't much different.

Today, there's a massive paradigm shift going on in data centers around the world. It's due to a disruptive technology that radically changes the way things have been done in data centers for decades. When you first hear about what virtualization technologies can do, it all sounds like a black art or maybe a crazy April fool's joke. But April is a few months away, and VMware's IPO was last August. Today, you can install server virtualization technology on a server, which masks server resources and allows administrators to create multiple virtual environments, with different applications and configurations, that can run on the server.

Scalent V/OE provides even more extensive functionality with Infrastructure Virtualization. By installing Scalent's controller on an x86-based server, you can manage pools of servers, their power state, and even transition entire pools of servers between different configurations along with their connectivity to their designated storage and network in five minutes or less. Applied to humans, this would be akin to teleporting yourself (and your connections, maybe some family members) at a touch of a button to a pre-designated location anywhere in the world in five minutes or less. To continue the analogy, Scalent's server repurposing capability applied to humans would mean that in the event of major disaster, you could bring up a new copy of yourself somewhere else in five minutes or less.

Questions?

In our customer meetings and at conferences, we commonly hear: 'What's wrong with booting stateful disks in my local servers? Isn't it more expensive and slower to boot from SAN?' Although Scalent doesn't force your storage connectivity decision, you can boot from local disk, over Ethernet via ISCSI or NAS, or SAN boot over fibre channel, we recommend booting stateless servers with external storage. That's not only because you get higher performance, higher reliability, and more resilient storage, but also because it's possible to failover a server with its connection to storage. The older paradigm of booting from local disk requires a lot of driver and BIOS work, which isn't easy to do. The disks take up your running environment and the tapes suck up time and energy. Worst of all, if the server dies, you're in big trouble. Local disk booting is a really stupid idea and has had its day.

Another question that people ask us all the time is: 'How does Scalent repurpose servers?' We can easily explain this with an example that contrasts the old paradigm with Scalent's server repurposing. For example, what if you wanted to leverage your daytime mail server to run a grid at night? But what if the grid runs on a different OS (Windows, Linux, Solaris) than what the server runs during the day? In the old paradigm, you'd have to manually swap out the disk card or put a new disk in to provision an image on the server. But the new grid server might also need to connect to a completely different network, which would require your data center administrator to make a connection to a SAN as well as a particular LUN on the SAN. As you can see, there are quite a few painful and time-consuming steps that you'd have to take to change the personality of the server.

Here's how Scalent's server repurposing capability works: (1) From a console (which could be a web services API, GUI, CLI, Java API, or a .NET API), you'd stop whatever the server was running during the day. (2) At a touch of a button, you'd change the server's personality from a mail server to a grid server. You're done. In five minutes or less, your newly provisioned grid server is ready for action. Think about how quick and simple life would be if you could do this! With Scalent software, you can do all of this as well as connect the server to a new network. (4) Just drag and drop a graphic representation of the 'cables' in Scalent's UI, and guess what, the server connects to a new network in your data center thousands of miles away. All the networking information is stored within the Scalent persona.

You might wonder 'Who else can do this?' The truth is, nobody else can take a running system, move it across the country, change its personality, and bring up the new image in a matter of minutes. Our software is up and running in Fortune 500 data centers today. We support your existing x86, SPARC, and PowerPC hardware running Windows, Linux, Solaris, and AIX as well as full VMware ESX and Xen hypervisors. What's unique about Scalent's technology is it can reconfigure networking as it moves personas geographically, and this applies to individual servers, or server pools, or your entire data center.

The old way of doing things entailed building brick walls and moats around under-utilized hardware resources. Some companies will also build brick walls, moats, and mines just to be sure. But virtualization technologies are taking the data center world by storm, and proving not only that this stuff works and can save you substantial amounts of money, but more importantly that it makes data centers adaptable. This adaptability means that you'll get higher utilization, more flexibility, and better responsiveness from your data center. As a result, your company will realize a competitive advantage over those that fail to make the transition. Got more questions? Come talk with us!

Alana Achterkirchen, Director of Marketing, January 2008

Our customers are amazing. Everywhere they look, they find different use cases for Scalent V/OE whether it's local high availability, disaster recovery, managing a virtual environment, or building a shared pool of test and development servers. Last week, we visited a company that is looking to improve their DR processes after having already installed hypervisor technologies in their data center. "We don't care what you do for Disaster Recovery, we have a very immediate use case to test with your product..." the customer said. It ends up that they want to go green in their data center operations by eliminating 1:1 redundant servers, eliminating manual server failover, and powering on servers only when they're utilized. Since Scalent V/OE has always taken a heterogeneous view of the data center, we have the ability to power on and off servers from any manufacturer, and found a very happy customer.

Going green can yield benefits to companies in any industry or geography because data centers are the biggest energy hogs in most businesses with their built-in redundancies and staggering amounts of equipment. Simultaneously, some ambitious companies are building environmentally-friendly buildings to house their green data center. If that's in your corporate culture and budget, then all the power to you. For the majority of us, there are smaller steps you can take to save on your power and cooling costs for your server farms.

Most importantly, you should know that Scalent is a member of PG&E's virtualization program in California, making customers who install Scalent V/OE software eligible for a rebate for virtualization and consolidation projects. Please go to the following website for more information on PG&E's application and acceptance process: http://www.pge.com/biz/rebates/hightech/htee_incentives.html .

Additionally, Scalent's power management capabilities enable data center managers to power on and off servers as appropriate which will in turn drive down your energy costs when any particular server isn't utilized for hours, days, weeks, or more. When necessary, you can bring servers back online quickly and automatically.

Then if you upgrade to energy-efficient servers from major hardware manufacturers, you'll also see savings in the amount of kW/rack consumed. Newer technologies are more energy efficient, such as HP's BladeSystem c-Class servers which offer thermal logic technologies to reduce power consumption and insight controls to lower maintenance costs. Go to http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/blades/components/c-class-components.html for more information. HP also offers trade-in, donation, and recycling programs which provide a simple way to make purchasing newer technology more affordable, while ensuring that older equipment is reused or recycled in an environmentally-friendly way.

The Unisys ES3000 family of blades, entry, and midrange servers can deliver high availability and excellent serviceability with their completely tool-less and modular components. Go to http://www.unisys.com/products/enterprise__servers/midrange__servers/index.htm for more information on their products.

With Scalent, you can leverage our product for any use case. You'll benefit from the flexibility and power of our infrastructure virtualization product, while going green at the same time. Sounds interesting? Come talk with us.

Alana Achterkirchen, Director of Marketing
Mahesh Natarajan, Director of Pre-Sales & Field Engineering

December 2007