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

Labels: Infrastructure Virtualization Scalent Systems