Scalent Infrastructure Manager (IM) automates the end-to-end provisioning of servers, network and storage connectivity in a coordinated manner to accommodate the changing needs of business. Enterprise customers use Scalent IM in a variety of ways in order to address their critical IT operations needs. Some of the popular use cases of Scalent IM Infrastructure Manager are:
RAPID PROVISIONING AND ROLLOUT
Does it take your IT organization weeks to deliver a server to the business unit that requested it ? Are the provisioning dependencies on the network and storage groups slowing down your ability to effect change in your server infrastructure ? Server provisioning can be a time-consuming manual task involving coordination between multiple silos in the IT organization, and costing your company time and money.
There is a solution: Scalent Infrastructure Manager lets you instantly provision servers, network, and storage connectivity. In a Scalent IM environment servers are stateless. You have the choice of booting from local disk or central storage (SAN, NAS, iSCSI). Scalent IM provisions a server in minutes by assigning a server image to a specific server and booting it.
Scalent’s image-based provisioning greatly simplifies the provisioning process regardless of the target server’s configuration. Scalent IM provides sophisticated tools to quickly migrate server images between local disks and central storage. Resulting server images are mobile – bootable across disparate physical servers and virtual machines. Server images are customized offline to include the correct drivers for booting on the destination server. This allows physical-to-physical (P2P) or physical-to-virtual (P2V) migration of server images for server upgrades, refresh, or consolidation.
Using Scalent results in fewer dependencies on your storage and networking groups. Server operations can proceed with server changes without affecting what the network or storage groups see. All server identity (MAC addresses, IP addresses, Fiber Channel WWN) moves with the server image regardless of which physical or virtual server the image is assigned to.
- Improved time-to-market for your users
- Rapid moves/adds/changes
HIGH AVAILABILITY
Have a standby server for each of your production servers? Have too many machines with no High Availability plan whatsoever? You’re not alone. Recent research studies have found that the cost of downtime in most industries reaches into the tens of thousands of dollars per hour, and businesses that suffer significant disruption in key IT services are likely to fail within months of such an event. Business Continuity is clearly an essential component of any IT strategy.
There is a solution: Scalent lets you dispense with most “standby” servers while still protecting all of your servers. Scalent IM provides an N+1 availability solution. A spare server anywhere in the infrastructure can replace any failed server. Scalent IM automatically detects server failures and retargets the failed server’s image to an available spare – physical or virtual. Network and storage connectivity is automatically established for the spare server.
Scalent IM eliminates the need for complex and expensive clustering solutions for those applications that can sustain momentary failures. This allows you to protect all of your applications against hardware failures, not just your high end applications.
- Reduced infrastructure overhead: Scalent enables real-time repurposing of existing infrastructure. No need for 1-to-1 machine redundancy – instead, enable N-to-1 failover, as any running server can be brought back online on any standby machine, with all LAN and SAN topologies preserved.
ENTERPRISE CLOUD/SHARED IT INFRASTRUCTURE
Is your test group starved for servers while DR has hundreds of idle "standby" machines? Running at 50% utilization because your daylight apps require 100% 12 hours a day, and your nighttime apps require 100% the other 12 hours -- on separate machines? Trying to maintain compliance with eco-efficient "green" power standards and wish you could just turn off machines when they weren't needed?
You’re not alone. With the increase in diversity of service-oriented, web-based, and multi-tiered networked applications, rise in numbers of remote workers, and overall expansion of the role of computing in daily operations, the demand for server-based processing power has reached new heights – and the growth shows no signs of slowing.
Yet too often the demand for computing power creates the unintended side effect of “Server Sprawl” – a seemingly endless influx of physical hardware, generating a never-ending cycle of “re-rack, re-cable, repeat” in response to shifting business system configuration needs, which in turn generates three major challenges for IT: cost, capacity, and complexity.
There is a solution: Scalent lets you grant individual high-demand business system servers more physical machine capacity on an as-needed basis… without increasing the total number of machines in the data center. Effectively, Scalent Infrastructure Manager enables you to create an enterprise compute cloud, of any size, internal to your company.
Companies who have used Scalent software to improve their IT consolidation approach have seen up to 56% improvement in total cost of ownership(TCO) through:
- Improved server utilization
- Reduced management complexity
- Lowered costs