Archive for January, 2012

Data Center Fabric Case Studies

Tuesday, January 31st, 2012

Three new data center fabric case studies. Read how IT managers have increased VM density, virtualized more apps, and saved on power, space and cooling with data center fabrics.

Read these for a quick look at the real-world benefits of a data center fabric.

  • xsigo data center fabricRisk management firm runs over 100 VMs per host, boosts performance 50% Read more
  • Law firm increases VM density to avoid a data center expansion Read more
  • Healthcare service provider reduces infrastructure by 77% Read more

While others talk about their promises, Xsigo solves today’s most challenging virtualization problems with data center fabric solutions.

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Intel Acquires InfiniBand: Do They See The Fabric of the Future?

Tuesday, January 24th, 2012

Why is Intel getting into the InfiniBand business? This is big news; bigger than the size of the acquisition would suggest.

Certainly it signals Intel’s growing interest in the infrastructure business. But perhaps more interesting is what it says about InfiniBand.

While InifiniBand is best known for HPC applications, I suspect Intel may have its sights on a much broader market than university labs. InfiniBand incorporates a number of technologies that make it very well suited for the enterprise.

Several current data center trends highlight why InfiniBand is well-positioned as the fabric of the future:

1) Server virtualization: To run a large number of VMs, virtualized servers need a lot of bandwidth. InfiniBand delivers by far the most cost-effective, power-efficient performance.

2) Convergence: The only solution for the growing connectivity needs of virtualized servers is to converge the infrastructure. It’s not hard to see the benefit of two cables vs 20 cables. InfiniBand provides the ideal transport for this. It is and always has been a reliable connection. You can run both Fibre Channel and Ethernet traffic over it without packet reordering.

3) Data Center Fabrics: The next challenge for the data center is to fix the East/West problem. Multiple Ethernet vendors are proposing solutions that simplify and accelerate server-to-server communications. Well, InfiniBand was designed as a fabric. The networking challenges faced by Ethernet were addressed in the original InfiniBand design.

Even the knock that InfiniBand is “just for HPC” is not true.

Xsigo has offered for years a data center fabric that converges FC + Ethernet server connections to a single InfiniBand link within the rack. The top-of-rack device fits right in with conventional data center core switching gear. It’s successfully deployed in hundreds of data centers today. And, Oracle uses InfiniBand as the cluster interconnect of their flagship database machine, Exadata.

Intel would probably not undertake a strategic move like this simply to better serve the HPC market. The big prize is the market for servers and infrastructure in next-generation cloud data centers.

Server virtualization dramatically altered the way we look at processors. The sky’s now the limit when it comes to multi-core / multi-socket implementations.

Infrastructure virtualization is the next big wave. Data center fabrics are the products riding that wave. Like virtualized servers, fabrics too will be built on significantly faster underpinnings. With an InfiniBand offering, Intel may be positioning themselves as a leader with a proven technology that was originally designed for exactly that application.

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Adapt or Die: The Evolution of Data Center Architecture

Tuesday, January 17th, 2012

Environmental changes don’t kill off a species. It’s the lack of adaptation that kills. This is the challenge facing IT managers today. The data center fabric can help.

Jon Oltsik of ESG wrote an article about the environmental changes in the enterprise data center. They’re truly tectonic. According to their research:

  • 2/3 of enterprises are consolidating (or have consolidated) data centers
  • Nearly 100% of enterprise data centers now have some level of virtualization
  • Most have aggressive plans for much higher virtualization workloads

Gartner concurs, reporting that the average number of workloads virtualized is over 50% now, going to 75% within two years.

Think back just a few years and you’ll recall a very different picture.

Four years ago, VMware was known largely as a great test and dev tool. Just two years ago, many shops still considered server virtualization suitable only for Tier 2 and Tier 3 applications.

Now virtualization usage is everywhere, but the data center management model remains in some middle ground.

ESG asked managers to identify their management pain points. Some challenges identified included:

  • Too many manual processes
  • Time consuming network provisioning and configuration
  • Organizational problems between the networking team and other functional IT groups
  • Network security

These are exactly the problems that the data center fabric was created to fix.

Your opportunity is to capitalize on these complementary trends — server virtualization and the data center fabric. Together they will provide an extreme makeover of data center economics.

Failure to act could result in… well, we only have to look back a few million years for that analogy.

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Case Study: Service Provider Boosts Data Center Agility, Cuts Costs with Xsigo

Monday, January 9th, 2012

Data center agility sounds great, but what does it mean? And how do you achieve it?

This case study from Solutions Healthcare looks at both of these questions. In their business, agility has specific meaning for SLAs and cost. Implementing an agile infrastructure let them increase effectiveness on both of these metrics.

But before diving into that, let’s consider the question of what agility means. It’s a vague, over-worked phrase, and it’s hard to quantify.

But its impact is neither vague nor intangible. In fact, data center agility can make a huge difference in your productivity and your daily life.

If you need to resolve an outage, it could make the difference between minutes or hours of downtime. Or if an update is required, it could make the difference between a  normal work hours task or a middle-of-the-night project.

So how can agility help? Here are six questions to ask.

  1. Can you add servers quickly and with minimal disruption when you need them?
  2. Are you able to easily move VMs from any server to any server, not just within a specific cluster?
  3. Does your infrastructure allow you to run any application on any server?
  4. Is it easy to resolve application performance issues without physically connecting new networks?
  5. Can you routinely resolve outages within the time allowed in your SLA?
  6. Can you launch a new application quickly, regardless of its network and storage requirements?

If the answer to all of them isn’t “yes,” a more agile infrastructure could help.

Jeff Bills, VP of IT at Solutions Healthcare, had exactly these concerns. And he implemented a Xsigo virtualized infrastructure to let him deliver higher service levels to his customers while reducing his own costs.

VMware + Data Center Agility

Jeff got agility in his data center the same way he got it on his servers: virtualization. A virtualized infrastructure decouples the connectivity from the physical connection. You can change the way a server is connected to networks and storage in software, which is a lot quicker than messing with I/O cards, cables, and switch ports.

It’s analogous to server virtualization. Just like you can carve a single processor into multiple independent VMs, infrastructure virtualization lets you carve a single cable into multiple independent links.

Jeff, a long time VMware user, found that putting these two technologies together made everything faster and more efficient. Check out his story for more.

So what do you think? Would more agility a plus for what you do? I’d be interested in hearing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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