Pods are everywhere! From ubiquitous music players (iPods) to pods that threaten humanity (Invasion of the Body Snatchers), the pod concept thrives in many forms.

Now the pod is becoming a central element of many data center deployments. It is a trend to watch because pods are already revolutionizing data center management. What are these pods, and why do they matter?

A pod, in our thinking, is a standardized unit of infrastructure. A mini data center-in-a-rack that is equipped with servers, connectivity, and perhaps storage.  The exact configuration will vary depending on each organization’s requirements. But within a data center each pod will look just like the one next to it.

Why do this?

The objective here is to save time. Employing pods standardizes deployment and management tasks, which means less time needed to complete these tasks. And that translates to higher efficiency and better resource utilization.

To see how powerful this idea can be, think about Southwest Airlines. They revolutionized the airline industry with standardization (and with funny safety briefings and peanut races).

At Southwest, the “pod” is the Boeing 737. By standardizing on this one aircraft, everything gets easier.

• All pilots can fly all planes.
• Any plane can fly any route.
• Any mechanics can work on (and has parts for) all planes.

And by standardizing, Southwest optimized the passenger load/unload procedures to cut turnaround times in half.

The result was vastly increased efficiency. Southwest won the airline trifecta with higher profits, lower fares, and a better user experience (their customer satisfaction rates are among the best in the business).

Pods can help achieve similar results in the data center as well. Here are some examples we’ve seen at our customers who have implemented a pod-based model:

• Infrastructure deployment times reduced from 2 weeks to under 4 hours
• Standardized, one-size-fits-all configurations
• Common management across infrastructure deployed worldwide
• I/O cost reduced 50% with consolidated infrastructure

The implications are huge. If you can deploy gear in hours rather than weeks or months, you can meet changing demand without having to provision resources as far in advance. That means you can run things closer to the limits and get better overall utilization.

This “just in time” operations model revolutionized manufacturing back in the 1980’s, and is doing the same  in data centers today.

Virtual I/O plays a critical role in pods

You need flexible server connectivity to accommodate a variety of applications. But for a pod to be truly “standardized,” the cabling cannot vary from one pod to the next. Configuration flexibility must therefore be enabled in software.

That flexibility is exactly what virtual I/O delivers. With virtual I/O, you can hook everything up the same (from the hardware perspective) and still deliver connectivity wherever it is needed. The result bears striking resemblance to the Southwest innovation:

• All pods can look the same
• Anyone can manage a pod, and do it from anywhere
• Any applications can (ideally!) run on any pod

Xsigo, of course, delivers the virtual I/O piece of this. And Xsigo now offers a smaller, lower-cost I/O Director (the 2U-high VP560) specifically for rack-based deployments.

It’s probably become evident that the pod is an ideal building block for the cloud. It helps enable the five cloud attributes discussed in previous posts.

Consequently, the Southwest analogy becomes especially apt. Not because Southwest takes their customers into the clouds. Sure, they do that. But what’s more important is this: a standardized operations model launched their stock price into the clouds. That’s the power of the pod.

Tags: cloud

This entry was posted on Friday, May 21st, 2010 at 2:19 PM and is filed under cloud. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.