Designing & Managing
Reliable IT Services
WITH EGENERA CLOUD SUITE SOFTWARE
Egenera, Inc.
80 Central St.
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Introduction
In today’s economic climate, IT organizations are under increasing pressure to do more than respond to the needs of the business as they arise. Instead, IT needs to anticipate business needs and deliver solutions through technological and process innovation.
One of the ways in which IT is moving from being reactive to proactive is through the delivery of cloud services. These may be internal or private clouds, external public clouds or SaaS services, or hybrid models that incorporate both.
This solutions brief describes how IT or service providers can overcome business and technical chal-lenges to implement highly scalable and highly available cloud services using Egenera Cloud Suite infrastructure and management tools.
Business Needs
Driven by the need to contain costs, accelerate time-to-service and enhance flexibility, the way IT services are delivered is changing. Rather than use dedicated infrastructure and continue to add datacenter resources, organizations are increasingly moving to cloud-based services that provide the agility businesses need.
Consider the following. If a seasonal or unexpected spike in business requires additional computing resources, how long does it take to acquire and configure the added infrastructure? Is it worthwhile to buy new hardware or can you leverage what is already there? As we all know, designing infra-structure can take time, but if you can deliver a catalog of pre-defined and pre-built services that can be allocated on demand and re-allocated when no longer needed, wouldn’t that provide a big advantage?
Enabling flexible computing can be a management challenge. There is tremendous value when infra-structure and services can be scaled up and down at will, but oftentimes the result is “virtual machine sprawl”. What is needed is a way to control all of these services from a single point of management. Another issue is reliability. If the infrastructure and services are not resilient and protected against failure or downtime then the business will suffer. Downtime equates to loss of revenue and income. In addition to designing an effective management approach, high availability and disaster recovery must be factored in as well.
The Technical Challenges
Delivering agile cloud services requires solving a number of technology challenges including design, provisioning, management, high availability and implementation of business processes. For example, having an interactive tool that helps design infrastructure and services makes it far easier to deploy a cloud-based catalog approach.
Once you have your design and management tools, how do you deliver high availability? Do you need to protect a few servers or an entire datacenter environment? Will you be able to meet the required service levels the business needs? How long would it take to get back online in the event of a failure? How do you address high availability and disaster recovery given the diverse infrastructure landscape?
The Egenera Solution
Egenera Cloud Suite software, which includes PAN Manager™, PAN Domain Manager and PAN Cloud Director, delivers a scalable and resilient IT services platform that is simple to design and deploy, yet inherently protects against a single server failure or an entire datacenter outage.
Egenera Cloud Suite enables enterprises to transform IT infrastructure into agile cloud services and benefit from automated, scalable, reliable and self-service infrastructure.
PAN Cloud Director
PAN Cloud Director (PCD) is a full cloud man-agement platform that makes it simple for both IT organizations and service providers to de-sign, request, provision, protect and manage IT as a service. With PCD you build service cata-logs and design infrastructure simply by drag-ging and dropping components together with an intuitive GUI tool.
With PCD the management of these environ-ments is also greatly simplified, allowing dy-namic design and deployment of infrastructure resources on demand.
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PAN Manager Software
PAN Manager lets you build a highly resilient and flexible computing infrastructure. It provisions, man-ages and protects IT infrastructure with its unique virtualization capabilities, powerful management software and policy-based automation.
PAN Manager Enterprise Edition includes N+1 high availability and verifiable disaster recovery as integral parts of the solution.
Based on the patented Processing Area Network (PAN) technology, PAN Manager’s unique approach works by abstracting IT infrastructure to create manageable resource pools of servers, I/O, network-ing, and storage.
Using the PAN Manager GUI, individual resourc-es from thresourc-ese pools can be assigned a profile or “personality”. Each profile contains the application configuration and service level requirements. Un-like products that limit you to virtual machines, PAN Manager easily provisions both physical servers and/or virtual servers. so you can allocate the ideal resource to any application.
What’s more, PAN Manager’s VMI feature enables the provisioning, management and protection of virtual resources without the need to license or pay for a hypervisor or third party management system. VMware and Hyper-V are also supported within PAN Manager.
With PAN Manager everything is controlled from a single GUI. From the GUI we can create a server profile with just a few clicks, and choose whether it should be a full physical server or a virtual server. One more click enables high availability and one last click enables fully verifiable disaster recovery. Once a profile has been activated, PAN Manager actively monitors and automatically manages the infrastructure in order to meet the capacity, avail-ability and response time requirements set by the business.
By specifying N+1 high availability you allocate a server to take over the workload from any failed server. This could be a physical server or a virtual server – with PAN Manager all that is required is the CPU and memory resources from that server.
By defining a server’s profile in software, you can then apply profiles to any resource, allowing work-loads to be dynamically allocated on demand.
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The DR functionality built in to PAN Manager allows you to fail over entire environments, whether that is between racks in the same datacenter or across geographically dispersed datacenters. By having this level of abstraction, the server definitions can quickly be applied to the resources wherever they are located, which also allows you to test whenever you need to. With PAN Manager you can even have different hardware specifications in your DR site and production datacenter.
As the failover process can be automated and initiated very quickly, DR servers can be used to run other workloads and non-critical applications. This eliminates the cost of idle hardware to maximize datacenter efficiency.
Solution Summary
By building a solution using Egenera Cloud Suite, you can deliver a complete, highly flexible, man-ageable and available IT services platform that enables IT to stay ahead of the needs of the business. For more information please contact Egenera.
For a DR environment this gives you the add-ed benefit of being able to mix hardware and still deliver enterprise-class infrastructure. As environments need to scale, hardware choices don’t become a limiting factor, allowing you to purchase the most suitable platform for the use case.
This capability enables great flexibility for both IT organizations and service providers. IT can
use those DR resources for applications such as testing and development until they are needed for disaster recovery. Service providers can choose the most cost effective hardware platform and still be able to deliver enterprise-class availability services across different customers.
PAN Domain Manager
PAN Domain Manager (PDM) takes DR functionality to the next level by allowing hardware platforms from different server vendors to be brought together as a single pool of resources within a PAN Man-ager environment.
