Data Center
Consolidation
MODERNIZING YOUR IT INFRASTRUCTURE
WITH EGENERA CLOUD SUITE SOFTWARE
Egenera, Inc.
80 Central St.
Boxborough, MA 01719
Phone: 978.206.6300
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Introduction
Data center consolidation is an important strategy for organizations today. The main driver is to re-duce cost. As an example, the US Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI) expects to reduce the number of data centers from about 3,000 to about 1,800 by 2015 - a reduction rate of 40% - and anticipates savings in the range of US$5 billion.
Advances in virtualization technology make this possible, as virtualization significantly increases the utilization of computing assets. It allows IT to deploy less hardware and cut the cost of data center space and power. It also increases availability and allows for easier disaster recovery deployment. However, virtualization comes with its own challenges. “Virtual machine sprawl”, or the continual proliferation of virtual machines, is one of them, as it is so easy to create new virtual servers. So, how can you reap the benefits of virtualization without creating a management nightmare when undertak-ing a data center consolidation project?
This solution brief will help answer that question.
Business Needs
There are several approaches an organization can take in regard to data center consolidation. The first is to reassess their own in-house infrastructure and start to adopt technologies such as server virtualization like VMware and a converged infrastructure solution like Egenera PAN Manager to re-duce servers, network and storage hardware.
The other one is to adopt public cloud services such as PaaS (platform as a service), ITaaS (IT as a service) or DRaaS (disaster recovery as a service). This way an organization can reduce the number of internal platforms – the ultimate consolidation exercise! This growing trend has been a boon to service providers, enabling them to drive new revenues from these offerings.
In most cases organizations are opting for a combination of approaches, including the creation of internal, private clouds that deliver faster time to service and greater flexibility to users.
Whatever model is adopted, the ultimate goal is to save money while delivering more efficient, flexible and scalable services back to the business.
Business Challenges
The business challenges reflect the approaches de-scribed previously. In some cases consolidating inter-nal data centers requires an upfront investment in more powerful hardware. It usually requires new software licenses for the chosen virtualization solution. How-ever those investments should be recouped over time through the reduction in space, power, hardware, and administrative expenses. Therefore there will be a good TCO/ROI story over the long term.
Moving to an external services model should mean reducing capital expenditures and freeing up IT to work on more strategic projects, however the cost of the services may increase operational expenditures.
Technical Challenges
Consolidating infrastructure or setting up an internal cloud service requires a well-thought out plan. It also requires the selection of the right technology pieces to ensure that the scalability, flexibility, availability and effective management goals are met.
The biggest challenge is usually an operational management issue and balancing the need for a di-verse set of capabilities without resulting in an increasing number of standalone tools. For example, to support the broad range of applications within a data center almost always requires a mix of both virtual and physical servers. How can IT easily manage both physical and virtual platforms as one, while ensuring availability and high service levels?
From a physical perspective, as more powerful hardware platforms are added to replace older serv-ers, will the number of connections required for networking and storage result in “component and cable sprawl”?
These are just two examples of technology considerations that can arise from data center consolida-tion.
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 de-ploy, yet inherently protects against a single server failure or an entire datacenter outage.
Egenera’s Cloud Suite enables enterprises to transform IT infrastructure into agile cloud services and benefit from automated, scalable, reliable and self-service infrastructure.
PAN Manager Software
Egenera PAN Manager™ is the key piece of Egenera Cloud Suite for data center consolidation. PAN Manager lets you build a highly resilient and flexible computing infrastructure. It provisions, manages and protects IT infrastructure with its unique virtualization capabilities, powerful management soft-ware and policy-based automation.
PAN Manager Enterprise Edition includes N+1 high availability and verifiable disaster recovery as integral parts of the solution.
PAN Manager’s virtual networking and storage capabilities also reduce components such as NICs and HBAs, simplifying the physical environment further.
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Egenera pioneered this technology, which today is commonly is known as Converged Infrastructure, over a decade ago, making it the most mature platform available today. Based on the patented Pro-cessing Area Network (PAN) technology, PAN Manager’s unique approach works by abstracting IT infrastructure to create manageable resource pools of servers, I/O, networking, and storage. Unlike products that limit you to virtual machines, PAN Manager provisions both physical servers and virtual servers so you can allocate the ideal resource for any application. PAN Manager also supports a broad range of server hardware including both blades and rack servers, allowing you to mix and match the platform of your choice.
At the heart of PAN Manager is the concept of resource pooling. PAN Manager pools CPU and memory resources from the physical servers, al-lowing workloads to be dynamically allocated on demand.
By defining a server’s profile in software, you can then apply profiles to any resource, allowing you to match the right physical characteristics to the task at hand. This level of abstraction delivers incred-ible flexibility to dynamically move workloads for scalability, or in the event of an outage or resource failure. From the GUI you can create a server pro-file with just a few clicks, and choose whether it should be a full physical server or a virtual server. 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 sys-tem. VMware and Hyper-V are also supported within PAN Manager.
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, availability 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 server running a hypervisor or it could be a physical server – with PAN Manager all that is required is the CPU and memory resources from that server.
The N+1 disaster recovery (DR) functionality built into PAN Manager allows you to fail over entire environ-ments, whether that is between racks in the same data center or across geographically dispersed data centers. By having this level of abstraction, the serv-er 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 data center.
As the failover process can be automated and ini-tiated very quickly, DR servers can be used to run other workloads and non-critical applications. This eliminates the cost of idle hardware to maximize data center efficiency.
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For a DR environment this gives you the added ben-efit 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 or-ganizations and service providers. IT can use those DR resources for applications such as testing and development until they are needed for disaster re-covery. Service providers can choose the most cost
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. This capability enables server profiles to be moved transparently between different platforms – allowing you to capitalize on the openness and flexibility of mixed vendor environments. This is particularly useful if you failover into the cloud – as you do not need to worry about what plat-form you are failing to, or that it matches production platplat-forms. For example you could be running HP servers in your environment, while the DRaaS platforms use IBM servers.
effective hardware platform and still be able to deliver enterprise-class availability services across different customers.
PAN Cloud Director
If your data center consolidation strategy includes setting up cloud services, PAN Cloud Director (PCD) makes it simple for both IT organizations and service providers to design, request, provision, protect and manage IT as a service. With PCD you build infrastructure by simply dragging and drop-ping components together with an intuitive GUI tool.
For the IT department or service provider the management of these environments becomes greatly simplified, allowing dynamic design and deployment of infrastructure resources on demand.
With PAN Cloud Director (PCD) you can start to manage the in-frastructure and platform as a true end-to-end service, giving IT administrators the ability to build infrastructure by simply dragging and dropping components together on a palette, whether they are physical servers or virtual servers. PCD is completely agnostic and open.
PCD coupled with PAN Manager solves the scalability challenges by delivering cloud-like characteristics for delivering IT services. It gives you the ability to design, provision and protect environments in real time.
Solution Summary
Building a solution based on Egenera Cloud Suite software and converged infrastructure manage-ment allows organizations to consolidate hardware platforms and deploy less infrastructure. It also consolidates management with the ability to manage physical and virtual environments along with a unified approach to HA and DR whatever the platform.
