IO Virtualization: The “Hypervisor” for Your Infrastructure

An Explosive Technology, But Don't Treat as a Standalone Product
  
More than ever in 2010, IO Virtualization (IOV) has been showing-up in products, written about, spoken about. Because I’ve had a few years’ experience with this technology, I wanted to give a very brief explanation of the concept, and focus more on why it will be increasingly important.
 
In particular, I want to draw an analogy where you should view IOV as a critical enabling feature of future IT Management…  but not as a stand-alone product. Why? It's similar in concept to how the hypervisor is an enabler (but usually not used as a stand-alone product) of data center management services. 

This blog is related to my 2009 installment on Fabric as an IT Enabler.

What is IOV?

Today's Physical Infrastructure

IO Virtualization is an approach whereby physical IO components such as Network Interface Cards (NICs) Host Bus Adaptors (HBAs) and Keyboard/video/Mouse ports (KVM) are reproduced logically rather than physically.  In other words, a physical IO port (Ethernet, Infiniband, PCI, etc.) might logically represent itself to the O/S as different configurations.

Clearly this is convenient because it (a) eliminates multiple costly IO devices that also consume power and installation time. But it’s also convenient because IO – and it’s associated addressing such as IPs, MACs, Worldwide Names, etc. – can be instantly configured with a mouse.


The other consequence of IOV is that a single physical port means a single physical cable.  In essence, a server’s logical IO is consolidated down to a single (physical) converged network which carries data, storage and KVM traffic.   So this means that no matter how many logical IO devices you configure for a server, there is still only a single cable out the back.  So IOV yields the ideal “wire-once” server environment that’s still infinitely re-configurable.

The overall value of IOV becomes clear fast:  Fewer physical IO devices to buy, fewer cables to install, zero re-cabling, fewer physical ports to buy, and instantly re-configurable IO. 

Differing Implementation Approaches

Infrastructure With
IO Virtualization

In brief, there are a few differing approaches to IO virtualization:

• Existing on-board Ethernet with new IO drivers: (e.g. Egenera)
• Converged Networking Adapters (e.g. Qlogic, Emulex)
• Appliances + high-throughput IO devices (e.g. Xsigo)
• Existing physical IO but with address hardware-based mapping/virtualization (e.g. HP VirtualConnect)

Putting IOV in Perspective

You should think of IOV using the following analogy: The way in which the hypervisor abstracts software in the application domain, IOV abstracts IO and networking in the infrastructure domain.  (However, to be clear, IOV is not a software layer as-is the hypervisor)

This analogy leads to a few more observations:

1. Where the hypervisor added software portability in the software domain IOV will do the same for the infrastructure domain.  Higher-order services like HA and consolidation were made possibly by the hypervisor.  Similarly, HA, DR and migration can be accomplished with IOV. And what’s more, a hypervisor is not required for IOV, so you can use IOV with native applications too.
2. The hypervisor used to be the focus, but now it’s merely an enabling feature embedded within higher-level IT management products. Those products leverage the hypervisor to perform tasks such as migration, fail-over and consolidation. You should view IOV similarly: it is an enabling feature that will allow for analogous IO consolidation, migration and fail-over.
3. Where hypervisor implementations and performance used to be hotly-debated, nobody really cares anymore.  Today the real *value* is not in the hypervisor, but in the management tools surrounding it.  Similarly, IOV should be judged less on how it is implemented, and more on the management tools and automation which manage it.

Forrester analyst Galen Schreck made a similar observation recently:

….Aside from benefits like reducing cabling and switch ports, I think the most interesting aspect of virtualized IO is the ability of a physical server's personality to be moved to any other server in the data center. In addition to the underlying network technology, the thing that makes this possible is integrated management of the server and data center fabric. In most cases, this won't be a stand-alone product that you acquire (though you can build your own solution from InfiniBand and PCI Express products on the market). This capability will most likely be an integrated part of whatever server and network environments you select, but now is the time to begin planning how you'll tie it in with the rest of your system management environment.

IO Virtualization in the IT Management Landscape

How might IO virtualization be used as part of the IT ecosystem in an integrated manner?

In much the same way that the hypervisor has since been embedded in tools like VMware’s vCenter, IOV can (and has been) embedded with higher-level management tools.

Taking an example I’m rather familiar with, Egenera’s PAN Manager Software surrounds IOV technology with facilities such as integrated with converged fabric networking, server boot control and storage connectivity.  When used alongside these and other services, IOV enables:

• Server High Availability– In the case of hardware failure, a server’s infrastructure state (IO addressing, storage naming, network topology and workload) can be re-instantiated on another bare-metal server. This provides a ‘universal’ style of failover that doesn’t require clustering software. And what’s more, the failed-over server workload could be a native OS, or a VM host.  IOV is agnostic to the workload!
• Disaster Recovery – expanding on the example above, if an entire domain of servers fails, the entire group of server IO states, networking states, etc. can be recovered onto another domain (assuming shared/replicated storage).  This approach to DR is elegant because it fails-over not just workloads but  the entire logical server/environment configuration as well.
• Scaling-Out – where a series of server profiles can be instantly replicated into an instant cluster. Workloads, NICs, HBAs, networking addressing and storage connections (complete with fabric-based load balancing) can all be cloned… starting with the IO and networking profiles, made possible through IOV.

In future blogs I’ll dive more deeply into how software-based IOV operates as part of the IT management ecosystem, and why it is a popular approach because of its cross-platform compatibility in a heterogeneous data center.

An Ideal Datacenter-in-a-Box, Part II

Last week I posted a Blog outlining Dell & Egenera's latest Datacenter-in-a-Box offering. More than one person took note of how I compared its simplicity in contrast to other offerings in the same space, but failed to detail the specifics of Egenera's PAN Manager software and how it mapped to 13 common IT Service Management functions.

The 13 different functions are mapped onto the data center "stack" at right. They span management of both physical and virtual software, servers, I/O, networking, etc. -- as well as higher-level functions such as High-Availability and Disaster Recovery.

The Dell PAN offering unifies 12 of the 13 functions, and provides them from within a single console is called PAN Manger. (The 13th function if provided via the Dell Management Console.) This single-console infrastructure management software consists of the base PAN Builder software, as well as two optional modules, PAN Server Portability, and PAN Portability.

So, using the diagram from last week, the functionality maps as follows:

PAN Builder:

• VM server management
• Physical server management
• Software (P & V) provisioning
• I/O virtualization & management
• IP load balancing
• Network virtualization & management
• Storage connection management
• Infrastructure provisioning
• Device (e.g. switch & load balancing) failover
  

PAN Server Portability:

• Physical N+1 failover (HA)
  
• Virtual host N+1 failover (HA)
  

PAN Portability:

• Disaster recovery (DR) for entire mixed P & V environments
  

I hope this helps detail not only the Egenera product, but also illustrates what's possible when the industry combines server management with virtual I/O and virtual networking & switching. It's the perfect complement to O/S virtualization, and massively simplifies traditional IT Operations Management.

An Ideal Datacenter-in-a-Box

Today's announcement marks a modest but meaningful step in Egenera's relationship with Dell, and in overall Simplification of IT .

Essentially the punchline is this: We've taken the most commonly-purchased hardware configuration and management tools used by mission-critical IT Ops, and integrated them into a single product with a single GUI that you can install and use in ~ 1 day. That's essentially the idea behind the "Datacenter-in-a-Box:"

Most common configuration: Blades + Networking + SAN Storage

Most useful tools to manage VMs + physical servers + network + I/O + SW provisioning + workload automation + high availability

That's what Egenera's done with Dell. It's a "unified computing" environment (to borrow a term) - but has integrated with it all of the most popular higher-level management functions too. That's to say it includes I/O virtualization, a converged network fabric (including virtual switches and load balancing - based on std. ethernet), and then includes tools for software provisioning, VM management, and high-availability to "universally" manage both physical and virtual workloads simultaneously. Pretty cool - and highly simple to use.

Don't believe all this stuff can be so simple? Here's evidence & illustrations why this move will help drive data center management toward greater simplification:

• (1) Check out how easy it is to provision a complete compute environment with N+1 failover in 6 steps
• (2) Compare the level of complexity reduction compared to some similar products
• (3) The Dell PAN Datatcenter-in-a-Box (DCIB), together with the Dell Management Console, provides a massively simplified management landscape as compared with alternative solutions. To wit:

The set of "traditional" products you'd need to buy/integrate.
ALL of these functions are already integrated within the Dell PAN DCIB:

Then, the roughly-equivalent solution you'd compose with HP:

And finally, the roughly-equivalent solution you'd compose with Cisco and their partners:

I'd also be remiss without pointing out that this product SKU configuration is available directly from our friends at Dell - and was born directly from customer requests for such a building-block. Folks who've already purchased this technology based on the Dell PAN System include

• Federal users who may replicate an entire mission-critical environment across dozens of aviation-related locations
• Financial-services users who wanted a consolidated approach to ensuring high-availability across dozens of blades w/different workloads
  
• Commercial customers wanting a flexible environment on which to run the company's SAP
• A Federal hosted services provider wanting five-9's of availability plus being able to re-configure systems/capacity a la an "internal" cloud
  
• Overseas users acting as an internal IT service provider seeking 'universal' HA and DR for all workloads

Plus thousands more worldwide locations where you can find the same PAN Manager software.

If you don't believe Dell hardware is ready for the Data Center, then think again.

Quantifying Data Center Simplification

Ever read that marketing fluff that says "blah blah simplifies your data center"? Ever wonder what that means and whether there is any quantifiable measure?

Infrastructure & management simplification is more than simply reducing ports, cable counts, and more than simply virtualizing/consolidating. (In fact, if done improperly, each of these approaches ultimately adds management complexity)

To me, true simplification isn't 'masking' complexity with more management and abstraction layers. Rather, it's about taking a systems-style approach to re-thinking the componentry and interaction of items across both software and infrastructure. For example, independently-managed components (and management products) can consist of

• Server/CPU status, workload repurposing
• Server console/KVMs
• Physical app management
• Virtual app management
• Physical HA/DR
• Virtual HA/DR
  
• Storage connectivity
• I/O management
  
• Networking & switch management
  
• software systems Management

It's not just about reducing cables & ports!

Three observations I've recently made have driven this concept home to me.

1. The arising of true Infrastructure management: systems like PAN Manager which essentially manage all of the above bullets together as a true "system" (see my earlier post on 6 simple steps to take to managing IT infrastructure) Nowhere else will you see as many as 6-7 complex IT management functions reduced to a single console.

2. An average case-study of a PAN Manager user. For example take a major Online Grocer dealing with a storefront website (environment was BEA WebLogic, Oracle9i RAC, CRM, business intelligence, etc.) for delivery admin and payment processing. Complexity consisted of traditional systems management, and then the addition of clustering and the 1:1 duplication of server, network and SW tools.

With a systems-style management approach, ultimately, servers, ports, cables, NICs, HBAs, disks, recovery systems -- and most of all, admin time and OpEx -- fell dramatically with a PAN-managed, systems approach to simplification. That took componentry from ~1,500 "moving parts" down to under 200. To me, "elegant engineering" equates to simplification.

3. Major equipment vendors are offering similar infrastructure management products to those from Egenera. But the "systems" issue still persists, even if some of them have solved for the networking, I/O & switching parts. So, after a pretty detailed analysis I did, it's still obvious that multiple "point products" are still needed to operate these products. Those products still represent a non-systems approach, to me at least.

What would you rather manage? A bunch of point products that mask complexity, or a true system that re-thinks how data center infrastructure is run? I'm thinking the PAN Manager-run system :)

RTI Fabrics... not just a networking play

Pete Manca, Egenera's CTO, posted an excellent Blog Explaining RTI Architectures, (a term coined by Gartner some time ago) and does a nice job of taking a pretty objective approach to 3 types:

"A converged fabric architecture takes a single type of fabric (e.g. Ethernet) and converges various protocols on it in a shared fashion. For example, Cisco’s UCS converges IP and Fiber Channel (FC) packets on the same Ethernet fabric. Egenera’s fabric does the same thing on both Ethernet fabrics (with our Dell PAN System solution) and on an ATM fabric (on our BladeFrame solution)...

"Dynamic Fabrics are not converged, but rather separate fabrics that can be have their configuration modified dynamically. This is the approach that HP uses. Rather than utilize a converged fabric, HP has separate fabrics for FC and Ethernet. These fabrics can be dynamically re-configured to account for server fail-over and migration. HP’s VirtualConnect and Flex10 products are separate switches for Fiber Channel and Ethernet traffic, respectively."

"The 3rd type of fabric is a Managed Fabric. In this architecture there is no convergence at all. Rather, the vendor programs the Ethernet and Fiber Channel switches to allow servers to migrate. This is a bit like the Dynamic Fabric above, however, these typically are not captive switches and there is no convergence whatsoever."

I'll take some liberty here, and emphasize a pretty important point:

Converged /managed fabrics aren't attractive just because they simplify networking. It's because they are a perfectly complementary technology to managing server repurposing as well. That's for *both* physical servers and virtual hosts.

It's no wonder why IBM (with their Open Fabric Manager), HP (with their Matrix bundle), Cisco (with UCS) and Dell/Egenera (with the Dell PAN System) are all pushing in this area.

Why? Because once you have control over networking, I/O and storage connectivity, you've greatly simplified the problem of repurposing any given CPU. That means scaling-out is easier, failing-over is easier, and even recovering entire environmentns is easier. You don't have to worry about re-creating IPs, MACs, WWNs etc., because it's taken care of.

So, if you can combine Fabric control with SLA management and then with server (physical and virtual) provisioning, you've got an elegant, flexible compute environment.

Infrastructure Orchestration in use within SPs & Hosting providers

For the past months I've held that new technologies are OK... but the litmus test is whether they're actually used and valuable in the real world.

One of those new technologies in the Enterprise Data Center space is what I call Infrastructure Orchestration (others term it fabric computing or unified computing). HP, IBM and now even Cisco have solutions in the space, but I believe only Egenera has been doing it the longest, and has the broadest installed base of enterprises in the real-world using it and expanding footprint.

With the explosive growth of virtualization, this segment of technology is hotter than ever. Why? In the way virtualization abstracts & configures the software world (O/S, applications, etc.), Infrastructure Orchestration abstracts and defines/configures the infrastructure world (I/O, NIC cards, HBA cards, storage connectivity, LANs, switches, etc.). So, not only can you define a virtual server instantly, you can define a *physical* server (maybe a virtual host, or a physical machine) down to I/O, NICs, Storage and Network. By doing this, you can reconstruct an entire data center -- giving you a unified approach to HA and/or DR. Cool.

I've been pointing out applications for this technology in Healthcare as well as in the Financial sector, and I thought it would also be useful to illustrate value in the Service Provider / Hosting market.

For this segment, the Infrastructure Orchestration approach is essentially used to build Infrastructure-as-a-Service, or IaaS. In the past it's been called "utility computing" but in the era of cloud computing, this seems to be the term in use.

Savvis

In 2004, Savvis set a goal to become the industry’s first totally virtualized utility computing data center, integrating virtualized servers, storage, networks, and security into an end-to-end solution. Today, the service provider houses over 1,425 virtual servers running on 70 industrystandard Egenera servers, 370 terabytes of storage and 1,250 virtualized firewalls.

As a complement to its managed hosting and collocation business, the company has built huge, scalable service platforms that can be leveraged by multiple clients with full security. This utility approach enables them to charge customers for resources more closely tailored to their actual needs. Each year, more revenues and profits are generated from utility hosting contracts with business and government customers ranging from start-up entrepreneurs to the largest enterprises in the world, enabling Savvis to compete and win against traditional hosting providers and outsourcers.

Albridge Solutions:

Albridge Solutions migrated from UNIX servers to industry-standard servers running Linux and Egenera-based Infrastructure Orchestration. Initially, they considered building a virtualized environment by combining virtualization and management point-products. They discovered, however, that resulting complexity would be overwhelming. Servers from the industry’s largest vendors were also ruled out since their legacy architectures made virtualization and resource sharing impossible. Today, using industry-standard servers and Egenera's software, Albridge can run any application on any server at any time based on demand... regardless of whether those applications are virtual, or native.

Panasonic Electric Works Information Systems Co., Ltd.

Panasonic chose Egenera products to consolidate servers and reduce floor-space. Along with enabling server consolidation, the software is delivering superior high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (HA). Applications running in the data center include an order-processing service for the manufacturing industry, a content delivery system and Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). Based on results, Panasonic has designated Egenera software as its standard infrastructure virtualization management software for mission-critical processing.

Egenera creates physical & virtual servers transparently

Egenera just announced that it's embedding virtual machine provisioning within its PAN Manager software for free.

PAN Manager is the "secret sauce" Egenera has been using to manage its own hardware for years, and recently OEM'd to Dell as part of their Dell PAN System. The software has always had the ability to provision physical and/or virtual servers with mission-critical levels of availability, including networking, I/O and storage configurations.

Now Egenera has bundled the virtual server provisioning option in at no charge into the core management product. The technology is based on the latest Citrix (Xen) technology.

That means that Egenera's own hardware -- as well as Dell Blades -- not only operates with a "unified computing" architecture (as some would call it!), but that operators have the option to create physical or virtual servers on-the-fly, as conditions require. And, regardless of the type of server (or software workload) the servers are protected with HA and DR, even across remote locations.

For Dell, this gives them a play in the mission-critical computing market, with a way to either embed VMs within their bladed environments, or to support other virtualized environments like VMware or Microsoft -- all with similar five-9's of availability.

Using the system is super simple and elegant. You'll never need to re-cable a server again, and never have to worry about I/O, network configuration or DR configuration. IMHO it will be the infrastructure model the industry will migrate to.

Videos: What is Infrastructure Orchestration

My first endeavors into online video. No pictures of me, but at least you get the audio.

Here is a brief, high-level overview of what's meant by Infrastructure Orchestration, including some messy annotations of mine while I speak:


And here's another video of it in action: The Dell PAN system that you can buy today:

Unified computing is so easy - 6 easy steps

With all of the chatter now about "Unified Computing" - as well as all of the skeptics thinking it's blue-sky future, I wanted to outline how incredibly simple it really can be. Even I can do it :)

At Egenera, we've been in this business since 2001, terming this technology "Infrastructure Orchestration."

When I asked my SEs how to describe using PAN Manager with the Dell PAN system to abstract data center infrastructure in software, they gave me back a surprisingly simple set of instructions. Not technical acronyms or jargon. I personally watched (and participated in) getting a compute environment, complete with high-availability fail-over and DR, up-and-running in under 15 minutes. And the cool part is that it included both native OSs, as well as VMs.

Using our GUI, the Administrator then

1. Defines resources –Identify available individual building-block resources which include pools of blades, internal switches, external switches, disks/LUNs, and OS images.
2. Organizes resources – Define logical groupings & access privileges for different pools and/or allocations as-needed by the business. Each group and its resources are distinct and secure from the others.
3. Builds profiles and servers – Assign physical blades; assign network connectivity; assign disks (each LUN is presented as a SCSI device); assign an OS (which could a native OS, as well as a VM host OS like VMware ESX); finally, boot the server profile
4. Assigns HA policies – Specify specific failover blades or shared pools, before or after building/booting the server
5. Defines DR policies – Entire server environment configurations (or subsets) can be defined and instantiated either on-demand, on-schedule, or any other reason.
6. (Optional) Reassigns servers – As simple as point/click/reboot. More than one server profile can be assigned to each blade. Change can be triggered via schedule or other commands.

The beauty of defining the server and its infrastructure in software is the ability to re-create it on demand, from a true "bare metal", wire-once environment.

Any engineer would appreciate how elegant a solution -- and set of user instructions -- this is.

First fruits from the Dell/Egenera deal

It appears the Egenera/Dell deal is moving forward with velocity. A first joint customer was announced today, the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Corporate Data Center Operations (CDCO).

This is the first of a pipeline of customers buying-into Infrastructure Orchestration (also referred to as Fabric Computing or Unified Computing) - first offered in 2001 by Egenera with their high-end BladeFrame + PAN Manager software, and now being mainstreamed as the Dell PAN System by combining PAN Manager with Dell hardware.

The VA's CDCO is really a hosting facility - much the way an xSP hosts applications for third-parties. In this case, they're hosting a mission-critical application for an influenza early-warning system. I've met with their CTO, who's a pretty forward-thinking guy. He recognizes the fact that his "customers" frequently change requirements, and computing demands frequently change too. So, for an environment comprising physical databases and virtualized instances, the Egenera/Dell system provided significant agility (ability to re-provision quickly) while maintaining a mission-critical level of availability.

The Dell/Egenera deal has been getting some profile lately - as it takes on similar technologies such as IBM's Open Frabric Manager, and HP's Insight Orchestration products. Stay tuned for some more juicy news.

Egenera PAN now available on Dell blades

Since about 2001, Egenera has been selling its high-end hardware/software combination that unified re-purposing of physical and virtual servers. It combined super-high-performance blades, with their PAN Manager software. PAN stood for Processing Area Network, akin to a SAN in its ability to logically re-allocate CPUs, and its ability to provide ultra-high reliability. Hundreds of customers at thousands of locations knew this to be the creme-de-la-creme of solutions.

In his blog today, Egenera's CTO talks about PAN Manager now available on Dell Blades.

That means a whole-new level of affordability/performance. It also helps put Dell's blade strategy square in the data center space - and able to take on HP and IBM. Out-of-the-box, Dell blades can support mission-critical levels of availability, regardless of P or V payloads.

It also endorses Egenera's historic approach to Infrastructure Orchestration and the network fabric (what others are also calling unified computing).

Correcting computing's wrongs - road to recovery?

As brilliant as the first microcomputer architects were, there were some early design principles that, as the law of unintended consequences outlines, have seriously hamstrung enterprise computing for years. But the industry is about to get out from under them in a big way.

We're about to hear lots about "Infrastructure Orchestration", by virtue of Cisco's anticipated entry into the blade market with their "unified computing" strategy. The principle has been known as that of a "computing fabric," first conceived by Vern Brownell, the then-CTO of Goldman Sachs, and later productized by Egenera.

Fundamentally, the concept abstracts-away a server's I/O, disk, storage connectivity, and out-of-band controls, making it a stateless entity. The result is a server with considerably more flexibility (e.g. ability to be re-purposed) and a significant simplification in how groups of these servers are managed. Just wait 'till this catches on.

A bit of history: How did we get here?
In the early eras of PCs, a number of new technologies arose: in particular there was the IP network, that allowed the CPU to talk to others, and external/networked storage, that externalized (or removed) the dedicated hard drive. Both of these technologies instantly resulted in additional hardware on the motherboard: The Network Interface Card (NIC) for connection to Ethernet, etc., and the Host Bus Adaptor (HBA) for connection to storage. Later on there was another bit of hardware, the on-board controller, that helped monitor/control "out-of-band" aspects of the CPU like power, temperature, performance; this also had its own equivalent of a NIC. These pieces of hardware were sometimes incorporated into the motherboard itself, or sometimes were additional plug-ins.

But each new technology came at an (unwitting) price: they became tightly-bound to the hardware and software. Each had a software driver, usually tied to the O/S. And each usually had its form of addressing -- IP and MAC address for the NIC, and usually the Worldwide Name for the HBA. Often, the NIC and the controller were actually part of the motherboard itself.

The result: Servers, their O/S, and sometimes even applications, were tightly-tied to their I/O. Changes to the network or storage meant changing I/O configurations. Changes to the server meant re-defining addresses as well. Every time a physical server had to be configured (or re-configured), the NIC, the HBA and even the controller's IP address had to be configured too. (And, if the server was on a separate network, external switches had to be configured as well).

This all made for an operations nightmare. The Application owners had to work with the O/S owners, who in-turn needed a process to work with Storage and Networking groups. No wonder operational spending is rising.

An alternative model.
Vern Brownell (and others) recognized the source of this complexity and asked whether the compute (CPU, memory, etc.) could be complete disociated or abstrated from the I/O.

In essence, the compute resource would be a stateless resource -- agnostic to the SW it ran, and agnostic to what I/O it was connected to. The I/O would be "virtualized" into a logical (rather than physical) connection... which meant that addressing and naming could be provisioned/changed in software.

Further, the physical I/O and network could be collapsed/unified. A single wire could carry all signals, and a set of switches could create custom (or private) connections between servers, or from servers out to an external network and storage. Hence the term "computing fabric" began.

This concept was initially productized around 2001 by Egenera, in the form of their BladeFrame hardware and PAN Manager software (short for Processing Area Network), and recently expanded to Dell hardware as well. The analogy to a SAN was clear: An abstracted, centrally-managed set of CPUs rather than an abstracted set of Disks. In the way that LUNs are mapped to physical drives, logical nodes would be mapped to physical (or virtual) CPUs.

Properties of the "compute fabric" a.k.a. Infrastructure Orchestration (a.k.a unified computing)
Once a set of servers is part of this compute fabric, a number of very elegant properties arise. Chiefly, any CPU can be re-purposed to handle just about any workload (assuming CPU is compatible, and memory is sufficient). Issues having to do with I/O, storage connectivity, etc. evaporate.

So, for example, if a server running a native O/S were to fail, another "bare metal" server could be instantly re-assigned all of the properties of the original server, connected to the failed machine's network, and then connected to the failed machine's shared storage. Presto - instant High Availability (HA).

Next, extend this example to a bunch of servers (and networks and switches). Should they all fail, such as in a disaster, the entire configuration, down to each server's I/O, networks, VLANs, etc., can be re-created in a separate location on "cold" bare (unprovisioned) hardware. Presto - instant Disaster Recovery (DR). All this assumes mirrored SAN storage, of course.

So what you might still say? Well, consider if the "native O/S" in the example above was really a VMware ESX server host. That means that an entire host configuration (down to the VMs) could be re-created elsewhere without having to re-provision the hosts themselves onto a physical piece of hardware. Neat, especially if you find yourself having to first duplicate hosts, hardware configurations and networks for your virtual failover sites. Not very "virtual," are they?

Now, finally, consider a mixed environment -- with native O/Ss as well as VM hosts (e.g. an SAP installation where some servers are virtual, but with native DBs as well). Complete HA and DR could be provided to the entire environment. At once. Cool.

Where we're headed
So if you think about it, if the original CPU mother boards and servers *hadn't* been equipped with stateful peripherals like NICs and HBAs, much of the complexity we deal with in data centers would be obviated. Instead, we would take for granted the fact that just about any workload could run just about anywhere, with the assurance that any other hardware could pick up if the original failed. We would have "virtual hardware" the same way we have virtual software.

And there's the point: that fabric computing - infrastructure orchestration, unified computing - is actually the ideal complement to any virutal (or physical) infrastructure.

No wonder why we'll see and hear more about this in the near future. Hardware vendors (Egenera, HP, IBM, Dell) are already doing it, and Cisco is about to. And what of VMware or Citrix?

"California" is deja vu all over again

Just in case you want a "preview" of what Cisco is expected to announce on March 16th, you might want to compare their unified computing model to Egenera's Infrastructure Orchestration technology it has been shipping for about 7 years.

Internet.com's ServerWatch reported today some additional details about Cisco's "Project California." It all sounds pretty familiar to what Vern Brownell conceived-of back in 2001.

This reminds me of the famous spoof of Bill Gates' announcement of Vista, as well as a more highly-polished roasting by Apple of Vista's well-publicized, but trailing, technology. So, to pay homage to radical new innovation based on things that have been in the market for some time, permit me to highlight some historic factoids from the article by Andy Patrizio:

"According to a source familiar with the products, the blades will be based on Intel's Core i7 processors and come with up to 192GB of memory, well above the maximum capacity of 128GB in today's blades. Intel recently announced it would begin shipping Core i7 Xeon processors, codenamed Nehalem-EP, as part of its Xeon 5000 series.

Truth-be told, Egenera's own BladeFrame hardware already supports 128GB of memory, on 6-core, 4-way boards. And, our 192GB/Nehalem is coming soon too. A customer of ours has already indicated that in experiments, they have over 150 VMs running on a single blade in the chassis.

"The blades include a PCI-Express connection, allowing them to connect to Cisco's high-speed Unified Fabric architecture. These connections also give the blades very fast Ethernet access to both the network and storage devices and eliminate the need for a storage-area network (SAN). Instead, the blades would talk directly to the storage servers.

Similarly, Egenera BladeFrame Frabric architecture inherently eliminated the need for NICs and HBAs, and permitted unified/consolidated I/O to travel between blades at 2.5GB, or out to data center switches and storage. By abstracting away the I/O, it allows our management software to instantly provision any number/type of I/O onto Bare metal.

"The blade servers are believed to come with Cisco's Nexus 5000 switches embedded in the chassis, which support the Unified Fabric and is built to be virtualization-ready. The servers will also feature tight integration with and support for VMware software.

As above, a switching fabric is already built into the Egenera system. And for years, Egenera blades have been available with vmBuilder , a module which embeds VMs within the system. In that way, administators have the option of provisioning a full physical blade, or dicing-it-up into many virtual blades.

"This would put computing and networking power all in a single box. 'It's more of making the computer part of the network, thus Unified Computing,' said the source... The term "Unified Computing" was first floated by Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior in a January blog post, where she described it as 'the advancement toward the next generation data center that links all resources together in a common architecture to reduce the barrier to entry for data center virtualization'. In other words, the compute and storage platform is architecturally 'unified' with the network and the virtualization platform....

"Computing and networking power in a single box"? Again, that sounds alot like the Egenera BladeFrame + PAN (Processing Area Network) Manager software, or like the Dell PAN System. Take a look at these demos.

Don't want to buy a high-performance Egenera BladeFrame? Well, you can also consider the Dell PAN System, which takes all of these "unified computing" Infrastructure Orchestration features, and runs them on Dell hardware, too.