Converged Infrastructure, Part 3

Converged Infrastructure: What it Is, and What it Isn't

In my two earlier posts, I first took a stab at an overview of converged infrastructure and how it will change IT management, and in the second installment, I looked a bit closer at converged infrastructure's cost advantages. But one thing that I sense I neglected was to define what's meant by converged infrastructure (BTW, Cisco terms it Unified Computing). Even more important, I also feel the need to highlight what converged infrastructure is not. Plus, there are vendor instances where The Emperor Has No Clothing -- e.g. where some marketers have claimed that they suddenly have converged infrastructure where the fact remains that they are vending the same old products.

Why splitting hairs in defining terms? Because true converged infrastructure / unified computing has architectural, operational, and capital cost advantages over traditional IT approaches. (AKA Don't buy the used car just because the paint is nice)


Defining terms - in the public domain
Obviously, it can't hurt to see how the vendors self-describe the offerings... here goes:
 
Cisco's Definition (via webopedia)

"...simplifies traditional architectures and dramatically reduce the number of devices that must be purchased, cabled, configured, powered, cooled, and secured in the data center.  The Cisco Unified Computing System is a next-generation data center platform that unites compute, network, storage access, and virtualization into a cohesive system..."

Egenera's Definition

"A technology where CPU allocation, data I/O, storage I/O, network configurations, and storage connections are all logically defined and configured in software. This approach allows IT operators to rapidly re-purpose CPUs without having to physically reconfigure each of the I/O components and associated network by hand—and without needing a hypervisor."

HP's Definition

"HP Converged Infrastructure is built on a next-generation IT architecture – based on standards – that combines virtualized compute, storage and networks with facilities into a single shared-services environment optimized for any workload."

Defining terms - by using attributes
Empirically, converged infrastructure needs to have two main attributes (to live up to its name): It should reduce the quantity and complexity of physical IT infrastructure, and it should reduce the quantity and complexity of IT operations management tools. So let's be specific:

Ability to reduce quantity and complexity of physical infrastructure:

• virtualize I/O, reducing physical I/O components (e.g. eliminate NICs and HBAs)
• leverage converged networking, reducing physical cabling and eliminating re-cabling
• reduce overall quantity of servers, (e.g. ability to use free pools of servers to re-purpose for scaling, failure, disaster recovery, etc.)

Ability to reduce quantity and complexity of operations/management tools:

• be agnostic with respect to the software payload (e.g. O/S independent)
• fewer point-products, less paging between tool windows (BTW, this is possible because so much of the infrastructure become virtual and therefore more easily logically manipulated)
• reduce/eliminate the silos of visualizing & managing physical vs virtual servers, physical networks vs virtual networks
• simplified higher-level services, such as providing fail-over, scaling-out, replication, disaster recovery, etc.

To sum-up so far, if you're shopping for this stuff, you need to
a) Look for the ability to virtualize infrastructure as well as software
b) Look for fewer point products and less windowing
c) Look for more services (e.g. HA, DR) baked-into the product.

Beware.... when the Emperor Has No Clothes...
In closing, I'll also share my pet peeve: When vendors whitewash their products to fit the latest trend. I'll not name-names, but beware of the following stuff labeled "converged infrastructure":

• If the vendor says "Heterogeneous Automation" - that's different. For example, it could easily be scripted run-book automation.  This doesn't reduce physical complexity in the least.
• If the vendor says "Product Bundle, single SKU" - Same as above. "Shrink wrapped" does not equal "converged"
• If the vendor says "Pre-Integrated" - This may simplify installation, but does not guarantee physical simplicity nor operational simplicity

 Thanks for reading the series so far.  I'm pondering a fourth-and-final installment on where this whole virtualization and converged infrastructure thing is taking us - a look at possible future directions.
 

Converged Infrastructure Part 2.

Part 2. Converged Infrastructure’s Cost Advantages

In my first installment about converged Infrastructure, I  gave an outline of what it is, and how it will change the way in which IT infrastructure is managed.

In this installment, I’ll go a bit deeper and explain the source of capital and operational improvements converged Infrastructure offers – and why it’s such a compelling opportunity to pursue.

But first, the most important distinction to make between converged infrastructure and “the old way of doing business” is that management – as well as the technology – is also converged.  Consider how many point-products you currently use for infrastructure management (i.e. other than managing your software stack). 

This diagram at right  has resonated with customers and analysts alike. It highlights, albeit in a stylized fashion, just how many point-products an average-sized IT department is using.  This results in clear impact in

• Operational complexity – coordinating tool use, procedures, interdependencies and fault-tracking
• Operational cost – the raw expense it costs to acquire and then annually maintain them
• Capital cost – if you count all of the separate hardware components they’re trying to manage

That last bullet, the thing about hardware components, is also something to drill down into.  Because every physical infrastructure component in the “old” way of doing things has a cost.  And I mean I/O components like NICs and HBAs, not to mention switches, load balancers and cables.

What might be possible if you could virtualize all of the physical infrastructure components, and then have a single tool to manipulate them logically?

Well, then you’d be able to throw-out roughly 80% of the physical components (and associated costs) and reduce the operational complexity roughly the same amount.

In the same way that the software domain has been virtualized by the hypervisor, the infrastructure world can be virtualized with I/O virtualization and converged networking. And, once the I/O and network are now virtualized, they can be composed/recomposed on demand.  This eliminates a large number of components needed for infrastructure provisioning, scaling, and even failover/clustering (more on this later).  And, if you can now logically re-define server and infrastructure profiles, you can also create simplified Disaster recovery tools too.

In all, we can go from roughly a dozen point-products down to just 2-3 (see diagram above).  Now: What’s the impact on costs?

On the capital cost side, since I/O is consolidated, it literally means fewer NICs and elimination of most HBAs since they can be virtualized too.  Consolidating I/O also implies converged transport, meaning fewer cables (typically only 1 per server, 2 if teamed/redundant). And a converged transport also allows for fewer switches needed on the network.  Also remember that with few moving (physical) parts, you also have to purchase few software tools and licenses. See diagram below.

On the operational cost side, there are the benefits of simpler management, less on-the-floor maintenance, and even less power consumption. With fewer physical components and a more virtual infrastructure, entire server configurations can be created more simply, often with only a single management tool. That means creating and assigning NICs, HBAs, ports, addresses and world-wide names. It means creating segregated VLAN networks, creating and assigning data and storage switches. And it means automatically creating and assigning boot LUNs. The server configuration is just what you’re used to – except it’s defined in software. And all from a single unified management console.   The result: Buying, integrating and maintaining less software.

Referencing the diagram at right, here's what this looks like on a physical level is fewer components: Costly NIC and HBA cards are virtualized, with their physical transport now consolidated over Ethernet ports, and switches/cables now replaced by a logically-configured switch.

Ever wonder why converged infrastructure is developing such a following? It’s because physical simplicity breeds operational efficiency. And that means much less sustained cost and effort. And an easier time at your job.

Next installment: What Converged Infrastructure is not.

Converged Infrastructure. Part 1

Since joining Egenera, I've been championing what's now being termed Converged Infrastructure (aka unified computing). It's an exciting and important part of IT management, demonstrated by the fact that all major vendors are offering some form of the technology. But it sometimes takes a while for folks (my analyst friends included) to get their heads around understanding it.  So I'm going to take a stab at a multi-part Primer on the topic.
 
Part 1: What is Converged Infrastructure, and how it will change data center management

Converged Infrastructure and Unified Computing are both terms referring to technology where the complete server profile, including I/O (NICs, HBAs, KVM), networking (VLANs, IP load balancing, etc.), and storage connectivity (LUN mapping, switch control) are all abstracted and defined/configured in software. The result is a pooling of physical servers, network resources and storage resources that can be assigned on-demand.

This approach lets IT operators rapidly repurpose servers – or entire environments – without having to physically reconfigure I/O components by hand—and without the requirement of hypervisors.  It massively reduces the quantity and expense of the physical I/O and networking components as well as the time required to configure them. A converged infrastructure approach offers an elegant, simple-to-manage approach to data center infrastructure administration. 

From an architectural perspective, this approach may also be referred to as a compute fabric or Processing Area Network. Because the physical CPU state (i.e. naming and configuration of I/O, networking and storage naming) is completely abstracted away, the CPUs become stateless and therefore can be reassigned extremely easily creating a “fabric” of components, analogous to how SANs assign logical storage LUNs.  And, through I/O virtualization, both data and storage transports can also be converged, further simplifying the physical network infrastructure down to a single wire.

 The result is a “wire-once” set of pooled bare-metal CPUs and network resources that can be assigned on demand, defining their logical configurations and network connections instantly.

BTW, there is another nice resource -- a white paper commissioned by HP (!) executed by Michelle Bailey at IDC. In it she defines what is a converged system:

"The term converged system refers to a new set of enterprise products that package server, storage, and networking architectures together as a single unit and utilize built-in service-oriented management tools for the purpose of driving efficiencies in time to deployment and simplifying ongoing operations. Within a converged system, each of the compute, storage, and network devices are aware of each other and are tuned for higher performance than if constructed in a purely modular architecture. While a converged system may be constructed of modular components that can be swapped in and out as scaling requires, ultimately the entire system is integrated at either the hardware layer or the software layer.

Converged Infrastructure and Software Virtualization

A Converged Infrastructure is different from—but analogous to—hypervisor-based server virtualization.  Think of hypervisors as operating “above” the CPU, abstracting software (applications and O/S) from the CPU; think of a Converged Infrastructure as operating “below” the CPU, abstracting network and storage connections. However, note that converged Infrastructure doesn't operate via a software layer the way that a hypervisor does. And converged Infrastructure is possible whether or not server virtualization is present.

Converged Infrastructure and server virtualization can complement each other producing significant cost and operational benefits. For example, consider a physical host failure where the entire machine, network and storage configuration needs to be replicated on a new physical server. Using Converged Infrastructure, IT Ops can quickly replace the physical server using a spare “bare metal” server.  A new host can be created on the fly, all the way down to the same NIC, HBA and networking configurations of the original server.

A Converged Infrastructure can re-create a physical server (or virtual host) as well as its networking and storage configuration on any “cold” bare-metal server.  And in addition, it can re-create an entire environment of servers using bare-metal infrastructure at a different location as well. Thus it is particularly well-suited to provide both high-availability (HA) as well as Disaster Recovery (DR) in mixed physical/virtual environments – eliminating the need for complex clustering solutions. And in doing so, a single Converged Infrastructure system can replace numerous point-products for physical/virtual server management, network management, I/O management, configuration management, HA and DR.

Converged Infrastructure - Simplifying Management for “The other half” of the Data Center

In the manner that server virtualization has grown to become the dominant data center management approach for software, converged infrastructure is poised to become the dominant management approach for “the other 50%” of the data center – its infrastructure.

However adoption will take place gradually, for a few reasons:

• IT can only absorb so much at once. Most often, converged infrastructure is consumed after IT has come up the maturity curve after having cut their teeth on OS virtualization. Once that initiative is under way, IT then begins looking for other sources of cost take-out.... and the data center infrastructure is the logical next step.
• Converged infrastructure is still relatively new. While the market considers OS virtualization to be relatively mature, converging infrastructure is less-well understood.

But there is one universal approach that can overcome these hesitations -- money.  So, in my next installment, I'll do a deeper dive into the really fantastic economics and cost take-out opportunities of converging infrastructure...

Differing Target Uses for IT Automation Types

One of the most oft-repeated themes at this year's VMworld was that of "automation." Everybody claimed they had it, but on closer investigation it had any number of poorly-defined meanings.

A specific angle I want to address here is that of infrastructure automation; that is, the dynamic manipulation of physical resources (virtualized or not) such as I/O, networking, load balancing, and storage connections - Sometimes referred to as "Infrastructure 2.0". Why is this important? Although automation of software (such as provisioning & manipulation of VMs/applications) usually captures attention, remember that there is a whole set of physical datacenter infrastructure layers that IT Ops has to deal with as well. When a new server (physical or virtual) is created, much of this infrastructure also has to be provisioned to support it.

There are 2 fundamental approaches to automation I'll compare/contrast: Let's loosely call them "In-Place" Infrastructure Automation, and Virtualized Infrastructure Automation.

Confession: I am a champion of IT automation. The industry has evolved into a morass of technologies and resulting complexity; the way applications (and datacenters) are constructed today is not the way a greenfield thinker would do it. Datacenters are stove-piped, hand-crafted, tightly-controlled and reasonably delicate. Automating how IT operates is the only way out -- hence the excitement over cloud computing, utility infrastructure, and the "everything-as-a-Service" movement. These technology initiatives are clear indications that IT operations desires a way to "escape" having to manage its mess.

At a high-level, automation has major top-level advantages: Lower steady-state OpEx, greater capital efficiency, and greater energy efficiency. And, automation also presents challenges typical of paradigm changes: distrust, organizational upheaval, financial and business changes. The art/science of introducing automation into an existing organization is to reap the benefits, and mitigate the challenges.

As infrastructure automation moves forward, it appears to be bifurcating along two different philosophies. Each is valid, but appropriate for differing types of uses:

• "In-place" infrastructure automation: (distinct from run-book automation) Seeks to automate existing physical assets, deriving its value from masking the operational and physical complexity via orchestrating in-place resources. That is, it takes the physical topology (servers, I/O, ports, addressing, cabling, switches, VMs etc.) and orchestrate things to optimize a variable such as an SLA, energy consumption, etc.
• Virtualized Infrastructure automation: Seeks to first virtualize the infrastructure (the assets as above) and then automate their creation, configuration and retirement. That is, I/O is virtualized, networking is frequently converged (i.e. a Fabric), and network switches, load balancers, etc. are virtualized as well.

Each of these two approaches has properties with pros and cons with which I'm familiar -- having worked for companies in each space. I'll try to elucidate a few of the "high points" for each:

"In-Place" Infrastructure Automation:
Examples: Cassatt (now part of CA), Scalent

• Automates existing assets: Usually, there is no need to acquire new network or server hardware (although not all hardware will be compatible with the automation software). Thus "in-place" assets are generally re-purposed more efficiently than they would be in a manually-controlled scenario. Clearly this is one of the largest value propositions for this approach - automate what you already own.
  
• Masking underlying complexity: A double-edged sword, I suppose, is that while "in-place" automation simplifies operation and streamlines efficiency, the datacenter's underlying complexity is still there - e.g. the same redundant (and sometimes sub-optimal) assets to maintain, same cabling, same multi-layer switching, same physical limitations, etc.
  
• Alters security hierarchy: Since assets such as switches will now be controlled by machine (i.e. the automation SW automatically manipulates addresses and ports) this architecture will necessarily modify the security hierarchy, single-point-of-failure risks, etc. All assets fall under the command of the automation software controller.
  
• Broad, but not complete, flexibility: Because this approach manipulates existing physical assets, certain physical limitations must remain in the datacenter. For example, physical server NICs and HBAs are what they are, and can't be altered. Or, for example, certain network topologies might not be able to be perfectly replicated if physical topologies don't closely match...or, if physical load balancers aren't available, servers/ports won't have access to them. Nonetheless, if properly architected, some of these limitations can be mitigated.
• Use with OS virtualization: This approach usually takes control of the VMM as well, e.g. takes control of the VM management software, or directly controls the VMs itself. So, for example, you'd allow the automation manager to manipulate VMs, rather than vSphere.
  
• Installation: Usually more complex to set up/maintain because all assets, versions, and physical topography necessarily need to be discovered and cataloged. But once running, the system will essentially maintain its own CMDB.
  

Virtualized Infrastructure Automation:
Examples: Cisco UCS, Egenera, Xsigo

• Reduction/elimination of IT components: The good news here is that through virtualizing infrastructure, redundant components can be completely eliminated. For example, only a single I/O card with a single cable is needed per server, because they can be virtualized/presented to the CPU as any number of virtual connections and networks. And, a single virtualized switching node can present itself as any number of switches and load balancers for both storage and network data.
  
• Complete flexibility in configuration: By abstracting infrastructure assets, they can be built/retired/repurposed on-demand. e.g. networking, load balancing, etc. can be created at-will with essentially arbitrary topologies.
  
• Consistent/complementary to OS Virtualization models: If you think about it, virtualized infrastructure control is pretty complementary to OS virtualization. While OS virtualization logically defines servers (which can be consolidated, moved, duplicated, etc.), infrastructure virtualization similarly defines the "plumbing" and allows I/O and network consolidation, as well as movement/duplication of physical server properties to other locations.
• New networking model: One thing to keep in mind is that with a completely virtualized/converged network, the way the network (and its security) is operationally managed changes. Organizations may have to re-think how (and who) creates and repurposes network assets. (Somewhat similar to coping with "VM Sprawl" in the software virtualization domain)
  
• Use with OS virtualization: This approach is usually 'agnostic' to the software payload of the physical server, and is therefore neutral/indifferent to the VMM in place. Frequently the two can be coordinated, however.
  
• Installation: Usually relatively simple. Few components per server, few cables, especially in a 'green field' deployment. Installation of software/BIOS on physical servers is probably not what you're used to, though.
  

Ideal use of these two approaches differs too. Obviously, "In-Place" Infrastructure Automation is probably best-suited for an existing set of complex datacenter assets - especially in a Dev/Test environment. As you'd expect , a number of existing lab automation products out there target this market. On the other hand Virtual Infrastructure Automation can certainly be deployed on existing assets, but its real value is for new installations where minimal hardware/cabling/networking can be designed-in from the ground up. Most of these products are designed for production data centers, as well as cloud/utility infrastructures.

My overall sense of the market is that adoption of "in-place" automation will be driven primarily by progressive IT staffs that want a taste of automation and service-level management. Virtualized Infrastructure Automation adoption, on the other hand, will tend to ride the technology wave driven both by networking vendors and OS virtualization vendors.

Stay tuned for additional product analyses in this space...