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April 21, 2008
Out of the Fire, into the PAN
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Simplify it, and lower the cost. That design change request, first uttered to the guy who invented the wheel, has been passed along to every datacenter manager on the planet.
For the past several years, IT innovators have gone about building solutions for this decree by developing server virtualization software. Egenera has been one of those virtualization pioneers, but the company didn’t stop at the server. Egenera also virtualizes the I/O infrastructure, then adds some heavy-duty management software to meet the request for simplification.
This vast software-ification is intended to maximize the benefits of that simplification. For example, users should spend less money on server and networking hardware; spend less time cabling and troubleshooting that hardware; keep systems running constantly and efficiently; recover faster from disaster; and be able to respond immediately to changing computing needs.
Egenera’s approach to redesigning the datacenter starts with its concept of the processing area network (PAN). The idea behind the PAN is to “unlock the resources from the server, from the hardware,” says Egenera CTO Peter Manca. Just as the storage area network (SAN) virtualizes storage arrays, the PAN virtualizes processing and memory resources. Networking I/O components (Ethernet cards, switches, etc.) also are virtualized. By turning servers and the glue that connects them into software, Egenera’s approach gives customers “a pool of stateless processing nodes.” A PAN is essentially a big pool of these diskless nodes connected via a high-speed fabric.
Servers in the PAN are not your traditional boxes with a specific hardware configuration. They are software assets that users can allocate to applications as needed, all under software control. These virtual servers (pServers) are mapped to physical blades. Virtual switches handle the communications between pServers and external networks. Egenera describes vSwitches as the virtual equivalent of an unmanaged Layer 2 Ethernet switch. Each pServer in a PAN can have as many as 32 of these switches, for a total of 4,096 virtual switches in a single PAN. Thus, Egenera says, a PAN has the capacity to handle clustering and network-intensive applications. The PAN architecture’s support for thousands of internal switches also allows for big consolidation gains in terms of I/O hardware.
These virtual components yield particular advantages for the person in charge of network availability: You can add or reconfigure connections on running servers without rebooting, and you can switch a server to another network without interrupting the services running on that server.
As a result of this freedom from hardware, Manca says, processing and networking resources can be configured and put to work in minutes instead of days, without the headache of moving or rewiring components. “Wire once, and rewire through software,” he says.
“By virtualizing I/O, we’ve made the server stateless, given the server sort of a blank identity. You can run Linux one minute, Windows one minute, Solaris the next,” Manca says. “You can quickly give any server whatever personality you need it to have. You’ve got the ability to use any blade at any time. When you virtualize the infrastructure, people don’t have to buy NICs or HBAs. They don’t have to buy dedicated hardware for their Oracle databases, for example. Fewer servers, fewer licenses. Then there are the soft costs and operating savings. The concept of stateless computing just has so many benefits.”
Master of the PAN
The big (virtual) brain behind the processing area network is PAN Manager, which distinguishes Egenera’s approach and embodies the company’s philosophy of datacenter virtualization. Manca describes it as “a combination of I/O virtualization technology and strong management software.” PAN Manager replaces server and network hardware with software, and then throws in a considerable list of crucial datacenter capabilities.
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