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June 23, 2008
Servers Get Multiple Personalities
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As a former IT architect turned CEO, Tony Bishop is in an enviable situation: He knows what technology his company needs, and he is in a very good position to make sure the company gets it. In his last job as chief architect in Wachovia’s Corporate Investment Banking Technology Group, he led a team that designed and built an infrastructure for utility computing. In his current role as chief executive for Adaptivity, he leads a company that designs and helps other companies implement service-oriented systems that are, above all, adaptive.
“Adaptivity’s core expertise is integrating the often disparate arenas of service-oriented architecture (SOA), virtualization, infrastructure automation and Web 2.0 technologies,” Bishop says. “We help large end-users, systems integrators and product manufacturers understand the ecosystem, the integration points, their individual weaknesses, and put together actionable projects in the context of a multi-year strategic roadmap.”
Because Adaptivity and its customers are in the service business, that ecosystem has to be able to respond to sudden changes in demand. Adaptivity designs real-time infrastructure systems, and for the supremely critical task of rapidly repurposing servers, Bishop chose technology from Scalent Systems. Scalent’s Virtual Operating Environment (V/OE) software is a key building block for Adaptivity’s real-time solutions and frequently is an early part of the roadmaps they design for customers, he says.
“If you think about IT in economic terms,” Bishop says, “a technology that can instantly determine the relative importance or priority of a workload based on a business policy and reallocate capacity accordingly is in the demand-side category. [Examples of that are] DataSynapse’s GridServer and FabricServer products. On the other hand, a technology that within minutes can turn an application down on a server and make that server available to boot up as a completely different application or system falls into the category of supply-side. And in a nutshell, that is the capability that Scalent enables.” (Scalent, by the way, has a partnership deal with DataSynapse.)
“Some people classify us as automation management or as virtualization, and we do those things,” says Scalent CEO Ben Linder, “but I think we tend to fit into the vision of real-time infrastructure, the notion that through automation management you can achieve higher levels of agility and higher levels of utilization. The central thesis behind what we do is that resources in the datacenter, including networking and storage, should be agile and malleable. Resources should be repurposable in real-time to do whatever workloads the business needs.”
V/OE installs an agent on every physical server that inventories physical capabilities, takes a snapshot of the server in action, and stores it centrally on the SAN. Any machine, or an entire farm of servers, then can be repurposed on the fly, including all associated network and storage access topologies, the company says. Scalent virtualizes the underlying physical machine operating system, network connectivity, and storage access.
V/OE lets datacenter managers quickly change which servers are running, what software stacks servers are running, and how those servers are connected to network and storage, Linder explains. There’s no need for IT to make changes to physical machines, cables, LAN connections or SANs.
“VO/E adds a layer of management that lets you control and automate servers, storage, and network switches so that under a single umbrella you can provision and orchestrate those resources. You can put a new OS, a new application on a server, then connect that server to a new network, all in a matter of minutes,” says Linder. “Our motto is ‘rack once, table once, repurpose infinitely.’”
Datacenter Reliability
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