Virtualized Computing Blades? Storage Blades? Talk About Running With Scissors
Know What Virtualization Is, But What Is Next? – Chapter 04
Talk about running with scissors? Running with scissors is very easy to do, and even easier to end up getting cut or worse. The computing industry does the same thing all the time. Locking onto one fact and letting it trump others or even excluding reality. What does that visual have to do with virtualization, or more to the point, blade technology? Blade technology addresses many of the concerns of the current and future datacenters. For example:
- Cable/Connection Management
- Power Consumption
- Heat Generation
- Total Rack Space
- Technical Assistance Confusion
- Remote Control/Console
- Configuration Management (Profiles/Personality)
Given a bit of thought I am sure you see how the above concerns are addressed by blade design. Even more important blades are cool, sexy (in a Geek way). Yes, they actually generated significant heat in past and current vendor specific blade generations, but newer lower wattage CPUs and better designs are addressing this. Another issue, with early blade design was a lack of redundancy, in connectivity, power, etc. However, blades reduce space, and complexity of maintenance, are hardware homogeneous, and when using boot from SAN, failover is relatively painless, in fact with some vendors these virtual connections are virtual transparent, no pun intended. Adding in the emerging technology of direct-current power backbones? Should that technology ever proves its-self, then power consumption may be improved as well, and some of the heat loading might be offset. But direct current is a shoot the moon issue, as I see it now.
Furthermore, I leave it to the reader to find out what vendors do what in reference to specific details, but they are all moving to making virtualization easier on blades in some way. From my personal experience, HP is leading the way, IBM is slower but moving, and Dell, well, Dell has missed the boat so far in comparison.
The real news is storage blades, and to a less degree half height chassis design, which provides some smaller site scaling. Imagine a small site that has, say, for four (4) computing blades, one being a failover blade, and three (3) storage blades that virtualization sees as shared storage? Talk about easy to do! Did some one say running with scissors? With virtual connection management, such as what HP does, and transplanting the blade profiles or personalities makes it even less of a pain, maybe even painless it that the local technical support needs to know absolutely nothing about the setup, if a blade fails, just swap it, just like swapping a single physical disk in a RAID 5 set.
What blades do not do well, is avoid costs up front, setup of blade infrastructure is not cheap, however, I do not see this as a negative, since a proper virtualization strategy is to pre-provision. This is part where those of us running with scissors get cut, and of course management does all the bleeding. I can hear the snorts, coughs, moans, and in a few cases the sound of blood rushing to the brain to stage a massive headache. I have yet to see anyone in management faint? But I remain hopeful to see that as well at some point. Is it not funny how management has some much trouble with words that begin with M, for example, management (of time/resources), money, maintenance, monitoring, etc? So in reponse, and to avoid the potential impact to management and all words related that start with M, does blade technology really save any money? That is a good question. The only real answer is… economies of scale, and your respective implementation strategy. If virtualization is the dominate strategy for your organization, not looking at blade technology is a true opportunity cost.
Add comment October 31st, 2007
