Virtualisation is a hot topic these days and you will be hard pushed to find a company that has not implemented, or at least thought of implementing, some elements within a virtual environment for their corporate infrastructure. ControlCircle can help with your business needs across many platforms and areas of virtualisation be it a thin client implementation, or a file area network (FAN) virtualising your file storage.
Storage Virtualisation
There is a huge problem for companies these days in managing their ever growing storage environments. This is not only a problem due to the amount of physical data but also the need for administrators to look after the data and to perform the company backup policy. Companies often have a completely heterogeneous storage infrastructure ranging from internal disk, through DAS and NAS, to SAN's. This can often mean that the skill set required to manage the environment is diverse enough to make recruitment difficult or very expensive.
Below is a diagram of NetApp's approach to solving this issue. Implementing a NetApp V-Series head unit you are able to manage the disparate vendor hardware from a centralised location and therefore greatly reduce the need for diverse skill sets. The technology will help you increase utilisation across the platforms as it will virtualise the individual disk silos into one pool (or as many as you wish) of disk. To read more on this please see the v-series PDF.
File Virtualisation - File Area Network or FAN
An alternative to the storage virtualisation is to move the virtualisation into the file level. This is the solution that F5 offer through their recent acquisition of Acopia.
An effectively deployed FAN will include:
- Heterogeneous support for a common management framework that is future-proofed against architectural choices over time
- Fine-grained, real-time policy-based controls across the entire infrastructure
- Network residency.
FAN implementation will allow servers and applications to deploy particular tools as required, regardless of platform, while allowing the storage layer to expand in a completely open fashion.
The greatest promise of the FAN is that file storage - whether its file servers or NAS systems, from heterogeneous vendors - can be networked in an intelligent fashion to make discrete and individual assets greater than the sum of their parts. As a pioneer in simplifying file storage management with intelligent networking, Acopia will continue to lead the industry with its innovative FAN vision. To read further about this technology please see download the following PDF v-series.pdf.
Both of these solutions give the end user the flexibility to buy their storage from any vendor which will drive competition between the vendors and will ensure that the consumer gets the best deal.
Server Virtualisation
The central tenets of virtualisation are adhered to within the server and desktop infrastructure, that is, ease of management and utilisation of the resources in a pooled environment. Whether the solution chosen is VMWare, Citrix Xen, or the soon to be released Microsoft Hypervisor the emphasis will be to make use of the wasted processing and memory within servers. The industry average for servers will see the CPU at far less than 10% of their capacity which does beg the question why are faster and multiple core processors being developed.
The Hypervisors that are produced by the aforementioned companies sit on bare metal and allow the internal hardware to be virtualised. The mindset needs to be shifted from how many CPU's or sticks of RAM there are too one of a pool of resources. If a machine has 4 X dual core 3.0GHz processors it must be viewed as having 24GHz of processing cycles that can be carved up an apportioned to a particular resource. This mindset of pools of resource is key to understanding the world of virtualisation.
With virtualisation software the utilisation of the servers can be pushed well in the 80% region and servers can be brought online as they are required. These policies can be set and using features such as vmotion only the resource and spinning disk you require will be online. This has a huge impact on the amount of power that is needed. Typical moves to a virtualised server infrastructure are seeing a 6 month ROI due to decreased power costs both from powering the server and the reduced need for environmental controls.
When you start combining some of the technologies the savings are even greater. For example if you run a VMWare VDI infrastructure on NetApp the savings that can be gained by using FAS deduplication are vast. To understand the effectiveness of this technology pairing please review the following video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Miv0PiJFzM; .
ControlCircle
ControlCircle can help you to specify areas of your business that can benefit from implementing a virtualised infrastructure, spec the solution, build it, and then manage this within a hosted environment. This service offering is completely bespoke and will be tailored to your business needs.