Thoughts on Virtual Infrastructure Management

Virtual Infrastructure Takes Us Back To The Past

By Rich Corley

In a recent blog Tony Asaro of ESG writes about his view of the future of IT Infrastructure. I think Tony rightly sees the future data center as one where resources such as CPU, Memory, and Storage are all resources that can be “pooled” to perform a particular task. As Tony points out

Perhaps it is time to consider gluing all of this stuff back together again. Why not run user applications and data management within the same infrastructure? You can have dozens and even hundreds of CPUs in a single rack. You can support 100s of TBs and potentially a PB of capacity in a single rack. Servers are made up of CPU, memory and disk capacity. Storage is made up of CPU, memory and disk capacity. Why aren’t we consolidating these resources?

These pooled resources are then defined by what type of application they are running. With the addition of virtualization technology these resources can be dynamic and shared. Resources can be allocated and reallocated on an “as-needed” basis. Today’s virtual infrastructure really takes the modern data center back to the past. With pooled resources, multi-threaded processors, and high speed IO channels the data center of today looks and works a lot like the data centers of 3 decades ago when mainframes ruled.

One big difference between the mainframes of past versus today’s virtual infrastructure is that in the past the mainframe was manufactured by one vendor and it was very well instrumented. Today’s virtual infrastructure is heterogeneous with components coming from many vendors and is not very well instrumented, therefore making it difficult to manage.

Tony recommends we call this new data center “Infrastructure 2.0″. I think maybe we should call it “Mainframe 2.0″.

October 12, 2007 | Filed Under Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment