This last fortnight there’s been a cacophony
of hyperbole and at times marketing fluff from vendors and analysts with
regards to Reference Architectures and Converged Infrastructures. As IBM launched
PureSystems, NetApp & Cisco decided it was also a good time to reiterate
their strong partnership with FlexPod. In the midst of this, EMC decided
to release their new and rather salaciously titled VSPEX. From the remnants and
ashes of all these new product names and fancy launch conferences, the
resultant war blogs and Twitterati battles ensued. As I poignantly watched on
from the trenches in an almost Siegfried Sassoon moment, it was quickly
becoming evident that there was now an even more ambiguous understanding of
what distinguishes a Converged Infrastructure from a Reference Architecture,
what it’s relation was with the Private Cloud and more importantly whether you,
the end user should even care.
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| IBM's PureSystems - Converged Infrastructure or a well marketed Single Stack? |
There’s a huge and justified commotion in the
industry over Private Cloud because with lower costs, reduced complexity and
greater data center agility, the advantages are compelling for any business
looking to streamline and optimize its IT. In the pursuit of attaining such
benefits and ensuring a successful Private Cloud deployment, one of the most
critical components that need to be considered is that of the infrastructure
and its underlying resource pools. With resource pools being the foundation of
rapid elasticity and instantaneous provisioning, a Private Cloud’s success
ultimately depends on the stability, reliability, scalability and performance
of its infrastructure. With existent datacenters commonly accommodating legacy
servers that require a refresh or new multiprocessor servers that are entrenched
between an old and insufficient network infrastructure, one of the main
challenges of a Private Cloud deployment is how to upgrade it without
introducing risk. With this challenge and the industry’s pressing need for an
economically viable answer, the solution was quickly conceived and baptized as
“Converged Infrastructure”. Sadly like all great ideas and concepts,
competition and marketing fluff quickly tainted the lucidity of such an obvious
solution by introducing other terms such as “Reference Architectures” and
“Single Stack Solutions”. Even more confusing was the launch of vendor products
that used such terms synonymously, together or as separate distinct entities.
So what exactly differentiates these terms and which is the best solution to
meet the infrastructure challenge of a Private Cloud deployment?
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| EMC's new VSPEX - Reference Architecture with a variety of options of components |
Reference Architectures for all intents and
purposes are essentially just whitepaper-based solutions that are derived from
previously successful configurations. Using various vendor solutions and leveraging
their mutual partnerships & alliances, Reference Architectures are
typically integrated and validated platforms built from server, network and
storage components with an overlying hypervisor. NetApp’s FlexPod and EMC’s
VSPEX fall into this category and both invariably point to their flexibility as
a major benefit as they enable end users to mix and
match as long as there remains a resemblance to the reference. With open APIs
to various management tools, Reference Architectures are cleverly marketed as a
quick, easy to deploy and risk free infrastructure solution for Private Clouds.
Indeed Reference Architectures are a great solution for a low budget SMB that
is looking to introduce itself to the world of Cloud. As for a company that is
either in or bordering on the Enterprise space and looking to seriously deploy
their workloads onto a Private Cloud, it's important to remember that sometimes
things that are great on paper can still end up being a horrible mess in
reality – anyone who's watched Lynch's Dune can pay testament to that.
The difficulty with Reference Architectures
is that fundamentally they still have no hardened solution configuration
parameters and ironically what they term an advantage i.e. flexibility, is
actually their main flaw as their piece by piece approach of using solutions
from many different vendors merely masquerades the same old problems. Due to
being whitepaper solutions, integration of specific components is only
documented as a high level overview with component ‘a’ being detailed as
compatible with component ‘c’. With regards to the specifics and how these
components integrate in detail, these are simply not available or realized
until the Reference Architecture is cobbled together by the end user, who
ultimately assumes all of the risk and financial obligation to ensure it not
only works correctly but is also performing at optimum levels. This haphazard
trial and error approach is counterproductive to the accelerated,
pre-integrated, pretested and optimized model that is required by the
infrastructure of a Private Cloud.
Furthermore Reference Architectures are based
on static deployments of sizing and architecture that typically has little
relation to the end users actual environment or needs, posing a problem whenever
reconfiguration or resizing is required. With end users being left to resize
and consequently reconfigure & reintegrate their solution, they also have
to constantly find a way to integrate their existing toolsets with the open
APIs. This subsequently eliminates a lot of the benefits associated with “quick
time to value” as many deployment projects get caught up in the quagmire of
such triviality. Added to this, once you’ve begun resizing or customizing your
architecture, you’ve actually made changes that are
a deviation from the proposed standard and hence no longer recognizable to the
original reference. This leads to the other complication with Reference
Architectures, namely support issues.
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| NetApp's FlexPod Reference Architecture uses Cisco UCS Blades & VMware |
With more than 90% of support calls being related to logical configuration
issues, they are more often than not an occurrence of bugs or incompatibility
issues. When the vendor has no responsibility or knowledge of that logical
build based on the fact that they meet your “requirements” to be flexible, the
situation doesn’t bode any better than when you have a traditional
infrastructure deployment. Vendor finger pointing
is one the most frustrating experiences you inevitably have to face when
deploying an IT infrastructure in the traditional way. Being on a 4am conference
call during a Priority 1 with the different organizational silos and the
numerous vendors that make up the infrastructure is a painful experience I’ve
personally had to face. It’s not a pretty sight when you’re impatiently waiting
for a resolution while the networking company blames the firmware on the
Storage and the Storage vendor blames the bugs with the servers while all the
time you are sitting their watching your CEO’s face turn into a tomato while
the vein in his neck throbs incessantly. When you log a support call for
your reference architecture who is actually responsible? Is it the company you
bought it from or one of the many manufacturers that you used to assemble your
self-built masterpiece? Furthermore which of those manufacturers or vendors
will take full responsibility when you’ve ended up building, implementing and
customizing the architecture yourself? Even at the point of
deployment, the Reference Architecture carries elements of ambiguity for the
end user ranging from which software and firmware releases to run to who is
responsible for the regression testing of the logical build. For instance what if you decide to proactively update to one of your
components’ latest firmware releases and then find out it’s not compatible with
another of your components? Who owns the risk? Also for example if you buy a
“flexible” Reference Architecture from vendor X, how will vendor X be able to
distinguish what it is you’ve actually deployed and how it’s configured without
having to spend an aeon on the phone doing a fact finding session, all while
your key applications are down? Reference Architectures are great for a
test environment or simple cheap and cheerful solution but using them as a
platform to take key applications to the Cloud reeks of more 4am conference
calls and exploding tomatoes.
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| Oracle Exalogic - Virtualization with OracleVM not VMware |
Single Stack Infrastructures on the other
hand while also sometimes marketed as a Converged Infrastructure or a
“flexible” Reference Architecture (or sometimes both!) are another completely
distinct offering in the market. These solutions are typically marketed as
“All-in-one” solutions, and come in a various number of guises. Products such
as Oracle’s Exadata and Exalogic, Dell’s vStart, HP’s CloudSystem Matrix and
IBM’s PureSystems are all examples of the Single Stack solution where the
vendors have tightly defined software stacks above the virtualization layer.
Such solutions will also combine a bundled infrastructure and service offerings
making them potential “Clouds in a Box”. While on the outset these seem ideal
and quick to deploy and manage, there are actually a number of challenges with
the Single Stack solution. The first challenge is that the Single Stack will
always provide you their own inherent components regardless of whether they are
inferior to other products in the market. So for example, instead of having
network switches from the well established Cisco or Brocade, if you opt with
the HP solution you’re looking at HP’s ProCurve, 3Com, H3C and TippingPoint.
Worse still is if you go with the Oracle stack you’re condemned to have
OracleVM as opposed to the market leading and technically superior VMware.
Another challenge is that you’re also tied down to that one vendor and are now
a victim of vendor lock-in. Instead of just having infrastructure that will fit
your existing software toolset and service management, you will inevitably have
to rip and replace these with the Single Stack’s product set. Additionally
these complex and non-integrated software and hardware stacks require
significant time to deploy and integrate, reducing a considerable amount of the
value that comes from an accelerated deployment.
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| HP's CloudSystem Matrix - A Single Stack that will also bundle in HP's Service offerings with the Infastructure
A true converged infrastructure is one that
is not only pretested and preconfigured but also and more importantly
pre-integrated; in other words it ships out as a single SKU and product to the
customer. While it may use different components from different vendors, they
are still components that are from market leaders and are well established in
the Enterprise space. Furthermore while it may not have the “flexibility” of a
Reference Architecture, it’s the rigidity and adherence to predefined standards
that make the Converged Infrastructure the ideal fit for serious contenders who
are looking for a robust, scalable, simply supported and accelerated Private
Cloud infrastructure. The only solution that is on the market that fits that
category is VCE's Vblock. By being built, tested, pre-integrated and configured
before being sent to the end user as a single product, the Converged
Infrastructure for the Amsterdam datacenter will be exactly the same as the
deployment in Bangalore, Shanghai, Dubai, New York and London. In this instance
the shipped Converged Infrastructure merely requires the end user to plug in
and supply network connectivity.
|
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| VCE's unique Vblock 700LX - A true Converged Infrastructure that ships out as a pre-tested & pre-integrated solution |
With such a model, support issues are quickly
resolved and vendor finger-pointing is eliminated. For example the support call
is with one vendor (the Converged Infrastructure manufacturer) and they alone
are the owner of the ticket because the Converged Infrastructure is their
product. Moreover once a product model of a converged infrastructure has been
shipped out, problems that may potentially be faced by a customer in Madrid can
easily be replicated and tested on a like for like lab with the same product in
London, rapidly resolving performance issues or trouble tickets.
Deploying a preconfigured, pretested and
pre-integrated standardized model can also quickly eliminate issues with
firmware updates and patching. With traditional deployments, keeping patches
and firmwares up to date with multiple vendors, components and devices can be
an operational role by itself. You would first have to assess the
criticality of each patch and relevance to each platform as well as validate
firmware compatibility with other components. Additionally you’d also need to
validate the patches by creating ‘mirrored’ Production Test Labs and then also
have to figure out what your rollback mechanism is if there are any issues. By
having a pre-integrated Converged Infrastructure all of this laborious and
tedious complication is removed. All patches and firmwares can be pretested and
validated on standardized platforms in labs that are exactly the same as the
standardized platforms that reside in your datacenter. Instead of a multitude of
updates from a multitude of vendors each year, a converged infrastructure
offers the opportunity to have a single matrix that upgrades the infrastructure
as a whole and risk free.
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| A Converged Infrastructure offers a standardized model making patching & firmware upgrades seamless regardless of location or number |
The other distinctive feature of a Converged
Infrastructure is its accelerated deployment. By being shipped to the customer
as a ready assembled, logically configured product and solution, typical
deployments can range from only 30-45 days i.e. from procurement to production.
In contrast other solutions such as Reference Architectures could take twice as
long if not longer as the staging, racking and logical build is still required
once delivered to the customer. It’s this speed of deployment which makes the
Converged Infrastructure the ideal solution for Private Cloud deployments and
an immediate reduction in your total cost of ownership, especially when the
business or application owners demands an instant platform for their new
projects.
The other benefit of having a company that
continuously builds standardized and consistent infrastructures that are
configured and deployed for key applications such as Oracle, SAP or Exchange is
that you end up with an infrastructure that not only consolidates your
footprint and accelerates your time to deployment but also optimizes and in most
cases improves the performance of your key apps. I’ve recently seen a customer
gain a 300% performance improvement with their Oracle databases once they
decided to migrate them off their Enterprise Storage Arrays, SPAARC servers and
SAN switches in favour of a Converged Infrastructure, i.e. the Vblock. Of
course there were a number of questions, head scratching and pontifications as
to what was seemingly inexplicable; “how could you provide such performance
when we’ve spent months optimizing our infrastructure?” The answer is
straightforward in that regardless of how good an engineering team you have, it
is rare that they are solely focused on building a standardized infrastructure
on a daily basis that is customized for a key application and is factoring all
of the components comprehensively.
To elaborate, typically customers will have an
in house engineering department where they’ll have a Storage team, a Server
team, a Network team, an Apps team, a SAN team etc. All of these silos then
need to share their expertise and somehow correlate them together prior to
building the infrastructure. Compare this to VCE and the Converged
Infrastructure approach, where instead there are dedicated engineering teams
for each step of the building process whose expertise is centred and focused
upon a single enabling platform, i.e. the Vblock. Firstly there’s the engineering team that
does the physical build (including thermals, power efficiency, cooling,
cabling, equipment layout for upgrade paths etc.). This is then passed on to
another dedicated engineering team that takes that infrastructure and certifies
the software releases as well as test the logical build configurations all the
way through to the hypervisor. There’s then another engineering organization
that’s sole purpose is to test applications that are commonly deployed on these
Vblock infrastructures such as Oracle, SAP, Exchange, VDI etc. This enables the
customer that orders for example an “Oracle Vblock” to have an infrastructure
that was specifically adapted both logically and physically to not only meet
the needs of their Oracle workloads but also optimize its performance. This is
just a glimpse of the pre-sales aspect; post sales you have a dedicated team
responsible for the product roadmap of the entire infrastructure ensuring that
software or component updates are checked and advised to customers once they
are deemed suitable for a production environment. The list of dedicated teams
goes on but the common denominator is that they are all part of a seamless
process that aims at delivering and supporting an infrastructure designed and
purpose built for mission critical application optimization.
So whether you’re feeling Pure, Flexy or
Spexy the key thing is to distinguish between Reference Architectures, Single
Stack Solutions and the Vblock i.e. a Converged Infrastructure and align the
right solution to the right business challenge. For fun and adventure I'd
always purchase a kit car over a factory built car. I'd have great fun building
it from all the components available to me and have it based on my Reference
handbook. I could even customize my kit car with a 20 inch exhaust pipe, Dr.
Dre hydraulics and fluffy dice because it's flexible just like a Reference
Architecture. Alternatively because I love Audi so much I could buy an Audi car
that has all of its components made by Audi. So that means ripping out the
Alpine CD player for an Audi one, the BOSE speakers for Audi ones and even
removing the Michelin tyres for some new Audi ones, regardless of whether
they're any good or if they’re just OEM’d from a budget manufacturer - just
like a Single Stack Solution. Ultimately if I'm serious about performance and
reliability I'll just buy a manufactured Audi S8 that's pre-integrated and
deployed from the factory with the best of breed components. Sure I can choose
the colour, I can decide on the interior etc. but it's still built to a
standard that's designed and engineered to perform. Much like a Converged
Infrastructure, while I may choose to have a certain amount of CPU for my
Server blades and a certain amount of IOPS and capacity for Storage, I still
have a standardized model that's designed and engineered to perform and scale
at optimum levels. For a Private or Hybrid Cloud infrastructure that successfully
hosts and optimizes critical applications as well as de-risk their
virtualization, the solution can only mean one thing - it's Converged.
