November 10th, 2008
What's next after server virtualization? Orchestration
There are a number of steps an organization could take after successfully executing a server consolidation strategy. One of them is to orchestrate workloads to make maximum use of physical server capacity, reduce power consumption, reduce administrative and operational expenses and create an environment which can assure that each and every workload can meet service level objectives. This usually requires tools to do the following things:
- Discover available resources such as physical systems, virtual systems, network virtualization resources and storage resources
- Catalog these resources allowing management of these resource by workload, business unit, location of physical systems and other useful categories
- Evaluate current usage of resources
- Model or calculate best possible use of datacenter resources based upon policies, service level objectives or other metrics
- Dynamically reassign or re-purpose resources as required to comply with policies, meet service level objectives and the like
- Continue to scan the environment to manage events based upon time, occurrence of specific events, capacity considerations and ongoing workload demands
Since the datacenter of any typical large organization includes mainframes, midrange systems, industry standard systems, network systems, storage systems and power management systems, the best tools would be able to include any and all of these resources in its dynamic modeling and automation function. Sad to say, most available tools simply can’t do this. Some “forward looking” statements from major vendors in the virtualization technology space speak about “datacenter operating systems” and only mention the industry standard systems on this list. Organizations need more than this to effectively deal with the issues they face on a daily basis.
I’m only aware of two suppliers that routinely speak if this complete list when they speak about their orchestration and automation systems - Cassatt and Sun. There are a few others that actually have this capability, such as HP and IBM, but they don’t focus on it in their public statements.
If your organization had such powerful tools at its disposal, would it deploy them?
Daniel Kusnetzky is a member of the senior management team of The 451 Group. He is responsible for research and publications on a broad array of technology topics. He examines emerging technology trends, vendor strategies, research and development issues, and end-user integration requirements. You can follow Dan on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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