Common oversights leave IT management drowning in complexity and costly inefficiencies
MARLBORO, Mass. — March 3, 2009 — Egenera, Inc, the leader in data center infrastructure orchestration, today announced the Five Blind Spots of Data Center Infrastructure Management. These are the infrastructure and operational realities that have been systematically overlooked or ineffectively addressed, compounding IT's complexity dilemma. Egenera has found that virtualization and data center management solutions by themselves fail to adequately support unified environments comprised of both virtual and physical resources and the complexity challenges that these implementations give rise to.
In research with customers and discussions with IT vendors, analysts and industry players, Egenera has identified five significant “blind spots” that are barriers to reliability, manageability, and flexibility. According to Christine Crandell, executive vice president and chief marketing officer for Egenera, the following five “blind spots” are the most common pitfalls that CIOs and IT departments face in their journey to achieving reliable, dynamic data centers.
- Blind Spot #1: Virtualization does not equal agility. While server virtualization does indeed provide significant mobility benefits, the industry often overlooks the fact that virtualization is at the software level only. Virtualization vendors fail to mention the administrative tasks that are needed to manage the underlying physical infrastructure as well as virtual machines. Egenera points out that data centers require solutions to “orchestrate” infrastructure and provide IT with a single, holistic view for managing both the physical and virtual components within the data center.
- Blind Spot #2: Virtualization does not equal simplification. There is certainly simplification resulting from the reduction in physical servers as well as the ability to create new virtual servers. However, virtualization ultimately creates more virtual objects requiring lifecycle management, more security to layer-on, and more moving parts to account for. Egenera highlights that simplification is achieved only through unified infrastructure management, bridging both physical and virtual resources.
- Blind Spot #3: Not all High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) is solved by VM (Virtual Machine) technology. One of the main reasons for adopting virtualization are the HA and the DR options. Should a virtual machine fail, then another can quickly pick up the workload. However, there is an implicit assumption in the industry that 100% of HA and DR environments are virtualized. For this assumption to be correct, all applications must be virtualized including identical VM stand-by recovery resources. Additionally, the recovery equipment must be pre-provisioned with VM software, and pre-configured identically to the primary servers. Egenera’s research shows that unified HA/DR, at the hardware/network level, is a more effective and cost-efficient approach. This enables mixed environments of physical and virtual payloads to be protected, simply and easily.
- Blind Spot #4: Provisioning is assumed only for software. There has been significant progress in the recent past toward advanced configuration control and provisioning of images to servers. But, in a virtualized environment, every change drives an equal and associated change in the physical infrastructure such as I/O, network and storage connectivity. Egenera’s position is that automated provisioning (and ongoing dynamic re-provisioning) of bare metal compute, I/O, network and storage must complement software provisioning.
- Blind Spot #5: Not everything is, or will, be virtual. There are many mission-critical, scale-out, performance- and/or license-constrained applications that will always remain on physical servers. This results in a preponderance of segregated-environment management systems. Egenera cautions IT Operations that there will always be a mix of physical and virtual resources. Therefore, a core requirement of managing today’s data centers is a technology-agnostic approach to simplifying and unifying physical and virtual environments.
Egenera argues that if each of these blind spots are recognized and appropriately addressed through a unified and holistic approach to data center management, IT departments can make great strides in responding to rapidly changing business requirements, and flexibly deliver business technology within an environment that is future-ready.
For years, Egenera has helped hundreds of customers worldwide address these blind spots. These organizations have discovered that PAN Manager® software provides the “infrastructure orchestration” required to manage their mixed physical and virtualized environments to deliver dynamically managed, always-available physical infrastructure that allows companies to simplify and often automate administrative tasks for a more reliable, cost-efficient data center environment.
