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Infrastructure Orchestration and Unified Computing are both terms referring to technology where
- Server CPU
- I/O
- Storage connectivity, and
- Network
are all defined and configured in software. This approach allows IT operators to rapidly repurpose CPUs without having to physically reconfigure each of the I/O components by hand—and without needing a hypervisor. It massively reduces the quantity and expense of the physical I/O and networking components, as well as the time required to configure them. In return, it offers an elegant, simple-to-manage approach to data center infrastructure administration.
From an architectural perspective, this approach is referred to as a compute fabric or Processing Area Network because the physical CPUs are stateless so their physical addressing (of I/O, network and sorage naming) is completely abstracted away. And, by abstracting the I/O, both data and storage connections can be converged, further simplifying the network infrastructure. What is left is a collection of raw, pooled CPUs that can be assigned on demand, defining their logical configurations and network connections instantly.
Infrastructure Orchestration is very different from—but highly complementary to—hypervisor-based virtualization. Think of hypervisors as operating “above” the CPU, abstracting software (applications and O/S) from the CPU making the software portable. Think of Infrastructure Orchestration as operating “below” the CPU, abstracting network and storage connections, making the CPU itself portable. However, Infrastructure Orchestration doesn't operate via a software layer the way that a hypervisor does.
The Infrastructure Orchestration and virtualization complement each other produces significant benefits. For example, let's consider a VM host failure where the entire machine, network and storage configuration needs to be replicated on a new physical server. Usning Infrastructure Orchestration, you can quickly replace the physical server using a spare “bare metal” server. You can create a new host on the fly, all the way down to the same NIC configurations of the original server. Now, expand this example to the failure of an entire environment. Infrastructure Orchestration can re-create the physical hosts as well as their networking and storage configuration on “cold” bare-metal servers that have not been pre-provisioned. In addition, you can re-create the entire environment using non-dedicated infrastructure at a different location.
Best of all, Infrastructure Orchestration functionality, such as the ability to provision a new server quickly, apply equally to physical servers. This is an ideal technology to use when managing mixed physical and virtual environments, including cloud computing infrastructure.
Infrastructure Orchestration (aka Unified Computing) is central in creating a highly reliable, dynamic data center. The technology is also core to:
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Real Time Infrastructure, defined by Gartner Research as a computing architecture that rapidly responds to changes in demand, failures, and business demands
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Organic IT, a similar concept defined and used by Forrester Research
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