The VMware announcement of their converged infrastructure offering EVO(lution) at VMWorld2014 generated a lot of discussion. Converged Infrastructure solutions have been available for several years. EMC has two successful converged infrastructure solution offerings:
- Vblock – produced by EMC-Cisco joint venture company VCE
- VSPEX – blue print assembled by EMC distribution partners
Many customers I work with are deploying or are planning to deploy converged infrastructure solutions. Many analysts predict this market will grow at greater than 50%. Gartner recently released their first Converged Infrastructure Magic Quadrant report.
I talk with many EMC customers and partners. There are several common sentiments that I have noticed. The first is there are four primary use cases customers are targeting for Converged Infrastructure solutions:
General-purpose workloads requiring high availability, service ability for standardized workloads
- General-purpose workloads outside main data center. Examples include remote office, and disaster recovery
- Optimized infrastructure for standard application services. Examples include Oracle database, VDI, and HADOOP
- Large scale leveraging next generation infrastructure for massive scalability
Most customers believe industry commodity hardware is good enough, except for general-purpose workloads supporting applications with high availability requirements. For high availability client-server applications customers continue to demand best of breed hardware components. These customers are supporting classic client-server applications where infrastructure outages = application outage = resume generating event. EMC has been very successful with our VCE, and VSPEX Converged Infrastructure offerings for this use case. For applications like virtual desktop, and next generation mobile, and big data analytic's applications that can easily and quickly restart workloads the Common Modular Building Block and Application Specific Building Block CI architectures are preferred. Clearly there is no single Converged Infrastructure architecture to meet all application needs.
The second requirement most customers have is Converged Infrastructure has to simple to deploy, with short time to value. Converged Infrastructure must be delivered ready for production. At EMCWorld this year, we deployed our Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution on VCE Vblock in 24 hours. VMware EVO: Rail is promising it will be able to serve virtual machines 15 minutes after power on. Automated workflows simplifying hardware discovery, configuration, and integration into existing customer networks is expected.
The third requirement is built in operations automation that is extensible via simple API. This automation is really at three layers:
- Hardware
- Infrastructure
- Application
Hardware automation is needed to accelerate deployment and mask variability. For example, as vendors change CPU, and disk drives models the installation, provisioning, and monitoring process should not change. There are a couple different ways CI vendors are approaching this requirement. VCE provides the Vision software which provides an API enabled abstraction layer to the underlying Vblock hardware. It is a passive solution that allows your preferred workflow engine to integrate to drive installation, provisioning, and monitoring. Changes to hardware components and hardware software versions are abstracted from your favorite workflow software by VCE Vision. The other approach is to tightly control the underlying hardware components and build a custom installer for the specific hardware. This is an area where I think CI vendors will be able to differentiate with some offering great hardware component flexibility.
Infrastructure provisioning is most often provided by existing commercial products like VMware vRealize Suite or Microsoft Systems Center. Not all customers need the full functionality of these tools so many CI vendors are providing simplified workflow solutions. VMware EVO: Rail will come with the simplified workflow system for provisioning, and monitoring VM's. This workflow tool updates vCenter via its API so there is one system of record and you can still use the full vCenter functionality for more complex tasks. A preview of this solution is available here.
Application provisioning is typically handled by existing commercially available for tools. Application-Specific CI solutions will provide a tool optimized for the application. As customers start to leverage CI solutions to support Platform as a Service (PAAS), solutions like Cloud Foundry application provisioning and updates will be optimized by the PAAS solution. Integration between PAAS solutions and Infrastructure provisioning systems is beginning as evidenced by the Kubernetes, Diego, and Fargo projects. This will make it easier for applications to be deployed on a wide variety of CI, or hybrid cloud systems.
It is clear that the time for Converged Infrastructure systems have arrived especially for the general purpose, remote office, and standard application services. Converged Infrastructure provides a simpler and faster opportunity to provide IT infrastructure. I believe the biggest evolution in this space will be improvements to the automation with new software. Today there are four main Converged Infrastructure architectures and customers need to understand the differences and carefully plan their architecture that will likely leverage a combination of these systems. Everyone I speak with is trying to simplify and minimize the time to value with their IT infrastructure investments. The days of spending six months or longer standing up new IT infrastructure is over.
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