I'm pretty sure data center managers dream of a day when the server platform (hardware or virtual) they buy can come from any manufacturer. And applications can be moved seamlessly from box-to-box with the click of a mouse. That dream is becoming more of a reality every day. HP and Cisco have created hardware platforms that allow application movement from server to server with a simple reboot, albeit only on their hardware. The hypervisor vendors, VMware, Citrix and Microsoft can move servers seamlessly from virtual server to virtual server with little or no downtime. Dell has taken this idea a step further with the Advanced Infrastructure Manager (AIM) product. With AIM, you can move a server “persona” between virtual and physical platforms with the same ease as HP and Cisco offer, but across heterogeneous hardware and hypervisor platforms. Sounds like a dream come true to me.
An AIM persona encapsulates a portable SAN and network server identity and combines it with a bootable shared storage image to enable cross-platform server mobility. They can run on bare-metal hardware or as a virtual machine in a hypervisor. Depending on your view of the value a particular hardware or virtualization software vendor brings to your environment, a solution like this could significantly change the landscape of your data center. Application migrations between hardware platforms can become as easy as bringing the server under AIM management and rebooting the persona into the new computing environment. Painful platform migrations become a thing of the past.
Another great use case for this technology?
The fast deployment of new applications. Envision a scenario where a new application is rolled out and the application owners and IT staff don't understand the server requirements to run the application properly. A virtualized infrastructure persona could be run on a server where the load requirements could be modeled and a determination quickly made whether the computing architecture was correct. If it wasn’t, shutdown the server, boot it on a smaller/larger server or in a virtual machine, and you have a completely new computing environment that is closer to your real-world requirements.
Implementing AIM functionality doesn’t come without some up front work. This technology leverages a shared storage network and in most cases, the ability to boot images from the SAN. Many organizations limit the servers they have attached to shared storage because of the additional expense, and very few implement boot from SAN. Environments where server capacity is dynamic, or quick recovery of a hardware failure is required would provide the most return on investment.
Ok, like all dreams you're going to wake up sooner or later, and then what? Well, how about scheduling a white-board session with our engineering team to evaluate opportunities for deploying AIM in your environment. Ping me here to schedule a session.
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