Using Virtualization and IBM BladeCenter to Create Business Value

The information technology marketplace continues to change rapidly while businesses are being forced to respond ever more quickly to new demands, which include more employee and customer interactions, new applications, and considerably more government regulations.

This is all complicated by the dizzying advances in technology with multi-core processors, faster memory, new I/O fabrics, and larger storage arrays. Meanwhile IT administrators and managers are attempting to select the most appropriate technologies to meet their growing needs, but they are limited by budgets, skills, employees, and physical environments. IBM BladeCenter™ and virtualization are helping to overcome these limitations.

Blade Leadership
IDC projects a better than 35% compound annual growth rate for blade servers over the next four years. At that growth rate, one out of every four servers sold will be a blade server by 2010. From the beginning, IBM has viewed blades as an enterprise class solution. This puts IBM in the unique position to create infrastructure savings by combining the physical integration of blades with the utilization increases of virtualization.

IBM recognizes a blade as a unique enterprise server because of the way it is operated, powered, and managed. An IBM blade contains only what is needed to run an application: processors, memory, I/O, and storage. To enable the blade, everything else—including redundant power supplies, hot-swap cooling fans, management hardware, and cables—is part of the BladeCenter chassis. The chassis itself is designed to support enterprise applications.

Protecting Your Investment
With a high availability mid-plane providing dual communication paths from the blades to their Ethernet, Fibre Channel, KVM, power, and management signals, customers can have confidence in the platform reliability. Customers are also concerned about the durability of their investment. IBM has maintained the same blade architecture for over five years, allowing all blades to work in all chassis and support many generations of processors and I/O fabrics in the same architecture. This gives customers flexibility, investment protection, and confidence.

In addition, IBM has formed Blade.org (link resides outside of ibm.com). This 80-member organization, which includes chip, operating system, network and storage vendors, as well as software vendors, systems integrators, and customers, is organized around open collaboration. Blade.org has defined a two-fold mission: to accelerate the growth of blade-platform solutions and to build end-user confidence in those solutions. As the capabilities of blades increase and the application software market lags in delivering new 64-bit, multi-threaded applications, virtualization becomes more critical to delivering the utilization levels required for growth.

Virtualization Enhances Utilization and Flexibility
The BladeCenter design fits perfectly with a comprehensive vision of virtualization as a broad continuum of logical resources. Virtualization creates manageable logical resources from pools of physical resources freed from their physical constraints. It is the abstraction of the logical device from the physical device. When deployed across the complete infrastructure, that allows IBM to help customers construct an OnDemand Datacenter. It no longer matters what type of servers or storage customers are running, which gives them greater flexibility in component selection. Virtualization will also drive much greater levels of utilization of that hardware, lowering the overall cost of productivity. It allows the administrators to leverage new high-availability and disaster recovery capabilities to create business resiliency; in addition, the overall manageability of the infrastructure is improved.

Virtualization can be used to create multiple virtual machines on a blade or to consolidate multiple blades as a single server, giving customers the flexibility to support a wide range of critical business services. The JS21 blades, which are based on PowerPC 970MP processors, offer native virtualization via IBM Advanced POWER® Virtualization (APV). With APV enabled, a dual-core JS21 blade delivers more virtual partitions than any other single blade on the market. BladeCenter also supports the use of VMware, Microsoft Virtual Server, and Linux distributions (Xen) on the IBM line of x86 blades. This is key to supporting the wide range of Microsoft® Windows® applications in the market.

"The power of the IBM BladeCenter when combined with the IBM portfolio of systems management software provides IT with benefits that move well beyond substantial reductions in the TCO."

However, there is more to virtualization than just servers, and the value of a virtualized infrastructure multiplies when you virtualize storage and I/O as well. IBM's recently announced Virtual Fabric Architecture for BladeCenter was designed specifically to help address this issue. First, virtualized servers will, in many cases, drive the requirement for more aggregate I/O bandwidth. As part of Virtual Fabric Architecture, IBM introduced its MultiSwitch Interface Module, which enables up to eight separate I/O paths to each blade. Additionally, IBM introduced InfiniBand (IB) bridges which provide hardware virtualization of both Ethernet and Fibre Channel traffic over a single IB fabric.

More than Server Virtualization
The state of storage virtualization is at a relatively primitive array-to-server level. Within a storage array server, RAID arrays are virtualized as disk volumes, and these virtual volumes are explicitly mapped to a server based on the unique world-wide name (WWN) of the Fibre Channel host bus adaptor (HBA) resident in the server. This creates distinct and inefficient array-based storage silos.

There are two key goals for storage virtualization: The first goal is to be able to look out from any server and see consumable storage resources as a single unified pool with a single point of administration. To do this it, is necessary to aggregate arrays with tools like . With all host servers dealing with a consistent logical representation of storage resources, administrators are free to optimize the supporting physical storage infrastructure at will.

The second goal is to look out from the viewpoint of that single point of storage administration and see host servers as a unified pool of resource consumers. This requires I/O virtualization. The IBM BladeCenter H Chassis extends virtualization to all Fibre Channel and Ethernet I/O via a built-in 4x Infiniband Cisco® Server Fabric Switch and Cisco's VFrame Server Fabric Virtualization Software. Within the BladeCenter H chassis, the Cisco switch and software create a unified "wire-once" fabric. All of the Fibre Channel WWNs and Ethernet MAC addresses are virtual.

Any blade server can be assigned manually, or the virtual view of storage and network resources that was assigned to another blade server can be taken over by policy. As part of the Virtual Fabric Architecture, IBM recently announced its intention to deliver the BladeCenter Address Manager to extend this concept of "wire-once," which will work with any vendor's fabric switches (Fibre Channel, Ethernet, InfiniBand, etc.). This is an incredibly high level of flexibility and gives administrators the ability to change their connectivity almost at will.

Such management efficiencies are crucial for IT managers, given the assessment of the Robert Frances Group that pegs the cost of acquiring a server at only 20% of the server's total cost of ownership (TCO). That puts the burden of increasing overall IT return squarely on lowering IT management costs.

Management Is the Key
To enhance the manageability of the BladeCenter, all IBM blades come bundled with offerings from the IBM Systems Director portfolio, including the platform management offering IBM Director, which helps provide hardware level management and system availability. It does this by working in conjunction with the BladeCenter Advanced Management Module (AMM). The AMM gives customers a direct connection for managing their BladeCenter hardware and integrates seamlessly with the IBM Director software to provide system level status and alerts.

In order to take advantage of the promise of simplification through the creation of virtualized resources, the Virtualization Manager extension of IBM Director is also included with each blade server at no charge. For customers looking to deploy commercial (VMware® Virtual Infrastructure or Microsoft® Virtual Server) or open source (Xen) hypervisor environments, that combination provides a management infrastructure for servers, network components, and storage—on both physical and virtual machines—from a single console for system administration. This simplifies the training required and speeds time to productivity for the IT staff.

Additional management capabilities can be added by extending the Systems Director portfolio with offerings from Tivoli enterprise management suite. By adding the Tivoli Provisioning Manager and Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator, customers can create a self-aware, dynamic infrastructure that is able to maintain policy-based service level agreements without administrator intervention.

The power of the IBM BladeCenter when combined with the IBM portfolio of systems management software provides IT with benefits that move well beyond substantial reductions in the TCO. As the economic forces behind globalization continue to drive critical business constructs, such as the extended value chains, brand equity, and product lifecycle compression, the delivery of innovative solutions to complex business problems will only intensify this critical success factor for IT. The need to deploy and manage resources in a heterogeneous system environment has become non-negotiable. It must be done consistently so that business critical applications meet Service Level Agreements on performance and availability. Together, IBM BladeCenter and virtualization can make this a readily obtainable reality for IT.