HP BL260c Delivering an Adaptive Infrastructure with the HP BladeSystem c-Clas - Page 5

There are several underlying business demands that fuel these management costs: • Increasing number of applications - competitiveness in business is often tied to bringing new business functions and applications online quickly • Increasing scale of applications - In both existing web-based enterprise applications and newer Web 2.0 social media applications, applications are being scaled to levels unthinkable a decade ago. Requirements for over 1000 servers in a single procurement for a single application are becoming increasingly common. • Increasing demands for availability - Almost all customer-facing applications on the web are mission-critical, demanding commensurate availability. In some cases, external regulations for data retention and retrieval on demand are driving availability. As a result of these business demands, IT administrators are acquiring new server and storage hardware faster than they are retiring it, leading to an increased number of elements to be managed. Routine user operations like moves, adds, configuration changes, patches, updates, and physical maintenance, can become major drains on time and budget. Industry perspective on future data center architectures Solving the data center problems described above requires a flexible, business-ready data center architecture. This section uses an industry perspective to discuss two conceptual layers involved in emerging data center architectures: a foundation layer that defines invariant characteristics, and a layer concerned with dynamic behavior and optimization. Foundation requirements The foundational requirements define a set of characteristics that are desirable for almost any environment, from small business to the large enterprise: • Modularity and scalability - The infrastructure must be scalable, capable of providing solutions ranging from a few elements (servers, storage and networking) to large enterprise (thousands of elements), and eventually large cloud-style computing (tens of thousands of elements). • Energy efficiency - As already discussed, energy efficiency has risen rapidly as a critical technology due to increasing computing demands, increased power densities, facility constraints, and energy cost. Architecturally, energy awareness includes both a system-level and a data centerlevel component. At the system level, the integrated hardware and software need to use energy-efficient components and take advantage of advanced features to manage power use within systems. At a data center level, administrators should be able to accurately monitor and collect power data, and use advanced control systems along with computation fluid dynamics to optimize infrastructure efficiency. • Manageability - Since overall management costs are increasingly cited as a primary concern, reducing those costs is a primary goal. Management brings with it the unique challenge of backward compatibility - since most installations of new technology must co-exist with legacy installations, new management architectures and tools must give thought to legacy systems. • Virtualized and virtualization friendly - Virtualizing server resources along with storage and network elements is one of the major trends of the last half-decade, and a data center architecture must embrace the concept of virtualization of all physical resources.5 Support for server virtualization can take many forms, from building servers that efficiently support the latest hypervisors to extending all of the management functions of physical machines to virtual machines, 5 While server virtualization is a relatively new phenomenon within industry-standardx86-based servers, the concept of virtualization was developed more than 40 years ago on mainframes and has been implemented in various ways since then. 5