EqualLogic User Conference: View From the Floor

October 2010, Part 3

Take AIM with Advanced Infrastructure Manager

One of the final presentations that I attended that I thought would be useful to VSM readers was the session on AIM – Advanced Infrastructure Manager.   AIM is an important pillar of Dell EqualLogic’s Virtual Infrastructure System (VIS) architecture, which encompasses servers, networks and storage.  Traditionally these areas of IT have been separate disciplines, but we are in the “virtual era” now where all three are bundled together to create workloads.  We used to use that term when we provisioned a physical server.  Remember, we would figure out the workload profile the application would need to run “x” number of users with “y” response time.  Now in the virtual infrastructure we can provision workloads from any number of physical or virtual resources in our data center, and AIM helps do just that.

First of all, AIM is hypervisor agnostic so regardless of who’s you’re using or if you have a mix of hypervisors for W2K and Linux servers, it will discover and manage the hypervisor and any VMs already configured.  And it retains your investment in your current physical infrastructure by providing a single point of management for all your physical and virtual resources.  What this means is that IT management can react in real-time to changing business requirements by dynamically provisioning or re-provisioning servers, networks, and storage.

AIM’s graphical user interface shows a unified view of data center resources— both physical and virtual which makes infrastructure provisioning simple and intuitive. You can rapidly deploy workloads onto servers and determine how they are connected to networks and storage, without making physical server, cable, or storage area network (SAN) changes.

AIM can also be configured to support a server failover strategy.  A spare server can replace any failed server in your infrastructure.  AIM automatically detects server failures and retargets the failed server’s image to an available spare— physical or virtual, and establishes network and storage connectivity to the spare server.  It doesn’t replace the high-availability of a clustered server configuration, but for applications that can sustain short recovery times, it’s ideal.

Taking server failover one step further, if you have included storage replication to a DR facility in your business continuance plans, AIM can be used to restart workloads at another site in the event of a site outage.

AIM helps IT realize what I call “Time-to-Compute” (TTC), or how soon can you provision a compute resource (server, networks and storage) so that you can apply a workload to it and put it into service.  Whenever you are able to shorten TTC, you win!  So, any software tool that can dynamically provision the resources for a new application needed by business without waiting, helps get IT management that much closer to a TTC of zero.