2010 Prediction: Pete Manca, Egenera

By Pete Manca
published: Wednesday, January 06 2010

Converged Infrastructure: The Next Step in Virtualization

2010 will be the year of virtual infrastructure, where unified I/O and converged networking will take hold to complement the now-maturing market of O/S virtualization and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
We’re all familiar with O/S virtualization – the hypervisor-based technologies that have been transforming how software is deployed and managed. But this is only half of the story within datacenters – remember that all of that virtual software runs on servers with physical I/O cards, physical cables, physical switches and more. 

This other half of the datacenter is the infrastructure domain. And, until recently, it has been assumed-away by the glitz and aura around OS virtualization. But the reality is that physical provisioning, deploying, and managing infrastructure represents nearly half of datacenter operational expenses. And use of Virtual Machines doesn’t impact that cost at all.

Managing datacenter infrastructure is less well-understood by the software, application and virtualization organizations in IT. It represents all of the I/O (including addressing), networking, switching, load-balancing, and even cabling in an environment. While this infrastructure is assumed as static, the fact is that it needs to be reconfigured nearly every time a server is re-purposed, every time an application needs to scale, and every time failed equipment is replaced.

In 2010 you’ll be seeing many productized technologies that begin to abstract and configure infrastructure analogously to how OS virtualization abstracts and configures virtual servers. You may already be hearing about some point-products today – under the guise of virtualized I/O, converged networking, unified computing or unified infrastructure. And there’s even an “Infrastructure 2.0” working group underway to codify where these initiatives are headed.

The business value of a virtual (or converged) infrastructure is akin to that we’re already familiar with from OS virtualization. Converged infrastructures will provide better network utilization, faster and less-expensive server and switch re-configuration, fewer physical parts, and overall simplified management – a big change from today’s routine of configuring network cards, cables, switches and the like. And therein lays the beginning of the “converged infrastructure” movement.

The core enabling technologies are virtual I/O and converged networking, where – in software – a single physical I/O card and cable appear to the O/S (or to the VMM) like any number of unique I/O ports and connections – for both networking (e.g. Ethernet) as well as for storage (e.g. Fiberchannel). Paired together, virtual I/O and converged networking will allow infrastructure to re-configured on-the-fly if needed, without any re-cabling.  Thus, the foundation for the concept of IaaS, the foundation supporting all cloud-computing models.

Why will converged infrastructure be important in 2010 and beyond? It will provide IT operations with functionality, flexibility and a cost-basis analogous to what O/S and applications personnel get from hypervisors (See fig 1). In fact, it will provide the “other half” of datacenter flexibility, and will perfectly complement the current drive to virtualize the O/S.

Figure 1 

During the next year or two, the more mature users of O/S virtualization will be completing their initial implementations. Some are already seeing that they’re still spending money configuring physical infrastructure to work within VMM environments, and reconfiguring them when those environments change – So they will likely be the first adopters of this new converged infrastructure model.
In 2010 where will we see these technologies appear first?  Most likely they will appear in many IaaS implementations (think hosting providers, cloud service providers, and internal cloud computing environments). These markets will be leading the way where O/S virtualization will be used for software flexibility, and where converged infrastructure will be tapped to provide similar levels of IaaS agility.