Grid Meter » Virtualization Introduces Bottom-Up Management Requirements

June 06, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Virtualization Introduces Bottom-Up Management Requirements

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Andreas Antonpoulos -- principal analyst at Nemertes research -- recently provided me with some great insights about the systems management impact of virtualization, and how a bottom-up approach to management (enter Grid) could be the future.

"One aspect of virtualization that doesn't get enough discussion is that while it can make your datacenter more flexible, there are also new issues of design versus run-time optimization. In the past, what we did with the infrastructure was design-time optimization. We'd build the infrastructure for the specific application. If you wanted ERP, you'd build your three-tier or four-tier system. You'd design every component to deliver to the capacity that you'd need. And then you'd turn it on and expect it to meet the demand.

Now -- as we're doing this flexible datacenter with pools of servers and storage -- that optimization happens at run-time. We're deciding how to allocate the resources to achieve the demands at each moment, because now there's nothing really pre-configured to run your application in that infrastructure. It's all shared.

What that means is that we're putting increased pressure on our management platforms. So now we're trying to do provisioning, monitoring, change management, service activation, load-balancing and workflows all from one monolithic management platform. And the result is that many people have found that their management systems are inadequate.

And Grid says that instead of a top-down approach, use a bottom-up approach -- a middleware solution that does the allocation and the workload management in that virtual pool, and is really designed for very heterogeneous platforms, which may not even have a single owner. Radically breaking from that top-down mold is what Grid does best, because a lot of the principles are very much peer-to-peer and creating ad hoc networks and machines when you need them to solve specific problems or do specific jobs. It doesn't require the kind of command-and-control architectures that most of the major management systems imply or assume. And because you can't really apply those sorts of command-and-control architectures very nicely to the datacenter, maybe a bottom-up approach is better. So I think there's a lot of potential for Grid in helping solve the complexity crisis."

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on June 6, 2006 08:06 AM

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