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EMC Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM) and Making IaaS Real

January 26th, 2010

Over the last few months of 2009 and into 2010, there has been a perceptible shift — from both data center customers and industry leaders that I’ve spoken to — signaling a new focus on not just visualizing or evangelizing but in practically achieving the vision of the next-gen data center. The vision: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), virtualization acceleration, and private clouds.

Customers we’ve been talking to are pushing hard for a reality-check. Is the buzz real? As we have presented and demonstrated Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM), we can safely and confidently confirm that the need is there, the time is ripe and THE BUZZ IS REAL…

We are helping drive towards a new model for the data center that relies on a much more unified infrastructure - the VCE Coalition Vblock being the prime example - and this in turn requires a new IT management model to leverage that infrastructure as a service. Today’s tools won’t cut it. You need a new approach designed with IaaS in mind with the following checklist capabilities as requirements:

Multi-Tenancy
Self-Service
Service Orchestration
Policy-Based
Infrastructure Unification
Practical Automation

Multi-Tenancy

New abstractions are required to achieve IaaS that include the ability to create, edit, activate, control, and assign services to customers - whether they are internal or external customers, chargeback or showback customers, it doesn’t matter. But beyond the ability to create and manage services from the infrastructure, you also need to be able to manage the concept of multiple customers or tenants accessing these services, with granular role-based access control and visibility. Multi-tenant management has to be built into the design of the product from the beginning - this is core to the architecture of UIM.

Self-Service

Fundamental to the power of IaaS is the ability to open up access to infrastructure services to different communities for self-service. UIM has been focused on this at two levels: (1) integrating with end-user vCloud portals for coordinated orchestration (where cloud end-users access a vCloud portal which in turn requests infrastructure services through UIM) and (2) providing data center IT teams a provisioning center for simplified interaction with a complex infrastructure.

Service-Orchestration

There is no IaaS without the “S” and the ability for the management systems to abstract services out from the infrastructure is a management imperative. As UIM is the element manager for the Vblock, this is an essential part of what makes UIM unique and powerful. That requires taking pools of compute, network and storage resources and mapping them to templates, tiers, grades or categories of services - cataloging these services - and then managing their configuration, compliance, activation, and delivery. But doing this automatically and correctly requires policies for compliant configuration. Read on…

Policy-Based

The unified infrastructures can present new and complex configuration challenges. Many analysts estimate that over 70% of outages in a traditional data center are caused by misconfiguration. Imagine what that could look like for new infrastructures that are not protected by configuration compliance checks. There are too many new concepts and new integration layers to keep track of in any one engineer’s head anymore. UIM provides out-of-the-box best practice-configuration and compliance checking to ensure critical missteps don’t bring you down, like Duplicate MAC Address tests and configuration checking for new Cisco UCS configuration elements such as service profiles, vNics and vHBAs.

Infrastructure Unification

The core concept of Ionix UIM is element management of Vblocks - bringing together network, storage, and compute configuration management into one system. So that means in UIM 1.0 managing Nexus devices (including Nexus 1000V, 5010, 5020, C7010, and C7018 models), MDS devices (including MDS 9222i, 9124, 9134, 9216, 9216A, 9216i, 9509, and 9513 models), and Cisco UCS systems (from managing UUID, WWN, MAC address pools to building LAN and SAN connection templates to managing Ethernet adapter and fibre channel adapter profiles) under one manager - and extending support for storage infrastructure in the next releases.

Practical Automation

If you are looking to manage multiple Vblocks, you’ll want 1-to-many management (one UIM for multiple Vblocks) to get scale and consistency across your configuration policies. If you want to schedule a configuration push, you’ll need a system to schedule, push, then validate success. If you want to compare configuration across Vblocks, run enterprise-level reports, track changes, and ensure best practice configuration changes, then you’ll need a friend like UIM.

Checklist Your Infrastructure Tools for IaaS

So that’s an IaaS checklist to grade infrastructure management tools going forward. Both the infrastructure and management systems have stepped up to make IaaS a reality.

So it’s real…Check it out.

Would love to hear what you think.

Bob Quillin

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