Marketplace Update. How Lenovo s Chassis Innovation Drives Blade System Value. March By Charles King, Pund-IT, Inc.

Transcription

1 Marketplace Update March 2015 How Lenovo s Chassis Innovation Drives Blade System Value By Charles King, Pund-IT, Inc. Pund-IT, Inc. Hayward, CA U.S.A Contact: Office: Mobile: charles@pund-it.com

2 How Lenovo s Chassis Innovation Drives Blade System Value By Charles King, Pund-IT, Inc. Introduction Blade servers are present in so many modern enterprise data centers that it s easy to forget just how radical solutions like IBM s BladeCenter seemed when they first became commercially available over a decade ago. By design, blade servers condensed as much compute capacity into as small a footprint as possible but achieving that goal required far more than just miniaturization. Without continuing innovation in heat distribution and cooling technologies, the future of blade servers would have literally melted away in spectacular fashion. But thinking that the servers in these solutions were wholly responsible for their market success would be a mistake. The fact is that blade chasses are every bit as innovative and impactful as the servers and other components they house. In fact, one could argue that the holistic development of all blade components represented a significant step forward in the systems thinking that is increasingly prevalent today. That s especially the case if one considers the growing marketplace success of integrated and converged data center solutions. So what are vendors doing to keep blade innovation alive? At least one IBM decided that a full, top-to-bottom redesign was in order and delivered just that in 2012 with its next generation Flex System blade architecture. In turn, that clear focus on long term innovation added substantially to the value of the investment Lenovo made when it purchased IBM s System x group, products and intellectual property in This report will consider how evolutionary chassis development should help keep Lenovo at the forefront of the blade revolution for years to come. That was then: New data center imperatives First generation blade solutions were very much products of their times. As servers based on Intel s x86 technologies moved quickly into corporate data centers, some challenges accompanied them. The essential design of scale-out rack systems required complicated manual configuration and deployment processes that were prone to error. Plus, poor design for highly dense environments meant that if or when something went wrong, troubleshooting and repair slowed to a crawl due to a mare s nest of cables. Blade solutions were designed to address those problems by integrating cabling and connectors into a chassis, allowing server, storage and networking components to be easily added, removed and upgraded. In addition, offerings like IBM s BladeCenter maximized customer choice by incorporating cutting edge mid-plane design and connectivity technologies. That made them powerful solutions for a wide variety of use cases, including server and application consolidation, and for supporting increasingly virtualized x86 workloads. But the Gigabit Ethernet, optical storage and USB 1.1 technologies that placed first generation blade systems at the leading edge of data center solutions a decade ago would be quite antiquated in modern data centers. As a result, it is critical for vendors to adapt their 2

3 blade architectures to meet substantially different business computing requirements (though surprisingly few actually have). So what do enterprises need from IT today? Modern organizations face three distinct ITrelated challenges: 1. Shrinking budgets: Continuing economic and market challenges mean that business organizations, including their IT departments are continually expected to do more with less. With IT budgets flat or in decline, it is critical for organizations to invest in computing infrastructures that help reduce operational expenses and enhance the impact and value of broader company strategies. 2. Increasing complexity: Computing has become central to virtually every modern business process. While that has provided numerous, measurable benefits it often results in widely distributed, increasingly complex IT environments that erode the efficiency of systems and staff. As a result, IT solutions that can improve system agility and simplify management and maintenance requirements are critically important to the health and well-being of the larger organization. 3. Explosion of the cloud: Leveraging private cloud deployments, and their associated reliance on virtualization, has become commonplace for many organizations. This requires increased system resources, especially memory. Without adequate system memory, businesses simply can t effectively deploy the larger virtual machines that underpin the cloud infrastructures. Looking to the decade ahead Lenovo s blade strategy Not surprisingly, IBM addressed those specific points in developing the Flex System architecture and solutions now owned by Lenovo. Why not surprising? Because as BladeCenter did in 2002, the 2012 Flex System launch delivered innovative solutions for a wide range of data center problems and imperatives. Lenovo s Flex System innovations include: An all new designed for the next decade chassis, which allows Flex Systems customers to enjoy the full benefit of current and future technologies Latest generation Intel processors technologies, including a refresh in April 2014 that made Flex Systems the first blade platform to support the latest Xeon E7 v2 CPUs and, more recently, new solutions based on Intel s Xeon E v3 Leading edge memory, storage and networking technologies that essentially eliminate system bottlenecks and allow Flex Systems to optimally support highly-virtualized and cloud workloads, as well as memory-dependent applications such as the SAP HANA inmemory database Lenovo s new XClarity systems management solution which extends across the company s System x servers and Flex System solutions, and also includes upward integration modules for VMware s vcenter and Microsoft s System Center Just as IBM s BladeCenter paid customers substantial dividends for over a decade, investing in Lenovo s Flex Systems today will provide support for leading edge compute and business benefits during the coming decade. Building a Classic Chassis Let s consider these points in greater detail. Lenovo recognizes that even as the impact of computing extends beyond the data center, innovative IT solutions and architectures must 3

4 increasingly address core business issues and imperatives. That viewpoint is crystallized in the company s Flex System solutions which are designed to provide benefits, including: 1. Reduced costs The Flex System chassis features best-in-class cooling design. When combined with the new x240 M5 compute nodes, this allows data centers to run at temperatures up to 40 o C (104 F), delivering immediate OPEX savings. Flex Systems are designed to support a wide selection of processor, storage and networking technologies, including Flash storage and a range of converged, high performance Gb Ethernet, SAN and Infiniband switches. From a storage standpoint, Flex Systems supports typical HDD options, but choosing Flash components can dramatically improve application performance, reduce the number of drives required to achieve optimal IOPS and delivering additional energy-related OPEX savings. Finally, unlike many other vendors, Lenovo does not charge for value-added features, including network connections, vnics, flexible port options or Layer 3 functions. That reduces CAPEX requirements but it also provides customers performance enhancements that continue over the life of the Flex System. 2. Improved agility The Flex System chassis supports 2-, 4- and 8-socket compute nodes (blades), as well as Lenovo s X6 X-Architecture memory technologies that deliver up to 3X better performance than previous generation BladeCenter solutions. Networking technologies integrated into the Flex System chassis design leverage virtual switches for quick and easy scaling, allowing systems to be easily configured and reconfigured to adapt to for changing business or strategic requirements. Flex System also supports significantly more mid-plane bandwidth than many competing systems, decreasing bottlenecks and enabling support for higher performance workloads and applications. 3. Centralized management - Lenovo XClarity TM is a new systems management solution designed to help administrators deliver infrastructure more simply and quickly. It integrates easily into Lenovo System x M5 and X6 rack servers and Flex System offerings, providing automated discovery, monitoring, firmware updates and configuration management, and can also be used for bare metal deployment of operating systems and hypervisors across multiple systems. Lenovo XClarity provides systems management on customers terms by enabling them to view and manage physical infrastructure via a variety of tools and interfaces. These include the Lenovo XClarity intuitive graphical user interface (GUI), external virtualization management tools with Lenovo XClarity Integrator software plugins, external, higher level cloud orchestration or IT service management tools (integrated with REST APIs) or scripts using Windows PowerShell. Lenovo XClarity can also forward Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) events and syslogs to external consolidation tools, along with notifications to subject matter experts. 4. Enhanced efficiency The Flex System s design approach allows the compute nodes within the chassis to communicate directly with each other (referred to as east-west traffic ) rather than having to route all system traffic through a top of rack switch ( north-south traffic ). This helps maximize overall compute efficiency. Because Flex nodes support more memory than competitors comparable blades, customers can load and support more virtual machines (VMs) on each node, reducing the cost of software licenses priced on a per-cpu basis. On the networking side, Flex Systems support of single network management point (for IP addresses) can substantially reduce complexity by seamlessly managing networking processes across up to nine Flex chasses. The Flex chassis is easily serviced from both the front and the back of the rack, and nodes can 4

5 be easily removed and opened to add additional components (memory, HDDs) to scale out. New nodes (scale up) can be added by sliding the node into an empty chassis socket. 5. Future proofing Flex Systems are designed to deliver optimal performance by supporting the latest Xeon microprocessor offerings but the platform is aligned to support Intel s roadmap for the next 10+ years. Similarly, Flex Systems are designed to be future proofed by robust existing and upcoming network scalability and bandwidth requirements. The chassis supports 10Gb Ethernet, 8Gb FibreChannel and QDR Infinniband out of the box. Plus, options for supporting 40Gb Ethernet, 16Gb FibreChannel, 14Gb FDR Infinniband and 12Gb SAS are also available. Future plans include support for 100Gb Ethernet and PCIe Gen4 technologies through new midplane board additions. Similar to BladeCenter, Flex Systems have been engineered to be extensible and adaptable enough to support to future components and developments. Practically speaking, that means that the investments Lenovo customers make in Flex Systems today will payout for years to come. The Flex System difference: Customer testimonials This all sounds great but what kinds of measureable benefits are Flex System customers actually achieving? Here are a few examples worth considering: Founded in 1995, Intrinsic is a pioneer provider of IT security services for enterprises and cloud hosting service providers. But annual business growth of 25 percent led the company to deploy a VMware vcloud-based software-defined virtual data center, dubbed Cloud Temple. Intrinsic chose Flex System as its core architecture, deploying 36 Flex System x240 compute nodes and then adding 48 Flex System x222 double density compute nodes. In turn, those support a virtualized 4PB storage pool based on IBM s Storwize V7000 systems and IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC). Along with delivering optimal performance. Flex Systems simplified management and maintenance features have helped Intrinsic keep operational costs low and released IT staff to provide clients direct support. Kelsey Seybold Clinic is a Houston-based healthcare organization with over 375 physicians and nearly 3,000 fulltime staff, including a 140 strong IT staff. The company had already implemented an IBM Power Systems solution to support its Epic EMR (electronic medical records) system but wanted a new solution to support a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Given the company s experience with IBM, the choice of the Flex System x240, along with IBM s FlashSystem storage, SVC and Atlantis software for the core VDI platform was easy. The resulting solution provides a high performance, highly responsive platform supporting 3,700 virtual desktops across 20 Kelsey Seybold clinics and other sites. The Mahanager Cooperative Bank was founded in 1973 to provide banking services to mill workers, dock workers, market vendors, shopkeepers and self-employed business people in the greater Mumbai region. Now, operating 32 branches serving all sectors of society and industry, the company determined that a significant upgrade to its core IT infrastructure was in order. With the assistance of IBM and Omnitech InfoSolutions, Mahanager Cooperative deployed a virtualized IBM-based infrastructure that significantly reduced electricity and management costs, saving the bank up to $800,000 annually. For its core banking processes, the company chose Flex System x240 compute nodes 5

6 running Microsoft Hyper-V. The resulting solution provides Mahanager Cooperative more performance on demand for transactional processing, and has reduced the time required for month-end and year-end reconciliations by more than 55 percent. Based in Verona, Italy, Unità Locale Socio Sanitaria 20 Verona (ULSS 20 Verona) is a public healthcare provider serving over 400,000 people in 36 different municipalities. Due to growing IT complexity (the company s four mission critical applications were all supported on different vendors servers) and a 2015 EMR compliance deadline, ULSS 20 Verona opted form an all new IT infrastructure with seven Flex System x240 compute nodes supporting business critical Oracle databases, an EMR repository, ERP, e- prescribing, patient support services and a development, test and control environment. The Flex System x240 nodes have provided outstanding performance and reliability for the company s Oracle environment, maximizing database throughput while minimizing CAPEX and keeping operational costs low. Equally important: the new Flex System environment enables seamless EMR file creation/management, and allowed ULSS 20 Verona to achieve complete regulatory compliance months ahead of the 2015 deadline. Final analysis Just as they have for over a decade, today s blade solutions represent the cutting edge of systems development and design. As a result, blade-based offerings like Lenovo s classic BladeCenter and new Flex System offerings evolved from being elegantly engineered solutions for server and application consolidation to becoming the standard architecture for integrated and consolidated systems. But considering these solutions merely according to the servers they support is a serious mistake. Instead, all of a blade infrastructure s components, including system chassis are holistically developed and integrated to maximize performance and the value of their owners investments. Moreover, the longevity of an architecture and its ability to adapt to new innovations is every bit as important providing support for current technologies. Those points all come to mind when one contemplates Lenovo s Flex System architecture which qualifies as an excellent example of how and how well a vendor can do things right. Flex System not only supports highly efficient and effective computing processes but its innovative chassis design allows customers to easily add-in next generation systems and components. More importantly, Flex Systems can help effectively future proof organizations against unwanted or unnecessary rip and replace upgrades As a result, investing in Lenovo s Flex System solutions allows businesses to enjoy superb compute performance while also addressing core business challenges, including lowering costs, improving agility, reducing complexity and enhancing efficiencies. Overall, Lenovo s approach to developing the Flex System architecture and solutions also enables customers to avoid compromises in application and compute performance, and in the business value they accrue from their IT investments Pund-IT, Inc. All rights reserved. About Pund-IT, Inc. Pund-IT emphasizes understanding technology and product evolution and interpreting the effects these changes will have on business customers and the greater IT marketplace. Though Pund-IT provides consulting and other services to technology vendors, the opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author alone. 6