HDS on April 19 announced its intention to develop and deliver an open, unified compute platform catering for servers, storage, network and applications. Other vendors have also articulated similar unified computing visions such as EMC/VMware/Cisco with Vblock and HP with Matrix.
HDS at this early stage articulates a concept of a “Scalable, unified compute platform with unprecedented levels of automated server, storage, network and application orchestration”. By pre-announcing, HDS clearly needed to be part of a debate while a functioning solution is in development and it’s competitors are promoting different concepts.
Why does the world need unified computing solutions?
IT professionals are clearly capable of managing their own environments with individuals on board who specialise in security, servers, server virtualisation, storage and its virtualisation, networking etc. And the management may even be outsourced to third parties. Which raises the question: maybe it ought manage itself? And many IT professionals try to automate as much as possible of the delivery of the necessary bits needed to run applications for its businesses. This delivery has been helped significantly by server virtualisation. Yet, a management wrapper or a layer that integrates the constituent parts is desirable.
In this announcement, HDS emphasises the concept of orchestration, which can be substituted as the many parallel sequences of events that need to take place to launch a solution. (HP also refers to orchestration). Others may refer to the combined elements of a so-called stack, although ‘stack’ is not my favorite image.
Openness
Vendors have a natural tendency of promoting its own components, (see: HP or EMC/VMware/Cisco). HDS conversely emphasises an open approach. Which we take to mean the management of resources that could be from any vendor. It is a laudable intention, but will undoubtedly take more effort.
Cloud
Cloud sneaked itself into the Unified Computing marketing collateral and for good reasons. In this piece I argued that a virtualised infrastructure underpins good cloud solutions. Whether they be private or outsourced. Similarly, unified computing will want to be as virtualised as possible. Conversely, cloud providers would want to base their infrastructure on high levels of automation and virtualisation.
Prospective customers:
Begin the process of exploration and question how it works. The intentions may be perfectly excellent but each specific implementation has to be tested. Sometimes management frameworks becomes irresistible purely by virtue of offering a regimented and disciplined approach. But the timesavings and automation gains need to be solid and measurable. Preferably the exploration is driven by good real life case studies. And then of course the inenvitable cost needs to be justified.
