I/O virtualization

Dell shipping Egenera PAN Manager on PowerEdge servers - finally

Dell announced today it has officially begun shipping Egenera’s Processor Area Network (PAN) Manager software on its PowerEdge servers sold in North America, nine months after originally announcing it would do so.

When Dell first reported it planned to ship Malboro, Mass.-based Egenera’s PAN Manager software, it was slated for availability by June. Dell did not respond to questions regarding the delay by the time of this posting.

But, now that it is shipping, PAN Manager software will extend beyond the hypervisor and virtualizes I/O infrastructure on Dell PowerEdge servers, including Ethernet network interface cards, Fibre Channel, host bus adapters (HBAs), and Ethernet and Fibre Channel switches.

By virtualizing I/O, PAN Manager essentially creates an entire virtual datacenter where nothing is tied to physical hardware, applications or operating systems. This allows IT to allocate compute, storage, and network resources wherever and whenever necessary. The software also manages both physical and virtual resources under one pane of glass. A demo of how it works is available here, on Egenera’s website.

With PAN Manager software, Dell will have a strength against competitors with virtualization management tools, such as Hewlett Packard Co. and its Virtual Connect software, which pools and abstracts the local area network and storage area network (SAN) connections to servers and virtual machines (VMs) in HP’s BladeSystems.

When Dell first announced its partnership with Egenera, Ideas International analyst Jim Burton posted a blog stating, “In today’s market, Dell can compete very effectively with other vendors on simple server virtualization and SANs. But what it lacks is a management tool that can pull everything together into an entirely virtualized datacenter. That is where PAN Manager comes into play. With PAN Manager, Dell leaps over many of its competitors with the ability to create the virtualized datacenter of the future today using inexpensive industry-standard components…We at IDEAS feel the OEM relationship is a win-win for Dell and Egenera, as well as the customers of both companies”

Unlike other software that Dell resells, PAN Manager is integrated with the Dell hardware in the factory. “That means the customer doesn’t have to worry about installing software, and all the pieces work together correctly with multiple vendors. Dell also provides any professional services and offers first line support on Dell / PAN Systems,” said Christine Crandell, Senior Vice President of Marketing for Egenera.

PAN software existed only on Egenera’s BladeFrame products until November 2007, when the company opened it up to third-party hardware. Fujitsu Siemens Computers was the first official OEM, and Egenera PAN Manager is now integrate into its Primergy server line as well.

Next Generation Data Center/LinuxWorld 2008: Reporter’s Notebook

I expected this year’s joint LinuxWorld/Next Generation Data Center conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco Aug. 4-7 to be full of technology vendors, high-level technical sessions, product news and interesting characters.

As you can see (at right), my expectations were exceeded.

This year’s conference is packed, with three to four keynotes each day, a large array of tech vendors and numerous technical sessions, covering storage, security, networking, applications, facility infrastructure, and virtualization.

In the five sessions I attended today, which touched on all of the above, virtualization was a predominant topic of conversation in each.

For instance, Rajiv Ramaswami, the vice president and general manager of Cisco Systems Inc., (at left), gave a keynote this afternoon, “Data Center 3.0: How the Network Is Transforming the Data Center,” and explained that, eventually, everything in the data center will be virtualized, including networks.

In another session I attended on creating an efficient, profitable data center, hosted by the Rocky Mountain Institute, virtualization was listed again and again as a key way to reduce data center power consumption.

Cloud computing (aka distributed computing), which goes hand in hand with virtualization, was also a popular topic in the sessions I attended, including the kickoff keynote, “Stateless Computing: Scaling at Zero Marginal Cost above Capex,” by Jeffrey Birnbaum, the managing director and chief technology architect for Merrill Lynch.

In between sessions, I took a tour of Rackable Systems’ 40-foot containerized data center (at right), Ice Cube, which was one of the most popular attractions on the large show floor.

Ice Cube is packed with up to 22,400 Intel Xeon processing cores in Rackable’s own half-depth servers, has a 36-inch central isle to access servers and uses direct current, or DC, power and self-contained uninterruptible power supply, or UPS, technology.

Ice Cube can be configured with IBM BladeCenter servers as well.

Tomorrow I’ll check out a keynote session by Oracle CIO and Senior Vice President Mark Sunday on delivering business value with next-generation data centers and more sessions on green strategies for data centers, cloud computing and virtualization.

Add PCI Express I/O connectivity without adding PCI Express

Recently, Tucson, Ariz.-based NextIO announced its ExpressConnect I/O virtualization product, which adds additional PCI Express (PCIe) I/O connectivity to any server in a data center.

“PCI Express is cost-effective, has a lot of bandwidth and a wide range of standard based I/O devices are available on PCIe, but usually there is only one [PCIe] device per server,” said Chris Pettey, the CTO and co-founder of NextIO. “With [ExpressConnect], you can have many PCIe devices for many servers.”

ExpressConnect works by virtualizing PCIe. It’s a 3U high box with slots into which you can plug I/O devices and is coupled with the N1400-PCM High-Speed Switch Module which enables blade servers to expand their PCIe signals outside the chassis. Doing so creates a pool of I/O resources that is separate from the server itself and can be accessed by any server.

Pettey compared ExpressConnect to Hewlett-Packard’s Virtual Connect, which virtualizes the connection between HP BladeSystem servers and a network but is proprietary to HP BladeSystem. “[ExpressConnect] can do everything HP Virtual Connect can do, only across many platforms and blades and racks. You can run any virtualization platform, any OS, and mix and match servers.”

Egenera’s Processing Area Network PAN Manager software also virtualizes I/O resources and is available on Egenera’s servers and Dell PowerEdge servers. Dell released its own version recently, called FlexAddress, for its PowerEdge M-series servers.

David G. Hill, a principal analyst at the Mesabi Group in Westwood, Mass, ranks NextIO’s product highly for data centers with high I/O throughput demands. “NextIO has the greatest impact in processing environments where the bottleneck is I/O performance, at a reasonable price,” Hill said. “The initial benefits are in I/O performance-demanding environments, such as high bandwidth, high-definition video processing, financial modeling and Web 2.0 data center virtualization.”

A few months ago, I spoke with NextI/O, then waited weeks and weeks for the company to come up with a user reference and some product pricing to no avail. In a case like this, I generally move product information from my My Documents folder to the Recycle Bin, but at face value it appears to be a pretty good technology, and Hill gave it high marks, so I (begrudgingly) decided to post this in case anyone is looking for such a technology.

Just don’t ask me what users think about ExpressConnect, because I don’t know that there are any. As for pricing, the company suggests contacting marketing@NextIO.com