[CAnet - news] Virtulization, SOA and Service Oriented Infrastructure

For more information on this item please visit my blog at 
http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
-------------------------------------------


[Here is a couple of excellent articles on the concept of Service Oriented
Architecture (SOI) where web services are used to represent various
virtualized and real distributed computational, network elements, storage
and data facilities.  Web services provides a new management tool to allow
managers of these facilities to quickly configure and re-arrange these
facilities as required.  This, of course, was also the rationale behind UCLP
- to allow users, whether enterprise managers or researchers to reconfigure
physical and virtual facilities, including network elements as they saw fit
for their application.  Some excerpts from eWeek and GridToday-- BSA

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2158548,00.asp

Virtualization has proved itself in the data center, where companies are
deploying the technology as a way to consolidate hardware, save on power and
cooling costs, and enhance disaster recovery capabilities.

Now, industry observers say, virtualization will play a key role in the
growing SOA (service-oriented architecture) movement. In fact, David
Greschler, director of integrated virtualization strategy at Microsoft, in
Redmond, Wash., calls virtualization "the key enabler for SOA."

"Everything is tied together. What virtualization does is provide a way for
all these pieces [of IT infrastructure] to be separated from each other, but
also to work together," Greschler said.

Those pieces he is talking about include applications, operating systems,
presentation layers, virtual machines, and storage and network devices.

[...]

At this level resides concepts such as policy-based management and the
enablement of self-managing virtualized systems, he said.



[From www.gridtoday.com]
SPECIAL FEATURES
==============================================================

[ ] M1579356 ) Connecting the Dots: Applications and Grid Infrastructure
              By Yaron Haviv, CTO, Voltaire              

  
  The move to grid or grid-like architectures within the datacenter 
  brings many benefits, such as growth of capacities, lower costs, and 
  support for an increasing number and variety of applications. This 
  trend has also brought additional infrastructure requirements and 
  associated challenges. Connecting and managing hundreds or thousands 
  of servers and networked storage, and incorporating server and storage 
  virtualization technologies, has created communication challenges, 
  network complexity and a steep learning curve for getting the most out 
  of the ability to virtualize infrastructure.
  
  With all of this complexity to deal with, have we figured out how much 
  time and resources it takes to deploy applications over grids?
  
  This article examines how grids built around a service-oriented 
  architecture (SOA) focusing on business tasks, business flows, and 
  service delivery will significantly shorten the time and efforts in 
  application deployment and configuration, while delivering the 
  greatest efficiencies. A datacenter grid model is proposed, which 
  includes considerations for deployment and provisioning tools for 
  applications, server and storage infrastructure, and high-performance 
  grid fabrics.
  
[..]

Service-Oriented Infrastructure (SOI) Management
  
  While virtualization of servers, storage and fabrics is a key element 
  to achieving a flexible and more efficient datacenter, it also is 
  critical to develop a new approach to data center resource management. 
  Instead of manual procedures by which administrators create and 
  configure the infrastructure, infrastructure resources should be 
  dynamically created and configured based on the application 
  requirements. This is achieved through the use of SOI management 
  tools.
  
  Fabric provisioning and SOI management tools, such as Voltaire 
  GridVision Enterprise software, depend on the use of dynamic and 
  unified datacenter fabrics, which have loose relationships between 
  resources and can be programmed to create whatever topology or logical 
  links are needed at a given time or to satisfy a given application 
  load.
  
  These tools are complementary to many of the virtualization and 
  automation/provisioning tools in market today because they focus on 
  the infrastructure and connectivity aspects of virtual datacenter 
  resources. They can integrate with the server virtualization products 
  (such as Xen and VMWare) and typically use an open and extensible API 
  for optional integration with server and storage provisioning tools  
  Orchestration and scheduling tools can use the SOI Web services API 
  and object models to provision infrastructure as needed, collect 
  health/performance information and get notified on infrastructure 
  events and changes.
  
  With a SOI, equipment can be wired once, thus eliminating physical 
  user intervention. Complex application deployment procedures that 
  cross organizational boundaries can be automated and conducted in few 
  minutes rather than days or weeks. They are less error-prone and 
  consume fewer resources. Furthermore, infrastructure can be 
  built-to-order to meet application-specific requirements with the 
  right balance of CPU, network and storage resources. Ultimately, this 
  makes applications on a grid more efficient and eliminates the right 
  bottleneck.
  


-------------------------------------
To SUBSCRIBE:
send a blank e-mail message to
[email protected]

To UNSUBSCRIBE:
send a blank email message to
[email protected]
-------------------------------------

These news items and comments are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect
those  of the CANARIE board or management.




-----------
[email protected]
[email protected]
www.canarie.ca/~bstarn
skype: pocketpro
SkypeIn: +1 614 441-9603


_______________________________________________
news mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.canarie.ca/mailman/listinfo/news