vBlade software introduces a new way of managing physical servers and virtual machines by providing a single environment for configuring, allocating, and managing both types of resources.
'Our vBlade software has been built to deliver agility and simplicity, enabling us to provide PRIMERGY BladeFrame customers the same levels of business critical services on a single platform,' said Rajesh Deepchandani, Large Enterprises, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Middle East.
'With this launch, Fujitsu Siemens Computers has become the first regional IT provider to eliminate both management and physical complexities currently plaguing enterprise datacenters.'
vBlade software provides critical services that include high availability, N+1 failover, disaster recovery and dynamic repurposing built into the PRIMERGY BladeFrame architecture for both virtual and physical resources through PRIMERGY BladeFrame Processing Area Network (PAN) Manager™ software.
'Agility is the ability of an organization to sense environmental change and respond efficiently and effectively to it. However, no organization will be agile if its datacenter and infrastructure aren't,' said Tom Bittman, vice president and Gartner Fellow at Gartner .
vBlade is a partition of a processing blade - pBlade and uses only a subset of the pBlade's processors and memory to establish a new, independent processing resource. Now a data center manager can consolidate multiple server workloads onto a single processing blade, including workloads based on different operating systems. The first vBlade implementation utilizes XenEnterprise™, a comprehensive virtualization solution from XenSource, Inc.
'Fujitsu Siemens Computers' vision of the Dynamic Data Center is to enable customers to implement a truly flexible infrastructure that provides maximum efficiency at lowest cost. The PRIMERGY BladeFrame delivers a full-virtualized, open platform that specifically focuses on eliminating data center complexity. With the introduction of vBlade, customers can now take advantage of the benefits of virtual machine technology without adding another layer of management or domain expert into their datacenters,' said Dieter Herzog, executive vice president, Enterprise Products at Fujitsu Siemens Computers.
'This is a very different approach than is being advocated by other vendors, who continue to add layer upon layer of software, only adding to the chaos of complexity that enterprises are trying to get away from.'
PRIMERGY BladeFrame servers, powered by Egenera, are virtual assets that are deployed, managed and repurposed quickly and simply. Rather than tie a specific operating system and application to a server, Fujitsu Siemens Computers' PAN architecture creates pools of compute, storage and network resources that can be easily shared and automatically repurposed based on business priorities and service-level agreements.
With the introduction of vBlade technology, users can define pools of physical and virtual blades, and deploy Fujitsu Siemens Computers' virtual servers on either physical or virtual blades in the same exact manner, across the entire PAN - including multiple BladeFrame systems - making the provisioning of servers to physical or virtual blades simple. This also provides easy failover, rapid scalability, load balancing and disaster recovery on a larger scale.
'The proliferation of virtual machines during the next decade will drive an explosion of complexity even greater than that caused by distributed computing in the 90s,' said Vern Brownell, Egenera founder and chief strategy officer. 'Meanwhile, other technologies - such as iSCSI, 10G Ethernet and multi-core processing - are also coming on strong. For IT, incorporating this juggernaut of solutions is a monumental management challenge.'
Brownell continued, 'The PAN architecture was specifically developed to abstract and encapsulate complex solutions such as virtual machines and eliminate their complexity from users.'
With vBlade software, virtual machines running on the PRIMERGY BladeFrame system also have automatic access to more virtualization services, including resource pools, BladeFarms, suspend/resume, live migration and other capabilities.