The Cloud has made many changes in the ways to establish anything online with different platforms. And Virtualization is the base which is powering tremendous growth in cloud computing services. At its heart, Virtualization is a hypervisor that allows the provisioning of different virtual machines on a single stack of hardware.
The hypervisor is the key enabler for two reasons for cloud services.
First it allows the base hardware to be divided up in the instances, allowing organizations to maximize their hardware utilization. Second, it provides provisioning of new services without having to be in the data room i.e. can be configured at anywhere on demand. The cost-effective benefits of increasing hardware utilization are obvious; however, it is a single shot of efficiency. But the ability to provide services on demand is the feature which fuels the continual growth in demand for cloud services.
On-demand provisioning, is an effective way which provides users with an elastic infrastructure to meet the varying usage demands, is possible due to a combination of the hypervisor and supporting services that are accessed by application programming interfaces (APIs). Through the use of APIs, third-party applications give users the ability to control virtual machines of its kinds as if they were independent instances of hardware.
But what if we think of performance or regulatory requirements or single Dedicated hardware configuration? That’s where stand alone provisioning comes into play with OpenStack’s Ironic project set to bring the flexibility of virtual-machine provisioning to Dedicated servers.
Why provision to stand alone?
The recently acquired Cloud service provider SoftLayer by IBM, have established an appreciable appetite for stand alone hardware in the data center. Having dedicated hardware offers organizations a boost, an extra layer of data security and dependability, ensuring that compute and storage resources are not being shared with others. And, equally as important, having dedicated hardware offers the ability to know exactly what performance is available, meaning service providers can offer improved, higher specification service-level agreements (SLA).
For Different applications such as relational database servers requires high configuration and storage resources, up to a point where using virtual machines becomes a bit low in delivering performance and economies of scale. While the need for virtual machines may have gone away, the need to meet fluctuating usage patterns hasn’t. This means that system administrations still need the ability to spin up servers as if they were virtual machines with SLAs in place to ensure dependable performance.
Organizations with large database and high computing power may feel more comfortable being able to guarantee that customers’ data is being stored on hardware that is only serving as a stand alone hardware server. And for hardware service provider’s products allow for higher performance SLAs without concerns that other virtual machines may lead to degradation in server performance. Single hardware with enough resources is situated for customers looking for increased performance and security benefits afforded by dedicated hardware, and service providers who can offer premium SLAs.
Over the last few decades, a movement started to get closer to the hardware, to remove the layers of software abstraction between the operating system and the hardware. Because early hypervisors ran on top of operating systems and were soon superseded by hardware hypervisors, which incorporated a lightweight operating system and the hypervisor in one distribution, with the goal of increasing overall system performance.
The OpenStack project has been working on hardware provisioning through the Ironic project. It will bring provisioning flexibility seen with virtual machines to stand alone physical servers, allowing service providers to integrate hardware provisioning within existing virtual environment systems with minimal changes to the software infrastructure.
While the Ironic project has been working on getting hardware provisioning ready at the software level, AMD has been testing hardware provisioning in its SeaMicro SM15000 server, ensuring that customers who need the benefits of stand alone hardwrae provision and manage a server deployment as easily as they do with virtualized servers. The SeaMicro SM15000 provides the ability to boot and install server images from a centrally allocated server and offers APIs that can be integrated into OpenStack environments.
Hardware provisioning through OpenStack’s Ironic project will give service providers the ability to offer stand alone servers as if they were virtual machines and open up new possibilities for organizations and service providers.
