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Innovation of IT service – the key to success of business of the company
Active implementation of innovations in information technology field allows to increase considerably efficiency of business processes, to optimize costs and to get additional competitive advantages. The contribution of IT service to ensuring successful performance of any company grows from year to year. Requirements to efficiency of IT are high more than ever today.
Despite great interest of IT specialists to new innovation concepts and technologies, in reality the solutions which already showed the efficiency are used. The IT head's task – to seize that opportunity when the new technology leaves a stage of experimental working off and becomes ready to mass use. At this moment it is possible to take a maximum of advantages of implementation of such technology and to provide to the company real competitive advantages.
The concept of Software Defined Infrastructure – mature innovative technology
Emergence of technology of virtualization which led to cardinal change of corporate computing systems became a striking example of efficiency of innovations. Virtualization far became not at once a mainstream in information technologies, but quickly showed substantial increase of efficiency and performance of IT services. Today the vast majority of server applications works in virtual environment, the selected placement is used only for customized applications or in hardware and software systems. An opportunity to abstract from specific hardware configurations of the server hardware that simplified a question of the choice of a hardware platform became one of advantages of server virtualization, unevident at the first stages of implementation. As a result the technology of virtualization became quickly available even to the small companies and startups.
Today became possible to make the following quantum leap in methods of the organization of infrastructure. Development of reference hardware server platforms and the software made possible implementation of principal components of infrastructure – computing modules, data networks, storage systems and jobs of users – in the form of the virtual objects which are not tied to specific hardware components of infrastructure. The virtualized resources can be collected in a uniform pool and to automate processes of their use. The infrastructures organized using this technology call software-defined infrastructures (Software Defined Infrastructure, SDI).
Today understand the managed virtualization complemented with software-defined data storage as SDI (Software Defined Storage, SDS) and software-defined network infrastructure (Software Defines Network, SDN).
Such infrastructures provide the highest flexibility and dynamism of use of resources and allow to implement fully the concept "IT as service", having completed thereby transformation of IT departments from technical services in a full-fledged business asset.
The companies of any scale can use software-defined infrastructures. An opportunity to refuse use of the specialized equipment which though solves in the most productive way narrow problems (network switching, data access, calculations), but requires considerable budgets on acquisition, implementation and maintenance became one of advantages of this technology. The program focused infrastructure can be unrolled, using the normal equipment. At the same time, thanks to the elasticity which is initially put in technology and scalability, it is possible to reach performance measures and reliability it is not worse, than shows the specialized equipment.
Today it is confidently possible to tell that software-defined infrastructures proved the efficiency and are capable to increase considerably return and return of investments into information technologies for the companies of any scale.
Customers pass to SDI because of obvious advantages of such approach to creation of infrastructure: high flexibility, rapid implementation of new processes and services, simplicity of service, data security and decrease in operating costs. The last advantage is reached in many respects thanks to normal equipment – servers, disk shelves, switches, network controllers. The attractive party of SDI is the possibility of gradation from the traditional infrastructure using to some extent virtualization to SDI by gradual transformation and consecutive implementation of different software-defined elements of infrastructure.
At the same time in general infrastructure becomes simpler. The SDI technology allows to apply homogeneous components which use is defined at the level of the software to creation of infrastructure. At the same time the logical connectivity of infrastructure at the expense of an exception of the specialized equipment and flexible resource allocation between different tasks increases.
Besides, SDI infrastructures are ideal for deployment of cloud environments. The cornerstone software-defined infrastructure supports levels of availability, efficiency and flexibility according to business needs that serves as a convincing argument for benefit of preparation of deployment of a private cloud in the companies of any scale.
The easiest way of transition to SDI infrastructure is transition to virtualization of server applications. For the companies with high-virtualized by the environment further transition to a private cloud and to SDI can be carried out step by step. Based on the high-virtualized servers it is possible to implement consistently software-defined storage system (for example, using freely extended software) and a software-defined corporate data network.
Simplification of process of transition to SDI infrastructure can be helped by the choice of equipment rooms a component which will be able to provide necessary scaling and flexibility in providing resources – computing, disk and network.
Structural elements for creation of SDI from DEPO Computers company
The Russian company DEPO Computers since 2007 leading in a segment of producers of the server hardware in Russia developed and provided the updated line of the servers intended for creation of software-defined infrastructures on the market. The newest technologies of Intel company giving enhanced capabilities in the field of high-performance computing, high-speed information transfer and the organization of corporate systems of data storage are the basis for architecture of servers.
The line includes three models of the classical servers intended for installation in a server rack. Servers support installation of two latest Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 v4 processors and RAM of DDR4 which provide the high performance of computing tasks and the maximum advantages to virtualization. Models differ in a disk subsystem and, respectively, construct of the body.
All models support a possibility of additional installation of two solid-state SSD disks intended for failsafe work of the operating system. Besides, servers support installation unary or double (with a possibility of hot swap) the power supply with the certificate 80+ of Platinum.
The DEPO Storm 3400P1 server has height 1U and allows to set up to 4 disks SATA or SAS with a possibility of "hot swap" and creation of failsafe RAIDs. The maximum supported amount of RAM – 1TB (16h64GB LRDIMM).
This model of the server within SDI infrastructure provides powerful computing resources for placement of the high-loaded applications.
The construct of the body of the DEPO Storm 3400V2 server allows to set up to 8 disks SATA or SAS (when using the discrete RAID controller or HBA) with a possibility of "hot swap" and creation of failsafe RAIDs. The server has height 2U and can be completed with one of versions of dual-processor motherboards with support of 16 or 24 slots of memory, 3 or 6 expansion slots, two or four the integrated network gigabit ports based on chipsets of Intel® i210 or i350, or two the integrated ten-gigabit ports RJ-45. The maximum volume of the maintained memory for this model of the server is up to 512GB for configurations 16DIMM and 768GB for payments with support 24DIMM.
In software-defined infrastructures this model of the server provides powerful network resources for the organization of software-defined network.
The third model in this series, the DEPO Storm 3400G4 server, is intended for the organization of a storage system. The body 4U high allows to set up to 24 disks SATA or SAS (for SAS the choice of a dvukhekspanderny basket is recommended) with a possibility of "hot" replacement and creation of failsafe RAIDs. The server provides two options of a configuration of network ports: 2 network ports Gigabit Ethernet 1gb/s based on the Intel® i350 or 2 controller network port Gigabit Ethernet 10gb/s based on the Intel® X540 controller in the first option and 4 network ports Gigabit Ethernet 1gb/s based on the Intel® i350 controller in the second.
The maximum supported amount of RAM – 1.5TB (24h64GB LRDIMM). All models of a line of the DEPO Storm 3400 servers have telemetric sensors and a possibility of monitoring a cache memory that allows to receive exact these loadings of the processor, memory and input-output system. The similar functionality increases efficiency of use of resources and allows to reduce the total cost of ownership.
Technologies of Intel
Market leaders pay close attention to development of the concept of software-defined infrastructure. At the end of March, 2016 the Intel company provided the new developments intended for creation of modern cloud environments and software-defined infrastructures.
The new generation of the server multi-core processors Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 v4 is optimized for work in the modern cloud systems of a corporate class with software-defined infrastructures and provides an optimal combination of performance and cost. New processors are issued on 14-nanometer technology, they contain bigger number of cores, more high-speed controller of RAM and include expanded support of technologies of virtualization. For the first time in Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 v4 processors absolutely new Intel® Resource Director Technology technology (Intel® RDT) for monitoring and management of the distributed system resources at the level of the operating system and virtual machines debuted. In addition, in new processors expanded function of hardware control of energy consumption, Intel® Processor Trace technology for program debugging using trace of accomplishment of commands, new and enhanced capabilities of quality improvement of service of Quality-of-Service (CMT, CAT, MBM), new opportunities of virtualization, and other technologies for performance improvement against the background of decrease in delays and energy consumption is also implemented.
Besides, the Intel company provided the first solid-state disks Intel® SSD DC P3320 and P3520 in which the most dense is used in the industry a flash memory 3D NAND. And in drives of Intel® SSD DC D3700 and D3600 series with support of NVMe the two-port configuration which provides the increased performance, reliability and integrity of data is for the first time implemented. High-speed solid state drives considerably increase flexibility and performance of platforms of server virtualization and software-defined data storage.
Example of the ready-made solution
Simple, effective and scalable example of implementation of the concept of SDI based on the free software of OpenStack – the solution DEPO OpenCloud TM intended for implementation of multifunction solutions for any type of a cloud: private, public or hybrid. The cloud platform of OpenStack allows to manage flexibly infrastructure at the level of components, abstracting from the equipment. All components of infrastructure are provided to users in the form of virtual resources – virtual machines, virtual storage systems and virtual network services. At the same time the cloud platform provides control automation with all infrastructure, high fault tolerance and simple scaling.
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