Server consolidation and containment with VMware is a proven way to contain cost, improve resource utilization and improve manageability by allowing IT organization to deploy more applications with fewer physical servers. This shift in IT infrastructure optimization has become a mainstream practice and can have a huge impact on capital and operational expenses related to total cost of ownership. Consolidated applications often require individualized storage resources which typically reside external to the VMware ESX server. This approach does not ensure any similar efficiency for the storage resource side of this problem. With BlueArc a unique Virtual-on-Virtual approach allows for a winning combination of VMware virtual server infrastructure and BlueArc virtual storage infrastructure to create an integrated top to bottom approach that fully consolidates both ends of the infrastructure for applications. This unique combination of VMware and BlueArc virtualization technologies enables a multiplying effect on application deployment cost savings. The combined use of both vendors in tandem can lead to savings across a wider breadth of the IT infrastructure scope and management requirements, ultimately reducing the cost of maintaining applications and allowing for simpler application expansion to grow the business.
As a member of the VMware Technology Alliance Program (TAP), BlueArc and WMware jointly pursue release based testing of interoperability through a stringent verification process. This process provides the assurances that customers need to know that things will work the first time and are supported for ongoing activities over time. This minimizes implementation risk and ensures the confidence necessary when making deployment and purchase decisions._ BlueArc unified storage networking approach allows for support of three different VMware protocol connectivity options:
As a member of the VMware Technology Alliance Program (TAP), BlueArc and WMware jointly pursue release based testing of interoperability through a stringent verification process. This process provides the assurances that customers need to know that things will work the first time and are supported for ongoing activities over time. This minimizes implementation risk and ensures the confidence necessary when making deployment and purchase decisions._ BlueArc unified storage networking approach allows for support of three different VMware protocol connectivity options:
The testing ensures compatibility with various levels of VMware ESX for server consolidation and Vmotion for business availability and application mobility. The VMware compatibility guide is available for reference to specific VMware and BlueArc Titan release levels and connectivity options and is updated periodically as new release are verified.
The BlueArc Titan offers a similar virtualization approach that partitions storage within a single physical resource or cluster to be uniquely identified and associated with individual applications on each virtual machine instance. In the case of iSCSI, multiple virtual machines can share accessibility to a single BlueArc Titan server or cluster for consolidation. Selectively each application can be presented with a unique set of iSCSI block LUNs for each virtual machine as needed._ These configurations are ideal for high performance virtual machines and their associated applications that need to ensure performance levels through securing multiple LUNS for combining capacity, throughput, IOPS and latency. This allows multiple instances of virtual machines independent of their location on different ESX servers to access storage resources as needed through IP network infrastructure as need and provides a high degree of capacity and performance scalability to allowing optimized storage resource consolidation.
Similarly, but even more powerful is connection of virtual machines through NFS network file system protocols. This form of connectivity can actually be shared between VMware instances, unlike iSCSI, allowing for unique application data sharing properties related to data access and workflow processes. Examples are internet services providers that need shared access to common source, image or boot images for horizontal scalability of web-servers and for environments that share common access to reference information like image libraries and sequencing files representing DNA patterns for bioresearch. The unique sharing properties of NFS is an alternative to most iSCSI implementation of VMware on the_ today market and with the backing of the BlueArc Titan hardware architecture it can be just as fast in performance making it a viable option. Shared resources are proven to improve utilization rates which make this option ideal for consolidation and workflow environments and long term reference or archive information, even a second tier archive or online storage for VMware installations allowing for simpler data protection and archiving over time.
The BlueArc architecture allows for a Virtual Server, which is similar to a Virtual Machine, but runs on the Titan storage system. This corresponding counterpart provides the same benefit by logically partitioning the storage physical asset to provide consolidation and containment with similar improvements in storage resource utilization and total cost of ownership. A simple example is that each Virtual Machine can be provisioned with a corresponding Virtual Server to allow for unparalleled access and resource partitioning on both the server and storage resource as needed individually, while simultaneously consolidating more application instances and their associated virtual machines onto a smaller set of hardware resources. This combination provides IT administrators with more control over a broader scope of IT resources to extend the efficiency of virtualization technologies and achieve high levels of productivity and resource utilization needed for maintaining and expanding application growth.