Fujitsu Siemens Computers raises bar for data centre virtualisation with vBlade software

Fujitsu Siemens Computers, the leading European IT provider, today launched vBlade software, a new software add-on to the PRIMERGY BladeFrame system powered by Egenera.

vBlade software introduces an entirely new way to manage both physical servers and virtual machines by providing a single environment for configuring, allocating, repurposing and managing both types of resources, and eliminating the complexities associated with virtual machine management.

A vBlade is a partition of a processing blade, also called pBlade, which uses only a subset of the pBlade's processors and memory to establish a new, independent processing resource.

Now a data centre manager is enabled to consolidate multiple server workloads onto a single processing blade, including workloads based on different operating systems. The first vBlade implementation utilises XenEnterprise, a comprehensive virtualisation solution from XenSource, Inc.

With vBlade software, PRIMERGY BladeFrame customers can take advantage of the same levels of high availability, N+1 failover, disaster recovery, dynamic repurposing and other critical services built into the PRIMERGY BladeFrame architecture for both virtual and physical resources through PRIMERGY BladeFrame PAN Manager software. Whether a customer is consolidating hundreds of servers onto virtual blades or deploying the most mission-critical applications on physical blades, Fujitsu Siemens is the first to eliminate both the management complexity and physical complexity plaguing enterprise data centres today, by providing a solution built to deliver agility and simplicity.

"Agility is the ability of an organisation to sense environmental change and respond efficiently and effectively to that change. However, no organisation will be agile if its data centre and infrastructure aren't," said Tom Bittman, vice-president and Gartner Fellow at Gartner[1].

"Fujitsu Siemens Computers' vision of the dynamic data centre is to enable customers to implement a truly flexible infrastructure that provides maximum efficiency at lowest cost. The PRIMERGY BladeFrame delivers a full-virtualised, open platform that specifically focuses on eliminating data centre 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 data centres," 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 have always been 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 have automatic access to a complete range of virtualisation services, including N+1 automatic failover, N+1 disaster recovery, resource pools, BladeFarms, suspend/resume, live migration and other capabilities.

vBlade technology will be priced as a separate add-on to the Fujitsu Siemens Computers BladeFrame system. A preview release is now available to Fujitsu Siemens Computers customers, and will become generally available in the first half of 2007.