Composable Infrastructure: Solution to efficient use of Heterogeneous Datacenters in Cloud

Hello Folks, Welcome back to Learnizo Global.  In this article, we will focus on a very efficient way of using resources of heterogeneous (that consist of bare metal servers, Virtual Machines, and containers) data centers in a cloud. Composable Infrastructure reduces the significant CAPEX of an organization by taking care of over-provisioning and optimum use of resources in a heterogeneous data center. An impactful use case for composable infrastructure is to make private clouds more closely resemble public clouds in terms of speed and availability. Other important use cases include EDGE computing and Big Data Analytics.

What is composable Infrastructure?

Less than half of the resources available in any given enterprise’s data center are being used by an application or workload. An enterprise with this statistic has over-provisioned their data center for the amount of work they need to do, and most of their resources are sitting idle and unused.

Composable infrastructure is the decoupling of resources from the hardware they reside on, pooling them into a form easily accessible from anywhere in the data center, and then provisioning workloads with exactly the amount of resources they need via software.

Decoupling, Pooling, Provisioning

The resource pool is the accumulation of all of the hardware resources in the data center into one general element for applications and workloads to access.

Through the network fabric (connects the various components of a data center (processors, storage disks, memory, accelerators)), the resources on those components can be accessed by an application or workload running on any server. This ubiquitous availability makes the resources a large pool that consists of everything and can be accessed by anything.

This pooling of resources eliminates the need for a server with compute, storage, memory, and networking resources configured as per the application’s specifications. When an application is finished running, the resources that were given to it are returned to the pool to be used by another application or workload. This means that when an application demands more resources halfway through its lifecycle, hardware does not need to be physically reconfigured. More compute power, for instance, can be pulled from the pool and applied to the application.

Composable Infrastructure Architecture Hardware

Disaggregation of resources, along with decoupling them from their hardware via software, means more control over the number of resources provisioned to a workload or application. This is a key characteristic of composable infrastructure architecture. An application running in a server is no longer limited to the resources that are bundled with the server. Instead, applications or workloads can be given access to a custom and specific amount of each resource needed. This means no more over-provisioning and resources sitting idle in a siloed box.

For the resources that can be disaggregated, the advancing speeds of fabrics like Ethernet or optical interconnect make it so the lag from processor to storage disk, for example, is short enough to allow the two to still work together optimally.

Composable Infrastructure Architecture Software

Composable infrastructure architecture has two major parts. First, the ability to disaggregate and aggregate resources into pools; and second, to compose consumable resources through a unified API. For the IT personnel who oversee the composed data center, management software is needed to communicate with the API. Examples of available software are HPE’s OneView, Dell EMC’s OpenManage Enterprise, and DriveScale’s Composable Platform.

These programs provide visibility of the data center, automated provisioning, automated integration of new hardware, and monitoring of resulting data to better provision applications.

Open APIs           

Open APIs in composable infrastructure are made with the intent to integrate third-party software and hardware with the more proprietary solutions.

SDN Fabric

In order for a whole data center, possibly made up of thousands or tens of thousands of servers, to be completely interconnected, an SDN fabric is needed. SDN fabrics add intelligence to the interconnection of data center elements to optimize traffic.

That, along with automation, virtualization, and separation of the control and data planes makes SDN a useful tool for composable infrastructure. Composable Infrastructure would be very helpful in some of the 5G cellular Technology Use cases where Private and Open RANS are being implemented.  Hope you had a better insight into the composable infrastructure after reading this article. We will discuss more converged and hyper-converged infrastructure in our further articles. For Now, stay safe and continue learning with Learnizo Global.