Scalent Infrastructure Manager (IM) is software you install in your data center to make your infrastructure dynamic. It works with your existing servers, network and storage.
Scalent IM delivers:
- End-to-end provisioning of servers and connectivity to networks and storage
- Rapid provisioning of server images
- Server Identity Management for Network and Storage connectivity
- Automatic High Availability
- Easier deployment of virtualization
END-TO-END PROVISIONING OF SERVERS AND CONNECTIVITY TO NETWORKS AND STORAGE
Creating a dynamic infrastructure requires coordinated provisioning and configuration management across servers, network and storage connectivity. Scalent IM is unique in its ability to manage your data center infrastructure as a whole – ensuring end-to-end application functionality.
Scalent IM’s graphical user interface presents a unified view of data center resources – both physical and virtual. Provisioning the infrastructure required for applications is simple and intuitive. Multi-tiered web applications and their associated network topologies are represented in an easy to understand visual metaphor.
RAPID PROVISIONING OF SERVER IMAGES
In a Scalent IM environment servers are stateless. You have the choice of booting from local disk or central storage (SAN, NAS, iSCSI). Scalent IM provisions a server in minutes by assigning a server to a specific server image and booting it.
Scalent’s image-based provisioning greatly simplifies the provisioning process regardless of the target server’s configuration. Scalent IM provides sophisticated tools to quickly migrate server images between local disks and central storage. Resulting images are mobile – bootable across disparate physical servers and virtual machines. Server images are customized offline to include the correct drivers for booting on the destination server. This also allows physical-to-physical (P2P) or physical-to-virtual (P2V) migration of server images for server upgrades, refresh, or consolidation.
SERVER IDENTITY MANAGEMENT FOR NETWORK AND STORAGE CONNECTIVITY
Network connectivity depends on the role a server is assigned. Scalent IM dynamically provisions the MAC and IP addresses of your servers. Scalent IM also adjusts the connectivity topology of your network to suit the assigned roles of your servers. As server roles change, the network topology adjusts automatically.
Scalent IM establishes storage access for each server dynamically. Any server can boot from any image without manual reconfiguration of the storage device. Scalent IM assigns the server’s identity to access its boot image and data volumes stored on Fiber Channel, iSCSI, and NAS.
Scalent IM provides an N+1 availability solution. A spare server anywhere in the infrastructure can replace any failed server. Scalent IM automatically detects server failures and retargets the failed server’s image to an available spare – physical or virtual. Network and storage connectivity is automatically established for the spare server.
Scalent IM eliminates the need for complex and expensive clustering solutions for those applications that can sustain momentary failures. This allows you to protect all of your applications against hardware failures, not just your high end applications.
EASIER DEPLOYMENT OF VIRTUALIZATION
Scalent IM can provision servers with hypervisors (VMware ESX, Hyper-V, Xen) and also manage the provisioning of the virtual machines in those hypervisors. Where clusters of hypervisors are required, Scalent IM coordinates the provisioning of network and storage access shared among cluster members. Scalent IM can easily grow and shrink cluster capacity based on need.
Scalent IM allows you to move server images between physical servers and virtual machines without conversion. During the lifecycle of application development, testing and deployment, Scalent IM gives you the freedom to provision server images to the most suitable server type without requiring any modification.