Printer Friendly
Data Center 'MapQuest'
Before Wachovia could begin such a large-scale project, however, it needed to obtain a clear picture of all the equipment and software it already had in its data center, as well as of how the business side interacts with the hardware and software. To obtain such a visual map, Hall says, he and his team -- with help from the University of North Carolina and IntePoint, a Charlotte-based provider of simulation and visualization software -- are building what he says is like a "MapQuest for the data center." This is a three-dimensional model of each data center that shows where things are physically located and how applications or components of applications interact with servers, storage, switches and other infrastructure components. The model also will diagram power usage.
"People need to understand where their infrastructure is and how it's being used or overused," Hall explains. "As we begin to virtualize our data centers, whether we're virtualizing the I/Os or virtualizing the computers, we need to have better end-to-end visibility. Once we have the visibility, we'll start to recognize redundancies."
Data collected from IT mapping software purchased from Tideway Systems will help create the 3D model, Hall notes, adding that his group is building and testing algorithms to determine -- based on such factors as computer machine models, types of processors and how much RAM they use -- how much power each device is using. Ultimately, he describes, the organization will colorize each server in the data center map according to how green it is.
What makes Wachovia's virtualization strategy unique is its breadth and depth. While many Wall Street firms have deployed VMWare and its ilk in many of their data centers, Wachovia is going way beyond this to build a virtualization environment that will encompass servers, grids, desktops, appliances, storage, memory and processors.
Virtual Reality
According to Hall, the bank is building blade-like "processor arrays" -- dense racks of up to 60 blades that will have no local storage and no directly connected I/O devices (e.g., hard drives, modems, network cards, keyboards, monitors, printers, etc.). "By having no local storage or I/O in the chassis, we're able to easily upgrade and replace boxes that have failed," he says, explaining that an InfiniBand I/O fabric will connect processor, storage and memory arrays.
"Rather than having two fibre channel cards, two Ethernet cards and a backup network card on every server and powering up all those cards, we're going to consolidate to one or two wires per computing device," Hall says. And not having hard drives on every server will help the bank significantly reduce power consumption.
The architecture also will simplify work for the IT department, Hall points out. "We want to make it so you could walk into the data center once a week and replace failed blades," he says. "No one would have to wake up at 3 a.m. to fix a server."
Wachovia also plans to use processor arrays on its trading floors. "Instead of putting computers on traders' desktops, we're going to put them in the server room," Hall relates. PCs will be stacked in a common chassis, while keyboards and monitors will remain on the traders' desks. "This doesn't really save us a lot, but it will give us the ability to waterfall server hardware to desktops and vice versa," Hall continues.
Hall says his group also is planning to virtualize some desktops, putting a thin client on the desktop and providing terminal services or Citrix, especially in Wachovia's new headquarters (scheduled to open in 2009), which is being built to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) specifications. "We hope next year to pilot the virtualized desktops and reduce power and cooling requirements at the user's desktop," Hall comments. "As computers become more powerful, rather than dedicating a high-power machine to a user who doesn't need a lot of capacity, it may be one machine for every two or four people." In other words, removing two or more things and replacing them with one.
Technology Vision
Wachovia is working with several vendors to make all of this happen, including Intel, Mellanox Technologies (a supplier of InfiniBand and Ethernet connectivity products that transmit data among servers, communications infrastructure equipment and storage systems), Cisco, EMC, Scalent, Verari, Sun, HP and Dell. In the case of Intel, for intance, Wachovia is looking at the chipmaker's rapid-boot technology and virtualization technology, Hall says. And Verari has provided Wachovia with the ability to decouple I/O devices and cables from the chassis to make the virtual processors possible, he adds.
According to Hall, Wachovia plans to deploy InfiniBand and VMWare within the coming year. In tests of this combination, he says, he's found that it can multiply I/O performance by 300 percent and substantially consolidate cables. Wachovia also plans to pilot the "back-rack PC" (for which desktop computers are housed in a rack rather than on desks) and virtualized PC designs, he notes. Further, the company will pilot the Scalent technology, which it already has tested in its lab.
In fact, Hall says, a lot of the planned new technology has been prototyped using existing products. Internal challenges, such as breaking down organizational barriers, he concedes, will be tougher than the technology challenges. From a technology standpoint, "We can do this today," Hall asserts. "It's just a matter of how we deploy."
