Scalent Teams with Emulex

Based in Palo Alto, CA, Scalent Systems, provider of real-time management and automation software for large data centers, announced the integration of the dynamic World Wide Name (WWN) configuration capabilities of Emulex LightPulse Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) with Scalent’s storage access virtualization. This implementation removes barriers to rapid server failover, and enables complex server deployments with storage allocation to be brought on-line in minutes.

Engineering at Scalent

Scalent allows data center operators to rapidly change entire systems and associated topologies, including which servers are running, what software is running on them, and how they’re connected to networks and storage. Scalent does this in real-time, without requiring physical changes to the infrastructure. Scalent V/OE software enables customers to take their data centers from ‘dead bare-metal’ (powered off hardware with no software installed) to live (newly deployed or restored), connected (to network and storage) servers, in five minutes or less.

Typically, SAN-based storage access is determined by a unique identifier (World Wide Name, WWN), which is hard coded to the hardware (HBA) installed in a physical server. This static binding leads to server administrators either physically opening servers and moving HBA cards to new machines in order move storage, or leveraging storage administration to reconfigure switches and storage arrays to recognize a new server.

“The virtualization of storage access is critical to automating the retargeting of storage from one server to another,” said Kevin Epstein, vice president, Marketing, Scalent Systems. “Scalent can repurpose servers and move storage without reconfiguration of the SAN or physical redeployment of adapter cards. This capability means that servers with SAN storage can now be brought on-line or fail-over in about 5 minutes.”

“Automating storage access with server provisioning greatly simplifies data center operations in a SAN environment,” said Scott McIntyre, vice president of Product Marketing, Emulex Corporation. “This integration tightly couples SAN connectivity and server provisioning, helping customers minimize time-consuming, manual storage fabric and disk LUN reconfiguration changes.”