Service Orchestration: The Key to the Evolution of the Virtual Data Center

Two new white papers titled “Virtualization: Benefits, Challenges, and Solutions” and “Service Orchestration: The Key to the Evolution of the Virtual Data Center” authored by industry analyst Dr. Jim Metzler can now be found in LineSider’s resource center.

The papers focus on the benefits of virtualization and discuss the need for service orchestration and automated provisioning. Service orchestration is an operational technique that helps IT organizations to automate many of the manual tasks that are involved in provisioning and controlling the capacity of dynamic virtualized services.

Dr. Metzler states, “Unfortunately, while computing resources have become virtualized and dynamic, most of the rest of the IT infrastructure is still physical and static.  As a result, deploying new services and/or making changes in the alignment of all the infrastructure resources (e.g., servers, networks, security and storage) that support a service typically requires numerous time-consuming manual tasks that span a number of technology and organizational boundaries.  This combination of tedious manual processes and the inefficiencies created by organizational silos leads to escalating workloads and operating expenses.  This combination also leads to having processes that don’t complete in seconds or minutes, but in days or weeks. Service orchestration can automate the configuration of physical and virtual entities and can control the allocation of resources shared among a number of virtual services.  Because it provides this functionality, service orchestration enables IT organizations to substantially lower cost and improve operational efficiencies by maximizing the leverage achievable from a shared pool of resources within the virtual data center infrastructure.”

LineSider’s OverDrive solves these problems.

OverDrive is Named a Hot Tool for the Next-Generation Data Center by Network World

 LineSider’s OverDrive was named as one of the top 10 hot tools for the next-generation data center! Check it out here.

Feature editor Beth Schultz writes “Why it’s interesting: This technology will become increasingly important as enterprise IT adds desktop virtualization, test lab automation and other highly dynamic workloads to the data center, says Rachel Chalmers, infrastructure management research director at The 451 Group. While IT has a choice of automation software for provisioning and de-provisioning virtual machines on the server side, the same hasn’t been true for switches and routers that connect those systems to one another. That’s the gap LineSider is trying to address, she says. Perhaps better called an abstraction layer than virtualization, OverDrive ‘provides a uniform interface through which those devices can be controlled automatically according to business policy,’ Chalmers adds.”

Network Services Virtualization Challenges Conventional Wisdom

Check out this article written by LineSider CTO Ken Ferderer

Network Services Virtualization
— Data center virtualization is changing the way we think about today’s networks. Stress fractures have begun to appear in the network triggered by the increasing adoption of virtualization around datacenter compute and storage platforms. The virtualization of datacenter resources, while good for the efficient utilization of costly physical resources, is placing enormous demands on the underlying network and operational support teams in terms of increasing support costs and time spent implementing changes to the infrastructure driven by the dynamic nature of virtual services. Traditional network designs and the tools that control and manage them cannot keep pace with the dynamic nature of virtual services.

The 451 Group Recognizes LineSider Technologies Vision and Product Architecture in Impact Report

LineSider Technologies, Inc., a leading provider of network services virtualization , today announced a recently published Impact Report by independent analyst firm The 451 Group titled, “In Quest for Network Services Virtualization, LineSider Won’t Be Sidelined,” is available for download on the company’s web site. In the report, LineSider is recognized for its lucid vision and its sensible product architecture.

In the report, 451 analyst Rachel Chalmers states, “Cloud computing is virtualization plus automation and while many companies offer good policy-based provisioning and runtime automation at the service tier far fewer offer comparable functionality for network devices. Yet the network, along with storage tier, is the Achilles’ heel of infrastructure that aspires to cloudiness. By interpreting business policies so that they can be enforced and playing nicely with existing network and configuration management arrangements, LineSider offers a tempting prospect to overworked network administrators who are trying to support private and public clouds.”