I can finally tell you what I’ve been working on for the last 17 months. Today Dell EMC announced the PowerOne System. This is what I’ve been working on, it hasn’t been a VDI program or anything like that. My work at Dell has been part of a team creating an autonomous, outcome oriented, converged infrastructure.
You might be asking — what is a PowerOne System? PowerOne is an autonomous converged infrastructure that is a giant leap forward in the industry and provides outcome oriented results. It is built on all Dell components. That means storage, compute, and networking are all from Dell.
- The storage array for the initial release of PowerOne can be either PowerMax 2000 or PowerMax 8000
- Workload computing currently runs on the Dell EMC MX7000 with either MX740c or MX840c compute sleds
- Dell PowerSwitch networking provides connectivity to all of the components
- At the heart of PowerOne resides the PowerOne Controller which directs automated outcome oriented results
What does “automated” and “outcome oriented” mean? It means that the components needed for workloads are brought together with automation and delivered as a declared outcome. This is a key concept that is unique to PowerOne. Let’s get even deeper on this with two examples.
Let’s say you are at a restaurant — you are given a menu of food available from the restaurant. You select your drink, appetizers, entree, and dessert. You don’t have to know how to make any of them. The chefs, bartenders, and wait staff know how to make it all for you and bring it to your table complete and with high quality. PowerOne works in much the same way: you declare the outcome you want, PowerOne then takes that and looks at what it has in inventory, and using stringent best practices, delivers the infrastructure for you to consume.
If you don’t dine out all that often, maybe cars are a better model. Consider driving down the road and you set your cruise control to the speed limit, take your foot off the gas, and go with the flow of traffic. You’ve declared an outcome: you want to go the speed limit. You don’t need to know all the complex operations for making that work, you just push a button. This is the same with PowerOne — you declare the outcome and PowerOne delivers that outcome without you having to know all of the inner workings and best practices to get the result you want.
All this declarative stuff is great, right? How does PowerOne deliver these outcome oriented results? They are delivered with the PowerOne Controller, the heart of PowerOne, that I mentioned above. The PowerOne Controller is a redundant appliance that manages all of the PowerOne infrastructure and delivers and maintains outcomes.
How does it do that? With a lot of cool programs running inside the PowerOne Controller. Remember, the PowerOne Controller is an appliance. When was the last time you bought a refrigerator and asked the sales person what sort of refrigerant it used. You probably haven’t ever asked, I just bought one last week and didn’t even bother to ask.
And you are probably thinking, well how am I supposed to be able to use PowerOne and make it fit into my environment? Great Question, I’m glad you asked! PowerOne has a fully functional API so you can leverage it as part of your data center automation tools. That means, if you want an automation process to stand up a new vSphere cluster whenever a request is approved, or have a script that watches your DevOps environment and adds a new host when resources are constrained, you can do it with PowerOne without needing to know the recipes.
Remember earlier when I talked about how outcome oriented results from PowerOne were like going to a restaurant? The restaurant doesn’t tell you how they make the chicken soup, nor do you have to tell them how to make it, you just declare “I’ll have the chicken soup.” Everything else is done behind the scenes. Same thing is happening with PowerOne, you just declare what you want and PowerOne prepares it for you.
Beyond the PowerOne API as a way to declare outcomes, PowerOne also has a UI that lets you declare outcomes. It’s called the PowerOne Navigator and is built on top of the PowerOne API. You can even try it out on the Dell Demo Center by looking for interactive demo ITD-0315 PowerOne Navigator. The PowerOne Navigator lets you engage in a declarative approach to IT infrastructure using a UI. (Seriously, go check out the demo.)
You’re probably wondering about how all of these outcomes are delivered and made available for consumption. The resources (storage, compute, and network) are logically configured together as a CRG or Cluster Resource Group. This is a logical grouping of infrastructure resources and their settings. You can have a bunch of CRGs.
Once a CRG has been declared, the hosts in it have VMware ESXi automatically installed on them and they are added to a vCenter for management. All of that is done automatically without anything more than declaring an outcome. The IT staff no longer need to know about all the obscure best practices for creating vSphere environments. PowerOne already takes those into account.
Below is the starting screen for creating a CRG. Notice, I declare a name, a version of vSphere, and whether I want to base its design off of any other CRGs I already have. A few more screens and I have a functional CRG with ESXi installed on it.
That brings up something that is really cool with PowerOne. You may have noticed here that it’s asking what version of ESXi I want installed on the CRG. PowerOne allows for multiple versions of vSphere in an environment. That means when the organization is ready to move a given workload to a new vSphere version, they can update it without affecting other workloads on other CRGs.
Does that mean each CRG has its own vCenter server instance? No, by default there are only two vCenter instances in PowerOne and they are located in a vSphere Management Cluster. One vCenter appliance is responsible for controlling the vSphere Management Cluster and the other is responsible for all of the other CRGs.
In addition, the vSphere Management Cluster holds the NSX-v components, vROps nodes, and a data protection VM. This leaves some space for additional management workloads to be installed on the vSphere Management Cluster.
There are a lot of other cool things in PowerOne I could share but this is already a fairly long post, so we’ll save those for another time. If there is something particular you’d like to know about PowerOne, let me know in the comments or DM me on twitter at @wonder_nerd.
May your servers keep running and your data center always be chilled.
A special thanks to Bob Percy for reviewing this post prior to publication.
