BladeCenter solutions

s the change from the rest of the organizations. This modular design approach also allows worldwide engineering teams to focus on core components in their area of expertise. It is common to have engineering teams certifying BladeCenter components in different countries, thus enabling the FSI firm to leverage key skills in the company to further maximize time to market of new business applications while also reducing IT costs. The BladeCenter enviroment, with its space planning, power, and cooling, is another example of leveraging IT skills in a worldwide perspective. For security reasons after 9–11, FSI firms have geographically dispersed their operational data centers. The ability to have a worldwide standard on blade hardware enables facilities engineering teams to standardize data center designs and accommodate different regulatory agency power requirements. This is another way in which the modularity of the BladeCenter system and its ability to uniquely customize installations reduces organizational support costs. Although the majority of early installations in the financial services sector were Linux environments, this critical mass of IBM blades in worldwide data centers is now promoting installations of Windows-based environments. Since the BladeCenter system is already certified and implemented in these infrastructures, all of the necessary work associated with the certification process for the ecosystem, environment, and management does not have to be repeated in order to have the Windows operating environment certified; and because it is already certified and implemented in FSI infrastructures, the necessary work associated with the interconnect infrastructure, environmental areas such as power and cooling, and management does not have to be repeated. Hosted-client solutions IBM hosted-client solutions provide the infrastructure required for hosting desktop sessions on remote server hardware. In a hosted-client environment, the desktop OS and applications execute on servers in a remote data center. By using the BladeCenter architecture for hosted clients, the data center infrastructure is simple to deploy [5], administer [3, 5, 6], and troubleshoot [3] at a significantly lower cost of ownership [2, 4] and higher density [5] than other form-factor servers. End-user storage, securely hosted in the data center, is remote from the user desktop. BladeCenter offers a wide range of local storage options and remote storage connectivity options [7]. End-users interact with a client device that can be supplied with a variety of software and hardware component options. The hosted-client work described in this paper is a result of the combined efforts of IBM eServer development teams, Tivoli* software developers, and researchers at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, New York. The subject hosted-client solutions refer specifically to hosting Windows and Linux OS and application sessions and providing a network-based connection from the client to those sessions. The hosted-client architecture allows existing Windows and Linux applications to be hosted. The hosted client supports the transition from existing environments with thousands of desktop personal computers (PCs) to a centrally managed desktop infrastructure that is more secure, manageable, and highly available. Hosted-client architecture allows endusers to restructure around thin clients and data-centerhosted servers while preserving the current application investment. The BladeCenter platform is ideal for hosting the scale-out compute infrastructure [4], storage [7], and networking [6] required to host the desktop OS. Requirements in desktop computing Key customer requirements in desktop computing are lower total cost of ownership, improved security, higher availability, and better manageability, as shown in Table 4. Hosted-client solution benefits The hosted-client environment provides server-class reliability to desktop users and allows the desktop compute and storage infrastructure to be distributed across geographically dispersed sites. The hosted-client solution promotes a new paradigm for desktop computing, with a number of advantages: Minimizes desktop clutter. Minimizes desktop noise, power, and HVAC (heating, ventilation, air conditioning) requirements. Improves data security; eliminates data stored on the desktop and moves it to the data center. Improves disaster recovery; end-user state and data moved from the desktop to high-availability clustered data center servers. Reduces network latency between desktop applications and server applications. Significantly reduces the cost of managing desktop environments. Provides the ability to customize, test, and refine a solution-delivery infrastructure in a test environment and captures the configuration and deployment process to minimize the cost in deployment to a production environment. Offers repeatable, consistent, and integrated deployment/undeployment of resources from infrastructure. L. S. FORE ET AL. IBM J. RES. & DEV. VOL. 49 NO. 6 NOVEMBER 2005 866 Provides on demand capability to share resources across various application environments to minimize total cost of ownership. Provides an integrated, validated, and tested environment which includes components that address major aspects of the hosted-client solution life cycle. Hosted-client architecture As depicted in Figure 1, the hosted-client architecture is composed of a three-tiered infrastructure. The tiers include the client tier (end-user interaction), the compute engine tier (hosts the desktop OS and applications), and the state management tier (manages all state associated with an end-user’s desktop experience). Hosted-client solutions enable access to desktop services from a wide range of client devices, including thin clients with embedded OSs, tablet and hand-held devices, and traditional repurposed fat clients running lockeddown OSs. A thin client may take the form of a terminal, such as a Neoware** [16] product, or it may be a reprovisioned desktop with a locked-down OS software load. A fat client is a PC desktop running a local OS with local applications that connects into remote-hosted sessions, such as a Citrix-hosted application. The client device provides KVM for the remote session. Depending on the environment, the client device may also provide connections to local printers, I/O devices (USB memory key, floppy disk, CD/DVD-ROM), and audio. The hosted-client compute engine can be constructed in multiple ways. The three primary solution approaches are the physical 1:1, terminal sessions, and virtualized. In the physical 1:1 solution, each end-user is running a separate OS instance on a dedicated PC blade. In the terminal session solution, each user is connected to a terminal session, and the applications execute within this session. Multiple concurrent sessions are supported on a single OS instance. In the virtualized solution, each end-user is running a separate OS instance. The enduser’s desktop OS is running in a virtual machine. A hypervisor, such as VMware ESX Server** or Microsoft Virtual Server, allows a single physical server to host multiple ‘‘guest’’ operating systems in individual virtual machines. All three approaches leverage a remote desktop network protocol. The three most common protocols in use today are Microsoft Remote Deployment Protocol [17], Citrix ICA** [18], and XDM (Linux/UNIX X Windows) [19]. The goal of hosted-client solutions is to provide an integrated, tested reference architecture that simplifies deployment, management, and maintenance of the hosting infrastructure while retaining the capability to customize the offering to specific customer needs through related service offerings. This solution is expected to provide automated deployment and provisioning of servers, OSs, applications, and management tools. The choice of the BladeCenter system as the hosting infrastructure provides the scale-out features, network deployment, configuration tools, and management capabilities required. The management software includes the following: IBM Director for BladeCenter hardware management