Sun's Mikael Lofstrand defines the principles of a new Sun network architecture called VeriScale and demonstrates how it meets the requirements of elasticity, scalability and five other detailed conditions making it ideal for a modern, self-provisioning datacenter. In a soon to be released Sun BluePrints that Lofstrand is authoring and sharing on his blog, he explains what the VeriScale Architecture is:

"The modern datacenter is evolving into the cloud computing model, where networking, platform, storage, and software infrastructure are provisioned as services that can scale up or down on demand. This model allows the datacenter to be viewed as a collection of managed application services that are deployed automatically, while utilizing the underlying services. Providing sufficient elasticity and scalability for the rapidly evolving needs of the datacenter requires these collections of automatically-managed services to scale efficiently, and with essentially no limits. Sun calls this truly scalable approach a VeriScale architecture."

He also maintains the architecture provides:

• A simple means to deploy components with ease so that the operational IT environment is efficient
• Support for a rapid development cycle to service new requirements and deploy new services
• Independence from a centralized provisioning systems since they inherently have breaking points that limit scalability
• Self-contained components that include a fully-operational, self-sufficient software stack with applications, virtualization technologies, storage, and networking for modularity and ease of deployment
• Services to be self-provisioned, while providing cost-efficient, scalable, and rapid deployments with standard technologies

Its functional components are managed through the OpenSolaris Dynamic Service Containers, which he explains in detail, and these components consists of:

• Point of delivery (POD): Represents a self-contained network service stack that includes both software and infrastructure devices.

• Base static platform: Consists of the interconnected nodes and storage devices that are physically wired and remain statically connected. These infrastructure components are virtualized in higher layers that can then be dynamically reconfigured as needed.

• Sun service delivery network (SDN) architecture: Provides a set of network connectivity, routing, load balancing, and security mechanisms that combine to form a flexible network infrastructure design framework.

• Target nodes: Actual compute hosts that run the applications.

• Services: Including infrastructure services, or applications, and include the networking logic they require.

Loftstrand also explains how Sun's VeriScale architecture provides a better, nontraditional method of automation, and how this automation relates to the service delivery network architecture. VeriScale's use of network optimization through distributing networking logic to the PODs is explored as well.

To illustrate the architecture's advantages, Loftstrand compares Web server deployment and load-balancing in a traditional versus a VeriScale datacenter.

He concludes: "From the primary requirement of the VeriScale architecture - scalability - follows its primary characteristic - POD self sufficiency. Put another way, each service is encapsulated within a payload with the full range of capabilities required. Once delivered to any suitably-capable POD, these payloads - applications, application platforms, or entire virtual machines (VMs) - can configure themselves and provide the useful function they were designed to provide with no support from central resources. These capabilities help enable the creation of elastic service domains that can rapidly scale up or down on demand, limited only by the availability of hardware resources."

More Information

The VeriScale Architecture for a Scalable, Elastic, Self-provisioning Datacenter by Mikael Lofstrand

Veriscale Architecture Wiki page [...read more...]

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