Continuous innovation and reduced operational costs

Earlier this year Breault wrote an article entitled “Drive Down Operations Costs with Titanium Server” which provided an overview of Titanium Cloud’s powerful Patch Orchestration capability. 

This feature allows an entire Titanium Server cloud – comprising Controller Nodes, Compute Nodes, and optionally Storage Nodes – to be patched with a single operation. System administrators love it.

In December he asked “Ready for More NFV Magic?” and detailed the release of our In-service, NFV Cloud upgrade facility which we included as a standard feature in the last release of Titanium Cloud. 

No one else delivered the ability to perform an *in-service*, hitless upgrade to OpenStack Mitaka – but Wind River did.

These two features, Patch Orchestration and In-Service Upgrade, are critical enablers for service providers deploying and managing live, real-world systems based on OpenStack and following the ETSI NFV architecture. 

Accepting ‘free’ solutions without these capabilities is costly, especially in the long run: hundreds of hours spent manually patching nodes, and untold scheduled application outage time for system upgrades; and would be the “gift that keeps on giving.”

Now, with the latest release of Wind River Titanium Cloud, the Engineering team has gone one step better and created a new feature that combines and builds on these capabilities to reduce upgrade effort and save even more time: In-Service Upgrade Orchestration – another industry 1^st.

As customers continue to deploy larger and larger clouds, the time taken to upgrade those clouds from one release to the next is ever increasing. While the existing in-service upgrade functionality represents a huge differentiated capability, it still requires a number of manual steps and careful procedural organisation. 

The new Upgrade Orchestration feature delivers an intelligent upgrade agent that guides operators though the upgrade process, offering choices and sequencing in an intuitive and helpful manner. Further, as part of this feature, Wind River now support the ability to upgrade multiple nodes in parallel (Computes and Storage) under the control of the upgrade agent. From testing, this parallelism achieves double digit percent time savings over sequential node upgrades. 

This kind of time savings can result in measurable OPEX savings to customers who choose Titanium Cloud.  This parallelism is completely optional and operators define their choices when establishing an ‘Upgrade Strategy’ with the agent.

Of course there are many fine details that are not covered here in this quick blog (e.g. how the Controllers are upgraded and when; why & where human judgment and decision making comes into play; how rollbacks work, etc.).  It is a very sophisticated system that takes many factors into consideration and is based on years of industry upgrade experience – just what you’d expect from Wind River.

If you’d like to learn more about its new In-Service Upgrade Orchestration feature, and all the other innovations that sets Titanium Cloud apart from the competition, feel free to contact them here.

Courtesy of Wind River.