The value of focus

One member at the company went through a lengthy and frustrating process to install a commercial, enterprise class OpenStack distribution. He had to wade through pages and pages of detailed installation instructions, navigating confusing options and a myriad of configuration choices.

This individual has considerable professional experience with OpenStack – it takes a lot to slow him down. So when seeing how complicated it can be to set-up OpenStack systems from scratch, it’s really no surprise that the uptake of the technology in the service provider market has been slower than originally expected. If OpenStack is complex for the experts, where’s the hope for the rest of us?

It’s a pleasure for the comapny tosay, it has solved a big piece of that challenge.

Installation and commissioning is one area where the virtualisation solution, Wind River Titanium Server, truly stands out.

Here is the explanation why:

Titanium Server is unique in that the whole solution is installed from a single binary image. This single image contains the full OpenStack distribution, the underlying operating system, a high performance vSwitch, and the Virtualisation Infrastructure Manager (a.k.a. the VIM, responsible in large part for much of the solution’s high reliability architecture). 

Competing virtualisation solutions come in pieces, often sold separately, for example, first you purchase then install an operating system, then you purchase and install an OpenStack distribution. If you want better performance, you further add a commercial vSwitch. After all that, then you try to make the pieces work together, hopefully picking the right options and configurations to meet your performance and reliability expectations. In the end, you might have a valid install combination that nobody has ever tried before.

See what a difference it makes when you choose an Engineered vs. an ad hoc/‘roll your own’ strategy?

Titanium Server has been pre-integrated for customers. All the individual components were selected and built in advance, then integrated together. Each of the layers were carefully Engineered for specific capacity and reliability targets. The product is delivered and installed from a single binary image – no other pieces need to be purchased or added on. 

That’s a very different process from what the others use. That’s the value of a focused virtualisation solution that has been purpose build for critical infrastructure.

Courtesy of Wind River.