Have you ever heard the terms “composability” or “composable infrastructure”? They may be somewhat new to many of our readers, but in the world of large-scale enterprise data centers and private cloud computing, composability is quite a hot topic, and will certainly continue to gain interest and visibility as time passes.
So, what exactly is composability? In today’s Tech Blog, we are going to review the basic concepts and point you in the direction of some additional reading for more detail.
To begin, in an enterprise data center or private cloud server site, physical hardware has been traditionally assigned to tasks or workloads in a relatively inefficient manner, where some resources go underutilized, driving up the cost of operations. To combat this, one key aspect behind composability is that it eliminates this inefficient resource usage – by assigning available resources to a task or workload at just the right time, in just the right amount. This also ensures that the right resources can be assigned to meet the performance requirements of a specific computing task.
This happens by grouping, or “composing”, a group of disparate resources in the data center, choosing from compute, storage, network and power resources throughout the data center, even when they are located in different physical hardware units. Instead, these resources are grouped into “pods” and “nodes” of available resources that can be called into action at a moment’s notice.
Leading industry publication Network World offers this definition of composable infrastructure:
“Composable infrastructure treats compute, storage, and network devices as pools of resources that can be provisioned as needed, depending on what different workloads require for optimum performance. It’s an emerging category of infrastructure that’s aimed at optimizing IT resources and improving business agility…The approach is like a public cloud in that resource capacity is requested and provisioned from shared capacity – except composable infrastructure sits on-premises in an enterprise data center.”
Composable infrastructure support is a key component of many MegaRAC remote and BMC management solutions; none more so than MegaRAC Composer™ our Redfish™/Intel® Rack Scale Compliant pod management software that enables on-the-fly aggregation and disaggregation of compute, storage and power resources within the data center.
For more reading on composability and composable infrastructure, we recommend the following articles:
- ZDNet: https://www.zdnet.com/article/composable-infrastructure/
- Network World: https://www.networkworld.com/article/3266106/data-center/what-is-composable-infrastructure.html
- Next Platform: https://www-nextplatform-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.nextplatform.com/2018/08/21/dell-moves-one-step-closer-to-composable-with-poweredge-mx/amp/
Thanks for reading today’s Tech Blog! Care to share your thoughts or experiences with composability? Please feel free to do so in the Comments section below, and be sure to let us know what topics you might like to see in the future.