In a typical data center, it’s common to provision more servers and storage devices than are needed in order to handle forecasted peak workloads as well as high availability and disaster recovery needs. This results in vast underutilization of expensive resources. In fact, server utilization rates are often less than 25%, which is why server virtualization has caught on like wildfire in the past few years.

How would you like to go beyond virtualizing a single server and its applications? What if you could control all the servers in your data center – physical or virtual – and repurpose them on the fly based on specific business or technical triggers? If this piques your interest, then get to know Scalent Systems and its Virtual Operating Environment (V/OE).

Scalent V/OE is a software solution that allows enterprise data centers to dynamically change the workloads various servers are running as well as which network and storage topologies those servers can access without needing to make physical machine, cable, LAN or SAN changes.

But Scalent V/OE isn’t an operating system like VMware. Rather, V/OE is a control system that provides real-time management and automation across physical and virtual servers. The Scalent controller (server) software runs on one machine, off to the side of your data center. Scalent V/OE reaches out to each physical or virtual machine to "tap" them via lights-out management protocols and cause them to power on / off. Then as a machine boots, Scalent – in real time – sets up the right network and storage addressing.

For example, if the machine is about to become an e-mail server, Scalent attaches it to the e-mail network and storage. If the machine is destined (at this particular moment) to be a VMware ESX server, Scalent attaches it to the correct ESX cluster network and storage for that cluster. Scalent then causes the machine to network-boot the appropriate bare-metal software image that the machine can now find on the central storage to which it has just been attached. Notably, that bare-metal software image can be Windows (and an Exchange server, or SQL server, or whatever), or Linux (and Apache, SAP, Oracle or whatever), or Xen or VMware ESX (and its cargo of virtual machines).

Of particular interest to data center operators are both the image portability and the fact that Scalent stays out of the data path. With image portability, Scalent can boot the server image into a physical machine or a virtual machine, with no "processing,” in real-time. Your Microsoft Exchange e-mail server can boot in a VMware virtual machine this boot, and the next boot, if you want, it could be on a bare-metal Dell blade, and the next on an HP rack-mount server. It's all transparent.

Linda Musthaler is a principal analyst with Essential Solutions Corporation.