The Utility Data Center, or UDC, was a product of Hewlett-Packard. It was arguably the first attempt to sell a private cloud. It featured a graphical interface that allowed the user to construct a server "farm," including servers, OS provisioning, networking, firewalls, load balancers, and storage.
The product began in 2002 as an intellectual property acquisition, from a small services vendor, Terraspring, that had used the product to manage their own data center. Originally termed project slinky, it was largely based out of the Fort Collins campus, and spent the first few releases porting the original solution from a stack based upon Solaris, Cisco switches, and WebSphere, to one based on HP-UX, HP Procurve, and Bluestone's Application server. Then the team spent considerable effort improving reliability, improving security, and creating packaging, procedures and documentation to make the solution salable as a product.
HP was on its second beta release when Sun Microsystems acquired Terraspring entirely, forming the basis for the Sun N1 Grid Engine.
The project was notable, in that it was a private cloud offering, based not on the manipulation of VMs, but the allocation of bare-metal servers contained in racks. The storage was distributed to the servers via SAN Brocade switches and the manipulation of the switches via a Java-based application that commanded the infrastructure out of band, largely with SNMP.
The farms were internally represented in an XML called FML (Farm Markup language), and enacted via a Java-based engine that managed provisioning, complete with safe "clean-room" networks for safe disk wipe and load between customer allocations, and one of the first uses of SAN gateway to act as a sort of "SAN firewall" to limit WWN spoofing, that at the time, was less well understood in SANs than the equivalent LAN spoofing. Internal discussions at the time were the inspiration for what later became the introduction of Brocade's "Secure Fabric OS" – the first SAN switch to introduce the notion of WWN authentication.
Though the product did see three major deployments, the project was canceled on September 27, 2004. Opinions differ on the exact reasons, but there are three likely factors: 1) The $1 million base price for the smallest UDC: a single resource rack, a single XP 128, and a single management rack. 2) The loss of first-mover advantage spending so much time stabilizing the product, and porting to the HP hardware/software ecosystem. 3) When the "dotcom bubble bursting" reached its highest point, a significant portion of the target market segment (ISPs and IDCs) for UDC went bankrupt.
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the Network File System (NFS), and SPARC microprocessors. Sun contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix, RISC processors, thin client computing, and virtualized computing. Notable Sun acquisitions include Cray Business Systems Division, Storagetek, and Innotek GmbH, creators of VirtualBox. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982. At its height, the Sun headquarters were in Santa Clara, California, on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center.
In computer networking, a thin client, sometimes called slim client or lean client, is a simple (low-performance) computer that has been optimized for establishing a remote connection with a server-based computing environment. They are sometimes known as network computers, or in their simplest form as zero clients. The server does most of the work, which can include launching software programs, performing calculations, and storing data. This contrasts with a rich client or a conventional personal computer; the former is also intended for working in a client–server model but has significant local processing power, while the latter aims to perform its function mostly locally.
In telecommunication, provisioning involves the process of preparing and equipping a network to allow it to provide new services to its users. In National Security/Emergency Preparedness telecommunications services, "provisioning" equates to "initiation" and includes altering the state of an existing priority service or capability.
Db2 is a family of data management products, including database servers, developed by IBM. It initially supported the relational model, but was extended to support object–relational features and non-relational structures like JSON and XML. The brand name was originally styled as DB2 until 2017, when it changed to its present form.
A World Wide Name (WWN) or World Wide Identifier (WWID) is a unique identifier used in storage technologies including Fibre Channel, Parallel ATA, Serial ATA, SCSI and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS).
NetApp, Inc. is an American data infrastructure company that provides unified data storage, integrated data services, and cloud operations (CloudOps) solutions to enterprise customers. The company is based in San Jose, California. It has ranked in the Fortune 500 from 2012 to 2021. Founded in 1992 with an initial public offering in 1995, NetApp offers cloud data services for management of applications and data both online and physically.
A blade server is a stripped-down server computer with a modular design optimized to minimize the use of physical space and energy. Blade servers have many components removed to save space, minimize power consumption and other considerations, while still having all the functional components to be considered a computer. Unlike a rack-mount server, a blade server fits inside a blade enclosure, which can hold multiple blade servers, providing services such as power, cooling, networking, various interconnects and management. Together, blades and the blade enclosure form a blade system, which may itself be rack-mounted. Different blade providers have differing principles regarding what to include in the blade itself, and in the blade system as a whole.
Opsware, Inc. was a software company based in Sunnyvale, California, that offered products for server and network device provisioning, configuration, and management targeted toward enterprise customers. Opsware had offices in New York City, Redmond, Washington, Cary, North Carolina, and an engineering office in Cluj, Romania.
Brocade Communications Systems, Inc., was an American technology company specializing in storage networking products, now a subsidiary of Broadcom Inc. The company is known for its Fibre Channel storage networking products and technology. Prior to the acquisition, the company expanded into adjacent markets including a wide range of IP/Ethernet hardware and software products. Offerings included routers and network switches for data center, campus and carrier environments, IP storage network fabrics; Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) markets such as a commercial edition of the OpenDaylight Project controller; and network management software that spans physical and virtual devices.
3PAR Inc. was a manufacturer of systems and software for data storage and information management headquartered in Fremont, California, USA. 3PAR produced computer data storage products, including hardware disk arrays and storage management software. It became a wholly owned subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise after an acquisition in 2010.
The Rackspace Cloud is a set of cloud computing products and services billed on a utility computing basis from the US-based company Rackspace. Offerings include Cloud Storage, virtual private server, load balancers, databases, backup, and monitoring.
Dynamic Infrastructure is an information technology concept related to the design of data centers, whereby the underlying hardware and software can respond dynamically and more efficiently to changing levels of demand. In other words, data center assets such as storage and processing power can be provisioned to meet surges in user's needs. The concept has also been referred to as Infrastructure 2.0 and Next Generation Data Center.
A storage area network (SAN) or storage network is a computer network which provides access to consolidated, block-level data storage. SANs are primarily used to access data storage devices, such as disk arrays and tape libraries from servers so that the devices appear to the operating system as direct-attached storage. A SAN typically is a dedicated network of storage devices not accessible through the local area network (LAN).
Universal Storage Platform (USP) was the brand name for an Hitachi Data Systems line of computer data storage disk arrays circa 2004 to 2010.
Virtual Cluster Switching (VCS) fabric technology is a Layer 2 proprietary Ethernet technology from Brocade Communications Systems, later acquired by Extreme Networks. It is designed to improve network utilization, maximize application availability, increase scalability, and simplify the network architecture in virtualized data centers.
Exalogic is a computer appliance made by Oracle Corporation, commercially available since 2010. It is a cluster of x86-64-servers running Oracle Linux or Solaris preinstalled.
Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 is the brand name of Hitachi Data Systems mid-range storage platforms.
The Dell blade server products are built around their M1000e enclosure that can hold their server blades, an embedded EqualLogic iSCSI storage area network and I/O modules including Ethernet, Fibre Channel and InfiniBand switches.
HP Cloud was a set of cloud computing services available from Hewlett-Packard. It was the combination of the previous HP Converged Cloud business unit and HP Cloud Services, an OpenStack-based public cloud. It was marketed to enterprise organizations to combine public cloud services with internal IT resources to create hybrid clouds, or a mix of private and public cloud environments, from around 2011 to 2016.
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