RSD

A Shared IT Infrastructure Tailored to Minimize Your TCO

In today’s dynamic business environment, composable IT infrastructure helps create the business agility that is critical to success. Inventec’s genuine RSD rack solution, “inRSD”, is the rack level composable system based on Intel® RSD 2.1 that activates the capability to “composes on the fly” for datacenters who are ready for hyper-scale growth. It not only provides rack-scale disaggregation, providing elastic configurations of high performance, big data volume or high throughput, but also allows optimized workloads to run on bare-metal, and all with a single management console.

The inRSD rack solution offers isolated, precisely tailored and cost-effective systems which can evolve for changing demands. It is as easy as a-few-mouse-clicks to create ratio-optimized combination of subsystems tuned for a variety of applications. The features are bundled with no extra cost, you can accelerate deployment and minimize your TCO by optimizing resource utilization and freeing available compute, storage, and networking resources. It realizes the concept of shared economy over IT infrastructure.

Fabric of inRSD Rack Solution

The inRSD rack solution is bundled with hardware and software components (see Fig 1 and Table A), including,

The Intel® RSD Pod Manager (PODM),
A 1G management switch with the RMM module, 
A 10G/100G TOR switch with the PSME module, 
2U K888G4 servers with Intel Xeon Gold Processor Scalable family, with BMC based PSME module, 
4U Falconwitch, the PCIe direct pooled IO system, with PSME. 

Individual compute nodes are dynamically configured to users’ specifications. By using Intel® RSD Pod Manager (PODM) to configure Falconwitch, the PCIe fabric switch, large collections of IO and acceleration devices are made available to multiple compute hosts, enabling users to rapidly and reliably compose and update compute, storage, and network resources.

Fig 1. Basic configuration of inRSD rack solution

Table A: Components of inRSD rack solution

Manage Datacenter Effectively by Intel® RSD

The Intel® RSD 2.1 software fabric of inRSD includes,

1. Pod Manager (PODM): 

A pod is a collection of physical racks, drawers, modules, and blades. Pod Manager manages the physical infrastructure in a pod. It uses Redfish APIs to communicate with the PSMEs and RMMs that manage the individual disaggregated hardware resources within the racks. 

2. Rack Management Module (RMM): 

RMM software handles infrastructure functions such as security certificates, IP address assignment, as well as power and thermal control and monitoring within a rack.

3. Pooled System Management Engine (PSME): 

PSME software manages drawers. It's deployed in computer server/Ethernet switch & PCIe switch to issue requests and report drawer hardware status & system inventory information to PODM. 

4. Browser based User Interface: 

The browser based user interface simplifies the managements of an Intel® RSD system. It also provides additional features to Intel® RSD to help end users managing data centers more effectively.

Through Intel® POD manager, resources are managed in Falconwitch, which is the PCIe direct attached pooled IO system, through Redfish interface. Redfish is a RESTful API using standard http/https protocols. As an open standard gaining wide adoption in the industry, it benefits from easy deployments. IT specialists can manage IO devices of inRSD by a management GUI or a datacenter manager with higher level intelligence of resource plans.

Fig 2: Intel® RSD 2.1 Block Diagram of inRSD System

Fig 3 shows steps of how to assign resources to a K888G4 host server within inRSD through Intel® RSD APIs:

(1) Use management GUI to acknowledge the POD manager for the resource assignments, 
(2) The POD manager will pass the information to the PSME in Falconwitch, and, 
(3) Falconwitch will assign the specified devices to the specified K888G4 server.

Fig 3: Use Case of how to assign resources to a K888G4 host server in inRSD through Intel® RSD APIs

For details of inRSD components, please visit below products.