Client: Terraspring
Project: Virtualization Control Center
Launched: November 2001
The dawn of our age of communication was heralded by the telephone. Everyone's seen the old movies where someone cranks the phone, and talks to the operator, who in turn connects a couple wires to complete the connection for the conversation. It was a crude method, but it worked.
The same is true today in a data center. If someone needs a new compute service, a network administrator would gather together all the necessary gear, sketch out the best way to connect it, wire it together, install operating systems and patches, and then load up any specific applications. On average, this process would take 6 to 8 weeks from start to finish. It's crude, but it works.
Enter Terraspring and data center virtualization. Just as the automatic telephone switch modernized the use of the telephone, Terraspring's mission was to modernize data center operations. By selectively wiring all components through an advanced switching system, devices could be dynamically linked in almost any imaginable way, and what once took 2 months to deploy, now took 2 hours.
To allow users to manage this rapid redeployment system, Terraspring developed the Virtualization Control Center, which was a web-based enterprise application. Most network administrators used tools ranging from a napkin to Microsoft Visio to design their service operations, but in all these cases, they'd have to take a drawn plan and implement it by hand. The goal of the Virtualization Control Center was to provide a network editor like Visio, but once the design was completed, the application would communicate the design to the provisioning server which would allocate and deploy the matching hardware automatically.
One of the greatest challenges of this project was to create an interactive feel like one would see in Visio, but to implement it using web browser technology. I worked extensively with our engineering team to develop what in my opinion is the most advanced DHTML application I've ever seen.
