IT is a complex system of hardware and software working together to run our modern industries and economies. No vendor can know or test every combination of IT solutions. For this reason, some choose to be cautious and declare perfectly valid solutions unsupported. These practices are inhibitors to innovators and IT departments that want to take advantage of groundbreaking technologies.
If it weren’t for early adopters ignoring the ambiguous rules of supported or unsupported, new technologies would never get off the ground. It often only takes common sense to overcome the misinformation surrounding application support.
Applications Run on Operating Systems
The operating system lies between the computing hardware and the business applications that run our industries.
Most of these applications run on Windows or Linux operating systems. Some of these applications work directly with specific pieces of hardware, but the majority work only with the logical abstraction of the hardware from the operating system. In other words, the applications don’t care what kind of processor, memory, or storage is in the server's physical hardware, only that there is sufficient CPU, RAM, network access, and storage resources available.
Operating systems have so successfully made applications indifferent to hardware specifics, that the addition of a hypervisor between the OS and hardware should not change anything about how the application runs. If it is running on a supported OS and has sufficient resources, the particular hypervisor has no impact on the operation of the application.
Application abstraction from physical hardware is practically the basis for the popularity of server virtualization.
How Multi-Vendor Support Should Work
Multi-vendor support can be a messy business, especially when vendors are looking out for number one rather than their customers. As IT professionals, we’ve all run into situations where a problem of unknown origin goes through a troubleshooting cycle of finger-pointing between various vendors. The application vendor blames the operating system vendor, the operating system vendor blames the hypervisor vendor, the hypervisor vendor blames the storage vendor, and the storage vendor blames the application vendor, resulting in a vicious cycle of downtime and despair. No one in these situations wants to take responsibility for getting to the root cause of the problem, much less fixing it.
This causes a problem because - even with hyperconverged infrastructure solutions like Scale Computing Platform, which eliminate most multi-vendor issues from the infrastructure - IT will always be a mix of a multi-vendor environment with application vendors. Vendors who either don’t have the right resources or the right approach to working with other vendors on support are often a bigger problem than trying to fix the actual technical problem.
Multi-vendor support should work differently. Vendors need to work together to cooperatively find the root cause, and then when the root cause is known, the vendor solution(s) causing the problem should take responsibility for a fix.
While the customer is involved, they do not need to be a switchboard operator connecting the communications between the various vendors. Vendors should take the initiative to reach out to each other to resolve the issue, which is why organizations like TSANet exist. TSANet is a multi-vendor support community for vendors to work together in a neutral community environment.
Scale Computing is a member of TSANet because it speeds the support process and leads to quicker resolutions for multi-vendor issues. Each vendor adequately supporting their own product in a multi-vendor IT environment is what alleviates the burden of the unknown from support. Will the application run on an untested platform? It should, and if it doesn’t, vendors can work together to quickly find out why not and offer a resolution. Vendors should take the initiative to reach out to each other to resolve the issue.
Scale Computing Partner Ecosystem
We place trust in the ability of IT vendors to come together to ensure customer-centric support for applications, operating systems, virtualization, and hardware.
In real-world situations, Scale Computing has rarely heard of application vendors refusing to support and remedy issues with their applications, regardless of where they run. In reality, most application vendors don’t know or bother to ask on what platform it is running, as long as it runs on their supported OS.
Scale Computing Platform is fully integrated and supported across a wide range of software and hardware. We verify and support a broad range of operating systems and versions running as virtual machines on Scale Computing HyperCore. If an application is designed to run on Windows or Linux and x86/x64 platforms, it is almost always supported on SC//HyperCore. In addition, we have specific partnerships with a select number of hardware and software technology providers.
Before asking whether an application will be supported on SC//HyperCore, ask yourself these questions first:
- Is the application tied to any specific server hardware components?
- Is the application licensing connected to any specific hardware components?
- Is the application specifically designed to interact with the virtualization hypervisor?
If the answer to these questions is no, which is true for most applications, then the only remaining question should be:
- Is the application supported on Windows or Linux?
If the answer to this question is yes, then it will run on SC//HyperCore.
Learn whether your applications are supported on SC//Platform by visiting this page or for further information on how Scale Computing Platform supports your third-party applications download the white paper.