Archive for November, 2006
AMD overtakes Intel in super computing list
Brief: AMD Shakes Up Top500 Supercomputer List - Hardware News by InformationWeek
As with most things amd had the initial lead over intel with it’s relatively low power 64 bit processors, companies (particularly banks) tend to fund their IT over so many years, so for the near future, their grid computing farms based on blades using the amd chips will mean amd have the lead. As the two firms battle over who has the fastest/lowest power utilization per processor, intel may start making the lead. My main area of interest with the near future though remains on rumours over fixed disk (ipod style) drives for blades, that would be fantastic, from a support angle the disk is the main part that has a tendency to fail.
Shutting down those legacy systems
HP needs help in forcing mainframe migration - Computing
One of the challenges we’ve had with the server migration/decommission process has been the legacy infrastructure. The legacy infrastructure often works fine, but uses a lot of power and constitutes a high percentage of our server support/maintenance contract. We’ve just started testing some of the legacy application servers on the itanium platform, it will be interesting to see how they perform, and what kind of space/power benefit we achieve if any. Ultimately the maintenance aspect and supportability will be the main issue, trying to get parts for legacy systems can take longer and make supporting them an ever more emotional process particularly if they’re tier 1 production (business affecting).
Dubai gets grid enabled.
albawaba.com middle east news information::Dubai World Migrates Portal to Oracle
“Capitalising on the technological advances offered by grid computing through Oracle Database 10g, and the integration of applications through Oracle Fusion Middleware will enable us to drive a higher percentage of transactions online to offset the dramatic rise in number of transactions across Dubai World’s numerous business units. Taking transactions online frees Dubai World staff to focus on developing new solutions to service emerging business sectors, contributing to the ongoing economic development of Dubai”
Grid is an excellent way of utilizing your computing power to provide service for your internal or external clients, coupled with Oracle grid can offer real benefits to a range of industries, (not just financial) as the article above highlights.
IBM uses less power than HP
LinuxWorld | IBM blasts energy-efficiency of HP’s blade servers
“”Now we know why HP’s slogan is the ‘lights out’ data center. As it turns out, turning out the lights offsets the inefficiency of their blade products,” said Doug Balog, vice president of IBM’s BladeCenter product line.”
The power issue is significant, and IBM seems quite definitive about it’s power utilization. Ultimately until there’s an impartial test, the debate will continue, and which brand you use will come down to which company wants the deal, which brand is the most competitive/appropriate for you.
HP growth better than IBM?
HP passes IBM as IT leader - Finance - www.crn.com.au
“Hewlett-Packard reported fiscal 2006 revenues of US$91.7 billion, helping the company leapfrog IBM as the world’s largest IT company.”
Very interesting, competition between IBM and HP over blades is increasing, as the market for blades grows.
Legacy boxes bad for the environment
“As far as electricity consumption goes, legacy systems are one of the worst culprits,” commented Martin Rice, CEO at Erudine, a company that makes toolkits to clone and replace their legacy systems. “They consume vast amounts of electricity and electricity production is one of the biggest sources of carbon emissions.”
Rice adds: “Legacy systems often require a large IT department to run them which, in itself, involves additional heating and lighting costs, as well as the environmental impact of running a larger office.”
The article highlights with that with new environmental legislation and the faster processors using less power, it makes the legacy infrastructure more expensive in comparison.
It’s right, an example would be the good old vms kit we’ve got or even the legacy proliant, all those pre g2 servers like the 5000’s or the dl760’s which performance wise use more power to produce less.
The challenge with the vms kit is that it works, it’s industrial strength, it’s proven and very rarely needs downtime barring hardware failures. Trying to encourage someone from something that works, costs in relative terms very little (no capex just support costs), is very challenging, particularly since the support costs are internal IT, not often true support costs. The typical example being £350 a box per year for support, not a £1500 for your dec box, £150 for your proliant 380g4.
Cooling an ever hotter datacenter
“November 16, 2006: According to Gartner, organisations need to look at agility and effective power consumption for the future of storage infrastructure. “
The issue that’s facing many an organisation these days is cooling their data center, and the article highlights where virtualization is going to become an ever increasing area of interest. Virtualizing your infrastructure is an excellent idea, and if done in the right way can dramatically improve the ability to manage and scale your infrastructure. With virtualization though, the key is deployment and ’sales pitch’ to your inhouse development application teams - the business sponsor.
It needs to be done in a way that provides infrastructure with justification for doing it in a real way, p-2v’ing (virtualizing) 12 servers on to a single esx host is only good if you decommission the old hardware and don’t re-use it.
Most importantly though is user experience which forms chargeback, performance and perception. The chargeback needs to be done in such a way to reduce the ‘average cost’, if it’s the same price as a rackmount, I’d take a rackmount every day, regardless of what IT say. Performance and perception are interlinked, the right kind of application server can be migrated, a processor intensive batch server with several cpus and gigabytes of memory might not be the best candidate.
But back to the article, virtulization an increasingly important element of your infrastructure.
Managing your datacenter
Aperture Looks to Ease Data Center Management
“The Stamford, Conn., company’s new Vista 500 resource management software is designed to give users insight and control over a variety of aspects in their data centers, from power and cooling to space and hardware.”
Apperture’s new software has been improved to enable your data center teams to better manage their data center infrastructure, and importantly adds additional functionality to manage your data center covering the different aspects of datacenter and infrastructure management.
Looks like what I’ve been looking for and look forward to seeing a demonstration of their new product.
Understanding the Different Acceleration Technologies
Understanding the Different Acceleration Technologies
A very interesting article noting the different ways of processing data, how for example graphics processors are becoming a point of interest for grid. For your desktop grid for example, adding a power graphics card which can do some of the number crunching increases the desktop processing bandwidth, something we’ve been looking at here at work.
Angstrom Unveils Liquid Cooled Rack Blades
Angstrom Unveils Liquid Cooled Rack Blades
This looks great, data center power and cooling are one of the primary costs of hosting/managing blade and rackmount servers.
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