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Super Micro Computer, Inc. (Nasdaq: SMCI), a leader in application-optimized, high performance server solutions, is showcasing the fastest 1U server on the planet, its new, 2-Teraflop SuperServer 6016GT-TF-TM2, this week at ISC ‘09 in Hamburg, Germany (booth 310). This massively parallel processing dual-GPU server is the first 1U multi-GPU (graphics processing unit) system with a fully non-blocking architecture. Optimized for performance and reliability, the 6016GT-TF-TM2 supports dual Nehalem CPUs and features two NVIDIA Tesla M1060 GPUs via two Gen2 PCI-Express x16 connections.

“Supermicro’s new 6016GT-TF supercomputing servers, by far the fastest 1U servers in the world, feature multiple x16 non-blocking native Gen2 PCI-Express connectivity to the GPU, highly reliable thermal optimization, and industry-leading power efficiency, making them the first ever truly optimized GPU servers,” said Charles Liang, CEO and President of Supermicro. “These highly parallel, multi-core, multi-GPU systems represent today’s cutting-edge solutions for a wide range of graphics and computationally intensive applications in fields like medical imaging, oil and gas exploration, quantum chemistry, financial simulation, genomics and astrophysics.”

“The importance of GPU Computing in both research and enterprise is growing rapidly,” said Andy Keane, general manager, GPU Computing, NVIDIA. “Supermicro’s innovative Tesla-based 1U server is tightly integrated to provide the highest possible compute density and a uniform building block for large-scale GPU Computing deployments.”

An article talking about Supermicro’s 1u server thats utilizing on board GPUs for processing peformance, they might be an ideal solution and very effective if your application can be written to exploit the GPU for those HPC/grid solutions, I’m off to read up more. I know at one point I’d been speaking with an architect about a similar solution for the desktop, each pc would get a card installed with a GPU and the grid/application could use these GPUs to do the process, the challenge at the time was the cost of the cards, coupled with the application code compatability as well as a little debate about sign-off/segregation of platforms.

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Greener Computing

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — In the growing universe of green IT hardware, software and services, there are two kinds of technologies, according to a new report from Forrester Research: Green IT 1.0 and green IT 2.0.

The 1.0 technologies are those that green the IT infrastructure of a company — like virtualization and power management — while 2.0 technologies are those that help the company green other aspects of its business, such as videoconferencing or supply chain management software.

An interesting read about the evolution of green computing, the evolution of green computing needs to continue, but as with virtualization, we need to recognize everyone is at a different stage in their IT lifecycle, that remembering the basic steps, getting buy-in a the easy level is the first step to adopting green IT as a strategy. Let us not scare people by saying refresh your equipment, re-write your application, and first start on the basics, power down the pcs at night, look at blank screensavers or enable power management, going forward you can see what steps you can take with your infrastructure, small steps, then we can move on to the next level in the data center, in the application code and the server/network/storage infrastructure.

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When I was speaking to Chris in sunny Canary Wharf, he asked me the unique selling points of the Proliant G6 server line.

At this point I asked him why, “Just testing, besides we’re thinking of buying a few to test and I wondered what you knew about them.”

With this in mind and not liking to stand down from a challenge (it’s totally off the top of my head with no preparation):

1. They use the new Intel processor which is faster and more efficient
2. Common power slot throughout the servers
3. The sea of sensors thing -  that allows the monitoring tools to adjust components to improve efficiency and cooling
4. The on board administrator – I confess that I have yet to see the on board administrator in action
5. I know they’re meant to be a lot more efficient when compared to previous generations of HP Proliant servers

With that I told him that when he got them in to let me know and I might be in the area so he can show me them and explain what he thinks.

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VMBlog

Calling virtualization one of the most transcendent technologies to hit the market in years, Siemens IT Solutions and Services, Inc., today introduced its full-scale Virtualization Services. Based upon three core tenets — Engage, Enable, and Evolve — the package of services is designed to guide customers through what Siemens calls the “Virtualization Evolution”.

“Most of the existing virtualization marketplace has developed from isolated projects, usually driven by short term cost savings and utilization efficiencies,” said William J. McNamara, VP for Strategy at Siemens. “Those benefits are undoubtedly important. But we see virtualization and cloud computing as much more significant developments with broad reaching value. We believe that they have the potential to fundamentally change how IT is delivered, how information is accessed and secured, and how business is enabled.”

The three tenets of the Siemens approach are designed to guide customers through the various stages of the Virtualization Evolution. At the outset, Siemens engages virtualization to simplify technology tools and business processes. By simplifying the IT and process environment, companies can reduce the number of non-value-added tasks and improve business efficiency. This simplified architecture must be housed and enabled in some fashion, and containment is the means. Containment engages all of the IT components into a centrally managed environment. By using the VMware(R) vSphere(TM) 4 platform with Intel(R) Xeon(R) processor-based servers for containment, companies will be able to save power, reduce emissions, and consolidate server space. After simplifying and containing system architecture, the next step is evolving to the optimum state of fully dynamic infrastructure. Emerging client virtualization solutions incorporating Intel(R) vPro(TM) technology provide enhanced security and improved manageability with increased end user flexibility. The entire Virtual Evolution is a journey along the road from initial simplification to the fully dynamic use of IT infrastructure.

Anything the vendors can do to further virtualization platform either through technical innovation, operational accessibility or business empowerment has to be a good thing, I wonder if we wont see more organizations adopting thin client virtualization solutions coupled with further private clouds and virtual infrastructure projects?

That we share the best practice and process information as best as we can, as we discuss not only our successes but also our failures, the more we can understand how to make the technology relevant to our business, and have our business ready for new technical opportunities, for a virtual platform.

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IT pro

IT professionals in the UK are devoting more budget to innovation and green issues than their counterparts in the US, Japan and Germany, according to a new study published today.

The study, conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of Microsoft, indicated that IT professionals in the UK are allocating 41 per cent of their budget to innovation, compared to only 35 per cent in Germany, and 29 per cent in the US.

Overall, 84 per cent of the 1,200 IT professionals questioned said they considered green factors when making decisions about data centres. But ‘green’ considerations were only factored into the final decision by only about half of those organisations (or 44 per cent of the total).

I wonder if this is for a number of reasons, data center space is still expensive in the UK as is the cost of power, as we need to contain costs and continue delivery, we need to look at what operational and technical steps we can take to deploy solutions that meet the business needs but are operationally energy efficient at the same time? I also wonder if this is related to the carbon footprint of the data center? Or simply that more and more organizations are reaching capacity on their data centers and are reluctant to committ to further spend in the data center world if they can avoid it? We’ll have to see, I’m off to read up more.

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Virtual Studio Magazine

The downturn in the economy is affecting the role and spending strategies of IT organizations, according to a Harris Interactive survey commissioned by Microsoft.

The study, announced on Tuesday, polled the opinions of 1,200 IT professionals in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Japan. Roughly 300 survey participants were polled in each country for the study.

Overall, about half (55 percent) of the respondents said that the economy had “changed the role of IT in their organization.”

Respondents expected to spend 37 percent of their IT budgets on innovation vs. maintaining current systems. About half (48 percent) have kept their focus on “driving business efficiency.” Cost cutting turned out to be less of a concern among the respondents, with just 30 percent saying that spending reductions were their main focus.

An interesting article talking about what affect economic conditions were having on their IT budgets and their strategy, it’s great to see what other people are thinking or experiencing within their organizations. We need to be careful that the act of simply cutting budgets can change the mindset to one where regardless of where we are financially/operationally, the default response is “sorry, we haven’t got the staff”, coupled with the fact that cutting headcount can reduce your ability to meet your SLA/project requirements. We should be and can identify where the core costs are and address them rather than cutting costs for the sake of cutting costs – for example could we reduce call out by giving the follow the sun support teams more access, changing the monitoring or granting the operations team specific tasks to do when an alert is raised rather than call out everything? Could we look at which applications are causing the most calls and ask the business lines to address them where possible, is it a lack of training and understanding that is resulting in repeated calls? Do we need to provide further escalation and working with a specific application team to help them respond to and resolve incidents?

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One of my friends works for a service provider, she was telling me the story about a contract that they had been awarded which ended up in a series of discussions about requirements for transformation in order to deliver service improvements.  The issue was that some key servers which performed various functions failed resulting in separate issues and incidents being logged, however due to the proximity of the incidents, the feeling was that the IT kept failing, that service improvements were needed.  The role of my friend was to provide a report and have discussions about the steps to take to resolve the situation. The interview explains it all my questions are in italic.

Explain the issues that you had

1. The primary SMS server failed which resulted in us being able to deploy new desktop applications to users desktops, so for a few days applications had to be manually dropped causing a perceived delay and discussions about inventory and security patching/virus scan software.
2. One of the application servers failed resulting in settlements archive data being unavailable, again this was service disruption in terms of archive data but not live service, which could be obtained through other means in other applications.
3. The primary file server for one business  line got full resulting in users being unable to save their spreadsheets for specific in house written applications.

What was the key factor in each incident and summarize how it was resolved

1. The SMS server failed as a result of age. It was a Compaq Proliant 1600R with two array shelves, running Windows 2000 with SMS, the array controller failed and corrupted the disk configuration, when this happened the server team tried a Windows repair but this proved to be unsuccessful. The server was handed over to the hardware team, who replaced a faulty disk, an array controller, upgraded the firmware and the Windows guys re-installed Windows and SMS, that part only took a few hours, the hardware part took the best part of a day whilst we ran diagnostics and obtained parts.
2. The application server had two things go wrong with it, the operating system blue screened complaining that the registry was corrupt and it was discovered that there was no backup due to the volume of data (700GB). Therefore the team had to very carefully try and get windows to start to the point where they could copy off the data, re-install windows and then copy the data back.
3. The file server had a 130GB volume and it got full. One of the applications that ran on the server failed creating very large logs in a short period of time filling the drive, as users continued to work on the file server and save their work. The fix was to delete the application logs recovering 10GB of disk space.

In summary, legacy infrastructure which lacked investment and best practice configuration, indeed the SMS server was barely in support, the application server was all RAID5 with no thought to backups or what happens if. The file server was simply one of those everything to everyone servers, so cross application, cross purpose, the accounts team stored their accounts on it, whilst development ran their applications on desktops but output their logs to it. Lack of architecture, too much growth and evolution of the business but not the platform.

What steps did you recommend going forward?

For the SMS server, two things, an SMS upgrade to a newer version on a new server, nothing expensive, just something in support, a DL385 with local storage which met our requirements. Windows 2003 and a new version of SMS, all configured in line with standards, the new server proved to be a lot easier to support, more scalable and took up a lot less space.

For the application, we asked for clarification about data requirements, how much of the data actually needed to be online and what could be archived once of to tape (and restored on demand). The feedback was we only needed 6 months data which was 180GB of the 700GB. We therefore performed a full archive of the drive, tested the restore a few times and deleted all but the 6 months of data required. With the data size down, it could now be added to the backups as there was sufficient capacity in the backup infrastructure for incremental and weekly backups.

The file server was more tricky due to the nature of the setup at that time. We had numerous file servers which lacked structure and had grown up from additional requirements, as one server got full, we moved that role/function to another one, creating mixed environments with mixed requirements.

The immediate steps taken were data role consolidation. The creation of three data environments:

• Application – this comprised of in house written applications which ran from or wrote to a shared network drive.
• Infrastructure  – data which was needed for support or shared purposes for example IT documentation, install media, and where users ran Office etc from.
• User data – this is where users shared drive for Outlook and their profile data would be stored.

The three file servers we had were then rebuilt one at a time using backup/restore and migration techniques to move data around, with a separate partition left for the application which ’caused’ the issue so to speak. By doing this we could also illustrate storage requirements and utilization more effectively, and take one part of the IT down without the other, so upgrade ud1 only affected user data, not users ability to access their applications or run Windows.

What was the most significant challenge?

The main step from my standpoint in terms of delivery was to remind everyone that there were three separate component failures.

• SMS server hardware failure resulting in operating system corruption
• Application server Windows failure
• File server space ran out.

This is important as I wanted to highlight that IT wasn’t falling apart, that we were not making mistakes, that there were in some respects to be expected but unfortunate failures within legacy components of the infrastructure. That some immediate small spend investment was needed to prevent this from happening again immediately as well as some data re-organization to meet our changing business requirements, and bring the IT in line with our dependence on it.  SMS when we first used it was an IT tool for testing, as the business requirements and user base evolved, the importance and role of SMS had changed, but the underlying technology had not, just like the management of the data on the application server.

Moving past the IT failure discussion and reminding the stakeholders that the IT was old, out of support and that we had got our return on investment, there was also some hesitiation about spending money, so we had to do some cost due diligence. By replacing that Compaq 1600 and two array shelves and replacing it with a DL385 we reclaim so much power and data center rack space, as well as some performance analysis and reliablity/being in support discussion.

The data migration and consolidation was also a bit tricky simply because of the need to obtain sign off, to ensure everyone was aware of what we were doing, obtaining the downtime window, and managing everyone’s requirements in terms of drive letters, shares and access. But with the new process in place, with the solution working quite well, we have managed to improve the understanding for the senior management team to know what is on what server, to re-brand everything within the IT space so that when we have an issue, it can be identified quickly and know what is being affected.

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There’s been a lot happening in the banking sector in the last few quarters, we’ve seen the number of banks and financial organizations reduce as organizations were merged or bought out during the various announcements and market activities. The first thing we’ll see from these deals is the inventory and integration of systems, coupled with the onboarding and decommissioning, as we try and rationalize not only the infrastructure but the applications we have to operate, evolve and support.

I’ll use banka and bankb to illustrate the case, banka has bought a similar sized bank, bankb and is integrating its systems, the tasks we would take (off the top of my head) are:

• Inventory of bankb’s businesses – what are core to that banks’ activities and identified or not supported through banka’s business, subsidiary/partner/in-house applications  – what duplicate applications do we have, which generates the most revenue, (though often the buyer keeps their applications and keeps the bit it wants from the company its buying)
• Inventory of the applications with their feeds/services/servers/storage and networks and the associated data center space/power requirements with their security requirements – accounts/domains
• Identify data center space savings against requirements, for example if I take bankb’s application servers and move them to my data center, what space do I need, what will that leave with me, what’s the migration timeline? How long do we need to keep the data center for bankb online and the related infrastructure, understanding that we can’t just delete a domain overnight, that some infrastruture will need to be brought over.
• Identify differences in standards and configurations – for example what technical/non-technical issues might create a barrier to success?

Against all this activity, part of the project to integrate will involve:

• What systems are in scope – what network/SAN storage/feeds are needed to migrate on a per server basis
• What systems can be simply moved, anything say less than five years old (it will have lights out) – how that fits with the business units
• What systems can be virtualized or supplied on new hardware with an existing or new build but still possibly operating on a legacy network

What’s the long term strategy?

• Standardize bankb’s platforms to be in line with your standards – possibly migrating on to your build, your network, on your approved platforms/configurations
• Normalize configurations in line with your standards so we have parity across the estate
• Work towards standardizing application configurations and best practice – again for parity across the applications
• Consolidate data centers, fewer data centers, onboard bankb users to your network, your desktop platforms and decommission legacy platforms and configurations

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Interesting comments so far, I wonder if organizations would not benefit from more collaboration, more community using our teams to drive forward innovation and revenue or service delivery. Simple technologies like the wiki, like chat and video conferencing and voice to move towards that follow the sun support model where not only can we support the application on a global basis, but we can do the same with deployments, with development. That we can create centers of excellence, enterprise standards, reduce our costs through standardization and innovation, “London got it working through….”.

We need to continue the discussions around the business, in the technology, in the process, the cross charging and the organizational models, the “how did so and so do it?”, to illustrate how we can earn revenue, gain competitive advantage to transformation and in doing so continue platform innovation, community and opportunity.

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http://ciscolivevirtual.com/

I’m at Cisco live using their virtual technologies, if you want to talk to me, get in touch, my username is bladewatch. It’s very cool to participate virtually, I’ve not done that before.

I’m just getting ready for the key note. I’m looking forward to seeing what Cisco are talking about in the virtualization/networking space, that they have entered the virtual space should further the message, the opportunities and the platform standards.

I wonder if we’ll see anything about the new Cisco blade and rack servers, anything to further the next generation data center, the unified computing model.

I’ll be twittering every now and again, that’ll be posted on the blog and on my personal twitter “martinmacleod”. My username is bladewatch on the virtual interface if you want to chat with me online.

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