Blade Watch

Platform

U.S. Defense and Intelligence Communities to Benefit from Platform’s Private Cloud Management Software

TORONTO, Canada, Jan. 26, 2010 — Platform Computing, the leader in cluster, grid and cloud management software, today announced a strategic partnership with Instrumental Inc., a leading provider of architecture, design and integration services for high performance computing (HPC) and data storage in the government and commercial sectors. The partnership enhances Platform’s global service capabilities and gives users an end-to-end, full service solution that maximizes the value of Platform’s private cloud management and HPC cloud-enabling software solutions, Platform ISF and Platform ISF Adaptive Cluster.

As U.S. government agencies and departments evaluate the potential cost savings, service level improvements and greater resource utilization offered by various cloud computing models, there is a recognized need for a technology-agnostic platform that can support and integrate legacy, heterogeneous HPC environments while also managing a wide-range of hardware, operating systems and virtual machines. In order to maximize prior technology investments, government agencies must invest in technologies that prevent vendor lock-in and that work with multiple types of operating systems.

“Platform’s ISF and ISF Adaptive Cluster can provide government agencies the scalability and performance needed to manage their data center resources while evolving to cloud-based infrastructure services and also adhering to federal requirements for open standards, compliance and budgetary requirements,” said Tripp Purvis, Vice President, Business Development, Platform Computing. “Given our longstanding partnership, Platform is in close alignment with Instrumental to ensure that our mutual HPC customers are able to efficiently manage compute- and data-intensive workloads in the cloud.”

It’s interesting to see the different organizations and bodies utilizing a range of technologies including HPC solutions to deliver their IT services, whether it’s grid computing, application virtualization or as a vehicle to achieve more with less, anything vendors and service providers can do to help end user business benefit has to be a good thing. Private clouds can be a great way of changing the way we provide core cross business services such as email, storage or compute services, the concept of buying utility on demand, moving away from a server per application or infrastructure for a specific business unit to a more commoditized way of doing business where I pay for what I need in the most economic location on the most efficient infrastructure. This does not mean moving away from where we are, nor does it mean changing everything, it can be simply looking at consolidation of roles, looking at our processes, our business requirements and establishing how we can achieve the same results with a different platform, a cloud solution for email centralized in an efficient data center rather than duplicated regional email hubs for example.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/186780/via_builds_lowpower_server_based_on_laptop_chips.html

Via Technologies on Tuesday announced a compact home server that will be powered by low-power processors, which are traditionally designed to run in laptops and netbooks.

The company’s Mserv S2100 device will run on the Nano processor in a desktop-size box that is 10.2 inches (0.25 meters) long and 4.7 inches high, the company said. The processor will operate at speeds between 1.3GHz and 1.6GHz.

This kind of device might easily meet the needs of many different businesses, we need to remember that not everyone is in the same place in terms of their technical or business requirements, that using appropriate technology is the way forward. I’m off to read up more, I wonder if this would not be an ideal file and print or even SharePoint/wiki server? It reminds me of the concept of a Mac Mini as a grid engine, very cool.

http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/sci-tech/grid-computing-network-extends-frontiers-of-research_100303092.html

London, Jan 13 (IANS) The power of grid computing, explored by a European consortium, is helping extend research in a multitude of disciplines, ranging from genetic origins of heart disease to reconstruction of ancient musical instruments to managing fisheries, says a new report.
A grid is a network of high-powered computing and storage resources available to researchers wishing to carry out advanced number-crunching activities.

I was reading an interesting article talking about virtualization of storage being the next big thing, and for many it will be. I wonder though if we should not be looking more towards the follow the moon vehicle for IT infrastructure, the concept of data center virtualization.

We need to be thinking of virtualization as an evolving path, in which we continue to further abstract the end user from the infrastructure and the application, where we move towards service down a wire or online rather than locking the user to a specific device with a client application, with all the anciliary components to deliver that service.  At the same time from an IT cost and business empowerment angle virtualization of the data center allows us to transform not only how we organize and support the IT services that the business needs, it allows us to look at how we host and power these services towards a follow the moon approach.

In IT support a few years ago, colleagues and CIOs were talking about the concept of follow the sun. This was quite simple, they wanted to unify the support, in a given enterprise if a London server went down which Tokyo needed to use, traditionally the regional politics would get in the way of fixing the problem, the operations team in Tokyo would have to call London, ask a London engineer to log on and see what the issue is, ok so say a 30 minute delay in most cases not world ending, but if the engineer couldn’t access that system, if the engineer had to visit the site, we could be talking Tokyo being unable to access that application for the best part of the day. So we adopted or looked at follow the sun support models, where APP Support looked after and had access to all their systems gloablly, that as Tokyo monitored their batch, if a London server went on its holidays, they could log on, take a look, try and fix it, and if they couldn’t then they could call London IT and ask for a server guy. It requires a degree of trust, of new thinking and organization, why could Tokyo server guy not look at the server, that was deemed as a step too far for some.

Anyway, follow the sun brought us a more fluidic support model reducing response times and empowered overnight changes and upgrades to the systems that previously might have been more challenging to action. If London had to reboot a network switch at 3am, that was fine, globally there was cover from APP Support who were on site who could log on and check the batch, the web site or the application was still working ok.

We introduced the world to server virtualization where instead of having a server per application, we could buy a server with a bit more memory, a bit more storage and have that ‘cut up’ and shared amongst the business units. It worked on the whole very well, but IT was still a bit confused and still is in many ways about how we charge for it and how we ‘make a profit’ for their cost center, you see we can only absorb so much before someone has to pay for the underlying infrastructure the 400TB of storage, the 32GB of RAM in each server, and compare that with the 1u special that might be good enough for a given application, keeping the per unit virtual machine cost competitive could be a challenge if we didn’t look at the way we billed for capacity, for delivering IT service.

At the same time we had application virtualization which meant instead of having a server per application, we could so easily have a shared pool of resources which I could ask my application to use, that my application only worked 9-5 meant that I could buy 9-5 compute resources from that shared pool. However this meant less perceived control to the application team, IT couldn’t understand again that in this concept it’s not about making a profit on the grid infrastructure, covering your costs, its about onboarding applications in order to spread the cost, spread the business benefits, and reduce your server count which will save you money anyway. 

We had the networks team talking about network virtualization, putting many lans down the one connection which was fantastic, coupled with people asking about storage virtualization, “why do I care where my files are stored” and they were right. But the challenges came when application teams and business sponsors didn’t quite understand what their actual requirements were in terms of performance and availability, “the cheapest they might say”, or “the fastest”, but if no one is going through in the background and archiving the data, asking do you really need to keep this all online, and if the backups work but take forever to restore, then we simply just keep eating more and more storage, regardless of how that storage is provided.

Moving back then to follow the moon, what is it that I feel we are trying to achieve?

Data center virtualization delivered through abstraction of the infrastructure and application delivery process. (in the IT world)

Having my IT services, my infrastructure and my application operate wherever the power, the carbon footprint or the support costs are cheapest to have the lowest operational costs at any point in time. (in the business world)

A statement that sounds more complex than it is, but let us take Martinsbank as an example, it has offices in Tokyo, New York, London and Paris. London is the hub, it connects all the regions. At the moment if London goes down the world ends, so it needs high availbility, it needs expensive data centers with all the bells and whistles, as this is where some of the core applications and services are hosted, additionally we cannot quite shut elements of London down and do ‘maintenance’ on the data center, it might take 6 months to get approval to power down the bcp London data center. Therefore any upgrade work is time consuming, prohibitively disruptive and ‘expensive to end users’, so it gets put off for longer which simply perpetuates the workload until it just has to get done, at which point end users are outraged at the disruption.

Think about this though. If I had my data center virtualized, that is I had my server, my network and my storage virtualized, (independent of how the application is set up), could I not quite easily say to Tokyo, “be London for the day”, here are the London virtual machines, their storage, their network infrastructure configurations, be London, let me failover London to Tokyo.  Think of what that could do for the data center for IT. With this scenario, with a data center if you like as a set of config files, a few TB of storage and virtual machine configurations, I could start a number of concepts:

• Business continuity between regions – why have London bcp site if New York can run it all be it a little bit slower, but run it nonetheless
• Data centers hosted by power or carbon cost – why not have my data center London, run in Mumbai, in China or Iceland, wherever I can purchase power, cooling and people at the lowest operational cost. But you see we can take this to the next level, where we have my London office run on servers, on infrastructure overnight in the region where the power is cheaper but have everything supported by my staff in London who are working.
• Upgrades become possible, want to deploy 10GB Ethernet, fine we can failover the data center workloads to a range of offices or data centers, whilst we do what we have always wanted to do, whether it’s upgrade the cooling, re-do the cabling which has become a mess, or simply refresh to the latest most efficient server hardware without the twelve month projects, the debates, the costs and the disruption.
• We can move towards an exciting concept where the IT for the business is in effect a few files, granted very large ones, but files nonetheless which move around our own internal cloud delivering the services we need, at a price and availability that we can afford, down to the possibility at a granular level.

A right size application hosting scenario, development we want that wickedly fast and always on (our developers are expensive), fine we host that on our Tier3 data centers, Production also needs to be stable and available, performance is also important, fine we put that on our tier1 data center, tier3 production is important but if it goes down there are redundant systems or other ways around it, so can we put that on the cheaper data centers, and our UAT applications put in a box somewhere we only need them when we have to do application validation for a project go-live.

Taken a little further then, we could extend the concept of follow the moon, I’ll have my data center move around the globe following power costs and combine it with follow the sun, so I have no need for oncall, where I can power down sites, data centers that aren’t needed. I have one data center, one application pool, which moves around the globe rather than a data center per region on 24/7 with 99.995% availability, when I can have 8 hour slots in which the US is online, EMEA is online, and the rest of the globe is online. I just need operations to co-ordinate the data center hand over process which might not necessarily be that difficult.  We can though evolve follow the moon, with follow the sun, to cloud, to a position where instead of each region having their own set of services and applications, we have credit which has regional components for each region, but is one application pool providing credit for that organization, with one set of infrastructure, a credit cloud, if you want to subscribe, not a problem it’s pay on use. The same with the email, with dns, with accounts and HR. Oh there will be data privacy and ownership issues to discuss and deal with, but they can be in the right format, with that we can change the nature of the organization from one of regions deviating from the master plan, to one in which the organization adjusts itself to that region – no more of the “can I have a DL380 in Tokyo, please we buy IBM”, resolve those regional and historical issues which always got explained by that magical statement, that is not how we do things. As we standardize and customize on a per region basis, we can further consolidate applications, reduce costs and be more dynamic in the enterprise. With this model, Tokyo needing more capacity for their credit system as the markets go wild, is not an issue, we can turn on London and have them share resources. We can right size:

• Regional requirements – how much of Tokyo’s capacity is duplicate and how much is actually used – how much could we consolidate and have London or New York use that capacity?
• Application requirements – right sizing the infrastructure to the application, stop having everything on all day every day on the fastest systems hosted in the most expensive data centers, could the London phonebook system not shut down when London systems are no longer in use?
• Infrastructure – examine what we have an how we can do things better, have the infrastructure aligned with the business need and able to cater to its requirements on the many operational levels that we have, UAT, development/test, production and production that just can’t go down.

Interestingly, I wonder how much of these possibilities will be constrained by the business, the application teams and the IT? Are people ready for change, and are we ready to evolve the business to a point in which it is working on the basis of revenue combined with the greater good, than the regional cost center or center of excellence concept – oh New York does email/dns/active directory, afterall we’re a US company, why can’t the dns, email, and active directory be a shared business service that works wherever it is cheapest and most efficient operationally? Does the infrastructure need to be in New York, or can my New York teams run the service wherever the services move around the globe following the sun.

Whether this goes ahead is one thing, but with follow the moon concepts, with the evolution of application and infrastructure virtualization, we can consolidate our cost base, transform our delivery, and interestingly start the move to taking the enterprise to enterprise 2.0.

So I put together a few bullet points and thoughts about 2010, in terms of what I feel end users will be thinking about, what technologies we might see being in demand and what vendors to keep an eye on. I have no doubt forgotten some vendors/technologies, and for that I apologize.

In the meantime, may I wish you and your family a very Merry Christmas and a prosperous and joyful New Year for 2010, wherever you are.

With that, back to the 2010 type content stuff:

Top issues/predictions for 2010

• More companies looking seriously at cloud – particularly for hosting particular components or services – a virtualization or Exchange cloud
• Further interest in the convergence of storage and Ethernet down the one connection – it reduces your support and deployment times
• Debates about carbon reporting, data center efficiency and data center management or design
• Investigations or discussions about follow the sun or follow the moon ways of doing business and IT
• Ongoing data center consolidation and virtualization
• Change in enterprise computing, I wonder if there will be a flatter de-centralized way of doing business combined with more white labelling?
• Business competition, complexity and agility to increase as we bring on new markets and new business units – do we use the same branding, the same infrastructure?
• Integration of IT services to business lines, or business lines to IT in the enterprise?

Top 2010 technologies

• Blade servers
• Virtualization -server, desktop and network
• Converged network and storage adaptors
• SAN storages
• Solid state disks
• Application virtualization
• Converged systems management possibly to the application layer – achieving more with less

Top vendors to monitor for 2010

• Cisco – Unified Computing System and where that leads us
• Dell – their servers continue to get better
• HP – in terms of systems management/business agility
• DataSynapse – what they can do to aid virtualization and grid computing
• Platform – scaling up the possibilities of grid computing
• Iceotope – how they will help wiith data center capacity and systems cooling
• Teradici – can we extend the possibilities of their technology to further desktop virtualization – can I have a pc down a wire from the cheapest geographical location on my network – London pcs from India, from China?
• VMware – wonder how they will continue to protect market share and innovation of the virtual platform
• Citrix and Microsoft in terms of their products in the virtualization space.

Which countries am I watching with interest for developments/demand? Easy – East is where the innovation, the money and the excitement is:

Russia, India and China – components of what economists call the BRIC countries.

http://blog.averesystems.com/2009/12/14/record-setting-latency-and-why-it-matters/

Low latency is near and dear to our hearts at Avere Systems. In my last blog post, I talked about our record-breaking SPECsfs2008 performance results in general. In this post, I’m only going to talk about latency. Our results were not only one of the highest throughput results, but at 1.38 ms of overall response time (ORT) it represents one of the lowest latency results ever posted for SPECsfs2008.

Check out this post about latency, something the guys were always talking about whenever we got talking about application performance and grid technology, an interesting read.

Platform Computing

LONDON, UK, Dec. 7, 2009 ― Platform Computing, the leader in cluster, grid and cloud management software, today announced that Sporting Index, world leaders in sports spread betting, has selected Platform Symphony for high-performance grid computing. The company is using Platform Symphony grid management software to increase the volume of transactions and event updates that it is able to handle, and in doing so underpin its expansion plans.

Sporting Index is experiencing significant growth in bet numbers, and with the rapid rate of partner sign-ups to its betting services business, Sporting Solutions, it is relying on Platform Symphony’s scheduling to increase server utilization and keep a control on costs.

“With circa four out of five sports spread bets placed in the UK coming through our systems, our core requirements have risen from around 300 to over 3,000 prices published per second” says Eachan Fletcher, Sporting Index’s CIO. “The growth that we’re experiencing in our B2B business is pushing up the number of sports and markets we need to cater for, and Platform’s grid computing technology is a great way for Sporting Index to scale up. Platform has helped us customize some of the grid components we’re using, on time and within budget so we can deliver the highest possible level of service to our customers.”

Grid computing solutions can be used as a vehicle to improve utilization, to achieve more capacity with less technology, as a business differentiator, (faster or more reliable), or in the case above to improve capacity for new business or new markets, an interesting read do check it out.

I spent this morning updating the layout and the content of the site to make it easier to access documentation and information on the site. It is easy to publish everything on one page, but quickly you get a massive list of documents which can be a bit difficult to view the information you are after.

With this in mind, I have played around the with the layout. So if you go to the Dell page on the site, it shows the Dell specific content and the firmware underneath, but as always you can just go to the Dell firmware page if you just want to download our spreadsheet, the same applies for our other vendor specific content below:

Cisco page

Dell page

HP page

IBM page

I have also separated some of the pictures/videos and content for the Bladewatch servers we have, again so that our documentation page only has documentation, hopefully this will make our information more accessible to our readers.

PublicTechnology.net

The University of Southampton’s new supercomputer, live from January 2010, has been named UK academia’s ‘greenest’ computer in this year’s Green500 List, a ranking of the World’s most energy-efficient supercomputers.

The Green500 List also ranks the supercomputer as the second most energy-efficient UK-based supercomputer overall – covering both academia and commercial markets.

Custom-designed and built by supercomputer and storage integrator OCF and using IBM’s iDataPlex server technology and running Windows HPC (High Performance Computing) Server 2008 R2 software, the supercomputer uses just 1 watt of power to generate speeds in excess 299.52 megaflops of performance.

The new supercomputer will be in use by leading-edge researchers across the University to make highly complex computations in fields ranging from cancer research to climate change.

Professor Philip Nelson, Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of Southampton, commented: “It’s good to know that the University of Southampton not only has one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, but also one of the greenest. While our researchers are investigating new responses to climate change, designing new transport systems and exploring the origins of life on earth, it’s important that we limit our impact on the planet.”

Check out this article talking about the University of Southampton new supercomputer based on IBM iDataPlex technology, it’s always great to see what possibilities have been created and what range of data center, software and hardware have been used to achieve this. I’m off to read up more.

PR Newswire

ARMONK, N.Y., Nov. 19 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — IBM ( IBM) supercomputers are the most energy efficient in the world, according to the latest Supercomputing ‘Green500 List’ announced today by Green500.org.

The list shows that 18 of the Top 20 most energy efficient supercomputers in the world are built on IBM high-performance computing technology. The list includes supercomputers from Saudi Arabia to Germany and the United States that are being used for a variety of applications such as astronomy, climate prediction and pharmaceutical research. IBM also holds 69 of the Top 100 positions on this list.

Energy efficiency — including performance per watt for the most computationally demanding workloads — is a core design principle in developing IBM systems. IBM offers the broadest range of generally applicable supercomputers represented on the Green500 List including Blue Gene, Power servers, iDataPlex, BladeCenter and hybrid clusters.

Check out this article talking about IBM’s ranking in the Supercomputing Green500 List, it’s great to see these kind of announcements which illustrate the possibilities of Super Computing and how with the right range of technologies and configuration, we can still deliver high performance solutions in an efficient way gaining a high performance per watt. Do check it out, Dell, HP and Cray are on the list (to name a few).