IDEAS Insights

Sun's Two-Tier OS Support Targets Next Wave of IT Infrastructure

Much of the discussion around Sun's OpenSolaris operating system has focused on comparing it with Linux in terms of open source development communities and processes. Indeed, the relationship between OpenSolaris and Solaris somewhat parallels the segmentation of leading Linux distributions into "development" and "production" releases, i.e. Red Hat Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Novell’s OpenSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. But the key development of this announcement is Sun’s introduction of robust support offerings for its dynamic, rapidly evolving operating environment. Neither Red Hat nor Novell offer formal support for Fedora or OpenSUSE (although Novell does provide free installation support for OpenSUSE). Thus, Sun has broken new ground in the open source OS business model by arriving at a solution that envisions the long-term needs of web-centric enterprises.

It is clear that much of the growth in the market is increasingly being driven by a new class of customer with a set of needs that diverge considerably from those of traditional commercial server environments. Users in this class consider massive levels of scale-out computing to be the normal way to grow capacity, and they rely heavily on proprietary software that is developed internally, which represents the “secret sauce” of their operations. Currently, the leading-edge proponents of this approach are predominantly in high-performance computing (HPC) environments; entertainment and media companies delivering content over the web; firms with web 2.0 business models; and some financial services organizations. Over time, though, their style of computing could impact a variety of organizations, as the lines between software and services start to blur, and end-users become more comfortable relying on remote computing resources that are accessed over the web.

As this segment of the market matures and gears up for operations, its customers are introducing new requirements for how systems should be designed in order to best meet their needs, some of which could send vendors back to the drawing board (as shown by IBM’s introduction of its iDataPlex architecture). Among other demands, these customers are creating a new set of rules for operating systems that will play a central role in their infrastructure. To be relevant in the rising wave of web-based computing, an OS should have the following characteristics:

• Support for industry-standard hardware based on x86/x64 processors, which are taking on ever more demanding workloads as a result of their continuously growing performance;
• Integrated support for virtualization, which is becoming a standard part of IT infrastructures both in hardware and software;
• Support for cloud/grid/utility computing, i.e. the ability for organizations to achieve optimal utilization of computing resources, regardless of their source or physical location;
• Real-time computing capabilities, in which services are performed within a guaranteed time span;
• Open source business models, whereby the OS supplier offers value based on service and support, rather than licensing;
• Choice of release streams, including a relatively fluid version with frequent updates and rapid functional improvements, as well as a more stable version suitable for critical production workloads.

Sun has addressed this last requirement with the first commercial release of OpenSolaris. While OpenSolaris has been available for some time, Sun announced that it will now provide support for the binary distribution of the OpenSolaris code. As a result, Sun now effectively offers its customers a choice of two supported operating systems: Solaris and OpenSolaris. Sun positions Solaris for “high speed developers and development teams”, as well as users who treat the operating system as a source of competitive advantage for applications such as high performance computing and social networking. By contrast, the traditional version of Solaris is intended for IT departments that value stability over rapid innovation.

At the front line of the largest web-based applications, resiliency is typically built into the user's software, so that few reliability features are needed at the level of individual servers. These applications are usually designed to continue processing in the event that servers fail due to outages in hardware or OS software. Thus, Sun’s offering of support for OpenSolaris may not be relevant for many of the cutting-edge web applications that might be deployed on it today. However, today’s web 2.0 workloads are tomorrow’s enterprise workloads representing the corporate backbone. As individual nodes in the cloud are used to host ever more critical workloads that are sensitive to critical points of failure at the level of individual systems, and thus require higher levels of uptime in the OS, OpenSolaris users may start to take Sun’s support offerings more seriously.

Sun offers two levels of support for OpenSolaris: "Essential" and "Production". While the pricing of these offerings has not yet been announced, based on their description, the Production level of support for OpenSolaris appears to be nearly identical to the "Premium" level of support for Solaris (except OpenSolaris Production promises one hour response time for Priority 1 calls, as opposed to immediate transfer for Solaris Premium). Therefore, the pricing of OpenSolaris Production compared to Solaris Premium will determine whether it makes more sense to deploy Solaris (which is free to deploy as well) or OpenSolaris. Compatibility between OpenSolaris and Solaris will also be a critical factor in determining which path customers take as they upgrade, thus controlling the flow of users from OpenSolaris to classic Solaris.

The ability for Sun to drive Solaris into IT infrastructures that are central to customers’ businesses remains a key milestone on its path to long-term success. Although Sun is aggressively optimizing its systems for web-based workloads, software serves as a much "stickier" bond with customers than most hardware, which can be swapped out relatively easy. As Scott McNealy was fond of saying, “users date their hardware, but marry their operating systems”. In the bigger picture, as more and more new businesses are seeded with infrastructures that are based on the web and scaling out, a requirement is emerging for new class of OS with a specific set of attributes, only one of which is an open source development model. Solaris and the leading Linux distributions are all well positioned to deliver these attributes, but Sun’s innovation in the business of operating systems could allow it to leap ahead of others in defining how this critical software component becomes integrated to customers’ organizations.

Not Extreme Storage, but Beyond Storage

HP just announced a new solution offering, the HP StorageWorks 9100 Extreme Data Storage System (ExDS9100), positioned as an ideal platform to deploy streaming media applications. But don’t let the name fool you – the new HP system is much more than another storage array.

The HP ExDS9100 offers rack-mounted, factory-integrated hardware, including an HP ProLiant c7000 BladeSystem with up to 16 blades, as well as HP StorageWorks disk controllers and drive enclosures supporting up to 820 disks (820 TB of raw storage capacity with 1 TB disks). These hardware components utilize the latest industry-standard technologies to provide high-density computing power and storage resources in an environmentally friendly fashion. Although the HP hardware is impressive, it doesn’t make the new HP offering uniquely distinctive. And a near-petabyte storage platform is quite scalable, but not so extreme today.

The secret-sauce of the HP Extreme Data Storage System is the PolyServe Matrix Server technology, which HP now owns through its 2007 acquisition of PolyServe. A key component of this technology is the HP Clustered File System (previously known as the PolyServe File System). The Matrix Server architecture uses the clustered file system to provide high-speed data I/O to clustered applications up to 16 nodes. One well-known implementation of this cluster technology is scalable NAS file serving, using the cluster as a NAS server to transmit data via network file protocols (such as NFS and CIFS) to other application servers or network clients. This implementation – a NFS file serving solution – is available from HP as the StorageWorks Enterprise File Services Clustered Gateway. However, the performance advantage of this architecture is fully unleashed when the applications, such as databases or streaming media, are running on the clustered servers and transmit data via direct I/O to the file system (without the overhead of network file protocols) – as implemented in the Extreme Data Storage System.

The product concept of Extreme Data Storage capitalizes on HP’s extensive experiences in providing scalable storage solutions for a variety of customers using HP PolyServe coupled with HP storage arrays. The new HP ExDS solution is designed to offer customers optimal scalability, density, ease-of-use, and affordability for their digital media and Web 2.0 deployments. ExDS in fact offers more than just a high-density storage platform; it provides a clustered application platform that is optimized for high-speed data I/O. The HP ExDS is a great example of the value that system vendors can bring to the storage market beyond innovations to the storage systems alone. It provides customers with a complete, integrated, and fully supported system solution that reduces the total cost of storing and accessing business data.

HP Adaptable Sustainability ?

HP in Australia recently held its  second annual Technology@Work end-user conference in Sydney; this year a (regional) analyst conference was run side by side with the end-user event. 

Paul Brandling, Vice President and Managing Director for HP South Pacific, gave the welcoming speech (see video), and introduced the event tag line of “Alternative thinking about business, technology and sustainability”, which featured all hp logo’s in a wonderfully environmental fluorescent lime green. During his keynote Mr. Brandling made the point that, “Globally over 50% of large enterprises will face data center floor space shortages in the next five years. Forcing many to relocate, our outsource, some of their applications.”

Dr David Morgan (a director of BHP, ex-CEO of Westpac, and recently co-chaired the “Future of the Australian Economy” stream at the 2020 summit) , gave an excellent keynote.  A video is to be put on the TAW08 website in the next few days, and is recommended. Major themes here were adaptability in the future planning for the Australia Economy, as well as regular references to the need for more federal legislation to replace up to eight state/regional legislative frameworks.

In the follow on meetings HP played its sustainability card. Highlighting a recent reduction from 85 worldwide data centers to now three pairs of two datacenters for the company. The associated power savings were enough to run the US city of Palo Alto (approx. same size as Darwin, Australia), whilst at the same time the company more than doubled its processing capability and storage capacity. 

It seems “IT as a utility” is being finally realized, at least within the top of the Fortune 5000 set (cf. HP, Westpac, and BT recently). A fundamental driver has to be a review of the cost of worldwide IP communications for these multinational companies.

Some in the industry remain skeptical as to the real value of ‘Green IT’ as an initiative. So it was interesting to note some of the examples to support the Green IT move. It was quoted that information computer technology (ICT) is estimated to be responsible for 4% worldwide carbon emissions (2% client products [e.g.: PC’s etc], 2% Data Centers). This is in contrast to aviation as a whole, which is only estimated to be responsible for 2% of emissions. 

The ENERGY STAR  label is now on major appliances such as office equipment, lighting, home electronics, and more. Computer equipment included in the ENERGY STAR program today includes desktop, notebook, tablet and workstations.  ENERGY STAR ratings for servers are coming and expected within 18 months. Whilst an ENERGY STAR rating for complete Data Centers is now on the drawing board.

So just how meaningful are these ENERGY STAR ratings ? The US Federal Government currently spends approximately $300M USD pa on energy costs. It is expected that a move from ENERGY STAR 3 to ENERGY STAR 4 equipment, would result in savings of $82M per annum. Now, that’s meaningful in both an environmental and economic context.

Sun Ray 2 is Worthy of a Closer Look

In the last few years, Sun has thoroughly redesigned the Sun Ray appliance to compete in the rapidly growing market for thin client desktop infrastructure. We recently had the opportunity to try out the new Sun Ray 2 in person at the Sun Executive Briefing Center in Menlo Park, CA and we were impressed. Sun has taken a product that has been around a long time and re-engineered it with all of the features customers expect today, plus some interesting capabilities that set it apart from the competition. Today’s Sun Ray 2 thin clients running Sun Ray Software 4 feature support for a wide variety of clients, enhanced security, and best of all the ability to runs Windows, Linux, Solaris, an Mac OS (or all four at once) equally well. The market has responded to these changes by buying Sun Rays at an ever increasing clip. According to Sun, sales have doubled from fiscal year 2006 to 2007.

One of the more interesting features of Sun Ray is its smart card authentication. Each desktop user in the organization has a credit card with an embedded Java chip that slides into the attached card reader. Users can show up at any Sun Ray in the company, log into their own account, and up will come their own desktop. When the card is removed without logging out, the desktop session remains suspended on the server until the card is inserted into another Sun Ray. Even days later from halfway around the world, the original desktop reappears, complete with all of the original applications. The Sun Secure Global Desktop Software provides this "Hot Desking" capability and also provides the ability to run multiple windows, each with a different application or operating system. For example, a Solaris 10, Windows, and Linux window can be open along with numerous browsers and desktop applications.

Management of thin clients has become increasingly important as IT departments deal with ever increasing complexity. Sun’s Desktop Manager 1.0 features an easy to use point-and-click web-based interface that makes centrally defining and configuring hundreds or thousands of desktops and their applications relatively quick and easy. The Sun Desktop Manager has three major components: configuration repositories that store configuration policies and organizational structure, management tools that help to enforce configuration policies, and agents residing on the client and fetch the configuration settings and apply them. It also features lockdown capabilities that prevent unauthorized people from making changes to configuration values or gaining access to unauthorized applications. Granted, this is a v1.0 product, but it seems to focus on what is truly needed in this space.

Overall, we are impressed with the improvements Sun has made to the Sun Ray. The current version is such a vast improvement over past iterations, it hardly seems fitting to continue calling it a "Sun Ray." Obviously, the entire thin client industry has improved tremendously in the last few years and there are now a number of excellent products from which to choose. But we feel Sun Ray 2 deserves special consideration in light of its smart card authentication and ease of management. If you are considering thin clients this year, and who is not, then you owe it to yourself to go down and try out the Sun Ray in person.

IBM Racks Up x86 Servers by the Boatload

The IT industry continues to trend towards hosting ever more massive workloads with scale-out architectures, in which large numbers of industry-standard servers containing x86/x64 processors are joined into clusters or grids. Much of the attention in recent years has been on scaling out with blade servers, which allow large numbers of servers contained in specialized modules to be deployed and managed in an optimal hardware footprint. Now, IBM has introduced a new server design, called the iDataPlex, which introduces a new level of density for cramming large numbers of processors into a small amount of space, using traditional rack-mounted servers rather than blades.

The iDataPlex concept resulted from a number of conversations IBM executives and engineers had with major web-based businesses and leading-edge financial services organizations. All of the major server vendors, including IBM, were pushing blade servers to these customers. But blades were too expensive for these massive scale-out deployments and traditional rack servers were not sufficiently customizable and lacked the required density. As a result, most of these customers ended up building their own server complexes simply because nothing on the market met their needs.

In designing the iDataPlex, IBM took a "clean sheet" approach that was inspired by blades, but uses the traditional rackmounted form factor. Server vendors like HP are pushing blades everywhere, and other companies like Dell and Sun are pushing a combination of rack and bladed servers. But no one had seriously looked at rack servers in years. IBM chose to use the same 42U standard rack envelope, but turn it sideways and shorten the servers themselves to 15 inches. That allowed up to 42 2U servers or 28 3U servers to be positioned into the same space that held half that many in a traditional rack design. A maximum of 672 processor cores per rack doubles the conventional rack density. Due to cost considerations, the iDataPlex has no backplane and relies on cables to carry all of the I/O. Each iDataPlex is entirely built in China in an IBM facility. Like mainframes, every system is custom built. It takes 3-4 months to sell and IBM expects that 70% of deployments will be in a new or redesigned datacenter.

For cooling, there are no fans attached to the processor boards themselves, only in the 2U/3U chassis, each of which contains 4 large fans. Further, IBM offers an optional rear-door heat exchanger for the iDataPlex that uses water cooling. The rack can be cooled sufficiently without the heat exchanger, which costs $75-100,000. However, when the water cooling is used, the demands on Computer Room Air Conditioning (CRAC) devices can be lowered or even eliminated in many cases. The result is a staggering 40% reduction in datacenter cooling costs today, and IBM is working to push that to 60% in the future.

Both rack servers and blade servers were designed back during the time when performance and performance density were key requirements. Reliability was also paramount and numerous redundancies and failover capabilities were added to ensure that applications would remain available even after a major server or component failure. The problem is all of the added redundancies pushed up the cost. With cloud computing, the old requirements have changed. Component reliability is no longer needed because the application itself can deal with failures. With tens of thousands of servers, failures occur all the time and bad servers can be swapped out on an hourly or daily basis. The cost of computing, and specifically the operating cost, is now the defining criterion. Anything that can save on the cost of electricity is a huge plus. IBM realized that this new market is now large enough to support a specialized server design that prioritizes low energy consumption and density over redundancies. Today, there are few customers demanding this type of solution, but the ones that do exist buy tens of thousands of servers at a time for deployments that can reach 100,000 servers or more. We at IDEAS feel that iDataPlex is a strong solution for this new class of customers.