Infrastructure 2.What?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Software, Cloud, Enterprise, Business, Hardware, Storage, HP on
We live in an industry driven by the Darwinian evolution of buzzwords. Many start down the memestream to mainstream acceptance, but most die along the way. Some are weeded out early, others struggle to survive in the fringes of the blogosphere. It’s interesting to watch evolution in process.
One of the terms that’s making its way through that great filter is Infrastructure 2.0. It’s still struggling to drive the agenda, but it managed to make its way onto the schedule for last week’s Future In Review conference in San Diego. The question was still “Just what is it?”, and there were interesting definitions from all parts of the industry.
Mark Hurd, HP’s CEO, was quite clear in his thinking, noting that POCs, servers, storage and network hardware were all converging on the same basic set of components. The only thing that would differentiate them was the software, saving money and making it easier to maintain an infrastructure. That’s certainly an important piece of the Infrastructure 2.0 jigsaw, but it’s still only a small part of the picture.
Amazon’s AWS, VMware’s VSphere and Microsoft’s Azure are another piece. They’re attempts to build a univeral operating system for cloud and virtualised workloads, where workload migrates to and from on premise datacenters - making them what Amazon CTO Werner Vogel calls “more elastic”. The mix of in-cloud and on-premise is key to the flexibility that businesses need, but it’s also a new complexity that needs a lot of management, and deeper consideration of just where your data is at all times.
Here’s a scary thought: Infrastructure 2.0: it’s 12 am. Do you know where your data is?
Data protection regulations aren’t ready for data that flows to where the workload is - and those workloads need to be geolocked, able to keep information inside the appropriate data protection regime.
Then there’s the thorny question of user interface.
Is a PC screen what the next generation of applications and services need? There’s a lot to be said for the traditional application, mixing rich data and rich display. Tom Malloy’s research group at Adobe is looking at next generation run times that can speed up cross platform rich internet applications. Tools like Adobe’s AIR and Microsoft Silverlight simplify user interface development, and bring Web 2.0 user experiences to the desktop.
Perhaps the most telling piece of the puzzle was one simple phrase: “We need to stop treating IT pros like Victorian file clerks”. It’s a statement that hit home - we do treat our IT pros as glorified clerks, waiting for them to do things by rote. What we really need is an automated infrastructure that flexibly configures itself to deal with the tools, applications and workloads we need to use every day.
Pull apart all the different definitions from all the vendors out there and that’s what Infrastructure 2.0 boils down to. It’s a world we really need to build - if only to show the world just what value IT really brings to business.
–Simon
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...
D2C - evaporating your data centre
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Cloud, virtualisation, Applications, Storage, Server on
We’ve all heard of P2V - taking a physical server and making it virtual. Now it’s time to start thinking about D2C.
Mary and I have just finished an intense couple of days at the DEMO09 event in Palm Springs, where 39 companies had 6 minutes each to unveil a new product. Most were consumer technologies, but there were a few for the IT Pro readership, with one of the most interesting being AppZero’s.
Getting applications to run in the cloud can be an issue. Most cloud services are proprietary, and where there’s scope for you to build and run your own cloud servers, you’re often limited to working through unwieldy and complex web interfaces. Even Amazon’s AWS isn’t that easy to use.
That’s where AppZero’s tools come into play. They can take an existing set of servers and replicate them straight into Amazon’s cloud. First servers are converted into virtual application appliances - whether Windows, Solaris, or Linux. There’s not much overhead - AppZero claims less than 3% - and once wrapped as a single VAA file it’s easy to move them just anywhere - whether it’s around your data centre or up into the cloud. Instead of configuring applications and operating systems, a move is as simple as a file copy.
There’s a control panel to help manage and set up cloud servers for your application appliances - helping you avoid the hard work in setting up EC2 servers. It’s not perfect yet (the DEMO09 version was a beta), and there’s no way of specifying Amazon’s European servers rather than the US network. However, there’s a lot of promise in the service, taking a Datacenter to the Cloud, making D2C reality.
Something to look out for!
–Simon
(in Palm Springs)
Rated: 20% (1 votes)
Loading ...
Windows 7 and the truth about portable performance
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Beta, operating systems, Storage, Hardware, Windows, Laptop, Microsoft on
Usually I say the fastest way to speed up any PC is to stick some more memory in it, but with cheaper notebooks and netbooks it’s actually more likely that your hard drive is slowing you down.
Take the Toshiba R400 I use as a rather stylish but not very speedy bedroom browsing machine. In its time this PC has had everything from Web editing tools to databases to three different 3G connection tools to the unremovable Nokia PC Suite on it and the parade of utilities and apps has taken its toll. I’ve been having problems for a few months that I was pretty sure SP1 of Vista would fix - I just never seemed to have the time to do the update because the same issues that would stop Outlook and IE from launching had the update failing when I tried to do it online. If I have to spend an hour downloading and running an offline update, I thought, it’s just as fast to spend half an hour upgrading to Windows 7; if it runs happily on a netbook then it should do just fine on the R400.
Apart from the size (12″ screen), the fact that it’s the slimmest convertible Tablet PC you can get and the price that those extra features put on it, I tend to think of the R400 as the first netbook. It looks lovely, it’s white and glossy, it’s very portable, it doesn’t have much battery life and the performance is limited. Not by the Centrino Duo chip, not by the memory (I’ve got 3GB in it) - but by the 4200RPM PATA drive. To fit in everything, Toshiba picked a 1.8″ drive and at the time that meant using the same hard drive that you’d find in an iPod. It’s still impossible to find anything beyond a 5600RPM 120GB SATA drive in the 1.8″ format; Toshiba has announced higher capacities but they’re not on the market for upgrades…
Many netbooks pull the same trick; by comparison the 5600RPM drive in the Lenovo S10 gives it the kind of performance you thought the Atom didn’t have the oomph to deliver.
Why does the drive speed make so much difference? Even 1GB of memory is enough for whatever you’re doing at the time to fit in memory but as soon as you switch to another program Windows does a ‘context switch’ - and pages out to hard drive for virtual memory.
Upgrading the R400 to Windows 7 beta went almost flawlessly; of course we had to stop and put SP1 on it first because you can’t upgrade without it, so it wasn’t actually a timesaver, but it’s the smoothest OS upgrade I’ve done in a long time. With Vista I’ve always recommended a clean install: 7 coped happily with the rash of apps, including Nokia PC Suite, and even recognises the 3G connection and shows it next to the list of Wi-Fi hotspots. But while things do feel a little nippier, and CPU usage was down around 1% with a couple of apps open in the background, I thought I’d run the Windows Experience Index to check how it rates the R400.
It gets a 2.0. not for the processor or the memory or the graphics; in fact this is the first time I’ve seen a notebook where the overall score is lower than the graphics result. It’s the hard drive transfer rate that brings the machine down - which now reflects exactly what I’ve seen in practice.
The Windows team has been talking about WEI and disk performance recently, including why they’ve changed the results from what the same configuration would have been rated as under Vista. It’s not that 7 has worse performance - it tends to be faster on the same hardware - or that your hard drive has magically got worse - it’s always been that bad; the WEI is just better at rating the performance you’ll actually see.
The same discussion reveals that a number of first-generation SSDs score very badly on performance under heavy load because they built up a backlog of data transfers and slow down to deal with them - scroll down for an excerpt with the details. Microsoft doesn’t feel that it can name names, which is a shame; unless all those drives are off the market by now, it would be nice to know what to avoid before you’ve bought a machine that gets a surprisingly low hard drive rating in WEI.
-Mary
“With respect to disk scores, as discussed in our recent post on Windows Performance, we’ve been developing a comprehensive performance feedback loop for quite some time. With that loop, we’ve been able to capture thousands of detailed traces covering periods of time where the computer’s current user indicated an application, or Windows, was experiencing severe responsiveness problems. In analyzing these traces we saw a connection to disk I/O and we often found typical 4KB disk reads to take longer than expected, much, much longer in fact (10x to 30x). Instead of taking 10s of milliseconds to complete, we’d often find sequences where individual disk reads took many hundreds of milliseconds to finish. When sequences of these accumulate, higher level application responsiveness can suffer dramatically.
With the problem recognized, we synthesized many of the I/O sequences and undertook a large study on many, many disk drives, including solid state drives. While we did find a good number of drives to be excellent, we unfortunately also found many to have significant challenges under this type of load, which based on telemetry is rather common. In particular, we found the first generation of solid state drives to be broadly challenged when confronted with these commonly seen client I/O sequences.
An example problematic sequence consists of a series of sequential and random I/Os intermixed with one or more flushes. During these sequences, many of the random writes complete in unrealistically short periods of time (say 500 microseconds). Very short I/O completion times indicate caching; the actual work of moving the bits to spinning media, or to flash cells, is postponed. After a period of returning success very quickly, a backlog of deferred work is built up. What happens next is different from drive to drive. Some drives continue to consistently respond to reads as expected, no matter the earlier issued and postponed writes/flushes, which yields good performance and no perceived problems for the person using the PC. Some drives, however, reads are often held off for very lengthy periods as the drives apparently attempt to clear their backlog of work and this results in a perceived “blocking” state or almost a “locked system”. To validate this, on some systems, we replaced poor performing disks with known good disks and observed dramatically improved performance. In a few cases, updating the drive’s firmware was sufficient to very noticeably improve responsiveness.”
Michael Fortin, Engineering the Windows 7 WEI
Not yet rated
Loading ...
Analytics get distributed, parallel and mathematical
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in data warehouses, analytics, Applications, Storage on
We had a very interesting conversation today, talking about the next generation of business analytics with folk from Greenplum. The most interesting piece of their story was just how their application works with data.
With no legacy to build on, the Greenplum engineers could take a very different architectural approach. Traditional databases use a single store, and a single query engine. Greenplum’s tools break data up into parcels, sharing it across every machine in their data processing network. A central server keeps track of where the data is held, and manages queries - which can be broken up and delivered to the appropriate servers, the results being assembled by the controller. Supercomputer aficionados will immediately spot that Greenplum are using a shared-nothing approach, where queries can run in parallel on sections of the data - speeding things up considerably. Having a master controller handling scheduling means you can even use unmatched hardware for your data servers.
Complex joins can be handled in a similar manner, with queries moving data between servers and assembling results on many different processors. With quad core a commodity, and six and eight following close behind, it’s not going to be difficult to build a powerful data processing farm (and use the same hardware for other tasks when you don’t need high level analytics).
There’s another spin out of the architecture - you can mix different query types in one analytic operation. With Greenplum’s tools you can mix SQL with Google’s MapReduce, and even throw in the R statistical language for complex mathematical operations. Modelling is an important piece of business analytics, and means that Greenplum’s tools are able to compete with high-end analytical tools like SAS. There are plenty of interesting use cases here - perhpas you’re currently working with massive data sets that take a week to process and a day or so to feed into predictive models. With Greenplum you’ll be able to load the data in parallel and run your statistical models on the data - giving you a considerable speed advantage.
Moore’s Law has hit the wall. Intel’s spectacular U-turn showed as much, as clock speeds dropped and the number of cores went up. That’s left software developers with something of a challenge -
Not yet rated
Loading ...
IDF: Will SSD mean the end of 5GB free?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Enterprise, Storage, Intel on
Cloud computing will shine on SSD, but your free storage might go away when it does.
The reason you get free storage on Gmail and SkyDrive and Mozy and flickr and all the other Web 2.0 services isn’t just to keep up with all the other Web 2.0 services. It isn’t just to draw in visitors who can see and click ads. It’s because when you use hard drives, especially cheap, consumer grade hard drives, to run your search engine on, the only way to make that storage fast enough is to leave most of it empty.
The hard drives that Google stacks together are never more than 25% full, because any more than that and the latency to get the information back off is just too slow to make the search effective and slap the ads on it. The other 75% is just sitting there spinning around on the platter and making you happy by putting your files on there for free makes sense.
You don’t need access often enough to slow down Google’s own accesses and Google can queue your request up to retrieve when it’s convenient - your Internet connection isn’t fast enough for you to notice.
SSD is still expensive, but it could save a lot of money for enterprises and Web services because it’s lower power. For a notebook PC you care about 15% longer battery life - if Intel’s figures carry over to real PCs; for a data centre, you care about Watts/IOPS and Intel is claiming SSD can offer six times the read performance using 98% less power and needing only 75% of the space - because you can put cooler drives closer together without space for fans and AC. That means SSD should quickly start to become common. But that could also mean the end of ever-increasing free online storage.
On the one hand, SSD is fast enough that latency is much less of a problem, so you don’t have to leave most of it empty. And on the other, it’s expensive enough that you don’t want to leave any of it empty.
Not yet rated
Loading ...
IDF: stress testing SSD
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Silicon, Storage, Hardware, Laptop, Intel on
Battery life? Performance? No, the important test Intel’s new SSD passes is known internally as P*ssmark
Not yet rated
Loading ...
Bignums
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Enterprise, Storage on
Did you ever have one of those days when everything seemed to be getting bigger?
I recently put the largest machine we’ve ever had onto our office network. A 64-bit server, with 6GB of RAM and 1TB of disk, it’s taken on the role of handling all our mail and files. When a new desktop PC arrives later this week, there’ll be over 7TB of storage on this small office network.
Just a couple of years ago we were surprised if we had more than 500GB of storage in an office. Turning back the clock still further, I helped design a UK-scale photo storage service, where we had a hierarchical storage system with a whole 3TB of spinning disk and 30TB of fast tape. Today’s fast external drives are making that architecture obsolete - our new server is using eSATA to do a whole server backup onto a 500GB drive. That back up? It only takes 30 minutes…
Outside out office the usual run of press releases seem focused on delivering larger and larger numbers. Cuil’s leaked launch (and the claimed size of its index) led Google to claim that it had indexed over 1 trillion web pages. That’s a pretty big number - 10 to the power of 12. It’s also the approximate number of bacteria living on the human body.
Closer to home, BT is claiming that it’s hooked up just under 17 million homes with broadband connections. It turns out that there aren’t many more homes to be connected, with broadband analysts Point Topic suggesting there are only around a million households that can migrate to broadband left - and around 9.6 million that don’t have internet access at all. The days of massive growth in broadband are behind us now, and what was a luxury is rapidly becoming a commodity. It would be interesting to see the spreadhseets at BT, as the company juggles the numbers to see how it can make money from running the data pipes.
After all, there’s plenty of scope for bringing the world online. Gartner recently suggested that there were over a billion PCs in use around the world (and soon there’ll be a billion transistors in each processor, thanks to Intel). While getting to a billion PCs in 30 years may seem a lot, there’ll be another billion in just 6 years, thanks to 12% annual growth. There
’s a lot of scope for significant social change here, as the emerging world (and especially the BRIC nations) start coming on line. The anglophile web will become just a part of a global, multi-lingual web - after all, even without the iPhone, China Mobile subscribers use more mobile data than any other network.
With all those machines, and all that information out there, there’s an issue of managing the information - and manging the storage it requires. The BBC has just such a problem.
The archive is currently managing about 700,000 digital items, with most of it still on discrete media (digital video tape, CDs, DVDs). There are about 280,000 actual master files, digitised from U-Matic video and 1/4″ audio originals, and from magnetic sound tracks. Then there are 60,000 viewing-quality video files, but these are held on CD-ROM in anticipation of a mass storage system. Overall they’re managing 12 petabytes, mainly on digital videotape - with a growth rate of about 400 terabytes a year, mainly on digital videotape.
If the numbers in your office are getting to big, be glad you’re not dealing with any of the really big numbers out there!
Not yet rated
Loading ...
The case of the disappearing disk space
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Windows Vista, Storage, Laptop, HP, Microsoft on
Where has 32GB of disk space gone and how do I make Vista give it back, or there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
When we’re on the road at conferences I take a fair few photographs, and I copy a lot of PowerPoints and PDFs onto my notebook, not to mention photographing products I’m reviewing, and then there’s recordings of interviews
Rated: 40% (1 votes)
Loading ...
The state of the Mac World
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Toys & gadgets, Storage, Hardware, Mobile, Apple on
The Mac Air is cute, shiny, lightweight
Not yet rated
Loading ...
CES: Travelling storage
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Storage, Hardware, Mobile on
Every now and then I want to throw my laptop out of the window in sheer frustration. I’ve certainly flung USB sticks across the room from time to time, by accident. I’ve also done a Bill Gates and left my travel mug on the car roof when we drove off (although unlike the spoof video in Gates’ CES keynote speech the mug wasn’t there when we arrived). Most flash drives can survive a certain amount of damage - or at least the flash memory can. A USB stick would probably survive the fall from a car roof but I have a rather fetching 1Gb earring made from a flash stick that was sticking out of Simon’s PC when he turned his chair a little too far and snapped off the USB connector.
Not yet rated
Loading ...
Tag cloud
Archives
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
Most commented posts
- Java's SSVAGENT.EXE: training the monkey
22 comments
- The ColdFusion Renaissance
- Chrome OS: what happens when "always connected", isn't?
- Responsible disclosure? Not quite, VMware
- There’s a reason smartphones are locked down
- At sixes and Windows 7s
- Supporting iPhones and Exchange? Today could be a very bad day...
- The LHC isn
- When the fat lady sings for the mobile web, is it the end of the Opera Mini?
- Wubi Tuesday
Highest Rated Blog Posts
- Songs of distant satellites (100%)
- Nobody knows what Web 2.0 really is (100%)
- Log in and lock in (100%)
- Top tips for speeding up Vista (100%)
- Mommy, why is there a home server in the office? (100%)
- Employees are our most valuable asset (snigger) (100%)
- Locking down IT or blocking creativity (100%)
- Consumer BlackBerrys are good for business (100%)
- HD Trek (100%)
- Join the (beta) community (100%)