Clusters, grids and mainframes

Aug 6 2008   2:47PM GMT

Ganglia 3.1 enables custom cluster, grid monitoring

Posted by: Caroline Hunter
Linux, DataCenter, HPC, Clusters, grids and mainframes, LinuxWorld, Administration, interoperability and integration

Ganglia, community partner to GroundWork Open Source, releases cluster monitoring product Ganglia 3.1 at LinuxWorld Conference & Expo this week in San Francisco. Ganglia is a distributed monitoring system for high-performance computing systems such as clusters and grids. The central feature of Gangila 3.1 is that it allows administrators to create customized “metric modules.” Admins can create a module from metrics for CPU, network, disk and memory that they select à la carte, allowing for a tailored monitoring environment.

“I would hope that [Ganglia 3.1] changes business practices for the better, making clusters easier to use and more expandable,” said Ganglia developer Brad Nicholes. “We want to make sure that whoever needs to monitor data has the resources they need to do so.”

Previously, an administrator could create a metric module but could not integrate it into the Ganglia interface.Ganglia 3.1 allows an administrator to expand a cluster by adding custom metric modules on an as-needed basis. Ganglia 3.1 uses the round-robin scheduling algorithm, which enables admins to tailor the collected data to company’s needs.

Nicholes noted that it is important to upgrade all gmon agents, tools which allow a GUI to “talk” to the various components of a cluster, at the same time.

If you would like to use Ganglia with GroundWork Open Source’s GroundWork Monitor, GroundWork offers a Ganglia Integration Module that allows Monitor to provide multiple role status views, dashboards, reports, notifications and configuration tools.

Jun 24 2008   2:28PM GMT

Red Hat/Groundwork faciliate university’s high-performance computing

Posted by: Megan Santosus
Linux, HPC, Red Hat, Clusters, grids and mainframes

At the University of Utah, scientists who require access to computational resources rely on the Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC), a facility that maintains 872 nodes across three clusters. To run those clusters, the CHPC relies on open source software, specifically Red Hat Enterprise Linux as an operating system and GroundWork Monitor for IT and network monitoring.

Tom Ammon, a network engineer at the CHPC said that his organization has used GroundWork for nearly two years. The monitoring tool replaced Nagios, an open source network monitoring tool. “Nagios is really powerful and flexible, but it has an arcane syntax and it’s a hassle to configure,” Ammon said. The university’s switch to GroundWork was made with the hopes of reducing the time spent administering the monitoring system.

While GroundWork has been successful in terms of streamlining administration tasks, Ammon said that the tool has also brought greater functionality than he anticipated. “GroundWork is open enough so that we’ve been able to integrate it with a lot of open source packages,” he said. For example, the CHPC has integrated GroundWork with Cacti, an open source networking graphing tool. According to Ammon, combining GroundWork’s network status information with Cacti’s graphing capability enables CHPC to look at trending data. “We use trending data in the data center to monitor things like temperature and humidity,” Ammon explained. “It’s not that helpful to know what the temperature is right now if you didn’t know what it’s been like for 24 hours,” he said.

With Red Hat Linux running on clusters and open source tools helping to monitor and manage the operational work involved in providing high-performance computing resources, open source, said Ammon, “has really revolutionized the way we are accomplishing our mission.”

Jun 18 2008   3:51PM GMT

IBM makes the case for cloud computing at Red Hat Summit

Posted by: Lauren Horwitz
Linux, Virtualization, Red Hat, TechTarget Blogs, Data center physical infrastructure, Clusters, grids and mainframes, Supercomputing

This post was written by Bridget Botelho, news writer.
The first hour of keynote addresses at the fourth annual Red Hat Summit at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston wrapped up with Jim Stallings, the general manager of enterprise systems division of IBM.

Stallings talked for about 30 minutes to a packed house about the ways in which data center infrastructure must change over the coming decade to handle increasing power costs, security issues and user demands for information.

“The new enterprise data center is greener, is open and is virtualized. It is much more dynamic and uses shared resources,” Stallings said.

Stallings made many mentions about cloud computing, which IBM refers to as dynamic computing, and said IBM will collaborate with companies to help them adapt their software for use in a managed cloud environment.

“Dynamic computing is the idea of not paying for peak capacity until you are at peak capacity. It is really a utility model, and industries are transitioning to this model today,” he said.
Stallings likened the evolution of the data center to that of businesses like banks, which have shifted from face to face to ATMs and Web-based enterprises. “With banking, you used to have to interact with a human, … then it moved to ATM machines, … and now we can electronically access our assets via the Web, and the software may be run from [some foreign country],” he said. “The physical bank as we used to think about it has changed completely.”

Many data center managers question the stability and security of cloud computing, but companies like Google, HP, Amazon.com and VMware Inc., use and advocate cloud computing environments.

Recently, VMware President and CEO Diane Greene said that VMware’s focus is on cloud computing.
Cloud computing appears to be the destination for enterprise data centers, and many are in the evolutionary stages today, Stallings said. “You don’t buy an enterprise data center, you evolve towards it in stages, starting with consolidation,” Stallings said.

Stallings threw out a lot of factoids and expectations about data center infrastructure but, oddly enough, did not use his pulpit to push IBM products.

Stallings’ only product mention involved a quick case study demonstrating how Volkswagen recently took 76 Unix systems and consolidated them onto six IBM mainframes to decrease its energy footprint.

Given that IBM appeared at Red Hat’s event, Stallings ended his presentation by flattering Linux. He said IBM uses Linux in its data centers, and expects Linux to be the standard operating system in cloud computing, where the OS is heavily used.

Nov 9 2007   9:52AM GMT

UPDATE REMINDER: Product of the Year nominations are going on now!

Posted by: admin
disaster recovery, Database, authentication, blades, identity management, Backup & recovery, Enterprise applications for Linux, Xen, Red Hat, green computing, Systems Management, Linux basics, SUSE/Novell, Hardware issues, Clusters, grids and mainframes, Open source applications, Administration, interoperability and integration

Working with vendors is tough. You need their help, they want your money. Hopefully, whatever it is they help you install works and the price meets you both somewhere in the middle (as in your side of the middle, right?).

Sometimes this process is a headache, but sometimes a project can really surprise you—things just work and upper management is just peachy keen with how the whole thing looks on the balance sheet.

In that vein, SearchEnterpriseLinux.com wants to help its readers discover the best of the best in Linux products for the enterprise in our prestigious SearchEnterpriseLinux.com 2007 Products of the Year awards. We’ve been asking readers and vendors over at SearchEnterpriseLinux.com to nominate a favorite product they’ve used or to nominate their own new product, and now we’ve opened it up to the Intertubes here at the Enterprise Linux Log. Regardless of where you fall — vendor, user or general Linux guru –the deadline is drawing near!

Our editorial team and a select panel of industry experts and analysts are currently accepting submissions online until 5 p.m. PST on Nov. 9, 2007 in a range of categories, including: Server Linux platform product (either a distribution release or a new, integrated server Linux offering); Security applications/tools for Linux on the server; Virtualization product for Linux on the server; and Linux administration tools. You can access the 2007 POY submission page in the link above.

To qualify, new or significantly upgraded products must have been shipped after October 31, 2006, and before November 1, 2007. Submit your entry today and let us know what you think are the top data center products on the market!

Sep 11 2007   10:17AM GMT

Mainframes, Linux, and cost advantages

Posted by: admin
Security, Power management, support, Linux versus Windows, Linux versus Unix, Clusters, grids and mainframes, Administration, interoperability and integration

Occasionally throughout the summer I’ve been chatting and emailing with Saugatuck Technology analyst Charlie Burns about mainframes, IBM and Linux. Many people have argued over the past year that the mainframe is dying out (again), but Burns and some very telling market trends go against that grain with a 180 degree turn: the mainframe is surging, and it’s all thanks to Linux.

I’ll have an article up a bit later this week (or early next) detailing just exactly what is going on in this space, but for now I thought I’d include one of the recent emails Charlie sent me that covers some of the basic cost advantages of the mainframe.

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Mainframe Cost Advantages
By Charlie Burns
Vice president, Saugatuck Research Inc.

Architecturally-based advantages in the hardware, the operating systems, and in the virtualization functionality enable mainframes to manage multiple diverse workloads based on business objectives and deliver exceptional cost reductions. If we compare the costs of using mainframes to those of conventional servers as noted earlier, we find the following:

• Technical support and maintenance costs. By consolidating and centralizing the capabilities of dozens of servers into a single platform, use of a mainframe drastically reduces the redundancies and differences that are de rigueur in server farm environments. If we accept conventional industry wisdom that states a minimum of 70 percent of IT costs are labor - and that the majority of labor costs are training and support - it’s easy to see how mainframes can quickly free up IT budgets for more strategic investment such as new application development.
• Software licensing and maintenance costs. Since most operating, middleware, and application software is licensed to each server it is used on, a mainframe offers substantial software savings. In a mainframe, the computing capacity applied to software can scale dramatically. Literally, hundreds of virtualized server images can operate in a single mainframe under a single license, thus, avoiding additional license and maintenance fees. In addition, the IBM System z has the capability of running specialized processors for Linux and for some application workloads. These processors are priced substantially lower than the base processors. Thus, the System z delivers both hardware and software saving on a broad scale when compared to individual x86 server platforms.
• User and IT training costs. Training costs tend to be driven by the number and complexities of multiple applications and operating systems. By enabling the use of all leading operating systems and applications within single platform, mainframes drastically reduce the need for training.
• Utility and environmental costs. Mainframes require substantially smaller amounts of power, UPS capacity, cooling, and floor space when compared to the environmental requirements of an x86 server farm with equivalent processing capacity. The mainframe’s advantage is even more substantial when one considers the reduced amount of storage and inter-connection equipment compared to an x86 server farm.
• Security costs. Mainframes enable centralization of software and application interfaces. Centralization of software enables vastly improved security management by reducing the number and types of access points. Additionally, because of its heritage, security is architected into the mainframe and is uniquely robust. For example the IBM System z family of mainframes provides security against information flow between virtual machines. The System z was first certified in mid-2003 as Evaluation Assurance Level 5 (EAL 5) by meeting the Common Criteria standard ISO 15408. Comparatively, virtualization on x86 server platforms require security to be added and layered as part of the operating system, applications, databases, and so on – further increasing both the complexity and cost of security, while adding more points of vulnerability due to incompatibilities between security systems and other software.

An Elementary Roadmap
Saugatuck recommends that every company with more that 20 x86 servers should perform a thorough evaluation of existing workloads and servers with the following steps in mind:

1. x86 servers yielding the largest savings should be migrated to the mainframe first (e.g., those with unique infrastructure support requirements)
2. x86 servers with the lowest utilization should be migrated early
3. Assets with an upcoming compelling event (e.g., need for capacity upgrade, lease expiration, etc.) should be migrated before incurring the expense
4. x86 servers/workloads should be aggregated by user department to leverage strong buy-in
5. Oldest technology x86 servers should be migrated early
6. Focus on real estate by freeing up contiguous raised floor space or eliminating sites as early as possible

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An interesting analysis. More to come later this week!