Hardware issues

Don’t want to go to the cloud? Cassatt says to build your own

You may be one of the data center administrators who’s heard the buzz about the cloud and has decided that it’s just hype. But the advantages of the cloud infrastructure are clear:

• Extremely low operating costs (as low as 1/10 traditional IT costs)
• Extremely high energy efficiency
• Extremely low levels of complexity
• High economies-of-scale
• Metered billing (based on use); transparent costs
• Other benefits of large data centers without owning capital

There are also a bundle of fears or disadvantages that are enough to keep many from jumping on board. Here are a few of Cassatt’s observations on what these are:

• Security: infrastructure sits outside the enterprise’s walls
• Service levels: Nascent model; agreements and levels unproven
• Performance
• Auditability and logging/traceability issues
• Potential for cloud platform architecture “lock in”
• Does not lower existing cost of installed capital or operations

In preparation for Cassatt’s internal cloud release this week, I talked to Ken Oestreich, director of product strategy, Steve Oberlin, chief scientist, and Jay Fry, VP of marketing at Cassatt. Oestreich explained how a product that the company had been developing for five years (initially referred to as its “utility computing product”) aligns with the cloud computing model. Essentially, Cassatt’s Active Response 5.2 allows you to turn your entire data center into a “cloud,” but without the disadvantages above.

“People who haven’t outsourced because of regulatory or security are not going to change,” said Oestreich. “They’re not going to a cloud.”

Seeing this opportunity, and realizing that many CIOs would love to take advantage of the efficiencies of the cloud but can’t afford the risk, Cassatt’s product allows users to get pretty close. Additionally, there are some advantages to the “internal cloud” model that include no platform-dependency issues and no “lock in” to an external cloud provider. Active Response 5.2 provides multi-platform support for Linux, Solaris, Windows and AIX; virtual machine support for VMware, Citrix (Xen) and Microsoft Hyper-V as adoption warrants; and networking support for Cisco, F5 and Force10.

In addition to Active Response 5.2, Cassatt has introduced its Active Profiling Service.

“Before you can embark on creating an internal cloud and merging application groups into pools that can share these resources, you have to know what you’ve got,” said Oberlin. “That’s what enables you to create a management strategy.”

Some consolidation planning software exists on the market, but Cassatt’s team thinks that it misses the mark and doesn’t provide users with all of the information they need. Cassatt points out that existing inventory tools don’t look at usage patterns, application dependencies or workload dynamics, and consolidation tools don’t consider workload management and server repurposing.

“A lot of companies today buy consolidation planning software if they’re doing virtualization. What this software doesn’t do is what all of our customers ask us about — provide a picture of the dynamics of the data center,” explained Oestreich. In order to manage a virtualized environment, it’s helpful to have an idea of “… which apps are quiescent and when, where the orphan servers are, where is virtualization appropriate and not, where is power management appropriate, and where is the internal cloud computing appropriate and not.”

Oberlin shared that the actual setup and implementation of the software can be rather rapid (a day or two). “The longest period of time is recording performance and utilization data to capture a reasonable business cycle to get a decent utilization profile of the applications over time,” said Oberlin.

The team envisions its internal cloud offering as something that users can gradually work into. I imagine dipping a toe in and then easing into the hot-tub and relaxing while the data center is efficiently managed.

1. Analyze infrastructure and opportunities using Active Profiling Service
2. Get started using policy management
3. Take advantage of the power-management infrastructure and achieve increased energy efficiency
4. Manage virtualization across multiple vendors, simplifying and automating virtual infrastructure
5. Implement application availability across platforms and achieve greater operational efficiencies
6. Implement resource repurposing across physical and virtual platforms and achieve greater capital efficiencies
7. Meter infrastructure use, regardless of physical or virtual

In a time of budget cuts and reduced staffing in the data center, there’s no question that improved efficiency in physical and virtual machine management is beneficial. This type of move can help any data center prepare for future increased utility costs and trim down on new equipment provisioning. And who knows, maybe one day you’ll consider joining a community cloud.

Sourcefire strengthens virtualization security with RNA

As attacks upon software systems become more sophisticated, it is crucial to adapt security measures to emerging threats. Virtualization is presently one of the most exciting technologies in the enterprise, but also among the most vulnerable.

At VMworld, Sourcefire, the security company that brought Snort to the market, has introduced a new product offering through its Sourcefire 3D. Most important, the release improves Real-time Network Awareness (RNA), a feature able to monitor both hardware and virtual environments.

First, RNA enables administrators to tailor the software to their compliance and policy requirements; the VM Detection feature combats the problem of VM sprawl by detecting all virtual machines and making them visible.

RNA is now supported by VMware’s support services, Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program and VMsafe. VMsafe includes an application program interface (API), which enables other security applications to monitor for and catch intrusions that RNA cannot see.

RNA saves enterprise resources by identifying threats as they occur by continuously collecting information about virtual machine activity at the surface level of a virtual environment. Other security tools collect such data only during the day, allowing intruders greater opportunity to inflict harm on the system.

Cisco router too costly? Vyatta wants to help

Vyatta Inc., the startup with attitude vying to take on the mighty Cisco Systems Inc., is seeking to expand its toehold in the networking market with the introduction of a larger router and security networking appliance — and at a fraction of the cost of comparable Cisco gear.

The Belmont, Calif., company, which describes its customers as smarter and better looking than those of its giant competitor in its press releases, debuted its 2501 appliance last week at LinuxWorld Conference & Expo. The 2501 has nearly twice the horsepower (1.8 GHz versus 1 GHz) and more expansion slots than its 514 predecessor, which was introduced last March.

Although Cisco has overwhelming market share, Vyatta’s pitch is its eye-popping price advantage (it’s about a tenth of Cisco’s cost). In addition, the functionality of Vyatta’s router is in software, which is easy to upgrade, versus Cisco’s proprietary hardware boxes, which can only be upgraded via replacement.

Rob Whiteley, the principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., said the new router is better and more powerful than its predecessor and would enable Vyatta to go after more than the low-hanging fruit of small companies and branch offices.

The 2501, in contrast, has the additional processing power and throughput required for medium to large networks and could function as a link to a wide area network (WAN) or a security appliance.

Vyatta will never be large enough to meet all of most companies’ needs, Whiteley said. But the growing acceptance of open source products and the current budget-shrinking economy should help Vyatta’s cause, he said. Ultimately, Vyatta’s success will depend on its ability to offer additional services along with its routers, he said.

Intel executive asserts commitment to open source

During the partner keynote presentation at the Red Hat Summit today, Boyd Davis, the general manager of server platforms group marketing at Intel Corp., reiterated the hardware company’s commitment to open source.

“Open source software is fundamental to Intel’s business success,” Davis said, who added that Intel is among the top four corporate contributors to open source software.

Davis then outlined the three trends shaping the enterprise computing market, namely optimization – which he defined as the ever-increasing control users want over their environments – virtualization, and energy-efficient performance. For each of these trends, Davis said, Intel, in conjunction with open source software providers, is at work on the underlying silicon components.

Davis also mentioned the LessWatts initiative, Intel’s project to make Linux more energy efficient. The aim of project, said Davis, is to ensure that software can work with Intel’s more energy-efficient hardware components.

Davis concluded his 20-minute presentation with a pledge of commitment to the Linux community. “Our goal is to maintain a close relationship with the community, to ensure[that] the underlying value Intel is building in the silicon is taken advantage of by the end user.”

Red Hat out-marathons the pack in financial services

You have to run pretty fast to keep up with Red Hat these days.

The leading open source vendor just broke two speed records for the financial industry. First, it broke the gold standard for real-time status by processing updates in less than one millisecond, completing a single transaction in .9 of a millisecond. Typically, the fastest processing rates are 10 milliseconds to 20 milliseconds per transaction.

Second, Red Hat had the lowest standard deviation ever recorded or less than .5 milliseconds, which in layman’s terms translates into greater consistency. And third, a single server with a stacked Reuters Market Data System (RMDS) completed a very high ‑- but not record-breaking ­­­­­- volume of transactions, 5.8 million updates per second.

The Securities Technology Analysis Center, which provides performance measurement services to the financial service industry, performed the tests, running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, the latest version, with RDMS 6.0 on IBM BladeCenter H and 10 gigabit Ethernet.

“In financial services, speed is the difference between making money and losing money,” said Scott Crenshaw, vice president of Red Hat’s platform business unit. “The result is clear: more data, faster data, means better trades and better decisions.”

As if that weren’t enough, Crenshaw struck a blow to proprietary software. “We were 2.4 times faster than Sun Microsystems,” he crowed, comparing Red Hat’s 5.8 million updates with Sun Solaris’ record of 2.4 million updates.

Go, open source! Guess you should have been here for the Boston Marathon!

Sun kisses and makes up

Sun Microsystems Inc. just did a smart about-face.
According to well-known open source analyst and blogger Bill Weinberg, a few years ago Sun quit the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) Carrier- Grade Linux working group when OSDL declined to grant Solaris equal status with Linux for Carrier-Grade networking applications. (For those of you who don’t eat and sleep networking trivia, Carrier Grade is a networking classification that signifies high availability and fast recovery.)

Well, it seems that the passage of time and the knock of opportunity have overcome any hard feelings, judging from Sun’s deal with Wind River Systems Inc., which was announced recently at the MySQL trade show.

Here’s the deal: Wind River, whose technology helps embedded devices run faster, has agreed to port its Carrier Grade systems to Sun’s latest and greatest UltraSparc T2 chip multithreading (CMT) processor, which runs much faster than a conventional single-core processor.

The deal is good for Sun, giving it an entrée into embedded networking applications, and good for the networking industry, which would benefit from Sun’s newest and most powerful CMT processors. This could in turn benefit data center managers who already use Sparc processors and are thinking about beefing up their telecom networks, Weinberg said.

Whether they’ll think to ask for Sun processors is anyone’s guess, Weinberg cautioned, since the processor brand isn’t highlighted in the hardware packages.”This is a bet on both sides,” Weinberg said. “It’s not a sure thing.”

But forgiveness is good medicine for the soul — and for business too. Sounds like a good move.

Vyatta router startup challenges rival Cisco with attitude

This blog post was written by Pam Derringer, SearchEnterpriseLinux.com’s news writer.

You’ve got to hand it to Vyatta Inc. The Belmont, Calif-based startup daring to take on Cisco Systems Inc. with free, downloadable open source router software is a hands-down winner when it comes to chutzpah.

As those in the news biz are painfully aware, the standard company description at the end of every press release (known as “boilerplate,” and rightly so) is typically jammed with as much meaningless jargon as a commuter-packed, rush-hour subway. But not Vyatta’s.

Vyatta starts by saying its “networking solutions (An empty word that should be exiled) provide an alternative to over-priced, inflexible products from proprietary vendors.” Zap No. 1. But that’s just the warmup.

Then it continues: “Our customers are smarter, better looking, and drive much nicer cars than purchasers of big-name products.” Zap. No. 2. Wow. This is getting personal. Way personal.

Finally, it compliments its customers as “thought leaders.” Attitude can go a long way in helping a David challenge a Goliath.

(A disclaimer: The boilerplate from Cisco, the market share networking leader, is brief and to the point. Much better than most. But it’s a lot less entertaining.)

As a closing note, I’m a native New Englander, so I didn’t have to read Vyatta’s company backgrounder to know that the startup was based in California. No kidding. Its boilerplate has California hip written all over it. Back to my long, impatient wait through gray skies and snowy driveways for our all-too-short New England summers.

Linux on the desktop: Soon, but not yet

This blog was contributed by SearchEnterpriseLinux.com expert Sander van Vugt.

At Novell Inc.’s annual BrainShare user conference in Salt Lake City, I talked to Guy Lunardi, one of the most important guys behind Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED). I had one pressing question for him. I showed him my new Dell XPS laptop, which has a lot of fancy stuff and runs out of factory Windows Vista (since that is the only OS that will allow me to use all the fancy stuff). So I asked him, “When will I install SUSE Linux on that?”

He responded, “Sander, if you go to a shop, buy a Vista DVD and install it on your laptop, do you think it will all work?” The answer was of course not.

When you introduce new hardware, one of the major issues is driver support. “Currently we are talking a lot with the people that develop the devices that are in these new computers to make sure that Linux drivers will be available,” Lunardi explained. “We help them wherever we can and it’s only getting better. It helps that we have some major customers like the Peugeot car manufacturer in France that demand specific functionality. They ask [for] a feature, we’ll make sure they get it and the result of all the effort will be in our new software.”

So there have been lots of developments recently. As a result, when it comes out later this year, openSUSE 11 will be as good as Windows Vista in supporting devices. “But,” Lunardi assured me, “you’ll always have to complete the installation of your operating system by downloading and installing additional drivers. That’s the case for Linux, [just] as it is the case for Windows.”

Fair enough. I’ll give it a try when openSUSE 11 comes out.

RHEL installation hang-ups and virtual media fun

I had an opportunity this week to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.5 (64-bit version) for a system running a specialized vendor application. I’d like to share my frustration with you so that you can avoid such learning experiences in your future server builds. 

On a Dell PowerEdge 2950 III server, we were unable to assign the Dell Remote Assistance Card virtual media capability or DRAC for a floppy image that contained the array controller driver for the OS install. As we did not have a floppy, our install came to a halt when trying to load the driver:

Installation stopped, now what?
This is not a show stopper. In fact, you have two options that can get this situation resolved. One option is access the files in a floppy image format, extract them to a CD-ROM and make an ISO image with only those files. The other option is hook up a USB floppy drive (the Dell BIOS will make this appear as a normal floppy) with the driver files extracted on a legacy floppy.

Rapid rebuilding process
Should you have multiple systems to re-install either for build or restore process, take the time to determine the quickest way to rebuild a server on your hardware. I’d recommend the CD-ROM ISO image simply because I find it easier to manage files than actual media.

Ubuntu server momentum builds toward ‘critical mass’

At CIO.com today, Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth gives a nice year-ending top ten list on a topic he’s surely familiar with on the most intimate of levels: Ubuntu.

More specifically, Shuttleworth talks about the Top Ten Reasons Why Ubuntu Is Best for Enterprise Use. In the list Shuttleworth runs down the usual laundry list of pro-Linux items, including flexibility, cost, support chops and its strong security track record; and addressed a few new ones as well like application selection. “There are more than 20,000 packages immediately available to Ubuntu users. These include the largest selection of open-source tools and a growing list of proprietary applications,” he said.

Normally, a CEO waxing positively about his own product is nothing new, but this year has been a roller coaster ride for Ubuntu and I can’t help but think this column is a harbinger of things to come for the OS.

First, there were two substantial releases for Ubuntu this year. In April Feisty Fawn (7.04) launched, and Canonical was again beating the server drum full-force to get users to notice that this free little distro had matured over the past two years. Deploying it on the server was now an option said Jane Silber, Canonical’s director of operations. “On the server side, we have increased support for virtualization, and Ubuntu now supports a number of virtualization technologies. We have been working with VMware on some performance testing with Ubuntu as a guest operating system and as the host OS. We have seen very good performance numbers there. We also have Xen in the universe repository, and we’ve added [Kernel-based Virtual Machine] support,” she said.

I had already written about this a few times over the past year and I was looking for something beyond what Canonical was already saying about what was being put into Ubuntu’s code.

We go that response in May, and it was a small landslide victory for Canonical. In a joint statement released May 3, Dell Inc.. and Canonical announced that Dell would offer laptops and desktop computers pre-installed with Ubuntu Linux 7.04. Dell CEO Michael Dell acquired a Precision M90 mobile workstation and loaded it with Ubuntu 7.04 and a host of open source applications just to cap the whole announcement off. At the time, Raven Zachary, a senior analyst with New York-based 451 Group, said the news also meant users could expect an Ubuntu server offering from Dell in the near future. “I think you will find Dell, over time, also offering Ubuntu across its server product line as Ubuntu grows in popularity in the data center,” he said.

Nice segue, Raven, because what happened next was right up that alley. During a qucik call with Canonical’s marketing director Gerry Carr in August, he and I started talking about hardware vendors and which among them might be ideal candidates for pre-installed Ubuntu. “[Pre-installed Ubuntu on the server] is something we would like to do, and we’ve made no secret about it,” Carr said. “Customers have asked for this, and if people want to see Ubuntu pre-installed on Dell servers, then they should go to [Dell] IdeaStorm and continue to ask for it.” The Dell/Ubuntu program was expanded to encompass Europe in August, and observers at the time said it was yet another indicator of Ubuntu’s building momentum.

Carr said that while the deal will “hopefully be with Dell,” Canonical is also considering server vendors other than Dell, and at a later date the company will reveal the results of those talks. “This doesn’t mean a deal is imminent, but those who want and require Ubuntu on the server will have something available reasonably soon,” he said.

Which leads us to the present. Last week, at Linux-Watch.com, Rick Becker, Dell Product Group’s vice president of applications, said Dell is currently in the process of certifying Ubuntu for all its server lines. “But we are still several months away from announcing a certification. I’d say it’ll be announced in Q1 next year,” he said.

The Ubuntu firehose is now open, but there are still a few obstacles to address before the prerequisite “touchdown” articles are written (how’s that for a mixed metaphor?) How big is the demand, you ask? Dell IdeaStorm received more than 130,000 requests for pre-installed desktop Ubuntu in early 2007, but that number is a pin drop compared to the number of Red Hat and Novell instances in the enterprise today. And that number pales in comparison to the number of Microsoft Windows deployments worldwide. There’s also the recently raised concerns about Ubuntu’s documentation to address as well.

Regardless, the momentum is building around Ubuntu on both the desktop and the server. Whether or not it reaches critical mass is something we’ll have to dig into now, won’t we?