Blade servers

Boston Marathon website prepares for traffic surge

About a million people will visit the Boston Marathon website on Monday to check out the 113th annual race, so the IT pros supporting the website have been hard at work these past few weeks making sure the site doesn’t crash that day.

The Boston Athletic Association (BAA)’s technical director, John Burgholzer, spends three weeks prior to the race building the infrastructure at a colocation facility in Massachusetts to support the BAA’s website and other technologies surrounding the marathon, like the new AT&T Athlete Alert System, which delivers text messages to people who are tracking runners whenever their runners hits a checkpoint.

Burgholzer, who owns a technology consultancy company in North Reading, MA called Information Overload, uses Hewlett Packard (HP) blade servers to run everything. Interestingly enough, he doesn’t go the virtualization route, which would probably be quicker and easier, because he doesn’t know enough about it or trust the technology to handle the surge of users during race time.

“We haven’t tried out virtualization at all and I’m not sure we would. We get about 50,000 to 60,000 concurrent connections at peak time during the race, and I’m not sure virtualization would work for us performance wise,” Burgholzer said.

I’ve heard this apprehension about virtualization before, so it appears the technology is not as pervasive as companies like VMware would have us believe. Mainly because guys like Burgholzer are far too busy to learn about an entirely new technology, especially when their traditional approach works just fine for them.

So, Burgholzer adds seven HP ProLiant blade servers to the two that are typically used to run the website, for a total of nine blades running Windows 2003. HP blade servers were the right choice for the BAA because the servers require little space and are easier to manage that rack mount systems, plus, the organization had been using HP gear even before Burgholzer came on board nine years ago, and HP has always been “extremely helpful” at race time, he said.

Before the BAA moved from “a bunch of pizza boxes” to HP c-class blade servers in 2007, cabling and management “was a nightmare,” Burgholzer said. “We would build the data center up before the race using rented systems and people didn’t really care how it was set up, so we had a rats’ nest of cables in the back of the rack,” he said.

By switching to blade servers, the cabling is not an issue; he just slides new blades into the chassis as needed, and the management software makes configuartion easy, he said. The chassis has one gigabyte Ethernet connections on both the front and back ends of the server chassis, which he says are plenty, and he uses F5 Networks technology for load balancing.

With all of that, he’s confident there won’t be any issues with the website on Monday - knock on wood. “We have a pretty well-tuned website now; there was a bit of a bandwidth problem in 2007 and at the peak of the race we have seen the website running slower, but we have gotten it down now,” he said.

The day after the race, Burgholzer will start looking for ways to improve the website and new features to add for next year.

Server sales suffer on economy, virtualization; vendors branching out

With the U.S. economy in a recession, world economies suffering and virtualization adoption on the rise, it comes as no surprise that factory revenue in the x86 worldwide server market declined 5.2% year over year to $12.6 billion in the third quarter of 2008 (3Q08), according to the IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker released December 3.

In fact, this is the largest quarterly revenue decline for servers since the fourth quarter of 2002, and the sluggish server unit shipment growth of 2.8% year over year in 3Q08 represented the slowest increase in server shipments since 4Q06, the IDC reported.

“The x86 server segment was definitely impacted by the economic downturn; there was significant deceleration in the quarter with a particular weakness in September,” said Jed Scaramella, IDC Senior Research Analyst, Servers. “Due to the uncertainty in the market, customers cut back on all nonessential spending.”

Volume systems revenue declined 7.2% year over year in the third quarter, the first decline for this market segment in more than 14 quarters, and revenue for mid-range enterprise servers declined 9.5% year over year. Shipment growth also slowed significantly for x86 servers to 4.0% (1.97 million units) because of a low demand, and revenue declined 6.6% year over year in 3Q08, representing the largest year-over-year decline for the segment in more than 24 quarters, IDC reported.

The IDC didn’t mention this in their release today, but it is obvious that virtualization is partly to blame the slowing demand for commodity x86 servers because it increases server utilization.  According to Tom Bittman, VP and distinguished analyst with Gartner, virtualization has penetrated 12% of the market, and the number of VMs deployed doubles every year. “By 2012, we expect more than half x86 workloads will be run on VMs,” Bittman said in an interview about his presentation on the virtualization market for Gartner’s 27th annual Data Center Conference this week.

“Virtualization and cloud computing have screwed up the market; vendors used to compete in compute islands, they were all direct competitors, but now they fight for control of an entire virtual layer. IBM and HP are competing in broad server technologies, instead of HP and IBM competing only in the area of server hardware,” Bittman said. “All vendors worry about becoming commodities and they all want to be considered the brains of the industry”

Perhaps that concern, along with slow server sales, is why vendors including HP, Dell and Sun have branched out into the area of data center services this year that could add a revenue stream beyond selling hardware. HP acquired EYP Mission Critical Facilities about a year ago and began offering data center services in March. Just this week, Dell announced it would offer services to help people extend the life of their data centers. Before that, Sun announced data center services that include data wiping.

But, there were exceptions to the grim server market numbers; revenue for high-end enterprise servers grew 4.0% year over year, the third consecutive quarter of growth for the segment. Other exceptions to the slowdown were blade servers (11% of the market) and IBM System z (9.4% of the market), which both increased this quarter, IDC reported.

Scaramella said IBM System Z sales didn’t suffer because they tend to be cyclical and are built into companies long-term budgets, which is not always the case for the smaller x86 systems. “Customer are more likely to push out [x86] purchases and see what they can do without,” he said.

And blades were the only platform to experience positive growth in the quarter, with all major vendors exhibiting double-digit growth in blade volumes, IDC reported.

I’m no analyst, but I am guessing the demand for blades didn’t slow down along with other x86 servers because today’s blades are pitched as ideal virtualization platforms. The HP ProLiant BL495c virtualization blade, for instance, is one of many new blades designed with more memory, data storage and network connections to meet the needs of memory and I/O-hungry VMs.

In addition to their appeal as a virtualization platform, blade servers are desirable because they take up very little space in cramped data centers and many blade surpass rack servers in power and efficiency.

So, it will be interesting to see whether server sales recover when the world economies improve, or if they remain depressed due to the increasing use of virtualization.

The IDC is predicting this slowdown to continue throughout most of 2009, but server sales will rebound with the economy, Scaramella said. “We are not anticipating a quick rebound [but] I do not think we will see the same extreme fall-off the market experienced after the dot.com bust,” he said. “At that time there was a tremendous amount of excess capacity built out in the infrastructure. Over the past few years, many companies have been in a consolidation mode - reducing the numbers of servers they have in operations as well as reducing the number of data centers they have in operations. Back in 2001-2002, companies were able to put off purchase due to the excess capacity, this is not the case today.”

HP’s energy efficiency crusade to control server, data center power

A few Hewlett Packard (HP) executives visited with me yesterday to discuss their Green data center mission - and surprisingly, they admit that it doesn’t always mean using HP hardware.

They started off our meeting with a discussion about new and existing server power control tools, which I’m not convinced many IT admins actually take advantage of.

HP’s new Dynamic Power Capping tool within Insight Power Manager lets IT set power caps on HP servers based on peak load trends to prevent over-provisioning of power. The cap can be set on single servers or on an entire chassis of blade servers, and can also be based on user-defined policies, according to HP’s VP of Enterprise Server and Storage Infrastructure Software Mark Linesch.

HP’s ProLiant servers shipped within the past few years already have the hardware for this feature baked into them, so ProLiant users need only do a firmware upgrade to add the Dynamic Power Capping feature, Linesch said.

“HP has invested a huge amount of money in green technology not just for the sake of being green. It has very practical implications that save companies significant amounts of money,” Linesch said.

Other companies offer power capping features on their servers as well, including IBM. IT can set a power cap for IBM servers and IBM BladeCenter systems via Active Energy Manager firmware, when the firmware supports capping.

These tools sound great, but I question whether or not power capping features are actually being used in data centers. I’d like to hear from users about this; power control features have existed on servers for many years, but does anyone use them? Is a tool like HP’s Dynamic Power Capping a viable option for virtualized servers?

HP’s execs also told me about their vendor-neutral data center efficiency consultancy services. Since HP’s acquisition of EYP Mission Critical Facilities Inc. a year ago this month, HP  has offered vendor agnostic consulting services to data centers to help them (for a fee) measure energy efficiency, without any pressure to use HP equipment, said Bill Kosik, energy and sustainability director of HP’s EYP Mission Critical Facilities group.

“That was actually part of the deal when we were acquired; we wanted to stay vendor neutral and we have been able to do that,” Kosik said.

So far, HP’s EYP group has performed consultancy work (including thermal mapping and energy analysis) for about 30 data centers that are either on the brink of a major power consumption dilemna or in a transition phase and need help planning, designing and developing their data center, Kosik said.

On November 3, HP announced new EYP services packaged in a tidy bundle, as vendors love to do, called HP Energy Efficiency Design and Analysis Services, which includes energy efficiency analysis and design services that help data centers meet compliance regulations like those from the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED).

And of course, HP isn’t the only company offering  data center efficiency software and services to data centers these days. The list is long, which is great for consumers.

Gartner lists 10 most disruptive technologies of 2009

Gartner, Inc. analysts highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2009 during the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, being held in Orlando through October 16.

Some of the technologies listed were the obvious, like virtualization and cloud computing, and Gartner predicts that servers will evolve beyond the blade server stage that exists today.

Gartner’s definition of a strategic technology is one that could have a significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. The analysts looked at factors like high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major financial investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.

These technologies impact the organization’s long-term plans, programs and initiatives. They may be strategic because they have matured to broad market use or because they enable strategic advantage from early adoption.

Gartner’s the top 10 strategic technologies for 2009 include:

Virtualization. In addition to server virtualization, virtualization in storage and client devices is also moving rapidly as a way to eliminate duplicate copies of data on the real storage devices while maintaining the illusion to the accessing systems that the files are as originally stored (data deduplication). This can significantly decrease the cost of storage devices and media to hold information.

Hosted virtual images deliver a near-identical result to blade-based PCs. But, instead of the motherboard function being located in the data center as hardware, it is located there as a virtual machine bubble. However, despite ambitious deployment plans from many organizations, deployments of hosted virtual desktop capabilities will be adopted by fewer than 40 percent of target users by 2010.

Cloud Computing. Cloud computing providers deliver computing capabilities “as a service” to external companies and the services are delivered in a highly scalable and elastic fashion using Internet technologies and techniques.

Although cost is a potential benefit for small companies, the biggest benefits are the built-in elasticity and scalability, which not only reduce barriers to entry, but also enable these companies to grow quickly. As certain IT functions are industrializing and becoming less customized, there are more possibilities for larger organizations to benefit from cloud computing.

Servers — Beyond Blades. Servers are evolving beyond the blade server stage that exists today. This evolution will simplify the provisioning of capacity to meet growing needs.

The organization tracks the various resource types, for example, memory, separately and replenishes only the type that is needed, so companies don’t have to pay for all resource types to upgrade capacity. It also simplifies the inventory of systems, eliminating the need to track and purchase various sizes and configurations. The result will be higher utilization because of lessened “waste” of resources that are in the wrong configuration or that come along with the needed processors and memory in a fixed bundle.

Web-Oriented Architectures. The Internet is arguably the best example of an agile, interoperable and scalable service-oriented environment in existence. This level of flexibility is achieved because of key design principles inherent in the Internet/Web approach, as well as the emergence of Web-centric technologies and standards that promote these principles.

The use of Web-centric models to build global-class solutions cannot address the full breadth of enterprise computing needs. However, Gartner expects that continued evolution of the Web-centric approach will enable its use in an ever-broadening set of enterprise solutions during the next five years.

Enterprise Mashups.Enterprises are now investigating taking mashups from cool Web hobby to enterprise-class systems to augment their models for delivering and managing applications.

Through 2010, the enterprise mashup product environment will experience significant flux and consolidation, and application architects and IT leaders should investigate this growing space for the significant and transformational potential it may offer their enterprises.

Specialized Systems. Appliances have been used to accomplish IT purposes, but only with a few classes of function have appliances prevailed. Heterogeneous systems are an emerging trend in high-performance computing to address the requirements of the most demanding workloads, and this approach will eventually reach the general-purpose computing market. Heterogeneous systems are also specialized systems with the same single-purpose imitations of appliances, but the heterogeneous system is a server system into which the owner installs software to accomplish its function.

Social Software and Social Networking. Social software includes a broad range of technologies, such as social networking (Facebook), social collaboration, social media and social validation. Organizations should consider adding a social dimension to a conventional Web site or application and should adopt a social platform sooner, rather than later, because the greatest risk lies in failure to engage and thereby, being left mute in a dialogue where your voice must be heard.

Unified Communications. During the next five years, the number of different communications vendors with which a typical organization works with will be reduced by at least 50 percent due to increases in the capability of application servers and the general shift of communications applications to common off-the-shelf server and operating systems. As this occurs, formerly distinct markets, each with distinct vendors, converge, resulting in massive consolidation in the communications industry.

Organizations must build careful, detailed plans for when each category of communications function is replaced or converged, coupling this step with the prior completion of appropriate administrative team convergence.

Business Intelligence. Business Intelligence (BI), the top technology priority in Gartner’s 2008 CIO survey, can have a direct positive impact on a company’s business performance. BI is directed toward business managers and workers who are tasked with running, growing and transforming the business. Tools that let these users make faster, better and more-informed decisions are particularly valuable in a difficult business environment.

Green IT. Shifting to more efficient products and approaches can allow for more equipment to fit within an energy footprint. Regulations are multiplying and have the potential to seriously constrain companies in building data centers, as the effect of power grids, carbon emissions from increased use and other environmental impacts are under scrutiny. Organizations should consider regulations and have alternative plans for data center and capacity growth.

A few of these technologies were also on Gartner’s list for 2008, including Green IT, Unified Communications, WOA, Mashup and Social Software. Other technologies Gartner expected to be significant for businesses in 2008 were Business Process Modeling, Metadata Management, Virtualization 2.0, Computing Fabric, and Real World Web.

IDC Server Tracker shows slowing x86 server growth

Framingham, Mass.-based IDC released its Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker for the second quarter of 2008 (2Q08) today showing that although the overall server market grew in the second quarter of 2008 (2Q08), x86-based systems experienced their slowest growth rate in 23 quarters.

As a whole, the worldwide server market grew 6.4% year over year to $13.9 billion in 2Q08, marking the ninth consecutive quarter of positive revenue growth and the highest Q2 server revenue since 2000.

Unit server shipments grew 11.1% year over year in 2Q08 driven by a hardware refresh cycle and infrastructure expansions, according to IDC.

Although volume systems revenue grew 2.1% in 2Q08, they underperformed the market for the first time since 4Q06, as server OEM’s experienced strong pricing pressure in the marketplace.

Matt Eastwood, group vice president of Enterprise Platforms at IDC, said in a statement, “IDC saw strong growth in blades, Unix systems, and IBM System z demand across the marketplace. Diversity in market demand demonstrates customers do not believe a single standardized infrastructure is capable of meeting all their computing needs.”

x86 Server Market Dynamics

x86-based systems experienced their slowest growth rate in 23 quarters. x86 server market growth slowed in 2Q08 to a rate of 3% year over year ($7 billion worldwide). The 2Q08 was also the first quarter that spending for non-x86 systems outpaced revenue growth for x86-based systems since 4Q00.

Could it be that server physical sprawl is slowing? Now that virtualization is mainstream, have people slowed down on their server hardware acquisitions?

IDC blames the x86 server market slowdown not on virtualization, but on the pricing climate, saying average selling values declined 8.4% year over year in 2Q08.

“The pricing challenges many OEMs experienced, particularly in the x86 server market, is a concern as it may foreshadow a slowdown in market demand as enterprise budgets face further scrutiny in the second half of 2008,” Eastwood stated.

“While all the major vendors exhibited strong unit growth, there was significant price competition throughout the quarter,” stated Jed Scaramella, senior research analyst for Datacenter Trends at IDC. “Low-end volume servers, such as 1- and 2-socket systems, are somewhat viewed as commodities and experienced the most pricing pressure. Additionally, the quarter was made noteworthy by the fact that several of the tier-one vendors began shipping their new systems targeting large-scale datacenters. Typically, these are stripped down servers that are designed to operate at maximum power efficiency. All components and features that are not essential, including server redundancy, are eliminated to reduce the capital expenditure of these datacenter customers.”

Nashua, N.H.-based Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff said speculation about virtualization causing server sales to decline have always swirled, but never seem to manifest.

“I’ve been hearing the “won’t people buy fewer servers?” question every time there were faster processors, more processor cores, etc. for as long as I’ve been an analyst. And the market just keeps on growing,” Haff said.

“What you are seeing here though–and which relates to virtualization to at least some degree–is the relative popularity of larger servers,” Haff said. “Virtualization really helps people more effectively utilize larger servers even when single apps don’t need all the
horsepower. Even within the x86 server space we’ve seen more interest in 4-socket servers after that category was in decline for years.”

Blade Server Market Shows Strong Shipment and Revenue Growth

Although blade revenue decelerated slightly in 2Q08, year-over-year revenue growth of 40.8% in 2Q08 was the third fastest over the past 2 years, IDC reported.

Overall, bladed servers, including x86, EPIC, and RISC blades, accounted for $1.2 billion in the second quarter, or 8.8% of quarterly server market revenue.

HP held the number 1 spot in the blade market with 53.3% market share and IBM held the number 2 position with 24.8% share. Dell and Sun also experienced blade revenue growth in 2Q08.

Virtual machines per server: A viable metric for hardware selection?

When server vendors introduce new blade servers these days, they often mention virtualization in the same breath, often touting the number of virtual machines (VMs) their hardware can support. But those numbers are hardly the result of scientific method.

For instance, San Diego, Calif.-based Verari Systems recently announced that its VMware ESX 3.5-certified VB1257 for BladeRack 2 XL supports up to twice as many VMs as competitive offerings (16). After speaking with Verari, I asked the competition — Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and Dell — how many VMs their blades can hypothetically support, and was given some big numbers.

But are these server vendors asking the right question? According to Anne Skamarock, a research director at Focus Consulting, the answer is no. Although vendors boast about the number of VMs their hardware supports, “it really is a silly way to look at it,” she said.

“The number of VMs supported depends on the workload. For CPU-intensive workloads, memory will also be a significant factor in performance,” Skamarock said. ”I have spoken with customers who are running 30 VMs per 8-core system and expect to increase that to 50 VMs per system.”

Skamarock said Virtual Desktop Infrastructure adds another twist. “The rule of thumb is six to eight virtual desktops per core, but again, memory will be a big issue here depending on the OS.”

According to preliminary data from SearchDataCenter.com’s 2008 Purchasing Intentions Survey, 61% of the respondents run less than 10 VMs per server, though 33% run 10 to 25, and a mere 5% run more than 25 VMs on a server.

Vendors make big VM support claims

According to VMware Inc.’s website, server consolidation ratios commonly exceed 10 virtual machines per physical processor; so presumably, a blade server with two CPUs, like Verari’s VB1257, should be able to support at least 20 VMs.

Within HP’s ProLiant blade server line, the ProLiant BL460c/465c and BL680c/BL685c would be a good choice for a virtual server platform, primarily because they offer a large memory footprint, which means more than 16 VMs per blade in both cases, plus more network expansion and storage performance, HP spokesman Eric Krueger said.

“Keep in mind of course the number of VMs always vary – the number could be higher or lower depending on the needs the application/VM — but based on the rule of thumb … the BL460c can support up to 16 VMs and the BL680c up to 32,” Krueger said.

Sun Microsystems Inc. claims its Sun Blade servers pack two and three times that many VMs. The Sun Blade X6250, which has up to eight cores with Intel Xeon processors, 64 GB RAM, 110 Gbps I/O and 800GB of internal storage, supports 36 VMs; the Sun Blade X6450, with two or four dual-core or quad-core Intel Xeon processors and up to 96 GB of memory, can support up to 42 VMs and the Sun Blade X8450 with 16 cores per module and 128 GB Memory, supports up to 48 VMs, according to Sun.

Dell was hesitant to name a number of VMs that its PowerEdge blade servers can support, because the number is dependent on a number of factors, like workload, memory, I/O. A spokesperson did say that “Dell has blades that support up to 66 loaded VMs. This is based on VMware’s VMmark benchmark test,” a spokesperson said. “This is an area where we are doing quite a bit of work, so stay tuned.”

So I’m wondering: Are VM support numbers a consideration when buying server hardware, or is it too subjective? Let us know what you think.

Next Generation Data Center/LinuxWorld 2008: Reporter’s Notebook

I expected this year’s joint LinuxWorld/Next Generation Data Center conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco Aug. 4-7 to be full of technology vendors, high-level technical sessions, product news and interesting characters.

As you can see (at right), my expectations were exceeded.

This year’s conference is packed, with three to four keynotes each day, a large array of tech vendors and numerous technical sessions, covering storage, security, networking, applications, facility infrastructure, and virtualization.

In the five sessions I attended today, which touched on all of the above, virtualization was a predominant topic of conversation in each.

For instance, Rajiv Ramaswami, the vice president and general manager of Cisco Systems Inc., (at left), gave a keynote this afternoon, “Data Center 3.0: How the Network Is Transforming the Data Center,” and explained that, eventually, everything in the data center will be virtualized, including networks.

In another session I attended on creating an efficient, profitable data center, hosted by the Rocky Mountain Institute, virtualization was listed again and again as a key way to reduce data center power consumption.

Cloud computing (aka distributed computing), which goes hand in hand with virtualization, was also a popular topic in the sessions I attended, including the kickoff keynote, “Stateless Computing: Scaling at Zero Marginal Cost above Capex,” by Jeffrey Birnbaum, the managing director and chief technology architect for Merrill Lynch.

In between sessions, I took a tour of Rackable Systems’ 40-foot containerized data center (at right), Ice Cube, which was one of the most popular attractions on the large show floor.

Ice Cube is packed with up to 22,400 Intel Xeon processing cores in Rackable’s own half-depth servers, has a 36-inch central isle to access servers and uses direct current, or DC, power and self-contained uninterruptible power supply, or UPS, technology.

Ice Cube can be configured with IBM BladeCenter servers as well.

Tomorrow I’ll check out a keynote session by Oracle CIO and Senior Vice President Mark Sunday on delivering business value with next-generation data centers and more sessions on green strategies for data centers, cloud computing and virtualization.

IBM BladeCenter servers now shipping in ICE Cube

Rackable Systems, Inc. entered into an agreement with IBM to offer IBM’s BladeCenter servers inside its ICE Cube modular data centers.

As part of this agreement, IBM BladeCenter will be the only blade server platform available for custom ICE Cubes. Prior to this agreement, Rackable’s containerized data centers only supported Rackable’s own server hardware.

IBM also started offering its own containerized data centers recently, as did Hewlett Packard with its version, called POD. Unlike most containerized data center offerings, HP is letting customers fill the POD with servers from any vendor - IBM, Dell, Sun Microsystems, or otherwise.

There are some other vendor neutral containerized data centers, like American Power Conversion (APC)’s InfraStruXure Express and Verari Systems Inc.’s Forest, though Verari does push customers to use its proprietary blade servers, a spokesperson said.

Effective today, Rackable’s ICE Cube modular data center will be outfitted with IBM BladeCenter T or HT systems, which are NEBS-3/ETSI-compliant, meaning they’re certified for use in telecommunications environments and carrier facilities.

The ICE Cube is available in 20 or 40 foot container sizes. BladeCenter-specific configurations of ICE Cube can reach densities up to 1,344 dual socket, Quad core Intel Xeon blades, or 672 quad socket, dual core AMD Opteron blades.