Networking

Cisco’s timing for Unified Computing System - a tad off?

Does anyone else think it is a bad idea for Cisco Systems to enter the server market when the industry is experiencing the most significant year-over-year sales decline in history?

Worldwide server revenue declined 24 percent in the first quarter of 2009 and shipments dropped 24.2 percent compared to the first quarter of 2008, and no one went unscaved; all of the top five global server vendors - IBM, HP, Dell, Sun and Fujitsu/Fujitsu Siemens - saw double-digit revenue declines for the first quarter of 2009, according to Gartner, Inc.

Worldwide: Server Vendor Shipment Estimates, 1Q09 (Units)

Source: Gartner (June 2009)

Meanwhile, Cisco is marketing the hell out of its upcoming Unified Computing System (UCS), which is rumored to start shipping in a couple of weeks. The company has been offering tid bits of information about UCS through webcasts for months to build anticipation for the system. For instance, yesterday. Cisco announced it would offer rackmount servers in addition to blades.

But once the drumroll for UCS dies and the system actually ships, who’s buying?

I would love to be a fly on the wall in a Cisco executive meeting to hear their strategy with UCS. Do Cisco executives really think this is a good time to introduce an entirely new server system? And are they arrogant enough to think they can beat IBM, Dell and HP at their own game?

Cisco’s Unified Computing System strategy; smart move?

I tuned in to Cisco’s web-based news conference yesterday to hear about their first server platform within the Unified Computing System, and my eyes are still rolling today.

Instead of showing off the new system - which they refer to as “the new movement” - with some demonstrations, we watched 90 minutes of Cisco’s CEO John Chambers and partners Intel, BMC, Microsoft, EMC and VMware congratulating each other on being masters of the universe. Good thing I had that barf bag nearby.

After Cisco and its partners were done talking about how revolutionary this new system is and how much they love each other, one reporter basically asked, where’s the beef? “We have been hearing about the California server for weeks now, but you haven’t mentioned anything about a server. Is this announcement related to that?,” he asked.

Before Chambers let his trusty engineer answer the question, he thanked all of his partners again. The Cisco engineer then reiterated  their strategy with this system while carefully avoiding the term “blade server” because the system is more than just that. And round, and round we went.

Bottom line, the system is a chassis full of Cisco UCS B-Series blades bundled with networking, storage and virtualization features. Take the pieces apart, and you have Cisco’s first blade servers. Some people may also have found it interesting that the Intel Nehalem-based servers come in both full and half depth options, so you can pack a ton of the half-depth boxes into a chassis (assuming they don’t throw off crazy amounts of heat).

So the fact that Cisco’s talking-head-style news conference was absolute torture doesn’t make the system itself any less interesting from a server market perspective. We already know their networking stuff works, so they really just have to prove themselves with some solid server engineering to compete with the existing x86 providers. (Cisco, I know you say you aren’t competing with those guys, but you are).

And in many ways, Cisco has come full-circle by introducing a server, said Anne Skamarock, a research director with the analyst / consulting firm Focus.

“When I worked at Sun Microsystems back in the mid-1980’s they debated becoming a Cisco putting intelligent switches (read: specialized servers) in the network. So in a very real sense, Cisco has been building servers for years – servers designed specifically for the work of switching,” Skamarock said. “If you think about it, the first “blade servers” were produced in the networking space years ago adding a form factor for multiple switches from the horizontal to the vertical.”

Cisco also talked about how much this system will save companies because it “radically reduces the number of devices and the required setup, management, power/cooling, and cabling,” but they didn’t talk about the acquisition cost. A Cisco spokesperson said they can not release any pricing details until April, but I am betting it is not a small number.

Even so, if Cisco has engineered a solid server and the system as a whole proves to be of good value, the Unified Computing System concept will catch on, but we aren’t sure when these systems will actually hit the commercial market.

And I’m sure server vendors like HP, Dell and IBM will follow suit with their own “me-too” unified systems similar to Cisco’s. Actually, those companies may even end up using their top networking partner for the plumbing. After all, in terms of virtualization, Cisco has come up with important technologies like VLANs and VSANs, which are now industry standards.

The way I see it, by creating this “new” market of Unified Computing Systems, Cisco is setting itself up for success in both the networking market and the server market.

Dell shipping Egenera PAN Manager on PowerEdge servers - finally

Dell announced today it has officially begun shipping Egenera’s Processor Area Network (PAN) Manager software on its PowerEdge servers sold in North America, nine months after originally announcing it would do so.

When Dell first reported it planned to ship Malboro, Mass.-based Egenera’s PAN Manager software, it was slated for availability by June. Dell did not respond to questions regarding the delay by the time of this posting.

But, now that it is shipping, PAN Manager software will extend beyond the hypervisor and virtualizes I/O infrastructure on Dell PowerEdge servers, including Ethernet network interface cards, Fibre Channel, host bus adapters (HBAs), and Ethernet and Fibre Channel switches.

By virtualizing I/O, PAN Manager essentially creates an entire virtual datacenter where nothing is tied to physical hardware, applications or operating systems. This allows IT to allocate compute, storage, and network resources wherever and whenever necessary. The software also manages both physical and virtual resources under one pane of glass. A demo of how it works is available here, on Egenera’s website.

With PAN Manager software, Dell will have a strength against competitors with virtualization management tools, such as Hewlett Packard Co. and its Virtual Connect software, which pools and abstracts the local area network and storage area network (SAN) connections to servers and virtual machines (VMs) in HP’s BladeSystems.

When Dell first announced its partnership with Egenera, Ideas International analyst Jim Burton posted a blog stating, “In today’s market, Dell can compete very effectively with other vendors on simple server virtualization and SANs. But what it lacks is a management tool that can pull everything together into an entirely virtualized datacenter. That is where PAN Manager comes into play. With PAN Manager, Dell leaps over many of its competitors with the ability to create the virtualized datacenter of the future today using inexpensive industry-standard components…We at IDEAS feel the OEM relationship is a win-win for Dell and Egenera, as well as the customers of both companies”

Unlike other software that Dell resells, PAN Manager is integrated with the Dell hardware in the factory. “That means the customer doesn’t have to worry about installing software, and all the pieces work together correctly with multiple vendors. Dell also provides any professional services and offers first line support on Dell / PAN Systems,” said Christine Crandell, Senior Vice President of Marketing for Egenera.

PAN software existed only on Egenera’s BladeFrame products until November 2007, when the company opened it up to third-party hardware. Fujitsu Siemens Computers was the first official OEM, and Egenera PAN Manager is now integrate into its Primergy server line as well.

Measuring application performance: Synthetic transactions vs. Real End User Monitoring

There are two ways of measuring application performance from the end user’s perspective: Synthetic transactions and real end user monitoring.

With synthetic transactions, an admin performs typical user functions while on a scripting screen; those actions are captured and run across multiple locations. “Companies with dispersed offices often use synthetic transactions to get a baseline of what a user is seeing for an ERP, HR or other corporate software application,” said David Langlais, director of product management at BMC Software. If an application takes longer than the determined baseline time to respond, IT managers would get an alert.

Synthetic transactions can also help IT managers track down a problem in the WAN. Is the problem inside or outside of the firewall? Run a synthetic transaction inside and outside the firewall to find out. “If my transactions are essentially the same from inside and outside the firewall, it’s not the outside network that’s impeding performance,” Langlais said.

Real end user monitoring tools use probes to track real user transactions in real time. “Companies that tend to face the public on the internet, Expedia, eTrade, Amazon, all use real user experience,” Langlais said.

So what model is the best fit for your organization?

Langlais outlined his recommendation in a recent email:

In general, I think corporate applications which are much more structured are well suited for synthetic. If there are many remote sites with many users (not so common in corporates) then RUM is a good complement. In general, RUM is well suited for mass public applications into e-commerce type applications where you are trying to find out how large groups from geographical areas are getting response. Here synthetic is a good complement to get the baseline response to critical paths through an application.

Many proponents of RUM are satisfied with this limitation however and spend a lot of effort pulling out the information they want.

There are also outside services that will do synthetic transaction for you. Give them a script of your transactions, and they replay them from all over the world. “A lot of the Internet-facing sites do that, as well as a lot of large corporations,” Langlais said. “The cons of outside services is that you have less granular control over what you are measuring and the costs can escalate very quickly. Basically, the more you measure and make use of the measurements, the more you want to measure.”

For more info, check out our recent Application performance management tutuorial.

Application performance management tool selection: Monitoring vs. managing

Last week, while doing some background research for our application performance management tutorial, I got into a discussion with Julie Craig, a senior analyst at Enterprise Management Associates about the difference between application monitoring and managing. While some tools can do both (i.e., troubleshooting and user experience monitoring), selecting the right tool for the job often depends on who’s using the tool.

Application performance metrics provide information about things like response time, quality of experience and user experience, Craig said. Application management products typically go “deeper” into the technology underlying the application, so that they can do the following:

• Detect performance problems
• Detect availability problems
• Correlate information from multiple underlying technologies to indicate overall application health.

“When application problems occur, [application management tools] isolate potential root cause to specific infrastructure elements or types,” Craig said. “For example, a performance problem might be traceable to poor database performance. This could be due to multiple factors, including poorly written SQL calls within application code, failure or potential failure of servers or network connections, too many users or transactions creating bandwidth bottlenecks, or potentially hundreds of other factors (or a combination of several). Application management solutions help IT teams track down problem source and hopefully minimize the amount of time that cross-functional technology engineers have to spend on isolating root cause and fixing the problem.”

Taking responsibility for app performance
According to David Langlais, the director of product management at BMC Software, senior IT staff care about whether end users call in to complain about an application performance issue. “For senior staff, seeing the inside of a JVM [Java virtual machine] is not that important.” These technologists care about technology’s results.

But still, someone has to get under the hood and take charge of the problem. With all of the different pieces of infrastructure involved in a multi-tier application, when an end user says, “There’s a problem,” every single person in an IT department could potentially get involved — from application programmers to network or database managers.

“The responsibility of performance management is distributed, but organizations don’t really like to work that way,” Jasmine Noel of Ptak Noel & Associates said. “What I’m seeing is the folks managing the application servers are assuming the broader role of Web applications manager, and they become the one throat to choke.”

Application performance management tools list
Craig emailed me the following list of vendors in the application performance space. The first list includes examples of tools that help senior IT managers get an end-user view of application performance. The second set lists application management tools for server managers looking for a deeper analysis. Many tools overlap both categories:

Application monitoring tools

• OpNet
• CA (Wily)
• Quest (Foglight)
• Oracle (Empirix)
• OpTier
• Citrix Edgesight
• BMC Proactivenet
• Coradiant (TrueSight)
• HP Mercury (now HP Business Technology Optimization Software)
• ASG Application Management
• This group also includes hosted services like Application Performance, Gomez, and Keynote.

Application availability, troubleshooting, root-cause analysis:

• Compuware Application Delivery Management
• Quest (Foglight)
• CA (Wily)
• BMC Proactivenet
• HP Mercury (now HP Business Technology Optimization Software)
• ASG Application Management
• OpTier
• IBM (Tivoli)
• Symphoniq
• PacketTrap
• eG Innovations

In your IT department, who’s in charge of application performance? Do you know of other application performance tools we should add to the above list? Leave your feedback in the comments.

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.

Next Generation Data Center and LinuxWorld conferences

The second annual Next Generation Data Center (NGDC)/ LinuxWorld Conference &Expo takes place Aug. 4-7 at Moscone Center North in San Francisco. SearchDataCenter.com and SearchEnterpriseLinux.com will be there to bring you news and information from some of the many technical sessions, keynotes and the show floor.

A few of the data center technical sessions we plan to cover include “Systems Thinking for a Radically Efficient and Profitable Data Center” by the Rocky Mountain Institute; and “Cloud Computing and the Data Center of the Future” by
Sam Charrington, the VP of product management and marketing at Appistry Inc.; and “Containers, Virtualization and Live Migration” given by Kir Kolyshkin, the project manager of the OpenVZ Project.

Some keynote addresses we plan to cover include “Stateless Computing - Scaling at Zero Marginal Cost above Capex” by Jeffrey Birnbaum, the managing director and chief technology architect at Merrill Lynch; “Data Center 3.0: How the Network is Transforming the Data Center” by Cisco Systems Inc. vice president and general manager Rajiv Ramaswami; and “Data Center of the Future: How the Delivery of Technology Will Change” by Citrix Systems Inc. CTO Simon Crosby.

Be sure to check in with us this week for these items and more.

Zimory testing data center resource trading marketplace

Zimory, a spin-off of Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, the research and development unit of Deutsche Telekom AG in Berlin, Germany, is testing a global trading platform to exchange data center resources on-demand via the Internet.

The Zimory Marketplace is basically a data center resource trading platform where users can buy and sell server resources and Virtual Machines (VMs). The company claims to be the first to introduce and operate an international trading platform to exchange data center resources.

The marketplace sounds like a great idea for data centers that experience workload surges  and need extra capacity on-demand, and data centers with underutilized servers can sell or rent their extra capacity to re-coup some power costs.

Zimory software

The Zimory software stack has three levels of operation:

• Zimory Host is the basic entity of a Zimory infrastructure. It is installed on each server which then becomes a part of a Zimory network of computing resources.
• Zimory Manager allows the user to oversee and manage an unlimited number of physical and virtual servers with Zimory Host installed and is available in a Zimory network. Zimory Manager ships with a web-based Graphical User Interface (GUI).
• Zimory Marketplace is the hub of the Zimory network and collects information about all available server resources and their status.

Servers having Zimory Host or Zimory Manager installed reside behind the Firewall within the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) of a data center, while Zimory Marketplace is located outside of the DMZ. All three of them interact with each other via standard HTTP.

Installing and using Zimory

To create a network of Zimory-enabled servers, the data center administrator downloads and burns the freely available Zimory Live CD image to boot each of the servers which is supposed to advertise their resources within the Zimory infrastructure. The administrator could also use a network bootable live image (also freely available) from Zimory. Both approaches will automatically turn a virtual server into a Zimory-enabled server. The installation process is almost identical for Zimory Manager.

Inside of Zimory Manager, the administrator can configure the available data center resources for direct online outsourcing and trading on Zimory Marketplace, and define limites to the available resources, as well as a pricing scheme (flat fee or pay-per-use).

For instance, the administrator can specify a particular group of Zimory-enabled servers or just parts of such a server for sale to third parties on Zimory Marketplace. Another option would be to rent remaining resources of a server with, say, less than 10% utilization.

Zimory in action

Before a workload peak occurs, systems in Zimory are running fine and the additional systems for load balancing are stored as VMs in Zimory Manager.

When an expected or unexpected load peak occurs, the IT administrator clicks on to Zimory Marketplace through Zimory Manager and searches for appropriate server resources. After finding those resources, she starts the VMs for load-balancing from within Zimory Manager.

The software applications contained in the newly deployed VMs will connect to the load-balancer of the core systems and start to take over parts of the workload. After the peak is finished the system will shut down the VMs automatically.

Of course, this can also be automated. An administrator can pre-define the thresholds for when the load is to be taken over by servers on the Zimory Marketplace.

The company plans to start beta testing soon and invites interested sellers, and purchasers, of virtualised capacity to register their interest on the Zimory website.

Add PCI Express I/O connectivity without adding PCI Express

Recently, Tucson, Ariz.-based NextIO announced its ExpressConnect I/O virtualization product, which adds additional PCI Express (PCIe) I/O connectivity to any server in a data center.

“PCI Express is cost-effective, has a lot of bandwidth and a wide range of standard based I/O devices are available on PCIe, but usually there is only one [PCIe] device per server,” said Chris Pettey, the CTO and co-founder of NextIO. “With [ExpressConnect], you can have many PCIe devices for many servers.”

ExpressConnect works by virtualizing PCIe. It’s a 3U high box with slots into which you can plug I/O devices and is coupled with the N1400-PCM High-Speed Switch Module which enables blade servers to expand their PCIe signals outside the chassis. Doing so creates a pool of I/O resources that is separate from the server itself and can be accessed by any server.

Pettey compared ExpressConnect to Hewlett-Packard’s Virtual Connect, which virtualizes the connection between HP BladeSystem servers and a network but is proprietary to HP BladeSystem. “[ExpressConnect] can do everything HP Virtual Connect can do, only across many platforms and blades and racks. You can run any virtualization platform, any OS, and mix and match servers.”

Egenera’s Processing Area Network PAN Manager software also virtualizes I/O resources and is available on Egenera’s servers and Dell PowerEdge servers. Dell released its own version recently, called FlexAddress, for its PowerEdge M-series servers.

David G. Hill, a principal analyst at the Mesabi Group in Westwood, Mass, ranks NextIO’s product highly for data centers with high I/O throughput demands. “NextIO has the greatest impact in processing environments where the bottleneck is I/O performance, at a reasonable price,” Hill said. “The initial benefits are in I/O performance-demanding environments, such as high bandwidth, high-definition video processing, financial modeling and Web 2.0 data center virtualization.”

A few months ago, I spoke with NextI/O, then waited weeks and weeks for the company to come up with a user reference and some product pricing to no avail. In a case like this, I generally move product information from my My Documents folder to the Recycle Bin, but at face value it appears to be a pretty good technology, and Hill gave it high marks, so I (begrudgingly) decided to post this in case anyone is looking for such a technology.

Just don’t ask me what users think about ExpressConnect, because I don’t know that there are any. As for pricing, the company suggests contacting marketing@NextIO.com