Appliances – Good, bad or virtual ?

So, in another prime example of “Why do Analysts blogs make it so hard to have a conversation?” , Gordon Haff of Illuminata today tweeted a link to a new blog post of his on appliances. No comments allowed, no trackbacks provided.

He takes Chuck Hollis (EMC) post and opines various positions on it. It’s not clear what the notion of “big appliance” is as Chuck uses it. Personally, I think he’s talking about solutions. Yes, I know it’s a fine line, but a large all purpose data mining solution with its’own storage, own server, own console, etc. is no more an appliance than a kitchen is. The kitchen will contain appliances but it is not one itself. If thats not what Chuck is describing, then his post has some confusion, very few organizations will have a large number of these “solutions”.

On the generally accepted view of appliances, I think both Gordon and Chuck are being a little naive when they think that all compute appliances can be made virtual and run on shared resource machines.

While at IBM I spent a lot of time, and learned some valuable lessons about appliances. I was looking at the potential for the first generation of IBM designed WebSphere DataPower appliances. At first, it seemd to me even 3-years ago that turning them into a virtual appliance would be a good idea. However, I’d made the same mistake that Hollis and Haff make. They assume that the type of processing done in an appliance can be transparently replaced by the onward march of Moores Law on Intel and IBM Power processors.

The same can be said for most appliances I’ve looked at. They have unique hardware design, which often includes numerous specialized processing functions, such as encryption, key management and even environmental monitoring. Appliances though real value add is that they are designed with a very specific market opportunity in mind. That design will require complex workload analysis, and reviewing the balance between general purpose compute, graphics, security, I/O and much more, and producing a balanced design and most importantly, a complete user experience to support it. Thats often the key.

Some appliances offer the sort of hardware based security and tamper protection that can never be replaced by general purpose machines.

Yes Hollis and Haff make a fair point that these appliances need separate management, the real point is that many of these appliances need NO management at all. You set them up, then run them. Because the workload is tested and integrated the software rarely, if ever fails. Since the hardware isn’t generally extensible, aka as Chuck would have it, you are locked into what you buy, updating drivers and introducing incompatibility isn’t an issue as it is with most general purpose servers.

As for trading one headache for another, while it’s a valid point, my experience so far with live migration and pools of virtual servers, network switches, SAN setup etc. is that you are once again trading one headache for another. While in a limited fashion it’s fairly straight forward to do live migration of a virtual workload from one system to another. Doing it at scale, which is what is required if you’ve reached the “headache”point that Chuck is positing, is far from simple.

Chuck closes his blog entry with:

Will we see a best-of-both-worlds approach in the future?

Well I’d say that was more than likely, in fact it’s happening and has been for a while. The beauty of an appliance is that the end user is not exposed to the internal workings. They don’t have to worry about most configuration options and setup, management is often minimised or eliminated, and many appliances today offer “phone home” like features for upgrade and maintenance. I know, we build many of them here at Dell for our customers, including EMC, Google etc.

One direction that we are likely to see, is that in the same current form factor of an appliance, it will become a fault tolerant appliance by replicating key parts of the h/w, virtualizing the appliance and running multiple copies of the appliance workload within a single physical appliance, all once again delivering that workload and deployment specific features and functions. This in turn reduces the number of physical appliance a customer will need. So the best of both worlds, although I suspect that not what Chuck was hinting at.

While there is definitely a market for virtual software stacks, complete application and OS instances, presuming that you can move all h/w appliances to this model, is missing the point.

Let’s not forget, SANs are often just another form of appliance, as are TOR/EOR network switches, and things like the Cisco Nexus. Haff says that appliances have been around since the late 1990’s, well at least as far as I can recall, in the category of “big appliances”, the IBM Parallel Query Server which ran a customized mainframe DB2 workload, and attached to an IBM S/390 Enterprise Server was around in the early 1990’s.

Before that many devices were in fact sold as appliances, they were just not called that, but by todays definition, thats exactly what they were. My all time favorite was the IBM 3704, part of the IBM 3705 communications controller family. The 3704 was all about integrated function and a unique user experience, with at the time(1976) an almost space age touch panel user interface.

IBM update on Power 7

For those interested, IBM has apparently revealed some details on the upcoming Power 7 processors. Gordon Haff an analyst has written two blog entries on aspects of the disclosure meeting. The first on the size, capacity, performance and the second, on the design, threading and cache etc. Nice to see Gordon picked up on x86 Transitive, no word on any new developments though.

I suspect that given the state of the industry now, the Power Systems folks are feeling pretty pleased with the decisions we made on the threading design and processor threading requirements almost over two years ago, no point in chasing rocks if you have virtualization. Best not rest on your laurels though guys. You’ve got some really significant software pricing issues to deal with, and it will be interesting to see if you took my advice on an intentional architecture for the Power server platform management.

In a interesting, karmic sort of way, I’m doing an “Avoiding Accidental Architecture” pitch here at Dell this afternoon, I’ll be using the current Power 6 state of affairs as a good, or rather bad example. Thanks as always to Tom Maguire of EMC, and Grady Booch at IBM for the architecture meme.

Ironman and Dell

I’ve seen the “Powered by Dell” tagline on the Ironman.com website but never given it much thought. This year I missed out on a coveted Ironman Hawaii (World Championships) slot, but was fortunate enough to get a call from the ironman HQ at the World Triathlon Corporation and get a slot in the Ironman Executive Challenge at Ironman Arizona in November.

So it was with some interest that Laura sent me a link to this article which links Dell and the Ironman with some useful insight from the chief technology officer for the Ford Ironman World Championship. It ends with five Ways Creative Use of Technology Can Turn a Small Business Into an Ironman.

Nano, Nano – Serving you on 15-Watts

The Dell XS11-VX8 Server

This is something I was asked about a few times at EMC World, power and form factors for servers. Here is the latest server from the Dell Data Center Solutions group (DCS). It’s only a little bigger than a disk drive, and you can get 252 servers in a 42U rack. While the form factor is interesting, very interesting, you need to think outside the “box” to get the true value.

It uses the Via Nano CPU, to deliver an incredibly low-power solution of 20-29 Watts/server when fully busy, and 15 Watts/server when the OS is idle. It includes enterprise features like 64-bit operating systems, 1-to-1 virtualization, and remote management via IPMI. What this does is turn the current server paradigm on it’s head. Instead of using more and more power hungry server chips that deliver more performance than you really need, which opens the gate for someone to tell you about server virtualization and consolidation to make the most of the power per watt, or cost of the server. The Dell XS11-VX8 just gives you “enough” performance, at a good price, and an effective price per watt. For those sensative to cross-charging, billing out IT services etc. it has another side effect of simplifying software licensing and allocation.

Over on the Direct2Dell blog community, Todd has written a post with some useful additional detail.

EMC World – standards?

Tucci and Maritz at EMC World 2009

I’ve been attending the annual EMC World conference in Orlando this week. A few early comments, there has been a massive 64,000ft shift to cloud computing in the messaging, but less so at ground level. There have been one or two technical sessions, but none on how to implement a cloud, or to put data in a cloud, or to manage data in a cloud. Maybe next year?

Yesterday in the keynote, Paul Maritz, President and CEO of VMware said that VMware is no longer in the business of individual hypervisors but in stitching together an entire infrastructure. In a single sentence laying out clearly where they are headed, if it wasn’t clear before. In his keynote this morning, Mark Lewis, President, Content Management and Archiving Division, was equally clear about the future of information virtualization, talking very specifically about federation and distributed data, with policy management. He compared that to a consolidated, centralized vision which he clearly said, hadn’t worked. I liked Lewis’s vision for EMC Documentum xCelerated Composition Platform (xCP) as a next generation information platform.

However, so far this week, and especially after this afternoons “Managing the Virtualized Data Center” BOF, where I had the first and last questions on standards, which didn’t get a decent discussion, there has been little real mention of standards or openness.

Generally, while vendors like to claim standards compliance and involvement, they don’t like them. Standards tend to slow down implementation historically. This hasn’t been the case with some of the newer technologies, but at least some level of openness is vital to allow fair competition. Competition almost always drives down end user costs.

Standards are of course not required if you can depend on a single vendor to implement everything you need, as you need it. However, as we’ve seen time and time again, that just doesn’t work, something gets left out, doesn’t get done, or gets a low priority from the implementing vendor, but it’s a high priority for you – stalemate.

I’ll give you an example: You are getting recoverable errors on a disk drive. Maybe it’s directly attached, maybe it’s part of a SAN or NAS. If you need to run multiple vendors server and/or storage/virtualization, who is going to standardize the error reporting, logging, alerting etc. ?

The vendors will give you one of a few canned answers. 1. It’s the hardware vendors job(ie. they pass the buck) 2. They’ll build agents that can monitor this for the most popular storage systems (ie. you are dependent on them, and they’ll do it for their own storage/disks first) 3. They’ll build a common interface through which they can consume the events(ie. you are dependent on the virtualization vendor AND the hardware vendor to cooperate) or 4. They are about managing across the infrastructure for servers, storage and network(ie. they are dodging the question).

There are literally hundreds of examples like this if you need anything except a dedicated, single vendor stack including hardware+virtualization. This seems to be where Cisco and Oracle are lining up. I don’t think this is a fruitful direction and can’t really see this as advantageous to customers or vendors. Notwithstanding cloud, Google, Amazon et al. where you don’t deal with hardware at all, but have a whole separate set of issues, and standards and openness are equally important.

In an early morning session today, Tom Maguire, Senior Director of Technology Architecture, Office of the CTO on EMC’s Service-Oriented Infrastructure Strategy: Providing Services, Policies, and Archictecture models. Tom talked about lose coupling, and defining stateful and REST interfaces that would allow EMC to build products that “snap” together and don’t require a services engagement to integrate them. He talked also talked about moving away from “everyone discovering what they need” to a common, federated fabric.

This is almost as powerful message as that of Lewis or Maritz, but will get little or no coverage. If EMC can deliver/execute on this, and do it in a de jure or de facto published standard way, this will indeed give them a powerful platform that companies like Dell can partner in, and bring innovation and competitive advantge for our customers.

Community involvement or free labor?

I’ve been following Andrew McAfee’s blog for a couple of weeks now, as a result of someone twittering a link to one of his blog entries. In his latest blog post, “Three Mantras“, McAfee discusses something many of the tech industry will recognize, self support systems. McAfee nicely summarizes the business opportunity to build around online communities as support subsystems.

I posted some of my thoughts on the topic in comments, namely the question of recognition and reward, not for participating, but for those that stay on and continue to participate. Initial participation is often self rewarding, we go look for help, experience or education in order to achieve some work related task. Need to get some help using a particular programming language or API – as Apple could have said “there’s a community forum for that!”

What makes McAfees blog interesting is his recognition of this phenomena, and his translation of it in to business terms and impact. For Dell, the guys that are part of the TechCenter have been doing a great job recently of creating knowledge and sharing it. They’ve recently run a number of demo and tech sessions on some of our key management technologies. You can find the Dell TechCenter here. It provides links into a wiki, Discussion Forums(just like the ones discussed by McAfee, the techcenter forum currently has some 34,000 topics) and the increasingly popular TechTuesday chats.

As I said in a comment to McAfee’s blog, this isn’t a new phenomena, as long ago as the late 1970’s I was first introduced to VMSHARE. A User run online bulletinboard/time sharing system aka forum to support and help users of IBM’s VM/370 operating system. While today there are many, many more forums, technologies and places to go for help, you can gain as much value from them today as I did then, because, and thats especially true for the Dell Techcenter, the people who participate are knowledgeable, dedicated and passionate about what they do, otherwise they wouldn’t do it.

Dell Management Console and 11G Server Launch

I spent Friday afternoon in a wet Round Rock parking lot where we held the launch thank you party for the team that put together the 11th Generation of Dell servers and the associated management software. We don’t complain about rain in Austin, it feeds some of the best things about town, namely Barton Springs, Lake Travis, which feeds Town Lake where I run, and the lake at Pure Austin North where I swim, in perfect conditions, twice per week. The celebration was sponsored by our partner Broadcom.

The event was hosted by our executives, including Michael Dell, and they made some important observations on the process to design the servers, market acceptance and customer feedback. While I was waiting in the food line, one the other folks and I got talking, he said “I looked at your blog the other day and you didn’t write anything on the Dell Management Console”. And he’s right.

It’s a significant step forward for Dell customers and for Dell. The DMC is based on the modular Symantec Management Platform architecture and offers a comprehensive set of features at no additional cost. While I was in IBM Power Systems, one of the fights I had with them was over their console and management strategy. While I’m sure they had good reasons the way they did, what they did, their ongoing strategy couldn’t follow the same path of fragmented consoles for this, consoles for that, different interfaces, different terminology for the same things etc. I’m hopeful still that when they introduce their next generation of servers, they’ll have learned the lessons that Dell already has.

DMC replaces the existing Dell hardware management console, Dell OpenManage IT Assistant. DMC has a plug-in architecture that allows the console to be extended with additional function and to be used as a manager for other scenarios, devices etc. However, true to the Dell mission to simply IT, Reduce TCO and one way we are doing that is to included a significant amount of function in the base, rather than as chargeable plugins. Here’s a summary of the major functions and improvements over prior offerings:

• Hardware - multiple choices on how to explore, report and understand hardware configs plus export as tables; many pre-configured reports asd well as the ability to create your own.

  Proactive heartbeat monitoring is also supported, based on a user defined schedule; event suscription is also supported for Dell servers and MIBs can be imported for non-Dell hardware.

  You can push config changes and agent, BIOS, driver and firmware patches to many servers simultaneously without scripting.

• Security – you can group devices and servers by geographical, logical, organisztional or type, or create your own. These can then be managed using role based secuity. You can create your own roles, or import them from Microsoft Active Directory.
• Software – Support for hypervisors such as VMware(r) ESXi as well as Microsoft and Citrix. Health monitoring, discovery of virtual machines, associate to physical host server etc. Also included is the normal OS monitoring of utilization for memory, processors, free space and I/O.
• Networking – The console includes support for a broad range of devices, but also includes support for Fibre Channel switches.

Thats an outline of the support in the new Dell Management Console, powered by Altiris from Symantec. I went to look for a couple of white papers to include links for. One with a more detailed list of device support and a second with a more comprehensive strategy that showed the plug-in architecture and the other function available for DMC. I came across this great resource, the Dell POWER Solutions magazine(just a hint of irony).

Here is a link where you can download the entire magazine, as a 21Mb PDF file. Alternatively, here is a link for an index into the articles where you can review each article seperately.

Moo cards II

When I first created “business” moo cards, it created quite a bit of a stir. So I figured I’d post the moo cards II the next generation design. Unfortunately I didn’t get organised early enough to get them for this weekends AustinBarCampIV, so I’ll be using the standard Dell ones if needed.

I actually found a useful feature of PowerPoint 2007. If you import the image(s). and the text on top, then select all the elements, you can export as a single file, rather than a ppt file or doing a screen copy and then saving with another program. Go ahead, make your own

Use cases for management/consoles

I think I’ve got a pretty good idea how people use consoles and do management for large centralised servers either UNIX or Mainframe based. What I’m quickly learning is that while I can speculate on how organisations would do management and use consoles for x86 servers, there doesn’t seem to be a concensus, or many clear use cases.

As you’ll see in the coming weeks, Dell have worked with partners to come up with some pretty compelling technologies in the management space, and especially in consoles. I can’t claim to have had anything to do with those. However, we are now on the road to make some pretty important decisions on where we go next, what technologies we use, especially in standards, and how we tie a number of the existing threads and product offerings together.

I worked on a similar decision while at IBM, it turned into a pretty vigorous and fractious debate, but unless things have changed since December, they’ll be implementing the broad outline as part of their Power 7 Server rollout.

Now, I could just get Dell lined up to do the same thing. Only I don’t think that would be right for Dell customers, and specifically around x86 rack and row management, and even probably down at the Small business level, although perversly, the proposal for IBM Power would have a lot on interest for SMB customers, but for a whole different set of reasons.

First thing this morning I got invited to listen to AG Lafley, the P&G CEO who is also a member of the Dell board of Directors. He made some interesting observations about being customer driven, it was a refreshing reminder.

So, rather than develop some “best effort” use cases for server management internally, I’d like your help. Would you be willing to send me a chart or diagram that shows how you manage your servers and how you use consoles? I’d like to know how many servers per consolve, connectivity between console and server(s), speed of connection, location of any firewalls etc. How many people need access to the console and so on. Mostly initially though I’m looking for some schematics that show the console, the servers, connectivity, placement of firewalls, secure zones etc.

Feel free to leave a comment here, I’ll email you directly or you can send any questions or diagrams to mark_cathcart at dell dot com .

Dell PowerEdge R905 Virtulization Server

In between meetings etc. I’m trying to find and keep up with some of the best Dell information sources.

Over on his Dell Community Blog, Matt M has put together a good blog entry with links and a video on the recent InfoWorld 2009 Technology award for the Dell PowerEdge R905 as the “Best Virtualization Server”.

I called this blog entry out as a follow-up to my prior posting about in-bound and out-bound management, and the challenges of using Intels AMT. The PowerEdge R905 was specifically designed around the AMD Virtaulization platform, which isn’t AMT compatible, but does have AMD-Virtualization or AMD-V which is exploited to the max in the R905.

IT T&C’S

I’ve been able to spend an interesting few weeks examining both how Dell goes about procuring technology and building it’s systems, especially within the Enterprise Product Group and to some degree storage.

Some good things, some bad things, some just are what they are, out of time to market and business necessity. One of the early things I think I want to drive is an effort to create a stanard set of IT Management T&C’s. Think about it, any major company wouldn’t deal with another major company without understanding and agreeing T&C’s for things like payments, legal, disclosure, IP and so on.

While small companies find the level of detail in these T&C’s an unfair burden, they do help in so much as they establish a baseline for how the company acts by default. There are always special cases.

I’m thinking that it is increasingly important from an in-band and out-of-band management perspective that we have the same. If you want to bid for business from Dell to build a device, server, storage, etc. then you ought to be able to find out what our baseline operational requirements are. In mostly cases these ought to be standalone from a given server build, from the baseboard design for the next server, the management console for storage etc.

So thats what I think I’m going to tackle first, a framework of API’s, Protocols, Transports etc. that we can support. I’ll classify each of the major initiatives we have underway, either they are tactically important and we’ll support for the foreseable future, they are depricated and we’ll stop using/supporting them at a given point, at which time they’ll be superceeded or replaced by xx or they are no longer supported or being developed and no new funding or projects will be undertaken using them.

Declaring how we’ll support the various technology platforms will be good for our customers. They’ll have a clear roadmap and be able to see where we are on for example standards implementations; Hopefully it will also reduce the number of protocols etc. in use and standardise around a smaller subset. It will also be good for the OEM’S and Partners we work with. they’ll know what we are going to ask for in RFQ’s, and will be able to influence our thinking ahead of time, and will be able to skill and tool-up before we ask them to bid/build for us. Finally, it will be good for Dell, we’ll be able to build libraries of re-useable assets to handle the specific API’s, protocols, transports etc. and re-use these as much as possible across different products. Also, it will put us in a better position with respect to testing and tooling.

Of course, as far as possible the T&C’s as it were, will be industry standard(s). Some of these will have to be, de facto, they are what’s being built and used today. One of the things I’ll be giving some serious consideration to will be Intel’s Active Management Technology or AMT. While it appears to address a number of the key areas you’d want to tackle, but depending on it would put us in a difficult position with respect to AMD processors, which don’t have the same function, implementedthe same way.

Interesting times, am definately enjoying the new job. Thanks again for all the best-wishes.

Dell OpenManage and Dell Managment Console

Not sure how many Dell customers I have for my blog yet since it’s early days, but I just learned from Scott Hanson SystemEdge blog on Direct2Dell that tomorrow, Thursday Jan. 29th at 11am (central) time, our Executive Briefing center are going to do an hour long demo of the Dell OpenManage  platform management and the shortterm roadmap, as well upcoming Dell Management Console (DMC).

The demo will be rerun a number of times this year, so I know its late notice for Thursday, but you can go here to sign-up for any of the events. The web conferences will use Microsoft Livemeeting.

I’d be really interested in any feedback on OpenManage and DMC. While one of my short term focus items is on the platform and firmware management and structure for the 11g server platform, I’m looking at the longer term 12g platforms, especially their integration with other Dell platforms like EqualLogic but also increasingly partner management platform like EMC, Microsoft and Cisco etc.

If you have any colleagues who work in operations, networking or storage in the x86 space, please pass the link along, and ask them if they have time to leave comments here. Thanks!

New Year, New Start

Something’s missing on Cathcarts Corner, for the first time in 22-years, there is no IBM in the center of my CV. I’ll be starting in a new position at Dell on Monday 12th of January, as a Director of Systems Engineering, and Distinguished Engineer.

I enjoyed my time at IBM enormously; I got to work with some great people, on some great development and customer projects. My time came to an end though in Power Systems and more recently, data center networking.

In IBM, I’d never been part of a traditional development organization, rather, as my long time mentor and good friend Adrian Walmsley once noted, a poacher turned game keeper.

In my last four years at IBM, every project I’ve worked on has been subject to major compromise, cut-back and delays to accommodate another part of the IBM business, and I found that too frustrating.

My first project in IBM Power Systems was a great learning lesson. We spent 5-months looking at the software requirements for the follow-on processor to the p6. Presented with two processor designs, in the end we decided to go with the obvious one that built on the existing p6 chip, rather than a radical, highly multithreaded alternative.

After that, I failed to get any real software interest, either as platform function, packaging or, importantly in systems, or platform management function. Although some of my core recommendations are being built for the next generations of servers, it was obvious that the Power Systems team were still maniacally focused on dominating the Unix hardware performance at the cost of almost everything else.

I’ve no idea how different things will be at Dell. Unlike IBM Systems Group who have to solve every problem on four different architectures, and for a dozen or so unique machine type-models, Dell have their own challenges. I’m looking forward to helping solve them.