Adventures in systems land

A couple of things from the “Monkmaster” this morning peaked my interest and deserved a post rather than a comment. First up was James post on “your Sons IBM“. James discusses a recent theme of his around stackless stacks, and simplicity. Next-up came a tweet link on cohesiveFT and their elastic server on demand.

These are very timely, I’ve been working on a effort here in Power Systems for the past couple of months with my ATSM, Meghna Paruthi, on our appliance strategy. These are, as always with me, one layer lower than the stuff James blogs on, I deal with plumbing. It’s a theme and topic I’ll return to a few times in the coming weeks as I’m just about to wrap up the effort. We are currently looking for some Independent Software Vendors( ISVs) who already package their offerings in VMWare or Microsoft virtual appliance formats and either would like to do something similar for Power Systems, or alternatively have tried it and don’t think it would work for Power Systems.

Simple, easy to use software appliances which can be quickly and easily deployed into PowerVM Logical Partitions have a lot of promise. I’d like to have a market place of stackless, semi-or-total black box systems that can be deployed easily and quickly into a partition and use existing capacity or dynamic capacity upgrade on demand to get the equivalent of cloud computing within a Power System. Given we can already run circa 200-logical partitions on a single machine, and are planing something in the region of 4x that for the p7 based servers with PowerVM, we need to do something about the infrastructure for creating, packaging, servicing, updating and managing them.

We’ve currently got six-sorta-appliance projects in flight, one related to future datacenters, one with WebSphere XD, one with DB2, a couple around security and some ideas on entry level soft appliances.

So far it looks like OVF wrappers around the Network Installation Manager aka NIM, look like the way to go for AIX based appliances, with similar processes for i5/OS and Linux on Power appliances. However, there are a number of related issues about packaging, licensing and inter and intra appliance communication that I’m looking for some input on. So, if you are an ISV, or a startup, or even in independent contractor who is looking at how to package software for Power Systems, please feel free to post here, or email, I’d love to engage.

Simulation is a big deal these days, not only can you get well ahead of actual chip availability by simulating architecture, but you can also run where otherwise you couldn’t normally.

Last week IBM Global Engineering Services (GES) inked a deal with Virtutech to use their Simics™ product to create advanced, system-level simulation models for IBM’s next-generation embedded processor cores, beginning with the PowerPC 464FP core.

More details here in the Virtutech press release.

No, not the verb, the noun.

One of my early posts in this blog was “A. Seven - Q. Ways to measure progress ?”, a response to an entry on Brian Peacocks internal blog. Thursday last week I had the pleasure of doing the pitch behind the post, to the world-wide IBM Assistant Technical Staff Member(ATSM) community. Although “corny“, one of the phrases that is a staple in the presentation is “Make sure change is something that happens for you, not to you”.

It stuck in my mind. When I got off a flight from the UK on Tuesday night, actually early Wednesday morning, I decided that I needed to live up to that mantra.

And so it was after some frantic last minute activities yesterday, I’m pleased to announce that today I signed form to become a full IBM US employee as of today. Nothing much else changes, I’m still leading the marketing requirements, scenarios and related work on Systems Management. I’m pulling together a number of important threads for the p7 based server, and I lead/own the Power Systems Appliance strategy work. But as of today I do that as a full IBM Corporation employee and will be resigning from IBM United Kingdom, and at least for the foreseable future, no more assignments. Colour me really excited.

Make sure change is something that happens for YOU, not to you.

[Update: I've uploaded the slides after a couple of requests, you can view them online or download from slideshare.net here. ]

Just like London buses, I don’t post for a while, then two came along together. Actually, I’ll follow this one up with some other interesting news for next week.

Anyway, a lot of the new on National Public Radio (NPR) today has been about NASAs next landing on Mars, instead of being another “bouncing ball” based landing, this time the Phoenix Mars Lander will be a more traditional rocket assisted landing, easy down gently. One thing NPR didn’t cover was that the Power Architecture will be at the heart of the mission and the lander. The major news organisations are just picking this up from an IBM press release, see Yahoo coverage here.

As Bowie sang “Wonder if he’ll ever know, He’s in the best selling show, Is there life on Mars?”

So, most larger IBM server users have a Hardware Management Console. The word console makes these boxes seem like they just provide a GUI into the inner workings of the IBM Servers, but actually they provide a huge amount of additional function and the systems wouldn’t be usable without them. More correctly they should have probably been called the IBM Server server.

As I’ve alluded to in a couple of prior posts, and on Twitter, I’ve been heavily involved in looking again at the role of Platform Management, that is the configuration, deployment, operation, monitoring of one or more System p homogeneous servers running in Blade or rack mounted systems. Yes, I understand that most organisations have other servers and want to manage them as well, and the work we are doing will definitely allow the System p Platform Management to be extended and driven by external Systems Management tools such as the IBM Systems Director, Tivoli Systems Management, BMC, Computer Associates etc. This will be through both existing and emerging industry standards(see blog).

However, what I’m focussed on short term is the role of the various tools within System p and AIX, but also to support Linux on Power and i5/OS, PAVE Linxu x/86 binaries etc.

As part of that it seems like re-missioning the HMC might be a good idea. On some of our Systems we have a feature called the Integrated Virtualization Manager(IVM) which provides some of the function of the HMC but without the requirement to run an external “console” aka the server server as it runs in a logical partition on the server itself.

I’m interested in any observation and comment on these two things. Would you want to see more function in an re-missioned HMC or does the function belong internally to the system, say running in a logical partition like the IVM? What do you see as the pro’s and con’s of each?

Over the past 6-months I’ve had a lot of feedback on both of these, I’ll incorporate any comments with those and hopefully towards the end of July be able to publish at least an outline or high-level design of where our thinking is.

See you in about 500-miles of cycling and a long spa weekends time!

A recent discussion on the value of infrastructure virtualization for SOA and SOA based middleware and related security issues was one worth posting on.

It seems to be a commonly held view that we really won’t get true Internet, Web security isolation for servers until we get the next generation of Intel hardware and related software updates from Linux and Microsoft and a protected kernal or nexus.

That overlooks the fact that System p already delivers features that enable hardware isolation that can protect software running in one logical partition from a). being hacked and b). if it is hacked, being able to compromise other partitions either directly or indirectly.[1] Continue reading ‘Security in Power5 LPARs’

In his Enterprise Architecture: Virtualization and Management by Magazine blog post, James McGovern muses on mainframe virtualization leadership and if the likes of James Governor and the 451 Group will start blogging about it. He also wonders if “IBM mainframes would make a better participant in a grid architecture than Sun, Dell or HP?”

It’s not clear where the link is to management by magazine, but the blogsphere is certainly a funny old world. Partitioning and virtualization is taking off in a big way and a few short clicks this is all back in focus. Continue reading ‘In search of partitioning’

Well the news is out that IBM has been selected by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a machine that provides 100 times the sustained performance of today’s general purpose supercomputers and is dramatically simpler to program, administer and use.

The machine will be Power7 based to be delivered in 2010 and beyond and will include, the AIX® operating system, IBM’s General Parallel File System, IBM’s Parallel Environment, and IBM’s Interconnect and Storage Subsystems — technologies that are key to IBM’s commercial product portfolio.

The DARPA project is one of the drivers for the n+1 generation of System p servers as the solution delivered to DARPA has to be a “commercial off the shelf” (COTS) system. However there are some really exciting things that we will be doing that go above and beyond the DARPA project that will change the face of enterprise computing, especially in total cost of ownership (TCO).

You can read the formal press release on the DARPA project here.

Meanwhile, much to do before then on both system design, packaging and software exploitation much of which will come with the Power6 based servers slated for 2007.