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.

Physicalization at work – software pricing at bay

This is an unashamed take from an Arstechnica.com article, and I certainly can’t take credit for the term. I’m just back from a week of touring around Silicon valley talking about our thinking for Dell 12G servers, to Dell customers and especially to those that take our products and integrate them into their own product offerings. It was a great learning experience, and if you took time to see me and the team, thank you!

One of the more interesting discussions both amongst the Dell team, and with the customers and integrators, was around the concept of physicalization. Instead of building bigger and faster servers, based around more and more cores and sockets, why not have a general purpose, low power, low complexity physical server that is boxed up, aggregated and multiplexed into a physicalization offering?

For example, as discussed in the arstechnica article, using a very simplified, atom based server, eliminate many of the older software and hardware additions that make motherboards more complex and more expensive to build, which in turn with the reduced power and heat, makes them even more reliable. Putting twelve, or more in a single 2U server makes a lot of sense.

They also, typically don’t need a lot of complex virtualization software to make full use of the servers. That might sound like heresy in these days when virtualization is assumed and the major driver behind much of the marketing spend, and much of the technology spend.

So what’s driving this? Well mostly, if you think about it, the amount of complexity needed in the x86 marketplace these days, and also in mainframe and Power/UNIX marketplace is through complex software and systems management. That complexity is driven by two needs.

1. Server utilization – in order to utilize the increasing processor power, sockets and cores, you need to virtualize the server and split into consumable, useful chunks. This would normal require a complex discussion about multi-threaded programming and complexity, but I’ll ignore that this time. Net, net there are very few workloads and applications that can use the effective capacity offered by current top-end Intel and AMD x86 processors.
2. Software Pricing – Since the hardware vendors, including Dell, sell these larger virtualized servers as great business opportunities to simplify IT and server deployment by consolidating disperate, and often distributed server workloads into a single, larger, more manageable server, the software vendors want in on the act. Otherwise they lose out on revenue as the customer deploys fewer and fewer servers. On eploy to combat this, to to charge by core or socket. Ultimately their software software does little and sometimes nothing to exploit these features, they just charge, well, because they can. In a virtualized server environment, the same is true. The software vendors don’t exploit the virtualization layer, heck in some cases they are even reluctant to support their software running in this environment and require customers to recreate any problems in a non-virtualized environment before looking at them.

And so it is that physicalization is starting to become attractive. I’ve discussed both the software pricing and virtualization topics many times in the past. In fact, I’ve expressed my frustration that software pricing still seems to drive our industry and, more importantly, our customers to do things that they otherwise wouldn’t. Does your company make radical changes to your IT infrastructure just to get around uncompetitive and often restrictive software pricing practices? Is physicalization interesting or just another dead-end IT trend?

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.

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!

Life is visceral

After I posted my “Is SOA Dead?” entry, Joel Zimmerman, aka Deadmau5 reminded me of this by Spiro Agnew, in a speech, just down the road in Houston, Texas, on 22 May 1970, where VP Agnew said in response to the Vietnam War riots: ”Subtlety is lost, and fine distinctions based on acute reasoning are carelessly ignored in a headlong jump to a predetermined conclusion.”

“Life is visceral rather than intellectual. And the most visceral practitioners of life are those who characterize themselves as intellectuals. Truth is to them revealed rather than logically proved. And the principal infatuations of today revolve around the social sciences, those subjects which can accommodate any opinion, and about which the most reckless conjecture cannot be discredited. Education is being redefined at the demand of the uneducated to suit the ideas of the uneducated.”

You can read the full text here or you can listen to it here. Why don’t people have diction like that anymore? Why have I taken to spelling everything the American way? And why are there no riots anymore over outrageous goverment actions?

Spaghetti cabling

Racks and Racks of Spaghetti, photo by: Andrew McKaskill

As always, I’ve been focusing on the positive and forward looking aspects of unified fabrics for data centers. I got a few interesting emails after my last blog entry on the problems people have now that need solving, not least the cost, reliability and sheer complexity caused by the current situation.

One of the emails included a link to this blog entry on vibrant.com, which has a great collection of cable mess pictures. In his email to me Chris wrote “most of our racks are carefully organised and formally tied off in bundles. Server replacement is relatively easy if you just want to exchange one with another that fits in the same space. The problem comes when you need to reconfigure a few servers, add some appliances, maybe remove an email backup or firewall appliance and relocate in a different rack, you undo the cable ties and everything starts falling apart. While none of our rows looks this bad, many of the racks within the rows end up looking like this.”

He goes on to discuss some of the related problems this causes and often the complete lack of momentum in solving the problem because of how labor intensive and expensive it can be, both in cost and downtime to deal with these issues. Another email included a link to this discussion forum on techrepublic.

I have to admit, this is an area I have little or no experience with. Nancy has yet to take me on a tour of the test bed we use across the hall for the high-end Power systems, and as I’ve been locked away working on design mostly for the past 5-years, I’ve not witnessed the explosive growth in large scale data centers. Since I’m doing customer validation sessions now, don’t be surprised if when I come to your office, I ask to see the machine room.

The “L” Word

There’s an excellent analysis by Frank Dzubeck over on Network World today about the new Enterprise Data Center and that hoary old chestnut latency. I don’t know who briefed Frank, it wasn’t me, Jeff and I talked this afternoon and I asked, it wasn’t him, since the article covered also the z10 announcement, I have a good idea though

Frank covers ensembles, data center utilization and the some of the new data center fabric issues extremely well. He also makes the point, that I’d like folks to be clear about, that this isn’t the resurgance of the mainframe, or everthing back to a central server.

We’ve grown use to indefinite waits, or unbelievably fast response times from certain popular websites, but the emerging problem is around latency in the data center. How to deliver service levels and response times in an increasingly rich and complex systems environment. It’s OK to build a data center or server subsystem focussed around a single business model, something like Amazons EC2 or S3, or Googles search and query engines; it’s another to integrate a vast array of different vendors IT equipment bought at different times for different business applications and services and integrate them all together and orchestrate them as business services. While MapReduce may or may not be as good as, or better than a database, not everything is going to be run in this fashion.

Fibre channel over ethernet is a going to happen, 10Gb ethernet opens up some real options in terms of both integrating systems, and distributing services. It will be almost as fast to connect to another server as it is to talk between cores and processors within the same server. This disclosure from IBM Research today shows the way to the next generation of interconnected infrastructure, working at 300-Gbit/second, the bus goes optical making the integration of rich data systems video, VOIP, total encryption of data, secure key based secure infrastructure services, integrated with more traditional transactional systems a real possibility.

The opportunity isn’t to take the same old stuff and distribute it because the fabric is faster, it’s about better integrating systems, exploiting new ways of doing things. Introducing a common event infrastructure, being more intelligent about WAN and Application routing, having a publish/subscribe/consume model for the infrastructure and genuinely opening it up and simplifying it.

Of course, there a re lots of blanks to be filled in, but the new Enterprise Data Center is taking shape.

Appliances, Stacks and software virtual machines

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.