Continuing my post-week coverage of the [Data Center 2010 conference], Wednesday evening we had six hospitality suites. These are fun informal get-togethers sponsored by various companies. I present them in the order that I attended them.

Intel - The Silver Lining

Intel called their suite "The Silver Lining". Magician Joel Bauer wowed the crowds with amazing tricks.

Intel handed out branded "Snuggies". I had to explain to this guy that he was wearing his backwards.

i/o - Wrestling with your Data Center?

New-comer "i/o" named their suite "Wrestling with your Data Center?" They invited attendees frustrated with their data centers to don inflated Sumo Wrestling suits.

APC by Schneider Electric - Margaritaville

This will be the last year for Margaritaville, a theme that APC has used now for several years at this conference.

Cisco - Fire and Ice

Cisco had "Fire and Ice" with half the room decorated in Red for fire, and White for ice.

This is Ivana, welcoming people to the "Ice" side.

This is Peter, on the "Fire" side. Cisco tried to have opposites on both sides, savory food on one side, sweets on the other.

CA Technologies - Can you Change the Game?

CA Technologies offered various "sports games", with a DJ named "Coach".

Compellent - Get "Refreshed" at the Fluid Data Hospitality Suite

Compellent chose a low-key format, "lights out" approach with a live guitarist. They had hourly raffles for prizes, but it was too dark to read the raffle ticket numbers.

Of the six, my favorite was Intel. The food was awesome, the Snuggies were hilarious, and the magician was incredibly good. I would like to think Intel for providing me super-secret inside access to their Cloud Computing training resources and for the Snuggie!

technorati tags: IBM, LSC29, Intel, Snuggie, APC, Schneider Electric, Margaritaville, CA+Technologies, Cisco, Compellent, Joel Bauer

Tags:  schneider+electric margaritaville intel apc ca+technologies snuggie joel+bauer compellent lsc29 cisco ibm

Mastering the art of stretching out a week-long event into two weeks' worth of blog posts, I continue my coverage of the [Data Center 2010 conference], Tuesday afternoon I attended several sessions that focused on technologies for Cloud Computing.

(Note: It appears I need to repeat this. The analyst company that runs this event has kindly asked me not to mention their name on this blog, display any of their logos, mention the names of any of their employees, include photos of any of their analysts, include slides from their presentations, or quote verbatim any of their speech at this conference. This is all done to protect and respect their intellectual property that their members pay for. The pie charts included on this series of posts were rendered by Google Charting tool.)

Converging Storage and Network Fabrics

The analysts presented a set of alternative approaches to consolidating your SAN and LAN fabrics. Here were the choices discussed:

• Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) - This requires 10GbE with Data Center Bridging (DCB) standards, what IBM refers to as Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE). Converged Network Adapters (CNAs) support FC, iSCSI, NFS and CIFS protocols on a single wire.
• Internet SCSI (iSCSI) - This works on any flavor of Ethernet, is fully routable, and was developed in the 1990s by IBM and Cisco. Most 1GbE and all 10GbE Network Interface Cards (NIC) support TCP Offload Engine (TOE) and "boot from SAN" capability. Native suppot for iSCSI is widely available in most hypervisors and operating systems, including VMware and Windows. DCB Ethernet is not required for iSCSI, but can be helpful. Many customers keep their iSCSI traffic in a separate network (often referred to as an IP SAN) from the rest of their traditional LAN traffic.
• Network Attached Storage (NAS) - NFS and CIFS have been around for a long time and work with any flavor of Ethernet. Like iSCSI, DCB is not required but can be helpful. NAS went from being for files only, to be used for email and database, and now is viewed as the easiest deployment for VMware. Vmotion is able to move VM guests from one host to another within the same LAN subnet.
• Infiniband or PCI extenders - this approach allows many servers to share fewer number of NICs and HBAs. While Infiniband was limited in distance for its copper cables, recent advances now allow fiber optic cables for 150 meter distances.

Interactive poll of the audience offered some insight on plans to switch from FC/FICON to Ethernet-based storage:

Interactive poll of the audience offered some insight on what portion storage is FCP/FICON attached:

Interactive poll of the audience offered some insight on what portion storage is Ethernet-attached:

Interactive poll of the audience offered some insight on what portion of servers are already using some Ethernet-attached storage:

Each vendor has its own style. HP provides homogeneous solutions, having acquired 3COM and broken off relations with Cisco. Cisco offers tight alliances over closed proprietary solutions, publicly partnering with both EMC and NetApp for storage. IBM offers loose alliances, with IBM-branded solutions from Brocade and BNT, as well as reselling arrangements with Cisco and Juniper. Oracle has focused on Infiniband instead for its appliances.

The analysts predict that IBM will be the first to deliver 40 GbE, from their BNT acquisition. They predict by 2014 that Ethernet approaches (NAS, iSCSI, FCoE) will be the core technology for all but the largest SANs, and that iSCSI and NAS will be more widespread than FCoE. As for cabling, the analysts recommend copper within the rack, but fiber optic between racks. Consider SAN management software, such as IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center.

The analysts felt that the biggest inhibitor to merging SAN and LANs will be organizational issues. SAN administrators consider LAN administrators like "Cowboys" undisciplined and unwilling to focus on 24x7 operational availability, redundancy or business continuity. LAN administrators consider SAN administrators as "Luddites" afraid or unwilling to accept FCoE, iSCSI or NAS approaches.

Driving Innovation through Innovation

Mr. Shannon Poulin from Intel presented their advancements in Cloud Computing. Let's start with some facts and predictions:

Today: About 25 percent of the [world's population] is connected to the Internet There are over 2.5 billion photos on Facebook, which runs on 30,000 servers 30 billion videos viewed every month Nearly all Internet-connected devices are either computers or phones

By 2015: An additional billion people on the Internet Cars, televisions, and households will also be connected to the Internet The world will need 8x more network bandwidth, 12x more storage, and 20x more compute power

To avoid confusion between on-premise and off-premise deployments, Intel defines "private cloud" as "single tenant" and "public cloud" as "multi-tenant". Clouds should be automated, efficient, simple, secure, and interoperable enough to allow federation of resources across providers. He also felt that Clouds should be "client-aware" so that it know what devices it is talking to, and optimizes the results accordingly. For example, if watching video on a small 320x240 smartphone screen, it makes no sense for the Cloud server to push out 1080p. All devices are going through a connected/disconnected dichotomy. They can do some things while disconnected, but other things only while connected to the Internet or Cloud provider.

An internal Intel task force investigated what it would take to beat MIPS and IBM POWER processors and found that their own Intel chips lacked key functionality. Intel plans to address some of their shortcomings with a new chip called "Sandbridge" sometime next year. They also plan a series of specialized chips that support graphics processing (GPU), network processing (NPU) and so on. He also mentioned Intel released "Tukwilla" earlier this year, the latest version of Itanium chip. HP is the last major company to still use Itanium for their servers.

Shannon wrapped up the talk with a discussion of two Cloud Computing initiatives. The first is [Intel® Cloud Builders], a cross-industry effort to build Cloud infrastructures based on the Intel Xeon chipset. The second is the [Open Data Center Alliance], comprised of leading global IT managers who are working together to define and promote data center requirements for the cloud and beyond.

Fabric-Based Infrastructure

The analysts feel that we need to switch from thinking about "boxes" (servers, storage, networks) to "resources". To this end, they envision a future datacenter where resources are connected to an any-to-any fabric that connects compute, memory, storage, and networking resources as commodities. They feel the current trend towards integrated system stacks is just a marketing ploy by vendors to fatten their wallets. (Ouch!)

A new concept to "disaggregate" caught my attention. When you make cookies, you disaggregate a cup of sugar from the sugar bag, a teaspoon of baking soda from the box, and so on. When you carve a LUN from a disk array, you are disaggregating the storage resources you need for a project. The analysts feel we should be able to do this with servers and network resources as well, so that when you want to deploy a new workload you just disaggregate the bits and pieces in the amounts you actually plan to use and combine them accordingly. IBM calls these combinations "ensembles" of Cloud computing.

Very few workloads require "best-of-breed" technologies. Rather, this new fabric-based infrastructure recognizes the reality that most workloads do not. One thing that IT Data Center operations can learn from Cloud Service Providers is their focus on "good enough" deployment.

This means however that IT professionals will need new skill sets. IT administrators will need to learn a bit of application development, systems integration, and runbook automation. Network adminis need to enter into 12-step programs to stop using Command Line Interfaces (CLI). Server admins need to put down their screwdrivers and focus instead on policy templates.

Whether you deploy private, public or hybrid cloud computing, the benefits are real and worth the changes needed in skill sets and organizational structure.

technorati tags: IBM, FCoE, iSCSI, NAS, NFS, CIFS, DCB, CEE, CNA, TOE, SAN, LAN, Convergence, FICON, Ethernet, BNT, Cisco, HP, 3COM, Intel, ODCA, CLI

Tags:  iscsi lan san toe cli cifs intel cee cisco convergence odca ethernet dcb hp cna nas ibm bnt fcoe 3com nfs ficon

Continuing my week in Washington DC for the annual [2010 System Storage Technical University], here is my quick recap of the keynote sessions presented Monday morning. Marlin Maddy, Worldwide Technical Events Executive for IBM Systems Lab Services and Training, served as emcee.

Roland Hagen

Roland Hagan, IBM Vice President for IBM System x server platform, presented on how IBM is redefining the x86 computing experience. More than 50 percent of all servers are x86 based. These x86 servers are easy to acquire, enjoy a large application base, and can take advantage of readily available skilled workforce for administration. The problem is that 85 percent of x86 processing power remains idle, energy costs are 8 times what they were 12 years ago, and management costs are now 70 percent of the IT budget.

IBM has the number one market share for scalable x86 servers. Roland covered the newly announced eX5 architecture that has been deployed in both rack-optimized models as well as IBM BladeCenter blade servers. These can offer 2x the memory capacity as competitive offerings, which is important for today's server virtualization, database and analytics workloads. This includes 40 and 80 DIMM models of blades, and 64 to 96 DIMM models of rack-optimized systems. IBM also announced eXFlash, internal Solid State Drives accessible at bus speeds. FlexNode allows a 4-node system to dynamically change to 2 separate 2-node systems.

By 2013, analysts estimate that 69 percent of x86 workloads will be virtualized, and that 22 percent of servers will be running some form of hypervisor software. By 2015, this grows to 78 percent of x86 workloads being virtualized, and 29 percent of servers running hypervisor.

Doug Balog

Doug Balog, IBM Vice President and Disk Storage Business Line Executive, presented how the growth of information results in a "perfect storom" for the storage industry. Storage Admins are focused on managing storage growth and the related costs and complexity, proper forecasting and capacity planning, and backup administration. IBM's strategy is to help clients in the following areas:

• Storage Efficiency - getting the most use out of the resources you invest
• Service Delivery - ensuring that information gets to the right people at the right time, simplify reporting and provisioning
• Data Protection - protecting data against unethical tampering, unauthorized access, and unexpected loss and corruption

He wrapped up his talk covering the success of DS8700 and XIV. In fact, 60 percent of XIV sales are to EMC customers. The TCO of an XIV is less than half the TCO of a comparable EMC VMAX disk system.

Dave McQueeney

Dave McQueeney, IBM Vice President for Strategy and CTO for US Federal, covered how IBM's Smarter Planet vision for smarter cities, smarter healthcare, smarter energy grid and smarter traffic are being adopted by the public sector. Almost every data center in US Federal government is out of power, floor space and/or cooling capability. An estimated 80 percent of US Federal government IT budgets are spent on maintenance and ongoing operations, leaving very little left over for the big transformational projects that President Barack Obama wants to accomplish.

Who has the most active Online Transaction Processing (OLTP)? You might guess a big bank, but it is the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), with a system processing 600 million transactions per day. Another government agency is #2, and the top Banking application is finally #3. The IBM mainframe has solved problems 10 to 15 years ago that the distributed systems are just now encountering today. Worldwide, more than 80 percent of banks use mainframes to handle their financial transactions.

IBM's recent POWER7 set of servers are proving successful in the field. For example, Allianz was able to consolidate 60 servers to 1. Running DB2 on POWER7 server is 38 percent less expensive than Oracle on x86 Nehalem processors. For Java, running JVM on POWER7 is 73 percent better than JVM on x86 Nehalem.

The US federal government ingests a large amount of data. It has huge 10-20 PB data warehouses. In fact, the amount of GB received every year by the US federal government alone exceed the production of all disk drives produced by all drive manufacturers. This means that all data must be processed through "data reduction" or it is gone forever.

Clod Barrera

The last keynote for Monday was given by Clod Barrera, IBM Distinguished Engineer and Chief Technical Strategist for System Storage. He started out shocking the audience with his view that the "disk drive industry is a train wreck". While R&D in disk drives enjoyed a healthy improvement curve up to about 2004, it has now slowed down, getting more difficult and more expensive to improve performance and capacity of disk drives. The rest of his presentation was organized around three themes:

1. Integrated Stacks - while new-comers like Oralce/Sun and the VCE coalition are promoting the benefits of integrated stacks, IBM has been doing this for the past five decades. New advancements in Server and Storage virtualization provide exciting new opportunities.
2. Integrated Systems - solutions like IBM Information Archive and SONAS, and new features like Easy Tier that help adopt SSD transparently. As it gets harder and harder to scale-up, IBM has moved to innovative scale-out architectures.
3. Integrated Data Center management - companies are now realizing that management and governance are critical factors of success, and that this needs to be integrated between traditional IT, private, public and hybrid cloud computing.

This was a great inspiring start for what looks like an awesome week!

technorati tags: IBM, Technical University, Marlin Maddy, Roland Hagen, Doug Balog, Dave McQueeney, Clod Barrera, x86, eX5, FlexNode, Barack Obama, DHS, OLTP, DB2, POWER7, Oracle, JVM, Intel, Nehalem

Tags:  oracle barack+obama oltp roland+hagen flexnode jvm nehalem ex5 clod+barrera technical+university intel ibm #ibmstorage power7 doug+balog marlin+maddy dhs #storage x86 db2 #ibmtechu dave+mcqueeney

Continuing my rant from Monday's post [Time for a New Laptop], I got my new laptop Wednesday afternoon. I was hoping the transition would be quick, but that was not the case. Here were my initial steps prior to connecting my two laptops together for the big file transfer:

Document what my old workstation has

Back in 2007, I wrote a blog post on how to [Separate Programs from Data]. I have since added a Linux partition for dual-boot on my ThinkPad T60.

Partition	Size	Format	Mount	Description
/dev/sda1	26GB	NTFS	C:	Windows XP SP3 operating system and programs
/dev/sda2	12GB	ext3	/(root)	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4
/dev/sda5	1GB	swap	swap	Linux swap
/dev/sda6	80GB	NTFS	D:	My Documents and other data

I also created a spreadsheet of all my tools, utilities and applications. I combined and deduplicated the list from the following sources:

• Control Panel -> Add/Remove programs
• C:\Program Files
• Start -> Programs panels
• Program taskbar at bottom of screen
• D:\Install-Files

The last one was critical. Over the years, I have gotten in the habit of saving those ZIP or EXE files that self-install programs into a separate directory, D:/Install-Files, so that if I had to unintsall an application, due to conflicts or compatability issues, I could re-install it without having to download them again.

So, I have a total of 134 applications, which I have put into the following rough categories:

• AV - editing and manipulating audio, video or graphics
• Files - backup, copy or manipulate disks, files and file systems
• Browser - Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Google Chrome
• Communications - Lotus Notes and Lotus Sametime
• Connect - programs to connect to different Web and Wi-Fi services
• Demo - programs I demonstrate to clients at briefings
• Drivers - attach or sync to external devices, cell phones, PDAs
• Games - not much here, the basic solitaire, mindsweeper and pinball
• Help Desk - programs to diagnose, test and gather system information
• Projects - special projects like Second Life or Lego Mindstorms
• Lookup - programs to lookup information, like American Airlines TravelDesk
• Meeting - I have FIVE different webinar conferencing tools
• Office - presentations, spreadsheets and documents
• Platform - Java, Adobe Air and other application runtime environments
• Player - do I really need SIXTEEN different audio/video players?
• Printer - print drivers and printer management software
• Scanners - programs that scan for viruses, malware and adware
• Tools - calculators, configurators, sizing tools, and estimators
• Uploaders - programs to upload photos or files to various Web services

Backup my new workstation

My new ThinkPad T410 has a dual-core i5 64-bit Intel processor, so I burned a 64-bit version of [Clonezilla LiveCD] and booted the new system with that. The new system has the following configuration:

Partition	Size	Format	Mount	Description
/dev/sda1	320GB	NTFS	C:	Windows XP SP3 operating system, programs and data

There were only 14.4GB of data, it took 10 minutes to backup to an external USB disk. I ran it twice: first, using the option to dump the entire disk, and the second to dump the selected partition. The results were roughly the same.

Run Workstation Setup Wizard

The Workstation Setup Wizard asks for all the pertinent location information, time zone, userid/password, needed to complete the installation.

Re-Partition Disk Drive

I burned a 64-bit version of [System Rescue CD] and ran [Gparted] to re-partition this disk into the following:

Partition	Size	Format	Mount	Description
/dev/sda1	40GB	NTFS	C:	Windows XP SP3 operating system and programs
/dev/sda2	15GB	ext3	/(root)	Ubuntu Desktop 10.04 LTS
/dev/sda3	15GB	ext3	unused	unused
/dev/sda5	5GB	swap	swap	Linux swap
/dev/sda6	245GB	NTFS	D:	My Documents and other data

Redefine Windows directory structure

I made two small changes to connect C: to D: drive.

• Changed "My Documents" to point to D:\Documents which will move the files over from C: to D: to accomodate its new target location. See [Microsoft procedure] for details.
• Edited C:\notes\notes.ini to point to D:\notes\data to store all the local replicas of my email and databases.

Install Ubuntu Desktop 10.04 LTS

My plan is to run Windows and Linux guests through virtualization. I decided to try out Ubuntu Desktop 10.04 LTS, affectionately known as Lucid Lynx, which can support a variety of different virtualization tools, including KVM, VirtualBox-OSE and Xen. I have two identical 15GB partitions (sda2 and sda3) that I can use to hold two different systems, or one can be a subdirectory of the other. For now, I'll leave sda3 empty.

Take another backup of my new workstation

I took a fresh new backup of paritions (sda1, sda2, sda6) with Clonezilla.

The next step involved a cross-over Ethernet cable, which I don't have. So that will have to wait until Thursday morning.

technorati tags: IBM, Lenovo, ThinkPad, T60, T410, Intel, Clonezilla, SysRescCD, Gparted, Windows, Ubuntu, Linux, Lucid, LTS

Tags:  sysresccd lts clonezilla lenovo intel ibm thinkpad gparted t410 lucid t60 ubuntu windows linux