Processor area networking

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Yesterday, I was at a very interesting presentation from Fujitsu-Siemens Computers. It doesn’t really matter who the OEM was – it was the concept that grabbed me, and I’m sure IBM and HP will also be looking at this and that Dell will jump on board once it hits the mass market. That concept was processor area networking.

We’ve all got used to storage area networks (SANs) in recent years – the concept being to separate storage from servers so that a pool of storage can be provided as and when required.

Consider an e-mail server with 1500 users and 100Mb mailbox limits. When designing such a system, it is necessary to separate the operating system, database, database transaction logs, and message transfer queues for recoverability and performance. The database might also be split for fast recovery of VIP’s mailboxes but my basic need is to provide up to 150Gb of storage for the database (1500 users x 100Mb). Then another 110% storage capacity is required for database maintenance and all of a sudden the required disk space for the database jumps to 315Gb – and that doesn’t include the operating system, database transaction logs or message transfer queues!

Single instance storage might reduce this number, as would the fact that most users won’t have a full mailbox, but most designers will provide the maximum theoretical capacity “just in case” because to provision it later would involve: gaining management support for the upgrade; procuring the additional hardware; and scheduling downtime to provide the additional storage (assuming the hardware is able to physically accommodate the extra disks).

Multiply this out across an organisation and that is a lot of storage sitting around “just in case”, increasing hardware purchase and storage management costs in the process. Then consider the fact that storage hardware prices are continually dropping and it becomes apparent that the additional storage could probably have been purchased at a lower price when it was actually needed.

Using a SAN, coupled with an effective management strategy, storage can be dynamically provisioned (or even deprovisioned) on a “just in time” basis, rather than specifying every server with extra storage to cope with anticipated future requirements. No longer is 110% extra storage capacity required on the e-mail server in case the administrator needs to perform offline defragmentation – they simply ask the SAN administrator to provision that storage as required from the pool of free space (which is still required, but is smaller than the sum of all the free space on a all of the separate servers across the enterprise).

Other advantages include the co-location of all mission critical data (instead of being spread around a number of diverse server systems) and the ability to manage that data effectively for disaster recovery and business continuity service provision. Experienced SAN administrators are required to manage the storage, but there are associated manpower savings elsewhere (e.g. managing the backup of a diverse set of servers, each with their own mission critical data).

A SAN is only part of what Fujitsu-Siemens Computers are calling the dynamic data centre, moving away from the traditional silos of resource capability.

Processor area networking (PAN) extends takes the SAN storage concept and applies it to the processing capacity provided for data centre systems.

So, taking the e-mail server example further, it is unlikely that all of an organisation’s e-mail would be placed on a single server and as the company grows (organically or by acquisition), additional capacity will be required. Traditionally, each server would be specified with spare capacity (within the finite constraints of the number of concurrent connections that can be supported) and over time, new servers would be added to handle the growth. In an ideal world, mailboxes would be spread across a farm of inexpensive servers, rapidly bringing new capacity online and moving mailboxes between servers to marry demand with supply.

Many administrators will acknowledge that servers typically only average 20% utilisation and by removing all input/output (I/O) capabilities from the server, diskless processing units can be provided (effectively blade servers). These servers are connected to control blades which manage the processing area network, diverting I/O to the SAN or the network as appropriate.

Using such an infrastructure in a data centre, along with middleware (to provide virtualisation, automation and integration technologies) it is possible to move away from silos of resource and be completely flexible about how services are allocated to servers, responding to peaks in demand (acknowledging that there will always be requirements for separation by business criticality or security).

Egenera‘s BladeFrame technology is one implementation of processor area networking and last week, Fujitsu-Siemens Computers and Egenera announced an EMEA-wide deal to integrate Egenera Bladeframe technology with Fujitsu-Siemens servers.

I get the feeling that processor area networking will be an interesting technology area to watch. With virtualisation rapidly becoming accepted as an approach for flexible server provision (and not just for test and development environments), the PAN approach is a logical extension to this and it’s only a matter of time before PANs become as common as SANs are in today’s data centres.

The new interface for Office 12

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Having just said that Microsoft needs to be better at innovating if it is to survive another 30 years in business, it seems that the next version of Microsoft Office has surprised everyone with a new, simplified user interface that removes much of the toolbar clutter. The press release includes screenshots for Office 12 core applications as well as a description of why Microsoft made the changes (there’s also a review of the interface on Office Watch).

I laughed when I read the comments about the new interface on Mark Harrison’s blog (which I was alerted to by Rory) – one which says “I hope [Microsoft] makes it easy for me to put things back the way I want” and another (from Mark) saying “[let’s] have a dinosaur button to revert… to [the] old UI”! Could this be another case where Microsoft are forced to provide a “classic” interface to please those who don’t want to move with the times? The press release indicates that there are no plans to do so at present that doesn’t mean things won’t change before the product is released and whilst I appreciate that from a user familiarity perspective, many organisations will be reluctant to change (as there will be an associated training cost), the current UI has evolved over many years and is far too complex.

Interestingly, Microsoft say that this only applies to their authoring applications – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access and parts of Outlook. Traditional menus and toolbars will still be used in many areas of the Office suite.

I can’t wait to see what they do to Outlook.

Happy Birthday Microsoft

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Microsoft turns 30 today. We tend to associate Information Technology (IT) with a rapidly expanding market of young start-up companies but whilst it is nothing compared to the global giants IBM, Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Fujitsu, 30 years is significant.

Microsoft has become ubiquitous – largely through its Windows operating system and Office productivity suite, but recently (and somewhat worryingly for someone who makes a living architecting solutions based on Microsoft technology), Microsoft has been drifting and MSFT stock prices (which were once rising at astronomical levels, splitting nine times between the company’s IPO in 1986 and 2003) have been virtually static in recent years leading to a number of reports suggesting that the company has lost its way. Maybe it was because Bill Gates stepped down as CEO, maybe it was just the sheer size of the giant, which employs almost 60,000 staff in 100 countries and had annual revenues of $39.75bn in 2004/5 (up 8% on 2003/4), generating profits of $12.25bn (up 50%).

On the surface, these figures look great – 8% growth and 50% increase in profits. But a look at the figures for the last 10 years shows that growth has slowed from 49% in 1995/6.

The trouble is that Microsoft has been losing ground to young upstarts like Google (mission: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”). Let’s face it, it was Microsoft that was the young upstart when Bill Gates and Paul Allen persuaded IBM to make MS-DOS the operating system for the first PC in 1981 (ousting CP/M). After being slow to embrace the Internet and a series of legal wrangles (some justified, others not), Microsoft was also late to embrace search technologies, whereas the current industry darling dominates with 36.5% of the web search market.

It didn’t help that for a period between 1995 and 2001, the flagship product (Windows) was split between the (unreliable and insecure) Windows 95, 98 and ME product line and the expensive business version, Windows NT (later Windows 2000). Since Microsoft finally converged the two product lines with the launch of Windows XP (which is still based on the Windows NT kernel) there has been a push towards delivery of a trustworthy computing platform, and despite its critics, I think Microsoft generally does pretty well there. If you have the largest market share you will get attacked my malware writers – that means Microsoft for PC operating systems and Nokia for mobile handsets!

The trouble is that since Windows 2000 and XP sorted out the security issues, operating system upgrades have been a little dull, with limited innovation. It doesn’t help that any bundling of middleware seems to result in a lengthy courtroom battle but without innovation, there is no reason for consumers to upgrade, and in the business market, where IT is a business tool (not the business itself), IT Managers are under pressure to reduce costs through standardisation. That often means standing still for as long as possible.

I really hope that Windows Vista/Longhorn and Office 12 are not the death of Microsoft. Microsoft’s mission is “enabling people and businesses to realize their full potential” and this week, in an attempt to realise its own potential, a massive re-organisation was announced, with the aim of making the giant more dynamic (and hence able to respond to the industry – let’s face it, Microsoft has never been the innovator but it is very good at marketing other people’s ideas and making them work – even MS-DOS was licensed from Seattle Computer Products). Maybe the new organisation will help the timely delivery of products but it’s amazing how the rising fortunes of the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox browser has focused Microsoft on delivering a new version of Internet Explorer after years of poor standards compliance) with very few new features and how the desktop search functionality provided by Google (and others) has focused Microsoft’s attention in this space (even if the current MSN Search strategy appears to be failing). Maybe increased competition in the operating system market (come on Apple, give us OS X for the PC – not just Intel-based Macs, which are really just Apple PCs and could also run Windows…) in the shape of the major Linux distributions (Red Hat and Novell SuSE) or free UNIX distributions like the x86 version of Sun Solaris will focus the giant on delivering great new features for Windows.

Microsoft was built on a dream of “a computer on every desk and in every home”. Despite all of the negative publicity that Microsoft tends to attract, it seems to me that (at least in the “developed” world) this dream has largely been realised. Let’s see what the next 30 years brings.