Vlogs

Virtualization has helped improve hardware utilization tremendously, but its full potential has not yet been realized. Virtualization technologies all share and virtualize a single physical port of the network adapter through software for the I/O needs of the virtual machines. All of that software battles to make I/O decisions for the virtual machines, which causes traffic jams, which slow the I/O performance and limit the number of virtual machines a physical server can run.

To address this issue, PCI-SIG, the special interest group that owns and manages PCI specifications as open industry standards, introduced a suite of specifications for Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) specifications to allow multiple operating systems to share a physical interconnect.

Now Dell, Intel and Citrix are putting the PCI-SIG specs into action and will be demonstrating SR-IOV technology at the Intel Developers Forum 2009. IDF attendees can check out the showcase at exhibit booth #711 and hear all the technical brilliance straight from Dell, Intel and Citrix experts.

Here is the gist of how it works. SR-IOV allows hardware implementation of virtual network interface cards (NICs) or virtual functions without software emulation. In this way, a single I/O hardware is subdivided logically to appear as up to 256 virtual NICs and each virtual function is assigned independently and directly to a virtual machine, bypassing the software bottlenecks in the hypervisor to achieve near native performance. It also provides precise per-VM control for the connection speed and QoS. This specific demo uses Intel VT-d and Intel® 82599 10 Gigabit Ethernet device and allows multiple virtual machines (VMs) running on Citrix XenServer on Dell PowerEdge R710 with Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 to directly share I/O devices.

SR-IOV holds great promise. It improves data throughput and increase performance, efficiency, and scalability with high performance I/O devices, while preserving flexibility and mobility with live migration support. In preliminary lab tests with Dell, Intel and Citrix, this technology reduces processor utilization, Increases bandwidth to virtual machines and improves data transfer rates across the network.

Another benefit is that SR-IOV can save reduce capital expenditure as it doesn’t require special network infrastructure. It works with existing standard 10GE Ethernet switches on existing network infrastructures. Some other virtualization solutions rely on proprietary technologies requiring rip-and-replace upgrades to networks to get the benefits of I/O virtualization. SR-IOV technology further cuts hardware costs by reducing the number of physical network cards, and switch ports, as well as cabling for even more consolidation in a virtualized environment.

Rich Hernandez, PG Development Engineer Strategist in Dell Server Advanced Engineering Group has been working on this technology. Here he is with a brief overview:

I’m getting down to the end of the videos I recorded last month at Cloud World/Open Source World and I’ve saved some of the best for last.  My penultimate interview is with Michael Crandell, CEO of Right Scale.

Right Scale, based in sunny Santa Barbara California, makes a cloud management platform that provides greater control over the cloud and makes it easy for companies to begin to migrate applications to the cloud or start building new ones there.  See what Michael has to say…

Some of the stuff Michael discusses:

• Right Scale focuses on three things: 1) Automation, 2) Providing a library of cloud ready solutions, 3) doing all this in an open and transparent way that allows portability among cloud platforms.
• How Right Scale came to be.  Their founder was teaching a class at UCSB about how to build an ecommerce site.  Amazon granted him some free compute time to use in his class.  He realized he needed a framework for managing and monitoring the classes usage, he also realized there was a business to built around this idea…
• Where Right Scale will be putting its efforts in the up coming year:
  • Supporting more cloud platforms as the come online
  • Increasing their partner program and their cloud-ready solutions
  • Increasing support for enterprise level editions and features e.g. security and compliance, user control, billing, metering…

Extra-Credit reading:

• Right Scale part 1: Mickos joins and control moves up the stack
• Right Scale part 2: Why the Cloud?  Apple Fanboys and server suffrage

Pau for now…

The CEO and founder of GoGrid, John Keagy, made an interesting assertion at Cloud World/Open Source World: over the next decade, the IT economy will shrink from $1.5 trillion to $500 billion.  I thought this was an interesting statement so I followed up with him after his talk and we sat down for a quick interview:

Some of the things John talks about:

• GoGrid plays in the Infrastructure on demand space and has been doing so since 2002.
• They work with partners in the layers above infrastructure and don’t have plans to venture north.
• The IT economy shrinkage will be driven by automation and reduced capex (commodity hardware is a big component of this)
• Right now its hardly a competitive market in the IaaS space (”its GoGrid and a bookstore”) so you can expect to see prices drop as the competition heats up.
• If you’re not doing your test and development and QA in the cloud, your not engaging in best practices.

Pau for now…

It’s hard to believe that I’ve now been at Dell for almost 10 years. Where did the time go? I think back to my first year at Dell as a fledging server marketing manager, studying RAID groups, redundant-hot-swap whatever every night when I went home, so I wouldn’t get roasted by the hard-core technical sales reps (TSRs). Let’s be clear … they roasted me anyway, but at least it was on my terms. Anyone that knows me knows I thrive on sarcasm and strong personalities. Those guys shaped me into the storage person I am today.

I was part of the Small and Medium Business (SMB) group of Dell back in those days. I loved the emotion involved in that job … entrepreneurs growing their businesses, people in love with their job (not necessarily in love with IT) -- I could relate. After living in that universe for almost three years, it became my foundation. Our performance plans call it Customer Advocacy (or something like that), but it ingrained a passion in me that still surfaces regularly today.

Maybe that’s why I’m all over our new PowerVault NX300 Network-Attached Storage (NAS) platform. It gives me a chance to get back on my SMB soap box and show how we’re addressing their business problems with technology -- like the quick set up, convenient yet advanced file sharing and the ability to reduce duplicate files, do snapshots and replicate files. Dell’s seamless integration of our hardware and Windows Storage Server 2008 make all of this possible.

We announced the NX300 introduction today as part of a larger launch addressing SMBs. It feels good to give back a little efficiency to the folks that essentially started my career.

There is a tree twisting thunderstorm raging outside and you know enough to grab a flashlight and candle just in case the power goes out. What’s the worst thing that could happen? You miss a rerun episode of Mad Men? Ah, but wait, isn’t the online sale is still going on at work through mid-night? Oh crud, what if the servers go down? Will you lose all the credit card transactions in process?

There is no need to sweat a power outage when your servers and storage are backed up with an uninterruptible power supply (UPS). You’re in luck. Today Dell unveiled 28 new UPS products with a whopping efficiency rating of 95% or more to keep your systems running. The UPS products come in a variety of wattages in either tower or rack-mount form to give you reliable, vital power backup for your IT equipment to protect your precious data.

Dell UPS systems come with LCD screens for instant status and monitoring of the full power load of a rack and even your entire network by glancing at the Dell UPS display. But what good is that when you’re kicking back at home? Not to worry, they have management software for remote management and monitoring through Web browsers. The Dell UPS will also send you an alarm notification and status reports through e-mail or a text to your mobile phones. They also will perform a graceful, unattended operating system shutdown if there is an extended power outage. Now relax and get back to watching Mad Men.

I had a chance to talk with William Muscato, product manager for the Dell Data Center Infrastructure team, about the new line-up of Dell UPS products. Here is what he had to say about how Dell has thoughtfully included features to simplify the selection, deployment, and monitoring of power backup and distribution.