Grid Computing Now! So did we do the job?
There's a debate raging in the Google Cloud Computing group about what are the key lessons to be learned from Grid Computing in bringing the notion of Cloud Computing to the market place. It sort of runs like this: "we don't want to make the same mistakes as Grid!" to which the grid
afficionados involved will respond with "what do you mean mistakes? Grid has been successful and Cloud is but an offshoot of Grid!" Those of you with any lengthy experience of the computing geek mind will know what happens next. A text version of the pantomime comedy line "Oh no you didn't"; "Oh yes you did!" delightfully summarised in the immortal Monty Python Argument sketch as "a simple act of gainsaying".
I have made my living for the past 3 and an half years from the proposition that "grid computing is good for us and we should all adopt it!", stemming from the work done in the UK e-Science programme over the past 10 years. Sitting here in 2008, it doesn't feel a bad place to be. Our collective view is that the best of the ideas from grid computing
middleware, regarded as configuration, resource allocation, scheduling and job management, seemed to have been incorporated into a set of useful tools for system management and
virtualisation.
Thus we have distributed computing infrastructures, often heterogeneous, and useful means for increasing utilisation in the data centre. Is this Grid, well for the purists, no, the infrastructures are usually proprietary and therefore not Grid, but for the pragmatists - of which readers will observe I am one, the answer is yes, this seems to have the right effect and its not bad for a start!!
What do you think the progress with Grid adoption has been over the past 3 years? Can you point to successful examples? Or proof points that its not happening? I'll be interested to know.
Meantime, at the world watching paint dry championships ...
Labels: e-Science, Grid Computing, virtualisation
Software Licensing in the Virtual Age
A lot has been written about the irresistible march of Virtualisation in the data centre and now on the desktop. There is no doubt that for many users of IT, and those that pay the bills, the ability to increase utilisation through the use of virtual machines embodying increased capacity to serve, is a boon to business. Leading to lower running costs and accelerating the ability of the IT infrastructure to react to business demand.
However, it is a rare beast that has only benefits and no costs or disadvantages that accompany. Nor is it the case in this instance. For we have the equivalent of a new fire burning away in the IT shop and virtualisation is simply adding more fuel to the conflagration. The challenge is that we already struggled to keep track of software licenses, and virtualisation is systematically breaking the bond between user and software and between hardware and software, such that it is very difficult now to see where and how many instances of software are executing.
Not a problem for your business, I hear you say. Well, you might consider the following questions before dismissing out of hand:-
1) How many licenses do you have in hand for your organisation? Is the agreement made based on number of employees? Hardware on which the software is installed? Some form of licensing mechanism which allows for licenses to be granted dynamically?
2) Are all instances of software run on the same premises, or spread across sites in the UK, and/or beyond?
3) Do you use open-source software in the same manner?
4) Do you use multi-core processors in the data centre? On the desktop?
Unless you are very well in control, I would suggest that most of you would find it hard to be equivocal in the answers of any of these questions, except perhaps for Yes to questions 3 and 4. In which case, you almost certainly are flouting your software licensing agreements in the virtualised infrastructures you are creating.
This is an area of concern which has been troubling many organisations at the leading edge of Grid and Virtualisation implementations for some time - and now its going mainstream. I would suggest that you check the license terms and conditions for your most common applications and then check to see the audit data and trail that you have in place for their management. If you are struggling to keep up with developments (and by the way, your developers now have new found freedoms to introduce servers at a drop of a hat!), join us for the Grid Computing Now! webinar on Thursday, April 10th at 2pm. You can register via our website
http://www.gridcomputingnow.org/ and there is no fee.
Speaking will be colleagues from Capgemini, talking about the steps you can take to characterise your usage ahead of negotiation with your supplier; Microsoft, a leader in innovating in the field of software licensing of products; and Scalable Solutions, a supplier of audit and management software for the enterprise. It'll be fun and all participants will have the chance to ask questions during the event and afterwards at an online conference session.
Look forwards to seeing you there!
Ian
Labels: software licensing, virtualisation, webinar
August and the world is becoming Greener!
I write this blog entry from my workplace in Edinburgh at the start of the 2007 International Festival and in the midst of the Festival Fringe which accompanies this event. Edinburgh becomes a city with twice the population at this time of year, the Scottish schools go back in a week or so, and so everyone is in town. The International Festival is holding its own on an increasingly crowded international stage, where there seem to be non-stop Festivals held during the summer months. But Edinburgh has one chief advantage over many, it's a beautiful city with much of historic relevance to see and sufficiently different to be noticeable in this increasingly homogeneous world. A great backdrop for the many
ingenious ways people find of having fun.
But why, I hear you ask, is this relevant? No particularly good reason, other than I fought my way through the crowds at lunchtime to run an errand and just enjoyed the fact that there were so many here already, Edinburgh's Festivals (for they include the Book; Film and just finished Jazz instances) run for the whole month of August, and the fact that it was warm outside!
And that brought me back to Green IT. In the past two months, I have attended the
EC's 2
nd meeting aimed at developing a Code of Conduct for Data Centres; listened to a particularly well articulated argument for
change in the Data Centre from
BCS colleague, Liam
Newcombe, and enjoyed participating in the closing panel session at Information Age's 2007 Future of the Data Centre Conference, a sort of unofficial end to the London conference season before the hols. The strong thread running through these events was the increasing concern at power usage (
abusage) in the Data Centre, which when coupled with the historic poor utilisation of compute resources makes for depressing reading. It may well be that our industry is responsible for generating the same level of carbon emissions as aviation, but at least the planes carry more than an average 15% of customers!
This is a story which is going to run for a while, if you haven't already read it elsewhere, you heard it here first!
The Green Grid is a supplier led consortium which is looking to bring some order and understanding to the picture, they've recently published some measures for data centre productivity, rather more related to computing function and power consumption, than delivered value. But, hey, I am not sure that we know how to measure the latter anyway.
We've also seen a rash of collapsing information infrastructures being announced, collapsing in the way that matter falls into itself towards a black hole. HP and IBM have announced eye watering initiatives to massively reduce their business support infrastructures, the former using
Virtualisation and standardisation; the latter a combination of this and the resurrection of the mainframe. You can guarantee that they'll be round to help you with your plans soon.
This approach certainly seems worthwhile and if that means we can switch off older, less efficient systems, then all to the good. If it also means that we can get more productivity from our servers then even better. But there is one problem that is not so easy to deal with, and I am not talking about finding the owner of a system in the corner which has been running for years but nobody remembers what it does. The problem that does concern me is how to migrate legacy applications into
virtualised/distributed environments.
If you are one of the many users of mainstream commercial application bundles from MS, Oracle, SAP,
SAS, and so on, you can relax, in that these organisations are running fast to provide "service enabled" application stacks which will help in the process of migration, isolating themselves from specific hardware implementation and revealing themselves as fashionable web services. But what about the myriads of other legacy applications which are bound to a physical hardware infrastructure and may not be wedded to an abstract,
virtualised infrastructure? Where do you get help for that?
There's no ready answer, other than to say your best bet is simple
virtualisation at the server level and hope that the
VM is compatible with your application software. There is some room for optimism with
VMWare and
Xen, but it's almost certainly a suck it and see equation! Still, the good news is that
VM overhead is typically in the single percentage realm and process performance advances are typically in the 10-20% for each generation, so you should win, you should be able to turn off some old equipment and run those apps alongside other, newer stuff - yielding an impressive advance in productivity all at the same time!
Of course, the proper thing to do is invest in developing an infrastructure, a service-oriented architecture and assemble your applications from web services. But that's another story and one which you almost certainly don't have the time, or the budget for today. Better get those operational costs down first and fight off the Financial Director's eagle eyes when prospective savings emerge. You'll need that money to do the job properly! Good luck!!
Labels: ; multi-core; power management, ; SOA, Edinburgh Festival, Green IT, Green IT; Semantic Web; Roadmapping, multi-core; power management, virtualisation, Web Services
