What’ll win for the hardware of the future? Lowest TCO, not efficiency or performance

GigaOm has a post on the Structure session with Calxeda, SeaMicro, and Tilera.

Efficiency vs. performance: What’ll win for the hardware of the future?

By Ryan Lawler Jun. 23, 2011, 6:09pm PT 2 Comments

At GigaOM’s Structure conference, hardware executives from Calxeda, SeaMicro, AMD and Tilera battled it out over how the hardware infrastructure of the future will take shape. For the most part, the debate came down to the need for highly efficient hardware that used up a fraction of the space and a fraction of the power of legacy hardware solutions, versus the desire for more powerful options from existing hardware makers.

I started blogging on the idea of the little green server with an Intel Atom 3 years ago.

Little Green Server Ideas Starting

TUESDAY, JULY 29, 2008 AT 12:48AM

ExtremeTech has an article building an Intel Atom based PC.

Intel's Atom has generated a lot of attention. Some of that attention has been positive: Intel building an x86 CPU whose primary design goal is very low power usage while maintaining good performance. On the other hand, Atom has been criticized for given up some key performance features, such as speculative, out-of-order execution.

What the author misses in making this an efficiency vs. performance battle is with many software services at large scale the cost of providing the service is the issue.  People want performance and efficiency, but want defines success is the cost of the service.

The next year will be when we see these servers hitting the market in mass.  Whoever is providing the lowest cost for performance per watt is most likely going to be winning the most amount of business.

I would watch the guys at Calxeda with ARM processors.

Facebook invites Goldman Sachs, Rackspace, AMD, and Microsoft to speak at Open Compute Summit, announces Open Compute Foundation non-profit

In Facebook's summary of the Open Compute Summit, they mention a community of presenters - Rackspace, Goldman Sachs, AMD, and Microsoft.

As a part of growing the community, the following people shared their perspectives:

• Joel Wineland and Bret Piatt from Rackspace shared their thoughts on how Open Compute Project servers could fit into their data center business. What was really awesome is that Rackspace benchmarked our Open Compute Project AMD 1.0 servers  against their own off-the-shelf hardware, and our servers did very well. For the first time, independent, external feedback on our designs was shared with the community! Rackspace also expressed what they would like to see this community do: to be ambitious and, most of all, to innovate.
• Grant Richard and Matthew Liste from Goldman Sachs presented their vision of OCP hardware filling a big role in their large scale compute clusters and, more importantly, how hardware from multiple Open Compute Project vendors could dramatically improve their ability to manage their systems, which are much more heterogeneous than ours.
• Bob Ogrey from AMD presented interest in Open Compute technology from China and other countries in East Asia, and discussed how AMD intends to open up their motherboard design files to ODMs in the near future.
• Dileep Bhandarkar from Microsoft shared his experiences building modular data centers, comparing and contrasting with the data center and server designs from the Open Compute Project. Most importantly, Dileep presented a number of technological areas Microsoft is potentially interested in engaging with the Open Compute Project going forward.

To continue the community effort Frank announced they will launch the Open Compute Foundation.

To help facilitate collaboration, Frank also announced our intention to create a non-profit foundation with roles ranging from using this hardware to building it to actually contributing to the specifications and leading entire projects. While all of the details aren't yet worked out, each project will be separate, allowing you to choose exactly the areas where you want to contribute and want to avoid. These projects must embody the four tenets of efficiency, economy, environmental friendliness, and openness that have driven the Open Compute project from the start. Projects and hardware sold based on these designs must be aligned with these core tenets before they can call themselves "Open Compute."

Facebook's Open Compute Project shares 2x Server v2.0 future and Storage Server v1.0

Facebook's Frank Frankovsky was on a panel at Structure 2011 and was as Dell's Forrest Norrod the baloney in the sandwich between the vendors VMware and Dell.  Frank looks like a pretty happy piece of Baloney here.

THE ECONOMICS OF OPEN EVERYTHING

The power of open-source software can’t be denied. At its best, it has democratized innovation and is a stub for other subsequent innovations. Think Apache and the web. But where is the money in it? Does there have to be a profit motive? We talk to two exponents of recent projects -- Open Stack and Cloud Foundry -- both of which are open and have the promise to shake up the cloud industry.

Moderated by:Lew Moorman - Chief Strategy Officer and President of the Rackspace Cloud, Rackspace
Speakers:Derek Collison - CTO, Chief Archictect, Cloud Division, VMware

Frank Frankovsky - Director, Hardware Design and Supply Chain, Facebook

Forrest Norrod - VP and GM, Server Platforms, Dell

The session was dynamic and Forrest Nod was able to crack a few smiles as well.

I didn't get a picture of Frank and Forrest smiling at the same time, but they are both looking quite serious here.

I caught Frank later at the conference and he said they shared their Open Compute summit information that they had on June 17, 2011.  I am going to break the information into a few posts - this one is server and storage hardware.

Facebook's Amir Michael announced v2.0 of the Open Computer Server that doubles the motherboard densities in the 1 1/2 U design.

Doubling the Compute Density

Amir Michael, Facebook’s hardware design manager, introduced our new initiatives in server hardware, presenting new AMD and Intel motherboard designs that double the compute density relative to our original designs.

Instead of placing a single motherboard in each chassis, we’re now building servers with two narrow motherboards sitting next to each other. These motherboards support the next generation of Intel processors and AMD’s Interlagos. To enable these new designs, we’ve also modified the server chassis, power supply (700W output from 450W), server cabinet, and battery backup cabinet.

What was not clear is what Facebook does for big storage for all the pictures on Facebook pages.  And.... the answer is Storage Server 1.0 which can support from one to four server connections with a variety of connection technologies to provide low cost and high performance.

Storage Server v1.0

One question that has been asked a number of times since releasing version 1.0 of the Open Compute designs is if Facebook plans to build a storage server. Amir announced a project designed for our storage intensive applications. It’s actually a platform approach in that you can vary the ratio of compute to storage using the same physical building blocks. If you fully load the server, each storage node can support 50 hard drives split across two controllers.

Paul Maritz, where do I work? Google, Microsoft, aahhh VMware, funny video snippet from Structure 2011

Paul Maritz was one of the better speakers at Structure 2011 and he did get some of the best laughs with a slip up checking on how many servers could be supported by one System Administrator at his company - Google, Microsoft, aahh VMware. 

Get a laugh the way the rest of the audience did.

Tough, Mean, Chaos Monkey Logo

Mike Manos presented on the Chaos Monkey and Donkey idea at Uptime.

Chaos Monkeys, Donkeys and the Innovation of Action

May 19, 2011 by mmanos

Last week I once again had the pleasure of speaking at the Uptime Institute’s Symposium.  As one of the premiere events in the Data Center industry it is definitely one of those conferences that is a must attend to get a view into what’s new, what’s changing, and where we are going as an industry.  Having attended the event numerous times in the past, this year I set out on my adventure with a slightly different agenda.

When I caught up with Mike he told me a lot of people said they were guilty of being data center donkeys.

Interestingly after my talk I literally have dozens of people come up and admit they had been donkeys and offered to reconnect next year to demonstrate what they had done to evolve their operations.

Werner Vogel at GigaOm Structure discussed the Chaos Monkey idea used at Netflix and had a slide.  Check out this logo.

The funny thing is the data center executive I was sitting with in Mike's presentation said He is a Chaos Monkey.  I am guilty of being a Chaos Monkey.

Now that you see a graphic.  Are you a donkey or a Chaos Monkey?