Dell has a BI practice?!

August 31, 2010

The week before last I headed out to The Data Warehouse Institute’s  (TDWI) World Conference in San Diego.  I went out to help support our BI team who were using the event as the forum to unveil Dell’s new Business Intelligence practice.

We got a bunch of puzzled looks as people approached the Dell booth and didn’t see any hardware.  Once however they learned what we were there to announce and why, they seemed to buy it (or maybe they just said they got it because they didn’t want to lose out on a chance to win the Dell Mini we were giving away :)

BI veteran, Mike Lampa, who has been driving the go-to market effort behind the practice acted as our chief spokesperson.   Here’s the message we were delivering, straight from Mike:

Some of the ground Mike covers:

  • Internally, Dell has one of the top 5 data warehouse implementations in world and we use most of the mainstream ETL, BI and database tools that are out there in the market.
  • The Perot acquisition has given us access to a global services delivery engine and we are marrying this channel with the BI expertise we’ve developed internally.
  • We’ll provide consulting services through our verticals and deliver end to end solutions targeted at vertical markets like Education, Health Care and Financial services.
  • Our goal is to do in services what we did in hardware, be  a disruptive force and bring in higher levels of innovation.

Extra Credit Reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Chattin ’bout Chatter, The new new thing from salesforce.com

August 30, 2010

A couple of weeks ago a group from salesforce.com paid a visit to Dell.  Among other things, they came to discuss their new product “Chatter” that Dell has recently launched internally and who’s virtues Michael Dell has tweeted.  Among the salesforce crew was Sean Whiteley, VP of product marketing.  I was able to get some time between meetings with Sean and learn more about Chatter.

Some of the topics Sean tackles:

  • How Chatter has done since its launch on June 22.  What type of traction they’ve seen with customers.
  • How Chatter differs from other internal social media platforms (hint: not only can you follow people; records, objects and information within your business applications have feeds as well, e.g. your notified when a presentation changes or a sales deal you’re following moves to a different stage.)
  • How the idea of Chatter came up. What role chairman Marc Benioff and his use of Facebook played.
  • Currently Chatter is tied closely to CRM but it will be tied to other apps going forward.
  • They believe that many more folks will use Chatter than usesalesforce.com.

Extra Credit reading:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Sun’s Chief Open Source Officer’s new Gig

August 27, 2010

Last but not least in my series of interviews from last month’s Cloud Summit at OSCON I present to you my conversation with Simon Phipps.  Simon, who until earlier this year was the chief Open Source officer at Sun Microsystems, recently joined the start-up ForgeRock as their chief strategy officer.  Here is what Simon says:

Some of the topics Simon tackles:

  • ForgeRock offers access management and authentication software based on open source code that was developed at Sun.
  • Since the software is open source you can download it for free at ForgeRock.
  • ForgeRock makes its money by selling subscriptions that provide various grades of SLAs.
  • Even though they are 4 mos old, they already have 20 customers including the world’s largest gambling exchange.

Extra credit reading:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Chief Scientist at BT: “In nature there are no SLAs”

August 16, 2010

J.P. Rangaswamy is British Telecom’s chief scientist and a very interesting fellow.  At the Cloud Summit at OSCON last month he delivered a talk on the future of the cloud.  I was quite intrigued so I grabbed him during the break to learn a bit more about a few of the concepts he presented.

Some of the topics that J.P. tackles:

  • Many of the best utilities we’ve built: Internet, Web, wireless environment etc are built on fundamentally frail best-effort infrastructures.
  • In order to gain predictability you sacrifice a lot of the original value eg. QWERTY
  • He’s not against SLAs, J.P.’s against the throwing away of value under the guise of false beliefs in SLAs.
  • What is the key area in the cloud that needs to be shored up? Interoperability.  Security is overplayed, just look at the development of the Web.
  • Need to concentrate on federation as a mind set — the ability to create services that are daisy chaining select pieces from a variety of each, vs integrated vertical stacks.
  • He’s worried about SLAs because the things people are doing to stop SLAs from being light weight are actually things that prevent interoperability.

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

OpenStack insights and code

August 11, 2010

I’m now at the mid-point of the videos I shot at OSCON Cloud Summit a few weeks ago.  Today’s feature is Brett Piatt from the OpenStack ecosystem development team who has been working on the project since it kicked off nine months ago.  Brett’s particular area of focus is the partners who have joined and are participating in the effort.  I got some of Brett’s time after the cloud summit ended and this is what he had to say:

Some of the topics Brett tackles:

  • Over 20 companies participating from hardware makers to software vendors who help you manage or operate OpenStack, e.g. Cloud kick and Rightscale as well as other service providers (who are actually Rackspace competitors.)
  • The Rackspace API and coupling it with feature releases.
  • The projects near term goal which is to get it in production beyond Rackspace and NASA.
  • What code is available now – OpenStack object storage (aka Swift) which powers Rackspace’s cloud files.
  • The Nova code = Rackspace cloud sw + NASA’s Nebula cloud = Cloud and VM orchestration system management package.  It’s mostly written in Python, some C & C++ as well as a dash of Erlang.  It also has built-in ipad, iphone apps, android apps and web control panel — something for the whole family!

Still to come in my OSCON video series:

  • J.P. Rangaswami, Chief Scientist at BT — Nature doesn’t require SLAs
  • Simon Phipps about his new company ForgeRock

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

PowerEdge C410x — Whiteboard topology

August 5, 2010

In the last of my GPGPU/PowerEdge C410x trilogy I offer up a whiteboard session with the system’s architect, Joe Sekel.

Some of the topics Joe walks through:

  • How does having remote GPGPUs connected via cable back to a server compare in performance to having the GPGPUs embedded in the server?
  • The topology of the PCI express  x16 (16 lanes per link) plumbing: from the chipset in the host sever through to the GPGPU.
  • The data transfer bandwidth that x16 Gen 2 gives you. 

Extra-credit reading:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Deep dive tour(s) of the PowerEdge C410x

August 5, 2010

In my last entry I talked about the wild and wacky world of GPGPUs and provided an overview of the PowerEdge C410x expansion chassis that we announced today. For those of you who want to go deeper and see how to set up and install this 3U wonder you’ll want to take a look at the three videos below.

  1. Card installation: How to install/replace a NVIDIA Tesla M1060 GPU card in the PowerEdge C410x taco.
  2. Setting up the system: How to set up the PowerEdge C410x PCIe expansion chassis in a rack, power it up and pull out cards.  Also addresses port numbering.
  3. BMC card mapping: How to map the PCIe cards in the PowerEdge C410x via the BMC web interface.  Also covered are how to monitor power usage, fans and more.

Happy viewing!  (BTW, the C410x’s code name was “titanium” so when you hear Chris refer to it as that don’t be thrown)

Extra-credit reading:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Say hello to my little friend — packing up to 16 GPGPUs

August 5, 2010

While the name GPGPU, which stands for General-purpose computing on graphics processing units, doesn’t flow lyrically off the tongue, it’s an extremely powerful concept.

What’s the big idea?

The idea behind this sexy five letter acronym is to take a graphical process unit (GPU) and expand its use beyond graphics.  Through the “simple” addition of programmable stages and higher precision arithmetic to the rendering pipelines, the GPU is able to tackle general computing and off load it from the CPU.

So what does this mean and/or why should you care?  Well the connection of GPGPUs to servers bring about ginormous increases in performance helping to make HPC and scaled-out deployments wicked fast.  This works particularly well when you’re talking about modeling, simulation, imaging, signal processing, gaming etc.  Not only can the addition of GPGPUs boost these processes by one or two orders of magnitude but it does so much more cost effectively than by simply adding servers.

What is Dell’s DCS group offering up?

The Data Center Solutions (DCS) team have an Oil & Gas customer that is always looking to push the envelope when it comes to getting the most out of GPGPU’s in order to deliver seismic mapping results faster.  One of the best ways to do this is by increasing the GPU to server ratio.  In the market today, there are a variety of servers that have 1-2 internal GPUs and there is a PCIe expansion chassis that has 4 GPUs.

What we announced today is the PowerEdge C410x PCIe expansion chassis, the first PCIe expansion chassis to connect 1-8 servers to 1-16 GPUs.  This chassis enables massive parallel calculations separate from the server, adding up to 16.48 teraflops of computational power to a datacenter.

But enough of my typing, see for yourself in the overview/walk-thru below starring DCS’s very own Joe Sekel, the architect behind the C410x.

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

5 lessons from the Cloud about Efficient Environments

August 2, 2010

The week before last our team decided to divide and conquer to cover two simultaneous events.  Half of us headed to Portland, Oregon for  OSCON and the other half stayed here in Austin to participate in hostingcon.

The Hostingcon keynote

Among those participating in hostingcon was my boss Andy Rhodes who gave the keynote on Tuesday.  Here’s are the slides Andy delivered:

(If the presentation doesn’t appear above, click here to view it.)

The idea of the keynote was to share with hosters the five major lessons we have learned over the last several years working with a unique set of customers operating at hyperscale.  Those five lessons are:

  1. TCO models are not one size fits all.  Build a unique model that represents your specific environment and make sure that you get every dollar of cost in there.  Additionally, make sure that your model is flexible enough to accommodate new info and market changes.
  2. Don’t let the status quo hold you back.  Not adapting soon enough and delays in rolling out solutions can cost you dearly.
  3. The most expensive server/storage node is the one that isn’t used (sits idle for 6-12 weeks) or the one you don’t have when you need it most.
  4. Don’t let Bad Code dictate your hardware architecture.
  5. Don’t waste time on “Cloud Washing.”  Talk to your customers about real pain points and how to solve them.

The WHIR’s take

The WHIR did a good write up of the keynote, here is the concluding paragraph:

So, it seems that cloud best practices will help companies reduce their physical infrastructure, which seems to be a bit counter-intuitive, given that Rhodes is representing a hardware provider. But it makes sense. Given the never-ending list of projects for IT staff, and as they drive down costs, their business will grow, and they’ll be able to increase their IT spend for innovative efforts. “What we’re hoping to do is let you do more with less.”

Extra-credit reading:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Customer reviews our 4-servers-in-one, the C6100

August 1, 2010

Outbrain is a company that provides content recommendation solutions for blogs and publishers.  Among their customers are such venerable names as USA today, Chicago Tribune, Slate and VentureBeat.

Data Center number three

The company recently decided to set-up a third data center and went out looking for what type of kit they wanted to outfit it with.  Much to our joy they decided on the Dell PowerEdge C6100.  Although they are currently waiting on delivery of the systems, Outbrain operations engineer Nathan Milford, has been playing with a demo unit for several weeks.

Earlier this week Nathan posted his initial thoughts, along with pictures and diagrams, on the C6100.  The post is appropriately entitled: Some Notes on Dell’s C6100 Multi-Node Server Chassis

In his post Nathan talks about:

  • Who else they looked at and why they went with Dell
  • The basic layout of the C6100
  • The “unscientific” testing, research and math he did on power draw on an individual node.
  • How intends to deal with some of quirks and infrastructure changes the C6100s will cause.

My favorite quote from the post is:

SuperMicro, SGI, HP all have similar devices, but the thing they don’t have is DCS, which is more or less independent of Dell and can be agile like a smaller vendor, but with Dell’s backing and resources.

You’ll want to check back on Nathan’s blog as he plans to add to his notes after the servers are installed.

Extra-credit reading:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

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