This is a liveblog of IDF 2014 session DATS009, titled “Ceph: Open Source Storage Software Optimizations on Intel Architecture for Cloud Workloads.” (That’s a mouthful.) The speaker is Anjaneya “Reddy” Chagam, a Principal Engineer in the Intel Data Center Group.
Chagam starts by reviewing the agenda, which—as the name of the session implies—is primarily focused on Ceph. He next transitions into a review of the problem with storage in data centers today; specifically, that storage needs “are growing at a rate unsustainable with today’s infrastructure and labor costs.” Another problem, according to Chagam, is that today’s workloads end up using the same sets of data but in very different ways, and those different ways of using the data have very different performance profiles. Other problems with the “traditional” way of doing storage is that storage processing performance doesn’t scale out with capacity, storage environments are growing increasingly complex (which in turn makes management harder).
Chagam does admit that not all workloads are suited for distributed storage solutions. If you need high availability and high performance (like for databases), then the traditional scale-up model might work better. For “cloud workloads” (no additional context/information provided to qualify what a Continue reading
Following on from my IDF 2014 Day 1 recap, here’s a quick recap of day 2.
You can read the liveblog here if you want all the gory details. If we boil it down to the essentials, it’s actually pretty simple. First, deliver more computing power in the hardware, either through the addition of FPGAs to existing CPUs or through the continued march of CPU power (via more cores or faster clock speeds or both). Second, make the hardware programmable, through standard interfaces. Third, expand the use of “big data” and analytics.
I attended a couple technical sessions today, but didn’t manage to get any of them liveblogged. Sorry! I did tweet a few things from the sessions, in case you follow me on Twitter.
I did have an extremely productive conversation regarding Intel’s rack-scale architecture (RSA) efforts. I pushed the Intel folks on the show floor to really dive into what makes up RSA, and finally got some answers that I’ll share in a separate post. I will do my best to get a dedicated RSA piece published just as soon as I possibly can.
Also on the expo floor, I Continue reading
This is a liveblog of the Data Center Mega-Session from day 2 of Intel Developer Forum (IDF) 2014 in San Francisco.
Diane Bryant, SVP and GM of the Data Center Group takes the stage promptly at 9:30am to kick off the data center mega-session. Bryant starts the discussion by setting out the key drivers affecting the data center: new devices (and new volumes of devices) and new services (AWS, Netflix, Twitter, etc.). This is the “digital service economy,” and Bryant insists that today’s data centers aren’t prepared to handle the digital service economy.
Bryant posits that in the future (not-so-distant future):
Per Bryant, when you’re operating at scale then efficiency matters, and that will lead organizations to choose platforms selected specifically for the workload. This leads to a discussion of customized offerings, and Bryant talks about an announcement earlier in the summer that combined a Xeon processor and a FPGA (field-programmable gate array) on the same die.
Bryant then introduces Karl Triebes, EVP and CTO of F5 Networks, who takes the stage to talk about FPGAs in F5 and how the joint Xeon/FPGA integrated solution Continue reading
In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m at Intel Developer Forum (IDF) 2014 this week in San Francisco. Here’s a quick recap of day 1 (I should have published this last night—sorry for not getting it out sooner).
Here’s a liveblog of the IDF 2014 day 1 keynote.
The IDF keynotes are always a bit interesting for me. Intel has a very large consumer presence: PCs, ultrabooks, tablets, phones, 2-in–1/convertibles, all-in–1 devices. Naturally, this is a big part of the keynote. I don’t track or get involved in the consumer space; my focus is on the data center. It is kind of fun to see all the stuff going on in the consumer space, though. There were no major data center-centric announcements yesterday (day 1), but I suspect there will be some today (day 2) in a mega-session with Diane Bryant (SVP and GM of the Data Center Group at Intel). I’ll be liveblogging that mega-session, so stay tuned for details.
I was able to hit two technical sessions yesterday and liveblogged both of them:
Both were Continue reading
This is a live blog of session DATS004, titled “Bare-Metal, Docker Containers, and Virtualization: The Growing Choices for Cloud Applications.” The speaker is Nicholas Weaver (yes, that Nick Weaver, who now works at Intel).
Weaver starts his presentation by talking about “how we got here”, discussing the various technological shifts that have affected the computing landscape over the years. Weaver includes a discussion of the drivers behind virtualization as well as the pros and cons of virtualization.
That, naturally, leads to a discussion of containers. Containers are not all that new—Solaris Zones is a form of containers that existed back in 2004. Naturally, the recent hype associated with Docker has, according to Weaver, rejuvenated interest in the concept of containers.
Before Weaver gets too far into containers, he first provides a background of some of the core containerization pieces. This includes cgroups (the ability to control resource allocation/utilization), which is built into the Linux kernel. Namespace isolation is also important, which provides full process isolation (so that one process can’t see processes in another namespace). Namespace isolation isn’t just for processes; there’s also isolation for network entities, mounts, and users. LXC is a set of user-space tools that attempted Continue reading
This is a liveblog of IDF 2014 session DATS002, titled “Virtualizing the Network to Enable a Software-Defined Infrastructure (SDI)”. The speakers are Brian Johnson (Solutions Architect, Intel) and Jim Pinkerton (Windows Server Architect, Microsoft). I attended a similar session last year; I’m hoping for some new information this year.
Pinkerton starts the session with a discussion of why Microsoft is able to speak to network virtualization via their experience with large-scale web properties (Bing, XBox Live, Outlook.com, Office, etc.). To that point, Microsoft has over 100K servers across their cloud properties, with >200K diverse services, first-party applications, and third-party applications. This amounts to $15 billion in data center investments. Naturally, all of this runs on Windows Server and Windows Azure.
So why does networking need to be transformed for the cloud? According to Pinkerton, the goal is to drive agility and flexibility for your business. This is accomplished by pooling and automating network resources, ensuring tenant isolation, maximizing scale/performance, enabling seamless capacity expansion and workload mobility, and minimizing operational complexity.
Johnson takes over here to talk about how Intel is working to address the challenges and needs that Pinkerton just outlined. This breaks down into three core Continue reading
This is a liveblog for the day 1 keynote at Intel Developer Forum (IDF) 2014. The keynote starts with an interesting musical piece that shows how technology can be used to allow a single performer to emulate the sound of a full band, and then kicks off with a “pocket avatar” presentation by Brian Krzanich, CEO of Intel Corporation. Krzanich takes the stage in person a few minutes later.
Krzanich starts with a recap of some of the discussions from last year’s IDF, and he points out some of the results over the last year. Among the accomplishments Krzanich lists, he mentions that Intel was the #2 shipper of tablets last year. (One would assume that Apple is #1.) Krzanich clearly believes that Intel has a bright future; he points out that projections show as many as 50 billion x86-based devices by 2020 (just 6 years away). That’s pretty massive growth; there are only an estimated 2.2 billion x86-based devices today.
The line-up today includes talks from Diane Bryant (data center), Kirk Skaugen (clients), Doug Fisher (software and services), and a live Q&A by Krzanich.
Krzanich starts a discussion of wearables and related devices with a mention of Continue reading