The anatomy of utility IT
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- The fifth utility, April 2002
Is it really possible to create a 'worry-free' system that offers as much power as needed on demand?
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Nevertheless, IBM is building grid computing capabilities into its software and hardware systems, using the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) standard developed by the Globus Project, a consortium of academics, public sector organisations, and industry partners including IBM and Microsoft.
Meanwhile, IBM's storage architecture based around the iSCSI Internet-protocol-based storage standard will offer distributed storage accessible across a network by grid-based applications. Most importantly, the company will offer grid computing through its eLiza programme.
Take it from the top
The top-down approach to utility computing is to have very powerful computers that are ultra-reliable and can be 'partitioned' to appear as several different servers. These separate partitions can then be altered and have resources added to them or removed as appropriate.
To depend on fewer servers, however, organisations need to know that they are reliable. IBM's approach to utility computing – to have a far less heterogeneous network and more consolidation – depends on servers being ultra-reliable (even offering mainframe-class reliability) for the utility computing environment to work.
Paul Horn, senior vice president of research at IBM, says that IBM plans to develop 'autonomic' computers – systems that identify and correct faults themselves, and that automatically adapt to the tasks required of them. IBM's research into autonomic systems, says Horn, is modelled on the human autonomic nervous system, which regulates and repairs the body, responding to changing conditions without any conscious effort on our part. He argues that if the current rate of expansion of digital technology continues, there will soon not be enough skilled people to keep the world's computer systems running. Far fewer and more reliable computers are the only option, he says.
One of IBM's early autonomic efforts is eLiza, a self-healing and dynamic workload management system announced in March 2001 and scheduled to first appear in the p690 series of Unix servers that was announced in October 2001.
Through the use of internal sensors, eLiza will monitor component health and automatically reallocate memory 'on the fly'. Chip-kill, memory mirroring, and hot-swappable memory, disks and other components – all standard features of mainframe computing – will be introduced to IBM's entire range of high-end servers as part of its Enterprise X-architecture.
The X-architecture also offers an additional benefit, says Tikiri Wandarugala, a senior server consultant at IBM Europe. ”You can build as you grow. You don't need to decide [immediately] how much power you're ever going to need.“ Rather than connecting to each other via backplanes connected to the PCI bus, systems based on the X-architecture connect directly into each other's memory controllers. Plugging a two-way system into a two-way system, for example, gives the user either two two-way systems or a four-way system indistinguishable from a purpose-built four-way system. A reboot of the system allows the administrator to switch between the two configurations. The difference is determined by application requirements: not all applications can take advantage of multiple processors or clustering, while licensing issues may limit the number of processors financially rather than technically.
Dell is taking a similar approach with its 'bricks' technology, due out at the end of 2002. Although it does not offer the speed of a direct memory interconnect, this modular approach to server design – where the user can add power supplies, storage, processing power or other server components to an existing system as though they were Lego blocks – is offered on a 'pay as you grow' basis.
Reliability issues aside, the ability to partition a single server into multiple 'virtual' servers remains an important requirement of top-down utility computing. Without it, a badly behaved hardware driver can bring down the whole operating system, no matter how big the computer; poorly written applications can ruin the performance of other applications on the same server; and hardware failures can render the whole server unavailable until the broken parts are replaced. By partitioning the hardware and software into virtual servers, a hardware failure only causes the demise of the servers that use those pieces of the server; overly hungry applications can only consume the virtual server on which they run; and an unstable operating system can be rebooted or replaced while processes running on the other virtual operating systems continue uninterrupted.
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