Scale up!

You know when you’re in the presence of greatness, and in the computing world this has happened only a few times for me. The first was when I sat down on that circular padded seating that surrounded a Cray supercomputer, some 20 years ago; resting my back against something so powerful, yet humming so gently, left a lasting impression. The next time was another Cray, a relatively modern one based on Digital Alpha chips, if I remember rightly. This had a power button on the front that took two hands to push, the very definition of a Significant Switch. Then, I remember my first encounter with the ES7000 from Unisys. A box taller than me, I was in awe of its ability to slice up its internal processing resources into any sort of topology you might desire. A clustered pair in four ways? No problem, sir. Eleven processors for your massively parallel weather-forecasting engine? But of course… The last big box that stirred my juices in this way was the huge HP Superdome kept in the SQL server-performance testing labs at Redmond, which I described here last year – this contained 64 Itanium processors, a terabyte of RAM and a roomful of hard disks all connected by a Fibre Channel network.

So imagine my surprise to be rocked yet again at WinHEC. This time it was in the Partners Exhibition area where vendors show off their latest tools, widgets and hardware. I walked past a stand with nothing of real interest – a regulation half-height rack of nondescript hardware, with its obligatory large plasma screen resting on top. The contents of this screen made me pause, though, and double-check what I’d just seen. Yes, there was Task Manager showing, let’s see, 16 processor graphs horizontally by four rows deep, so that’s… 64 processors in all! Intrigued, I turned my attention back to that innocuous rack and noticed that the vendor was Newisys, highly regarded for its Opteron-based servers. But something wasn’t right. There was a pile of quad-processor servers in this rack, but that didn’t equate to the jaw-dropping CPU display on top.

A representative from Newisys explained what the company had done. It had taken its commodity four-processor Opteron server and fitted it with dual-core CPUs, so each machine now became a full eight-way box. Then it took another seven of these boxes, and… I interrupted him at this point. How on earth, I asked, had it made one physical server out of these eight boxes? He showed me the back, where there was a spaghetti junction of cables, interconnecting each box with its brethren. It turns out that it had extended the Opteron HYPERchannel bus out of each box and interconnected it with the next one, using InfiniBand cards and cabling apparently, but running the HYPERchannel protocol over the top. Suddenly, each motherboard was connected to another. I’m assuming it just worked and there were no nasties such as multiple disk controllers clashing with each other. But it was clear enough what it had done – taken one Opteron-based server and joined its brain to the next, and then to the next and so on down the rack.

I’ve no idea whether this is a sensible idea, so don’t get your chequebooks out yet. Newisys’ people indicated that it yields a storming throughput, and I’ve no reason to disbelieve them. My only concern is the huge data rate that would be flowing through this backbone and whether the proposed solution was sensible for production use. I might well have got hold of the wrong end of the stick, and this may just have been a proof-of-concept hack to see whether it was possible. Even so, you have to admit it was a wicked solution to the scale-up problem. I tried to be clever by wisecracking that of course the average hardware failure rate on this super-box would now be eight times that of the standalone box, and received the intriguing reply that the Longhorn server version due next year supports such configurations, even allowing you to quieten one box off so it can be disconnected and hot unplugged/plugged into the computer. Now, I just need to find an excuse for buying one…
Scale out

If you think this is too much like putting all your eggs in one basket, you can go for a “scale-out” approach. Microsoft hasn’t had any serious scale-out solutions so far, unless you consider the limited facilities like front/back server configurations in Exchange Server. Building a rack of web server front-ends is nice, but not quite the sort of raw horsepower solution I was thinking of – hence, my interest in the news that the Compute Cluster Edition of Server 2003 is about to ship. This consists of two pieces: the cut-down version of Server 2003 and the management tools that run across the entire cluster.

I spent some time recently with the CCS group in London, and it was interesting to learn that the big super-clusters – using thousands of nodes – might be getting lots of headlines, but actually represent only a tiny fraction of installed systems. Given the rise in the power of even standard 1U servers, it’s possible to put together a seriously powerful compute cluster for as little as £10,000, and at that price you can almost afford to buy one per researcher. Don’t bother with heavyweight time management on your cluster, just let people have their own.

So what’s the point of running such a setup on Windows as opposed to, say, Linux? Well, Microsoft reports that a significant number of companies that are writing cluster-supporting applications are looking at the Windows platform and finding it easy to write highly distributable applications. The built-in system-wide Active Directory and Kerberos implementation make it possible to write applications that key directly into the existing username and security policy, whereas managing such issues on a non-Windows cluster within a Windows environment leads to extra configuration and management overhead. And using Windows as the sole OS means you get all the benefits of other tools such as Microsoft Operations Manager and so forth.

Obviously, there would be no point in trying to run Exchange Server on such a cluster: you need dedicated, highly scalable code that gives you as near to a linear return on investment as possible for the number of machines you bring to the party. Microsoft has done a pretty good job on the scheduling and management side, although it’s clear there are areas where more polish and work would be beneficial.

Is it worth looking at? Yes, of course, if you’re either seeking to deploy high-value, high-performance code that will benefit from it, or if you’re about to start writing your own. Nevertheless, getting the latest boxes to scream at 100% utilisation is a sight we see all too infrequently these days.

Up the Chimney

At WinHEC, Microsoft announced the shipment of its TCP Chimney technology. In a nutshell, this is a means of offloading a large chunk of the network stack processing away from the OS and drivers, and onto a dedicated processor on the interface card itself. The reason it’s faster is that it bypasses the need to perform multiple flips between user mode and kernel mode, each of which imposes a significant time and processing overhead. This might not seem a big thing, but it matters when you’re trying to push network traffic at Gigabit Ethernet speeds or faster. The networking world is racing towards 10GB speeds, and we need server hardware that can keep up with them.

I won’t bore you with the intimate details of how to build a Chimney topology application – all the information is on the Microsoft website and it isn’t something most of us will ever have to worry about. Nevertheless, Microsoft is confidently predicting that most of the serious networking hardware will have Chimney support in place by the end of the year. I, for one, will be looking for it in future server purchases. Jon honeyball
SharePoint Server 2007

You’re going to be hearing a lot about Microsoft’s new offerings in the Office and operating system arenas, and I have to say that I like what I see so far in both. Word 2007 is so nice it’s almost painful, but it’s early days and I’ll see how I feel after a few months more of steady use. On the server side, there are new incarnations of quite a few applications, of course, plus one brand-new one. Over the next few months, I’m going to place myself in the position of a system administrator who’s interested in these new technologies, pleased to see that there are stable betas available that have reasonable timeouts, and wants to try out some of this new software. It isn’t a role I’ll find difficult to play, as it pretty much describes what I do anyway.

This month, I’m going to kick off with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Now, I must admit that while I’m familiar with SharePoint and have used it in the past, it hasn’t featured highly for me in quite a while, so I was curious to see how much I could find out about the software before I went ahead and installed it. One of the first things that caught my eye was a link at the bottom of the SharePoint Server 2007 homepage that promised free online e-learning, and another that prompted me to undergo a demo. I choose the word “undergo” carefully, as my experience of these demos is that they tend to be fluffy, PR-based things, full of happy, smiling people who just can’t believe how good life is now that they’re able to use the scintillating product in question. I’m here right now to assure you all that nothing has changed in this area.

The introduction makes heavy use of standard industry business-speak – a language spoken only by the people who write white papers on these subjects, or who bore for the world with PowerPoint presentations. Were I to meet someone in normal life who actually uttered the words “empowering better-informed decisions throughout the enterprise and responding proactively to business events” during a conversation, I’d probably want to run away and hide. The start of the demo is full of this stuff, but finally we got to the meat of the presentation and met Bob, creator of an embedded form in the Fabrikam International website.

Bob sits smugly in his chair, looking as pleased as punch at his colossal IT capabilities. Forms Services in SharePoint Server 2007 allow Fabrikam to easily collect customer information, and there are built-in validation rules that help to ensure this information is captured accurately. This is all good stuff, but I’m struggling to concentrate, because frankly I’d like to give Bob a swift poke on the nose to wipe that smug grin off his face. The form is integrated into Fabrikam’s CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system and, once filled in, is automatically made available to those who need to see it via a portal site. This lets Fabrikam employees examine the information and use it as they wish, and to emphasise this point we’re treated to the sight of Bob and two of his colleagues, who look as happy as he does at their ability to do this.

I now learn that Office SharePoint Server comes with Excel services, which enables users to access a central copy of a spreadsheet via their web browser. It also enables said users to share spreadsheets with colleagues while protecting sensitive data. Now I get to meet Mary, who has a winning smile and lovely teeth, and who is clearly delighted at the prospect of being able to access this data via the back-end of the CRM system, using aforementioned Excel services. Once she’s analysed the information on the forms, she can update them with further data that’s made available to the sales rep who’s actually going to be face-to-face with their customers. Each sales rep has a personalised portal in SharePoint that shows them information on leads, their current customer data, messages from colleagues, information provided by their manager/s, documents and so on. Sales reps can also see where they stand with their sales targets, with that information provided both textually and graphically. Julian looks quite happy about this, especially as he realises that, thanks to the data on the lead, if he makes this sale he’ll have achieved his month’s target. He looks quite a lot tenser than the colleagues we met earlier, but then there’s quite a lot riding on this for him.
To help him out, Julian looks for more information on his lead using the corporate intranet and SharePoint Enterprise Search, which shows him that his lead is an existing customer who’s recently moved to the US from Germany. The search enables him to look for documents, business data, people, web pages and more. Julian can now send Hans (the sales rep in Germany who previously looked after this client, and who looks as dementedly happy as everyone else in the company) an email enquiring about the customer. Julian is now armed with enough data to begin preparing a proposal for the client, Steve. He uses a Word template for this proposal, then fires up PowerPoint to create a presentation using slides from a library with prepared paragraphs, charts and graphics. His proposal complete, Julian now uses SharePoint to kick off an approval workflow – this process is triggered automatically when Julian puts the proposal in the document repository.

Julian’s manager, George, seems to be a thoughtful chap and clearly approves of Julian’s endeavours, as he grants approval within minutes. Julian now publishes the proposal to an extranet so that Steve can read it, then sends him an email to tell him that the proposal is there for viewing. Steve checks it out and suggests changes via the Review interface of Microsoft Word 2007. The document had been flagged by Julian for notification in the event of changes being made, so as soon as Steve makes his comments Julian receives an email containing the proposed changes. He can quickly make a change, have it approved once more by George and is now free to book the face-to-face meeting with Steve. Julian clinches the sale and makes his monthly target. Fabrikam stores all customer proposals for a minimum of seven years, in a repository that’s been created with SharePoint Server 2007 – the company is able to set up rules for this repository and have them applied automatically to all documents as they arrive.

The point this demo gets across quite effectively is that Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a collaboration tool that brings together activities such as content management, business processes, portals, search capabilities and more, making them all accessible via a single interface and a single application that works well in conjunction with established Microsoft Office applications, web browsers and other Microsoft Server products. The combination of the demo and other online information has convinced me that I’m ready to take the next step in the process of increasing my knowledge of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, which means taking the free six-hour e-learning course. It’s time to upgrade my Microsoft e-learning player and settle down to some serious homework. I’ll let you know how I get on next month. Dave Moss

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