Tag Archive - ibm

Cutting-edge of Cloud Computing

November 25, 2009 in , , , , , , , , , , with 17 Comments

Just got off the bus in Montreal, Québec. This is a lightning visit, in 48 hours, I’ll be back in my office in Ottawa. But, right now, I’m taking a drink in one of my favorite downtown coffee shop and I’m planning.

The next few hours will see little sleep and lots of action ; More precisely I’ll be deploying lots of hardware (2 IBM SAN, 2 core servers, 2 switchs, 2 APC, 5 branchs servers – supporting up to 20 ‘leaf’/virtual servers), and then somes (3 couples of 2 systems in high redundancy (wackamole IP ‘fencing’, shared-storage through DRBD). All that will go in ‘my’ new 48U cage @Hypertec (old nortel building) to act as a demo for some clients.

Once that’s completed, the true fun start: A very big part of this infrastructure is going to be self-healing, failure resitant and high performance. We are speaking of :

  • automatic & dynamic launch of new ‘branch’ systems (xen dom0), without having to do anything more than to rack them (no OS install needed, can be upgraded by rebooting them),
  • high redundancy at the leaf level (xen domU, automatic migration toward less used dom0),
  • failure resistace through bonded interface, multi-path & multi-host fiberchannel SAN & controller…

    • This is going to be solid, scalable, fast : the holy grail of a lot of service provider that are aiming at automatization of their ‘hosting’ business. The result of a lot of planning and testing ; the cutting-edge of cloud-computing.

    HPC Market is moving

    May 29, 2009 in , , , , , , , , , , with 7 Comments

    The HPC (High Performance Computing) market is not really known for its Black Swan. The same interconnects have been available for years (Ethernet: ~30years, Infiniband: ~10years, Myrinet: ~12years, …) and the same player battle in the field (Cray : 1972, IBM: 1911, HP: 1939, …). Well, thats not so true anymore. In the last month, we saw:

    - Rackable Systems buy SGI (who built 3.40 % of the current list of TOP500 supercomputer ; statistic in time available here).
    - SiCortex wasn’t able to get a third financing round & close doors.
    - Quadrics shut down.

    And in the midst of all that:

    Cray buy back its depts.