When a server is a converged solution
Thought this was kind of funny/odd/ironic/etc...
I got an email a few minutes ago which is talking about HP App System for Vertica. Which, among other things HP describes as being able to
This solution delivers system performance and reduces implementation from months to hours.
I imagine they are referring to competing solutions and not comparing to running Vertica on bare metal. In fact it may be kind of misleading as Vertica is very open - you can run it on physical hardware (any hardware really), virtual hardware, and even some cloud services (it is supported in *shudder*Amazon even..). So you can get implementation of a basic Vertica system without buying anything new.
But if you are past the evaluation stage, and perhaps outgrew your initial deployment and want to grow into something more formal/dedicated, then you may need some new hardware.
HP pitches this as a Converged Solution. So I was sort of curious what HP solutions are they converging here?
Basically it's just a couple base configurations of HP DL380G8s with internal storage (these 2U servers support up to 25 2.5" disks). They don't even install Vertica for you --
HP Vertica Analytics Platform software installation is well documented and can be installed by customers.
They are kind enough to install the operating system though (no mention of any special tuning, other than they say it is "Standard" so I guess no tuning).
No networking included(outside of the servers as far as I can tell), the only storage is the internal DAS. Minimum of three servers is required so some sort of 10GbE switches are required (since the severs are 10GbE, you can run Vertica fine on 1GbE too for smaller data sets).
I would of expected the system to come with Vertica pre-installed, or automatically installed as part of setup and have a trial license built into the system.
Vertica is very easy to install and configure the basics, so in the grand scheme of things this AppSystem might save the average Vertica customer a few minutes.
Vertica is licensed normally by the amount of data stored in the cluster (pre-compression / encoding). The node count, CPU count, memory, spindles doesn't matter. There is a community edition that goes up to 3 nodes, and 3TB (it has some other software limitations - and as far as I know there is no direct migration path from community to enterprise without data export/import).
Don't get me wrong I think this is a great solution, very solid server, with a lot of memory and plenty of I/O to provide a very powerful Vertica experience. Vertica's design reduces I/O requirements by up to ~90% in some cases, so you'd be probably shocked the amount of performance you'd get out of just one of these 3 node clusters, even without any tuning at the Vertica level.
Vertica does not require a fancy storage system, it's really built with DAS in mind. Though I know there are bunches of customers out there that run it on big fancy storage because they like the extra level of reliability/availability.
I just thought it was kind of strange some of the marketing behind it, saving months of time, being converged infrastructure and what not..
It makes me think(if I had not installed Vertica clusters before) that if I want Vertica and don't get this AppSystem then I am in a world of hurt when it comes to setting Vertica up. Which is not the right message to send.
Here is this wonderful AppSystem that is in fact -- just a server with RHEL installed.
For some reason I expected more.
Big pop in Tableau IPO
I was first introduced to Tableau (and Vertica) a couple of years ago at a local event in Seattle. Both products really blew me away(and still do to this day). Though it's not an area I spend a lot of time in - my brain struggles with anything analytics related (even when using Tableau, same goes for Splunk, or SQL). I just can't make the connections, when I come across crazy Splunk queries that people write I just stare at it for a while in wonder(as in I can't possibly imagine how someone could of come up with such a query even after working with Splunk for the past six years).. then I copy+paste it and hope it works.
Sample Tableu reports pulled from google images
But that doesn't stop me from seeing an awesome combination that is truly ground breaking both in performance and ease of use.
I've seen people try to use Tableau with MySQL for example and they fairly quickly give up in frustration at how slow it is. I remember being told that Tableau used to get a bunch of complaints from users years ago saying how slow it seemed to be -- but it really wasn't Tableau's fault it was the slow back end data store.
Vertica unlocks Tableau's potential by providing a jet engine to run your queries against. Millions of rows? hundreds of millions? No problem.. billions ? It'll take a bit longer but shouldn't be an issue either. Try that with most other back ends and well you'll be waiting there for days if not weeks.
Tableau is a new generation of data visualization technology that is really targeted at the Excel crowd. It can read in data from practically anything(Excel files included), and it provides a seamless way to analyze your data and provide fancy charts and graphs, tables and maps..
It's not really for the hard core power users who want to write custom queries. Though I still think it is useful for those folks. A great use case for Tableau is for the business users to play around with it, and come up with the reports that they find useful, then the data warehouse people can take those results and optimize the warehouse for those types of queries (if required). It's a lot simpler and faster than the alternative..
I remember two years ago I was working with a data warehouse guy at a company and we were testing Tableau with MySQL at the time actually (small tables), just playing around, he poked around, created some basic graphs and drilled down into them. In all we spent about 5 minutes on this task and we found some interesting information. He said if he had to do that in MySQL queries himself it would of taken him roughly two days. Running query after query and then building new queries based on results etc. From two days to roughly five minutes -- for a very experienced SQL/data warehouse person.
Tableau has a server component as well, which you can publish your reports for others to see with a web browser or mobile device, the server can also of course directly link to your data to get updates as frequently as you want them.
You can have profiles and policies, one example Tableau gave me last year was one big customer enforces certain color codes across their organization so no matter what they are looking at they know Blue means X and Orange means Y. This is enforced at the server level, so it's not something people have to worry about remembering. They can also enforce policies around reporting so that the term "XYZ" is always the result of "this+that", so people get consistent results every time -- not a situation where someone interprets something one way, and another person another way. Again this is enforced at the server level, reducing the need for double checking and additional training.
They also have APIs - and users are able to embed Tableau reports directly into their applications and web sites(through the server component). I know one organization where almost all of their customer reporting is presented with Tableau - I'm sure it saved them a ton of time trying to replicate the behavior in their own code. I've seen folks try to write reporting UIs in past companies and usually what comes out is significantly sub par because it's a complicated thing to get right. Tableau makes it easy, and probably very cost effective relative to full time developers taking months/years to try to do it yourself.
It's one of the few products out there that I am really excited about, and I've seen some amazing stuff done with the software in a very minimal amount of time.
Tableau has a 15 day evaluation period if you want to try it out -- it really should be more, but whatever. Vertica has a community edition which you can use as a sort of long term evaluation - it's limited to 1TB of data and 3 cluster nodes. You can get a full fledged enterprise evaluation from Vertica as well if you want to test all of the features.
I wrote some scripts at my current company to refresh/import about 150GB of data from our MySQL systems to Vertica each night. It is interesting to see MySQL struggle to read the data out, and Vertica is practically idle as it ingests it (I'd otherwise normally think that the writing of the data would be more intensive than the reading). In order to improve performance I compiled a few custom MySQL binaries that allowed me to run MySQL queries and pipe the results directly into Vertica (instead of writing 10s of GBs to disk only to read it back again). The need for the custom binaries is MySQL by default only supports tab delimited results which was not sufficient for this data set (I actually compiled 3-4 different binaries with different delimiters depending on the tables - managed to get ~99.99999999% of the rows in without further effort). Also wrote a quick perl script to fix some of the invalid data like invalid time stamps which MySQL happily allows but Vertica does not.
Sample command:
$MYSQL --raw --batch --quick --skip-column-names -u $DB_USERNAME --password="${DB_PASSWORD}" --host=${DB_SERVER} $SOURCE_DBNAME -e "select * from $MY_TABLE" | $DATA_FIX | vsql -w $VERTICA_PASSWORD -c "COPY ${VERTICA_SCHEMA}.${MY_TABLE} FROM STDIN DELIMITER '|' RECORD TERMINATOR '##' NULL AS 'NULL' DIRECT"
Oh and back to the topic of the post - Tableau IPO'd today (ticker is DATA) - as of last check it is up 55%.
So, congrats Tableau on a great IPO!
Some pictures of large scale Microsoft ITPAC Deployments
Just came across this, at Data Center Knowledge. I have written about these in the past, from a high level perspective they are incredibly innovative, far more so than any other data center container I have seen at least.
Once you walk outside, you begin to see the evolution of Microsoft’s data center design. The next building you enter isn’t really a building at all, but a steel and aluminum framework. Inside the shell are pre-manufactured ITPAC modules. Microsoft has sought to standardize the design for its ITPAC – short for Information Technology Pre-Assembled Component – but also allows vendors to work with the specifications and play with the design. These ITPACs use air side economization, and there are a few variations.
I heard about some of these being deployed a couple years ago from some friends, though this is the first time I've seen pictures of any deployment.
You can see a video on how the ITPAC works here.
Activist investors and not wanting to be public
Another somewhat off topic post but still kinda tech related. There has been somewhat of a rash of companies the past few years that say they either don't want to go public or some that already are public and want to go private again.
Obviously the leading reason behind this is often cited as companies not wanting to have to deal with the pressure of short term investors. Some are more problematic than others.
Two events caught my eye this morning, the first one is Carl Ichan's attempt to crush Dell. The second is apparently a dual headed assault against the board of Emulex for not taking the buyout offer from Broadcom a few years ago.
The average amount of time people hold stocks for has collapsed over the past decade or two( I saw some charts of this at one point but can't find them). People are becoming less and less patient demanding higher returns in shorter amounts of time. The damage is being done everywhere, from companies surrendering their intellectual property in order to be allowed to do business in China, to companies just squeezing their staff trying to get everything they can out of them. I saw someone who claimed to be an IBMer (widely regarded as giving investors what they want) claiming IBM is being gutted from the inside out, all the good people are leaving, it's only a matter of time.. This certainly may not be true, I don't know. But it wouldn't surprise me given IBM's performance.
Corporate profits are at record highs as many like to cite. Though I see severe long term damage being done across the board in order to get to these profits in the short term.
HP is probably a prime example of this, as a result they felt they had to go spend a ton of money acquiring companies to make up for the lack of investment in R&D in previous years.
But of course HP is not alone. This problem is everywhere, and it's really depressing to see. The latest attempt from Icahn to kill Dell is just sad. Here is Michael Dell the founder and CEO trying to save his company for the long term, and here comes in Icahn who just wants to squeeze it dry. Dell may not succeed if they go private maybe they go bust and investors lose out. Maybe Icahn's deal is better for investors. For some reason I rather view the situation as for what's best for the company. Dell has done some smart acquisitions over the past few years, they need (more)time to sort through them. If investors don't like what Dell is doing they are free to sell their shares.
Not long ago BMC got acquired as well (I really have no knowledge of BMC's products) by private equity and it's quite possible the same happens there too.
HP attacked Dell when the plan was announced to go private, saying things like "Dell is distracted now", and HP is a better fit for customers because they are not distracted. I got news for anyone who believed that - HP has more distractions than Dell. I have absolutely no doubt if HP could manage a way to go private they would do it in a heart beat. I think HP will get past their distractions, they have some great products in Proliant, 3PAR, Vertica, and others I'm sure that I can't cite off the top of my head.
Same sort of short sightedness I see all the time with folks wanting to embrace the cloud, and the whole concept of shifting things from CAPEX to OPEX (though some accountants and CFOs are wising up to this scam).
The same thing is happening in governments around the world as well. It's everywhere.
It's just one of those things that has kept my vision of the future of our economy at such low levels (well if I said what I really thought you might think I'm even more crazy than I already come off as being 
)
anyway, sad to see....
Lost almost all respect for Consumer Reports today
I was getting my morning dose of CNBC this morning(I'm not an investor - I watch CNBC purely for entertainment purposes) when news came over the wire that Tesla had gotten a 99/100 rating on their ultra luxury green car by Consumer Reports.
I watched the interview with the guy at Consumer Reports and I was shocked, and I still am. A bit disgusted too.
Let me start out by saying I have no issues with the car itself. I'm sure it's a fine automobile. My issue is with the double talking standard of Consumer Reports in this particular case.
(forgive me the quotes will not be precise, see the video link above for the full interview)
The guy who wrote this report starts off by saying it's better than the other $90,000 cars in it's price range... (also goes on to say it's better than pretty much ANY car they have EVER EVER EVER TESTED -- not just better than any other electric car -- ANY CAR)
..but..
It is an electric car, while it has a long range compared to other electric cars, I can take a Toyota Corolla and drive to Cleveland from New York -- I can't do that in this car yet.
You can only go about 200 miles before charging it up, that is a severe limitation. (those last two are his words)
CNBC goes on to quote him as saying If you leave it unplugged, you experience what you describe as a parasitic loss of energy(Consumer Report's words) that amounts to 12-15 miles per day, and asks him on that topic. He responds -
The concern is this is a new vehicle from a new automaker and there's going to be growing pains. If you're really looking for something to be trouble free off the bat - look elsewhere (his words too!)
I'm really glad I saw the interview. My disgust here is not with the car. I have no doubt it is a fine car! I think many people should go buy it. But if these sorts of flaws knock only a single point off the score ....that just seems wrong. Very wrong. Especially the last bit -- if you want something to be trouble free look elsewhere -- for something that got rated 99 out of 100!!!
He goes on to talk about how it takes 30 minutes to charge the battery to half strength at one of Tesla's charging stations. He thinks people would be happier (duh) if they could fully charge it in four minutes.
CNBC half seriously asked him if you could charge a Tesla from a hotel room power outlet. Consumer reports guy said yes but it would take a VERY long time.
People buying this $90k car obviously are not concerned about the price of gas. It's really more for the image of trying to show your green than anything else, which is sad in itself(you can be more green by buying carbon offset credits - folks that can afford a $90k car should have no trouble buying some). But that's fine.
Again my issue isn't with the car. It's with the rating. Maybe it should be a 75, or an 85. I don't know. If it was me I'd knock at least 20 points off for the lack of range and lack of charging stations alone. Now if gas was say fifteen dollars a gallon I could see giving it some good credit for saving on that.
I think what Tesla is doing is probably a good thing, it seems like decent technology, good (relative to other electric vehicles) range. Likely can't take it on a road trip between SFO and Seattle any time soon..
I have relied at least in part on Consumer Reports for a few different purchases I have made (including my current car - which if I recall right Consumer Reports had no rating on it at the time it was too new. One of my friends just bought the 2013 model year of my car a few weeks ago). It was extremely disappointing to see this result today. Maybe I should not of been surprised. I don't pay too close attention to what Consumer Reports does, I check them usually once every couple years at most. This may be par for the course for them.
Internet tech review sites have often had a terrible reputation for giving incorrect ratings for some reason or another (most often it seems to be because they want to keep getting free stuff from the vendors). I had thought(hoped) Consumer Reports was in a sort of league by itself for independent reporting.
I think at the end of the day the rating doesn't matter - people who are in the market for a $90k car will do their homework. It just sort of reeks to me of a back room deal or perhaps a bunch of hippies over at Consumer reports dreaming of a future where all vehicles are electric, never mind the fact the power grid can't handle it. (I can hear the voice of Cartman in the back of my head - Screw you hippies!). Tesla wants all the positive press they can get after all.
So let's see. We have a perfect score of 99/100 along which we have the words severe limitation, parasitic loss of energy, and look elsewhere if you want a trouble free experience ........
I'll say it one more time - my problem is with the perfect rating of 99/100 not with the car itself.
Internet Hippies at it again
I was just reading a discussion on slashdot about IPv6 again. So apparently BT has announced plans to deploy carrier grade NAT (CGN) for some of their low tier customers. Which is of course just a larger scope higher scale deployment of NAT.
I knew how the conversation would go but I found it interesting regardless. The die hard IPv6 folks came out crying fowl
Killing IPv4 is the only solution. This is a stopgap measure like carpooling and congestion charges that don't actually fix the original problem of a diminishing resource.
(disclaimer - I walk to work)
[..]how on earth can you make IPv6 a premium option if you don't make IPv4 unbearably broken and inconvenient for users?
These same folks often cry out about how NAT will break the internet, because they can't do peer to peer stuff (as easily in some cases, others may not be possible at all). At the same time they advocate a solution (IPv6) that will break FAR more things than NAT could ever hope to break. At least an order of magnitude more.
They feel the only way to make real progress is essentially to tax the usage of IPv4 high enough that people are discouraged from using it, thus somehow bringing immediate global change to the internet and get everyone to switch to IPv6. Which brings me to my next somewhat related topic.
Maybe they are right - I don't know. I'm in no hurry to get to IPv6 myself.
Stop! Tangent time.
The environmentalists are of course doing the same thing -- not long ago a law took effect here in the county I am at where they have banned plastic bags at grocery stores and stuff. You can still get paper pags at a cost of $0.10/bag but no more plastic. I was having a brief discussion on this with a friend last week and he was questioning the stores for charging folks he didn't know it was the law that was mandating it. I have absolutely, not a shred of doubt that if the environmentalists could have their way they would of banned all disposable bags. That is their goal - the tax is only $0.10 now but it will go up in the future they will push it as high as they can for the same reason, to discourage use. Obviously customers were already paying for plastic and paper bags before - the cost was built into the margins of the products they buy - just like they were paying for the electricity to keep the dairy products cool.
In Washington state I believe there was one or two places that actually tried to ban ALL disposable bags. I don't remember if the laws passed or not, but I remember thinking that I wanted to just go to one or more of their grocery stores, load up a cart full of stuff, go to checkout. Then they tell me I have to buy bags and I would just walk out. I wanted to soo badly though I am more polite than that so I didn't.
Safeway gave me 3 "free" reusable bags the first time I was there after the law passed and I bought one more since. I am worried about contamination more than anything else, there have been several reports of the bags being contaminated mainly by meat and stuff because people don't clean them regularly.
I'll admit (as much as it pains me) that there is one good reason to use these bags over the disposable ones that didn't really hit me until I went home that first night - they are a lot stronger, so they hold more. I was able to get a full night's shopping in 3 bags, and those were easier to carry than the ~8 or so that would otherwise be used with disposable.
I think it's terrible to have the tax on paper since that is relatively much more green than plastic. I read an article one time that talked about paper vs plastic and the various regions in our country at least - what is more green. The answer was it varied, on the coast lines like where I live paper is more green. In the middle parts of the country plastic was more green. I forgot the reasons given but they made sense at the time. I haven't been able to dig up the article I have no idea where I read it.
I remember living in China almost 25 years ago now, and noticing how everyone was using reusable bags, similar to what we have now but they were, from what I remember, more like knitted plastic. They used them I believe mainly because they didn't have an alternative - they didn't have the machines and stuff to cheaply mass produce those bags. I believe I remember reading at some point the usage of disposable bags really went up in the following years before reversing course again towards the reusables.
Myself I have recycled my plastic bags (at Safeway) for a long time now, as long as I can remember. Sad to see them go.
I'll end with a quote from Cartman (probably not a direct quote I tried checking)
Hippies piss me off
(Hey Hippies - go ban bottled water now too while your at it - I go through about 60 bottles a week myself, I've been stocking up recently because it was cheap(er than normal) I think I have more than 200 bottles in my apartment now - I like the taste of Arrowhead water). I don't drink much soda at home these days basically replaced it with bottled water so I think cost wise it's an improvement )
(same goes for those die hard IPv6 folks - you can go ahead, slap CGNAT on my internet connection at home - I don't care. I already have CGNAT on my cell phone(it has a 10.x IP) and when it is in hotspot mode I notice nothing is broken. The only thing I do that is peer to peer is skype(for work, I don't use it otherwise), everything else is pure client-server). I have a server(a real server that this blog is hosted on) in a data center (a real data center not my basement) with 100Mbps and unlimited bandwidth to do things that I can't do on my home connection (mainly due to bandwidth constraints and dynamic IP).
I proclaim IPv6 die hards as internet hippies!
My home network has a site to site VPN with the data center, and if I need to access my home network remotely, I just VPN to the data center and access it that way. If you don't want to host a real server(it's not cheap), there are other cheaper solutions like VPS or whatever that are available for pennies a day.
Openflow inventor admits SDN is hype
The whole SDN thing has bugged me for a long time now. The amount of hype behind it has driven me mad. I have asked folks to explain to me what SDN is, and I have never really gotten a good answer. I have a decent background in networking but it's never been my full time responsibility (nor do I wish it to be).
I am happy to report that it seems I am not crazy. Yesterday I came across an article on slashdot from the inventor of Openflow, the same guy that sold his little networking startup Nicira for a cool $1.2B (and people thought HP paid too much for 3PAR).
He admits he doesn't know what SDN is either anymore.
Reading that made me feel better
On top of that our friends over at El Reg recently described SDN as an industry "hype gasm". That too was refreshing to see. Finally more people are starting to cut through the hype.
I've always felt that the whole SDN thing that is going on is entirely too narrow in vision - seemingly to be focused almost entirely on switching & routing. Most of the interesting stuff happens higher up in the advanced layer 7 load balancing where you have more insight as to what is actually traversing the wire from an application perspective.
I have no doubt that the concepts behind SDN will be/are very useful for massive scale service providers and such (though somehow they managed without it as it is trying to be defined now anyway). I don't see it as very useful for most of the rest of organizations, unlike say virtualized storage.
I cringed badly when I first saw the term software defined storage last year, it just makes me shudder as to the amount of hype people might try to pump into that. HP seems to be using this term more and more often. I believe others are too, though I can't bring myself to google the term.
Giant Explosion of companies moving off of AWS
Maybe I'm not alone in this world after all. I have ranted and raved about how terrible Amazon's cloud is for years now. I used it at two different companies for around two years(been almost a year since I last used it at this point) and it was, by far the worst experience in my professional career. I could go on for an entire afternoon listing all the problems and lack of abilities, features etc that I had experienced -- not to mention the costs.
But anyway, onto the article which I found on slashdot. It made my day, well the day is young still so perhaps something better will come along.
A week ago I quoted Piston’s CTO saying that there was a “giant explosion” of companies moving off of Amazon Web Services (AWS). At the time, I noted that he had good reason to say that, since he started a company that builds software used by companies to build private clouds.
[..]
Enterprises that are moving to private clouds tend to be those that had developers start using the cloud without permission.
[..]
Other businesses are “trying to get out,” he said. AWS has made its compute services very sticky by making them difficult for users to remove workloads like databases to run them elsewhere.
Myself I know of several folks who have stuff in Amazon, and for the most part the complaints are similar to mine. Very few that I have heard of are satisfied. The people that seem to be satisfied (in my experience) are those that don't see the full picture, or don't care. They may be satisfied because they don't want to worry about infrastructure no matter the cost, or they want to be able to point the finger at an external service provider when stuff breaks (Amazon's support is widely regarded as worthless).
"We have thousands of AWS customers, and we have not found anyone who is happy with their tech support," says Laderman.
I was at a company paying six figures a month in fees and they refused to give us any worthwhile support. Any company in the enterprise space would of been more than happy to permanently station an employee on site to make sure the customer is happy for those kind of payments. Literally everyone who used the Amazon stuff in the company hated it, and the company wanted Amazon to come help show us the way -- and they said no.
I am absolutely convinced (as I've seen it first and second hand) in many cases the investors in the startups have conflicts of interest and want their startups to use Amazon because the investors benefit from them growing as well. Amazon then uses this marketing stuff to pimp to other customers. This of course happens all over the place with other companies, but there are a lot of folks that are invested in Amazon relatively speaking compared to most other companies.
There's no need for me to go into specifics as to why Amazon sucks here - for those you can see some of the past posts. This is just a quickie.
Anyway, that's it for now.. I saw the article and it made me smile.
HP Project Moonshot micro servers
HP made a little bit of headlines recently when they officially unveiled their first set of ultra dense micro servers, under the product name Moonshot. Originally speculated as likely being an ARM-platform, it seems HP has surprised many in making this first round of products Intel Atom based.
Picture of HP Moonshot chassis with 45 servers
They are calling it the world's first software defined server. Ugh. I can't tell you how sick I feel whenever I hear the term software defined <insert anything here>.
In any case I think AMD might take issue with that, with their SeaMicro unit which they acquired a while back. I was talking with them as far back as 2009 I believe and they had their high density 10U virtualized Intel Atom-based platform(I have never used Seamicro though knew a couple folks that worked there). Complete with integrated switching, load balancing and virtualized storage(the latter two HP is lacking).
Unlike legacy servers, in which a disk is unalterably bound to a CPU, the SeaMicro storage architecture is far more flexible, allowing for much more efficient disk use. Any disk can mount any CPU; in fact, SeaMicro allows disks to be carved into slices called virtual disks. A virtual disk can be as large as a physical disk or it can be a slice of a physical disk. A single physical disk can be partitioned into multiple virtual disks, and each virtual disk can be allocated to a different CPU. Conversely, a single virtual disk can be shared across multiple CPUs in read-only mode, providing a large shared data cache. Sharing of a virtual disk enables users to store or update common data, such as operating systems, application software, and data cache, once for an entire system
Really the technology that SeaMicro has puts the Moonshot Atom systems to shame. SeaMicro has the advantage that this is their 2nd or 3rd (or perhaps more) generation product. Moonshot is on it's first gen.
Picture of Seamicro chassis with 256 servers
Moonshot provides 45 hot pluggable single socket dual core Atom processors, each with 8GB of memory and a single local disk in a 4.5U package.
SeaMicro provides up to 256 sockets of dual core Atom processors, each with 4GB of memory and virtualized storage. Or you can opt for up to 64 sockets of either quad core Intel Xeon or eight core AMD Opteron, with up to 64GB/system (32GB max for Xeon). All of this in a 10U package.
Let's expand a bit more - Moonshot can get 450 servers(900 cores) and 3.6TB of memory in a 47U rack. SeaMicro can get 1,024 servers (2,048 cores) and 4TB of memory in a 47U rack. If that is not enough memory you could switch to Xeon or Opteron with similar power profile, at the high end 2,048 Opteron(AMD uses a custom Opteron 4300 chip in the Seamicro system - a chip not available for any other purpose) cores with 16TB of memory. Or maybe you mix/match .. There is also fewer systems to manage - HP having 10 systems, and Sea Micro having 4 per rack. I harped on HP's SL-series a while back for similar reasons.
Seamicro also has dedicated external storage which I believe extends upon the virtualization layer within the chassis but am not certain.
All in all it appears Seamicro has been years ahead of Moonshot before Moonshot ever hit the market. Maybe HP should of scrapped Moonshot and taken out Seamicro when they had the chance.
At the end of the day I don't see anything to get excited about with Moonshot - unless perhaps it's really cheap (relative to Seamicro anyway). The micro server concept is somewhat risky in my opinion. I mean if you really got your workload nailed down to something specific and you can fit it into one of these designs then great. Obviously the flexibility of such micro servers is very limited. Seamicro of course wins here too, given that an 8 core Opteron with 64GB of memory is quite flexible compared to the tiny Atom with tiny memory.
I have seen time and time again people get excited about this and say oh how they can get so many more servers per watt vs the higher end chips. Most of the time they forget to realize how few workloads are CPU bound, and simply slapping a hypervisor on top of a system with a boatload of memory can get you significantly more servers per watt than a micro server could hope to achieve. HOWEVER, if your workload can effectively exploit the micro servers, drive utilization up etc, then it can be a real good solution -- in my experience those sorts of workloads are the exception rather than the rule, I'll put it that way.
It seems that HP is still evaluating whether or not to deploy ARM processors in Moonshot - in the end I think they will - but won't have a lot of success - the market is too niche. You really have to go to fairly extreme lengths to have a true need for something specialized like ARM. The complexities in software compatibility are not trivial.
I think HP will not have an easy time competing in this space. The hyper scale folks like Rackspace, Facebook, Google, Microsoft etc all seem to be doing their own thing, and are unlikely to purchase much from HP. At the same time there of course is Seamicro, amongst other competitors (Dell DCS etc) who are making similar systems. I really don't see anything that makes Moonshot stand out, at least not at this point. Maybe I am missing something.
Influx of SPAM – batton down the hatches!
I don't know what is going on but for some reason this blog has been getting a lot more SPAM comments recently. I mean normally Akismet takes care of everything and MAYBE one gets through a MONTH, eleven have gotten through today alone (update: now 14)
I haven't been keeping track, but that little counter on the right side is up to almost 75,300 now -- the last time I recall noticing it I thought it was below 30,000..
The Akismet plugin says it is operational and the API key I am using is valid,and all servers are reachable.
I wonder what is going on, maybe today is just my lucky day.
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