| CPD Seminar 2012-08 Optimised Racks & Heavy Data |
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| August 2012 | |
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Compucon CPD Seminar
4:00 - 4:15pm Outside the Square Outside the Square o We will talk about smart dust this time. Smart dust has been deployed in war zones but not publicly announced for civil use as of today due to privacy issues. We will look at it in more details than just saying it is the Internet of All Things to come. We will cover the technology aspects of it and we will be surprised to realise how much we know (very simple indeed). This will allow us to prepare ourselves for the near term future. Optimised Rack Systems (ORS) o This session takes a hardware platform perspective whereas the next session takes an implementation perspective. ORS refers to the approach of maximizing installed performance capacity per unit of space or per watt of electricity consumed or per dollar invested. Blade servers are the most known implementation of ORS, and container systems are the most recent developments of ORS. These arrangements provide the context but they are not in demand by our average peers in New Zealand. We will step down the ladder and introduce smaller implementations of ORS including the smallest one which is 1U2 meaning 2 systems in the space of 1U. The main focus is on the FFP and TCO performance of these arrangements so that our peers can add this knowledge to solve computational problems or enhance organisational productivity and competitiveness. We will compare them to non-optimized arrangements to assure that we do not lose any perspective. Abbreviations: FFP is fitness for purpose. TCO is total cost of ownership. 1U is 1.75” (44.45mm) of height in a standard 19” cabinet providing 42U of space. Heavy Data Systems o The industry uses the term Big Data to describe the very large volume of data for management and operational analysis. We use the term Heavy Data System to describe the computing systems for handling big data. Heavy is a term that encompasses a big range of weights. We will focus on the lower half of the weight range in this session. We will start from an 8 HDD DAS system and expand it to 800 HDD still as DAS (direct attached storage) and obviously with RAID protection and speed consideration. Where does SSD fit in? We will touch on server virtualisation as implemented by VMware and Microsoft. We will talk about NAS and SAN as implemented by Microsoft and the Linux communities. We will limit the scope to homogeneous computing only which is the norm for daily business requirements such as in a local area network of a small to large organisation. We will talk about heterogeneous computing or super-computing in September as for research, design simulation, or digital content creation uses. Abbreviations: HDD is hard disk drive. SSD is solid state disk. RAID is redundant array of inexpensive disks. DAS is direct attached storage. NAS is network attached storage. SAN is storage area network. |