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Dorothy Ochs
June 23, 2010
July 16, 2010
Hilton San Francisco
333 O’Farrell Street,
San Francisco, CA
Herman Chan will present “Intelligent Rack PDU’s – Key Learnings from Customer Case Studies.” Up to 90% of the power to mission critical facilities is consumed by powering and cooling equipment at the rack. In this session, Raritan will provide insights on how customers are utilizing intelligent rack PDU’s to better understand their power utilization, make better use of power and cooling capacity, and drive energy efficiency initiatives to reduce carbon footprint and save money.
June 21, 2010
One of the most important considerations in designing a Raritan enterprise datacenter management system is the architecture of the CommandCenter systems. This discussion provides an overview of how CommandCenter works and how it can be effectively deployed.
CommandCenter Architecture Overview
CommandCenter provides a single point of user access for all devices and systems under its management. The CommandCenter appliance is based on a hardened and secured Linux kernel. The CommandCenter appliance has dual hard drives in a RAID 1 configuration, dual 10/100/1000 NICS, and available dual power supplies. It is a fault tolerant appliance that is not prone to Windows/MS issues.
The primary function of CommandCenter is to provide centralized access to all datacenter IT resources. It also provides centralized user authentication, authorization, auditing, and reporting. Users connect to the CommandCenter and are authenticated and granted access based on local CommandCenter policies. User authentication can be Local, Active Directory, LDAP, TACACS, Radius, Radius w/RSA, or any combination of these. Once users are authenticated, their session is redirected and is sent directly to the desired KVM/Serial switch or datacenter device. This keeps traffic local between the user PC and the KVM/Serial switch or datacenter device. This architecture means CommandCenter systems are very robust, very scalable, and require minimal LAN/WAN bandwidth.
Herman Chan
June 21, 2010
Saw some interesting news today in an article by Katie Fehrenbacher on the earth2tech.com site, “5 Green Data Center Startups You Need To Know”. What caught my eye was the excerpt on a company by the name of SeaMicro™. They seem to be the first commercially available server solution utilizing low-cost, low-power, high volume CPUs, for server farm and cloud computing applications. The SM10000 product takes density to a new level with support for 512 Intel Atom® low power processors in a 10U package. WOW! That’s a lot of processors. That’s over 2000 processors in a full rack! The SeaMicro website suggests that this product was designed to replace 40 1 RU dual-socket servers which typically take a full rack but require only 2KW, which they suggest uses 1/4 the power and takes 1/4 the space.
When we talk at trade shows and user groups, we often cite that it’s not all about processors but rather the efficiency of the servers, e.g. how much output or workload do you get per unit input or watt. And I often bring up the analogy of miles per gallon and having hybrid cars in your data center or SUV’s in your data center. Both get you from point A to point B but one does it in a much more efficient way. Since there is a huge cost to leave servers idle, a data center operator’s goal should be to get more utilization of their servers and introduce virtualization or if I use the car analogy, pack more passengers into the car to get from point A to point B. We also regularly reference spec.org’s spec power benchmarks, to attempt to get a baseline or common way to understand server efficiency by make/model/configuration. As I was searching the site, I found that a 1U, dual-socket, 6 core per socket PowerEdge R610 system from Dell can provide 2938 server-side java operations per watt. I wonder what the SeaMicro system can do? Kudos to the SeaMicro team for thinking outside the box, or in this case, in a new 10U box. Look forward to seeing some cost and performance benchmarking information to compare against what already exists in the industry.
June 21, 2010
Raritan booth #671
June 27 - July 1, 2010
Mandalay Bay
Las Vegas, NV
Dorothy Ochs
June 18, 2010
Come visit Raritan at Angelbeat St. Louis and Kansas City to learn about the latest KVM solutions, power management and data center infrastructure management. We’ll be raffling an iPod Shuffle too. For more information about the show and to register, visit www.angelbeat.com.