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SGI and SuSE Team Up on FailSafe for Linux
Syn Ack writes, "SGI and SuSE announced at CEBIT that they are going to team up to bring Iris FailSafe to Linux. Linus is quoted as saying that this is a "piece of the puzzle" that Linux is missing. Here is SGI's press release." The press release says FailSafe for Linux will be open source, but doesn't say under what license.
This kind of redundancy and task distribution could help break linux/unix type systems more into the upper level corporate server market where Solaris currently seems to be the trend do to it's robustness.
- learn mathematics - shoot dope -
Could this sort of thing be used as protection against Denial of Service attacks?
"Early to rise, and early to bed / Makes a man healthy but socially dead" -- Yakko Warner
This is what all those nay-sayers of Linux have been waiting for. "But who needs FailSafe for Linux? I thought it was FAILPROOF! Isn't that why we should switch to it? I don't see Windows needing FailSafe..."
:P
BTW, for those of you who couldn't tell, that was a joke
My plan is to pimp before they realize I'm a jackass. Hit 'em hard and fast.
Not being a networking person, I'm really rather ignorant in this area. I always assumed that all multiple server systems must be running something simmilar to this. Since the majority of the servers out there are running unix/linux how have they been doing this sort of distributed overflow handleing stuff?
- learn mathematics - shoot dope -
Redhat's piranha tools in 6.1 already allow clustering. The SGIs failsafe thing needs to work with a RAID drive array and does roughly the same thing as the linux virtual server project http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/
SGIs stuff is available for download if anyone is interested at http://oss.sgi.com/ projects/sgilinux11/download/1.2-latest/ISO/
failsafe, failsafe.. Whats a failsafe..
I read slashdot for the articles.
SGI has just gotten cooler and cooler. They *really* donate code to the cause, as opposed to Sun, which just claims to do so... (but with strings attached)
;)
And failover is really handy. You never know when you're going to have hardware die on you. Of course, it's much more important when you're working with a bunch of NT boxes, but...
Established vendors with real operating systems switching to Linux instead for production-level systems, and improving it, and giving back to the community. Does it get any better?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I guess AC doesn't know about "Loki". :)
meisenst
Green's Law of Debate: Anything is possible if you don't know what you're talking about.
Not really. The classic DDoS attack ( AKA what took down Yahoo ) simply has no defiance. Apart from perhaps having separate sites under different names with the same Data onboard.
What most people miss about those DDoS attacks is that they didn't actually overload the servers. On the contrary, they loaded down the pipes so much that the servers sat idle for hours.
See cringly's latest rant for more details ( not from him but a letter writer ). The only practical protection is to secure machines to prevent them becoming zombies in someone else's DDoS army.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
I know that failsafe won't require a numa architecture to run under linux, but the link mentions this running on ccNUMA based Origin servers. I haven't heard anything about numa support for linux, and it would be a very cool thing to have. It would definitely help Linux grow out of the strictly peecee image it has. I have no idea what it would take to implement that though, if it could be some sort of subsystem, or if it would have to be a seperate branch from the smp capable kernel. Does anyone have any resources for NUMA on linux?
This will do wonders for Linux Availability and Scalebility.
That however is just touching on the obvious part. Less obvious is that this will let stuff written for Linux scale to the upper limits of business computing in very short order.
How is that you ask ?
Linux has been ported to the IBM Mainframe in such a way that a single s390 Box can run thousands of copies of Linux each doing dedicated tasks. The resources available to each can be adjusted to whatever the Kernel supports ( I.e. 64 GB or RAM, 2 TB of Storage etc... ) or what's needed for that particular operation ( 1 mips on the image server, 3 on the Web servers and 20 on the Database server ).
Add this in and you start to see a really terrifying scenario where Linux is able to scale to tomorrow's web service tasks and very little else can. By that I mean when Computing takes off in the 3rd world the way TV has. When Bandwidth becomes cheaper and more abundant. You are talking about 20 Million 800x600 two way Videophone conversations at the same time.
Nobody has the horsepower to play traffic cop in that situation now. But a Linux mainframe scaled to beyond today's limit will. Being Linux will simplify the development process since the developers can all have it on the desktop too.
As for the Licensing. SGI isn't completely cluless. They put XFS under the GPL to get it into the Kernel and avoid a fuss. This ccNUMA stuff will be at least partially in Kernel space so you can once again expect it to be GPLed.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
SGI is so great that they're ditching IRIX in favor of Linux.
Look at the facts first please (providing links is nice too).
SGI has really changed their direction lately.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
SGI wants you to think they actually care about opensource but really they don't. That's why they try to charge people $1,200 for the package needed to run even gcc. It's called the IDO. They package up needed headers and other essentials along with their compilers with this IDO to lock you into using their stuff only.
Now rather than being kind individuals give out the IDO package they refuse. Irix 5.3 and below are basically limited to hobbyists today. Not many are still running 4D equipment in any serious commercial application. In doing this they are really only hurting the 'community' of hobbyists who like do create free software. SGI is incredibly two-faced. Don't help them in any way or promote anything they make until they quit being such hypocrites.
Perhaps I've missed something, but the High-Availability Linux Project (http://www.linux-ha.org) already has similiar goals for clustering and failover.
Wouldn't it be better to put more community effort into a "real" OpenSource (GPL'ed) solution instead of trying to port Irix's existing product and possibly getting a half-baked license?
A staff member of the SuSE team told me that the source for IRIS FailSafe will be GPL'ed. And if you take a look at http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/odi-26.02.00-0 01/ you will notice that the c't magazine writes the same, so that this info has a high probability...
You found a sword: +4 damage, +5 moderator points
Linux may be the only enterprise UNIX but that hardly makes it an enterprise operating system. I'm not even sure if that assurtion that it's the only Enterprise UNIX is even supportable, but it'd be cool if it were true...
Linux NEEDS clustering to become a true Enterprise operating system. It also needs to actually improve its stability... a true enterprise operating system must NEVER, EVER go down. Even for upgrades! Clustering is one solution to this problem, and Linux needs it to gain mass enterprise acceptance. Until then, things like OpenVMS (which isn't open in the open source sense) will still be more feasable in the enterprise market.
I'm not saying that SGI is a savior or something, but this is a weak area in Linux which needs to improve. Until it does, closed operating systems which already implement clustering will be used in Linux's place in enterprise situations. (This is also a lesson Microsoft needs to learn but I'd rather they didn't and keep on trying to sell Win2000 as an "enterprise solution." :)
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
The 3D filemanager as seen on Jurrasic Park. THAT'S what I want to see open-sourced =)
The capabilities of SGI's stuff aren't in any of the current Linux offerings. It has complete N-node cluster quorum, application monitoring and failover-restart capabilities. It also has the nice GUI that is necessary to make it look real. This is completely comparable to the Win NT/2k Microsoft Cluster Services (MSCS).
The people who have made whinny comments here really don't get it. It would have taken a year or 18 months for the community to come up with something flakey that would approach the capabilities that have just been dropped in our laps by the grace of [deity of your choice]. Adoption and exploitation of Linux/Failsafe, and getting it all going on IA64 this year is critical to smacking Redmond around while they fumble with Win2k.
I would hope more and more companies with locked in proprietary software would release it like SGI, making it usefull and acceptable to people who won't go down the proprietary road. We could still use some better storage solutions.
You are probably the exact same COWARD who whines everytime there is a sgi article. They CAN'T release it for free, they licensed the tech from AT&T and others. If you have a copy of the IDO somewhere and you look at the header files they have copyrights all over them, and they aren't from SGI; hence SGI CAN NOT LEGALLY GIVE THEM TO YOU!!!!
I guess you want sgi to be sued to death by giving out other companies' copyrighted material!!! They are bound by law... oh yeah in your mind I guess that companies should be able to take GPL'd software and make it closed source. I guess you are just a friggin idiot!
I have posted multiple times about getting header files from a linux box then using the compiled gcc (from SGI nontheless) and getting it working just fine. If you aren't able to get it going, I guess that would be because you just aren't smart enough.
Spell checker & grammar check off because I don't care.
I was just visiting the SGI booth here at Cebit and I must say that I am very impressed with those guys. I was talking to one of the engineers that have worked on the XFS port to linux, and it was interesting to hear the "Engineers" point of view on the entire release scenerio of XFS into the GPL
They previewed for me the XFS actually working on one of there linux boxes running at the show.. (I must say, the new rack mount cases they have are SOOO sexy!!)
But most importantly , I spent a bit of time talking to the engineers and I was very impressed with how they want to help the community. I felt like they where members of the community themselves, just getting paid for it.
Has anyone had a chance to see the new Octane product they have under a NDA? (I am going to sign it just to get into the "Closed doors" and play with it...)
For any company bigger than say 10 people, the guys you meet at the Cebit booth are not the actual product engineers. This sounds a lot like they hired a bunch of Linux people to pose as the real engineers and rave about the "community". The sad thing is it seems to work.
a) SGI can do nothing right: so I guess switching to Linux is wrong? Making a very high percentage of the machines on the Top500 list is wrong? Um, ok...
b) They have crappy unscalable hardware: So I guess Onyx II Infinite Reality Graphics are crappy? Hate to break it to you, but, while they may be a bit pricey, there ain't nothin' much faster. As for unscalable, 512 processors isn't scalable? Please. I run Irix on a machine with 512 processors and 196 gigs of RAM. Can Linux do that? Other than Cray, and Intel's one-off for ASCI, does anyone make anything bigger? Granted we (I work for SGI, in case you couldn't tell) are selling Cray, but the T3E has been sold in configurations of 1800 processors and the architecture scales even further. I think that qualifies as "scalable".
c) Inferior OS with no features Linux doesn't have: Pass me whatever *you're* smoking please. How about a journaling file system that is production ready? Scalable to 512 processors? ccNUMA support? Runs Alias|Wavefront applications that produce probably at least half the special effects you see on TV/movies? I'm sure there are more, but I don't feel like coming up with them. Now don't get me wrong - Linux is a great OS, but that doesn't mean that Linux lacks no feature found in Irix.
d) Public commercial company: RedHat. VA Reasearch. Need I go on?
e) Secret motives to steal the genious from Linux: And just how would we do that even if we wanted to??? All we would succeed in doing is getting everyone upset with us and ending up with a propietary version of Linux. Where, exactly, would that get us besides bankruptcy court? If it were up to us, we'd probably insert massive scalability features into Linux like, say, support for 512 processor SSI's. But, the Linux community would never accept those changes so we simply won't make them until the community will. Trust me, SGI is far more interested in playing by the rules than I'll bet most "Linux companies" out there.
If you want a company that keeps mumbling about contributions to Linux/Open Source and doesn't deliver, think of Sun, not SGI.
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
"IRIS FailSafe runs in a cluster environment"
.....
OK, this I can appreciate. But the next sentence makes me wonder how useful it will be :
"In the event of a failure IRIS FailSafe automatically fails over applications from one system in the cluster to the other."
so if i understand correctly, if an application fails, Iris makes sure that the failure is spread out over the whole cluster. Distributed failing ? Interesting approach
CJM
Remember, public companies have a legal obligation to make money. This means that they will act with (enlightened?) self-interest. This means most companies will at different times act in ways which are good or bad from our point of view. It's not like with humans, where personality comes into it. All companies have the same selfish personality, just reacting differently because they are in different situations.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
I understand that Linux has multiple desktop environments (aka window-like GUI), I also understand that Linux has multiple distros. I can understand the possible need for multiple journaling file system for Linux, but try as I may, I just can't find enough reason for Linux to have multiple HA, Fault Tolerant options.
There is the original High Availability scheme that had been in development for quite some time, and then Red Hat thrown in its own version - sorry I can't remember what's the name - and now SGI and SUSE is coming in with its own version.
While I personally to the "CHOICE IS GOOD, MORE CHOICES IS BETTER" concept, multiple HA/FT option will ultimately confuse the consumer/user of Linux, and that will undercut Linux's ability to gain confidence in the corporate world.
Please allow me to propose that all the available options for HA/FT for Linux to be murged, and in the result, Linux will become the world's # 1 OS with the most robust HA/FT.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
> This kind of redundancy and task distribution
> could help break linux/unix type systems more
> into the upper level corporate server market
> where Solaris currently seems to be the trend
> do to it's robustness.
I beg to differ, albeit for just a little.
Yes, it is true, the availability of HA (High Availability) and FT (Fault Tolerance) will be good for Linux in general, but we must be careful not to ignore the adage "Too many cooks spoilt the soup" for there are currently (counting the SGI/SUSE announcment) at least THREE different implementations of HA/FT for Linux !!
Linux should acquire HA/FT, no doubt, but Linux should have ONE VERY ROBUST HA/FT and not three or four or five not-very-much-useful HA/FT.
Please allow me to propose that a merge of all these HA/FT efforts to be carried out, so to benefit all the Linux community and to pave the way for Linux to penetrate the corporate world and be used as the OS for the entire enterprise.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
While it may be understandable for Linux to have multiple GUI development... While it may even be okay for Linux to have more than one journaling FS, I question the wisdom for Linux to have more than one HA/FT option, because, IMVHO, that will only confuse the users, and the confusion will be turned into a powerful weapons for M$ FUD machinery.
They may say something like this - "See? Linux is so fragmented that even in the HA/FT area it has to have many different implementations of HA/FT !"
My question again, thus : Does Linux really need more than one HA/FT implementation?
Is it possible to pursuade the people behind all those different implementation to merge their efforts and produce a most stable and robust HA/FT thingy for Linux.
Does anyone think that is possible?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
This is kinda unrelated but I would like to say this - perhaps this post was meant as a joke, but others of this nature often aren't. I've noticed that any time a company releases a product open source, the first thing that happens is they get flamed on Slashdot. This does *not* encourage companies to release more software. I've been in meetings where first and second line managers (I'm a peon, not a manager, though) have questioned SGI's strategy of going open source because they have seen comments here and wonder if we will ever be accepted. Remember that when you post, people! Your posts *do* get read, sometimes even by important people! EOR (End Of Rant)
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
I personally think that the Linux community is aiming too low here. High Availability failover services are just about to become yesterdays technology. Take a look at where Compaq are taking their Tru64 Unix clustering.
/usr for all systems (each cluster member has its own root and swap, also on shared storage).
/etc/{memb}/blah/... where {memb} is mapped to the cluster member ID. From a members perspective the filesystem structure adheres to tradition, when in reality system specific parts of the filesystem are held independantly.
... A cluster "system" disk, containing a common
... Cluster Common Filesystem. All filesystems mounted on any cluster member appear in the mount tables on all systems. Even filesystems on private buses (eg: CD-ROM's)
... Context Dependant Symbolic links, eg:
... Install the OS once and the Cluster software once. Adding new cluster members (out of the box, with no installed OS) takes only 10 minutes.
... Install an application only once and all members can run it.
... Cluster member numbers factored into PID numbers (init is no longer PID 1) creating unique cluster wide PID's. Helps in cluster process management, but more importantly, paves the way for future advances in "process" failover between cluster members. IMHO this is the holy grail for future cluster technology.
... DLM (distributed lock manager) out of the box. Applications like Oracle Parallel Service should be a lot easier to build, run an maintain in future.
There are a good number of other features, but this is enough to get the point across. There is a big difference between what is "called" clustering in the UNIX world right now (which is not much more than fast hot standby failover) and what clustering was meant to be. VMS has had it for years. Compaq's Tru64 UNIX is on the cusp of getting it (first production quality release is TruCluster v5.0a, due I believe within a month or two).
THIS is what Linux Clustering needs to be aiming for. Not playing catch up with existing failover technology, because that will soon go the way of the dinosaurs.
Macka
No.
:) The people who maintain Mosix call it a "fork and forget" cluster, because basically what it does is to distribute processes between nodes. It's not as special-purpose as Beowulf, and doesn't need to have things specially coded/compiled for it to work (of course, Beowulf will likely get better performance, IF you take the time to tailor your app to it, and if your app was "embarassingly parallel" to begin with).
:)
:) Maybe I'll try this SGI thing when it comes out, too; can't look bad on a resume...
Mosix is a clustering technology which is more similar to--yes, your favorite--Beowulf. Except that Mosix is basically, as my friend puts it, "SMP Writ Large"
This is more of a failover technology, e.g. it's not really a "cluster" in the sense you're thinking. It's more than 1 machine, yes, but they're there to provide high availability. Basically, if one machine goes down, another will take over for it.
You can get something similar by going here:
http://linuxvirtualserver.org
They have patches and instructions for setting up a nifty webserver HA cluster, which makes use of apps like mon, heartbeat, and fake (at least 2 of which are Debian packages, which makes my life easier
I'm now building a cluster out of low-end machines, and I'm going to try to run both Mosix AND VirtualServer
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
At least, I hope that was the original intent. Just in case...
...'failing' over... ...'failing over'
It's not:
It's:
As in, "failover". This means the software does what you would expect: in the event of a failure, a working machine takes over for the failed one.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
My personal speculation: :-)
Caldera will likely jump on the bandwagon. Red Hat might, and TurboLinux almost certainly won't. Of course, all would be more than welcome to. We've got a really big bandwagon