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What Web 2.0 Means for Hardware and the Datacenter
Tom's Hardware has a quick look at the changes being seen in the datacenter as more and more companies embrace a Web 2.0-style approach to hardware. So far, with Google leading the way, most companies have opted for a commodity server setup. HP and IBM however are betting that an even better setup exists and are striking out to find it. "IBM's Web 2.0 approach involves turning servers sideways and water cooling the rack so you can do away with air conditioning entirely. HP offers petabytes of storage at a fraction of the usual cost. Both say that when you have applications that expect hardware to fail, it's worth choosing systems that make it easier and cheaper to deal with those failures."
I'd love to RTFA but there's no link...
Web 2.0 is about a thousand layers above hardware, it does not in any manner, approach.
Deleted
Oooi, editors...
How about a link in the story? Or whats the deal here? We need a site to slashdot!
Where's the article link?
google.slashdot
A new buzzword... move on, nothing to see here.
Oh, I get it. This is Web 2.0 hardware setup because users can add and modify servers as they see fit! Wait, the users have no control over the hardware?
Sounds pretty stupid, but maybe Tom's hardware guide has a good explanation...wait, there's no link to the article, or anything at all! At least we'll get some good discussion going because this is Slashdot, right?
This is probably the worst article I've ever seen on Slashdot.
HP and IBM's Take on Web 2.0 http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/servers-hp-ibm,1937.html
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/servers-hp-ibm,review-30875.html
WTF is TFA link?
But from the summary, it seems that "Web 2.0 servers" are like "Web 1.0 servers" but they would need more
1. storage (for user comments)
2. I/O (less caching, more throughput)
3. processing power
But then that is just common sense. Regardless, "Web 2.0" is clearly a misused term to fullest extent possible these days. Might as well be "web enabled" and "linux" at end of the 90s.
For New Buzzwords...
.5U servers, for what can be done on a modified Xbox.
Web 2.0 is gonna be better then Web 1.0 Just like Vista was WAY WAY better then Windows XP!
Though I mean common seriously, this stuff is getting a bit dicey. Web 2.0 isn't really even a standard of OTHER standards. It's a term for how much java, shockwave, and ads you cam JAM INTO A WEBSITE!
What Web 2.0 means for hardware, is that a bunch of companies late to taking in the $$$ from Web 1.0 are gonna not miss the next gravy train. Overselling to data centers a rack of watercooled 128 core
Then again thats just my opinion.
P.S. Don't mod troll me, I am fragile like an IPO for a search engine.
Commodity hardware and a solution like VMware ESX.
High availability, built in redundancy, cheap per-unit cost. What's not to like?
Works for your mission critical apps and your less critical stuff.
posting anonymously to avoid karma whoring:
Tom's Hardware has a quick look at the changes being seen in the datacenter as more and more companies embrace a Web 2.0-style approach to hardware. So far, with Google leading the way, most companies have opted for a commodity server setup. HP and IBM however are betting that an even better setup exists and are striking out to find it. "IBM's Web 2.0 approach involves turning servers sideways and water cooling the rack so you can do away with air conditioning entirely. HP offers petabytes of storage at a fraction of the usual cost. Both say that when you have applications that expect hardware to fail, it's worth choosing systems that make it easier and cheaper to deal with those failures."
If they need those 3 things to offer the same performance, and are uglier to boot... then yeah, that's Web 2.0 all right.
Maybe they let Ops mod their servers too.
Gotta bring in the user content aspect into the picture.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
When I order a mocha, now I ask for 2.0 % milk
Web 2.0 is growing up ... He allows people to interact with him ... but why even talk about it? The more we talk about it, the more important this web 2.0 guy thinks it is...
It's Tom's Hardware. This is the entire article, only on one page instead of 6.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/servers-hp-ibm,1937-3.html
I didn't say it. Netcraft didn't say it. IBM and/or Tom's Hardware did!!
Won't somebody think of the angular momentum of the Earth?
The best way to organize your serverroom for web 2.0 compliance is by stacking the servers diagonally. This way, air can float freely between racks, improving the flow of the system administrator gas based bowel attacks.
Don't bother with those 10Gb switches, just hook it all up on wireless. Wireless network, wireless fibre storage, wireless power! Your megaflops (the rate at which a million projects per second will turn out to be a flop) will increase by a factor of 213% per watt.
Web 2.0, the best thing to happen to your serverroom since buttered toast and angry system administrators, can be yours now only for $ 9999,95 per diagonal server! Why go for a 1U server when you can have a 2U for three times the price. Call now, and receive a free "My other server is a web 3.0" bumpersticker which will be applied by an angry salesman who'll also slash your tires for FREE!
Warning: servers may not be stacked diagonally on top of eachother, rather rammed into your rack repetetively by an angry monkey (which we've nicknamed "Bob the technician"). Aforementioned technician may or may not leave presents in your servers. Do not feed Bob during the installation process, nor introduce Bob to small children and pets.
No, no, no, no. VMWare ESX was Web 1.5. New hardware is Web 2.0. Get with the program!
For those not keeping up, here is my guide to Web 2.0:
Web 1.0: House blend coffee
Web 1.5: Tall, skinny latte with soy milk
Web 2.0: Frappuccino.
Web 1.0: Static HTML
Web 1.1: Dynamic HTML
Web 1.5: Dynamic XHTML
Web 2.0: HTML? What's that?!
Web 1.0: Cisco routers
Web 1.1: Cisco routers runnning IOS
Web 1.5: Nortel routers
Web 2.0: Who needs routers? We have IPV6!
Web 1.0: Wired
Web 1.5: Wireless
Web 2.0: Sharks. With friggin' LASERS attached to their heads!
My blog
The big companies are locking on to 'Web 2.0' as a moniker for embracing an idea they had been completely ignoring until Google took advantage of it and forced everyone to notice. Smaller companies had already gotten the message that while hardware-failure tolerant servers have their place, in many situations with large numbers of systems the only practical place to solve it is in software, and then expensive hardware redundancy is superfluous, costing both initial money and additional power/cooling.
I'm not saying Google was by any means the first to think of this or do it, but no one else that did that as part of their core strategy had come to the spotlight to the degree Google has. Every single one of Google's moves to the industry at large has become synonymous to 'Web 2.0', and as such hardware designs done with an eye on Google's datacenter sensibilities logically become 'Web 2.0' related. You'll also note them saying 'Green computing' and every other possible buzzword that is fashionable.
Of course, part of it is to an extent trying to create a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy around 'Web 2.0'. If you help convince the world (particularly venture capitalists) that a bubble on the order of the '.com' days is there to be ridden, you inflate the customer base. Market engineering in the truest sense of the phrase.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
We've been deep into Child 1.0 but there were a lot of issues so my wife turned sideways for Child 2.0 and we're sure our cost efficiencies, eco-awareness and community acceptance will be a lot higher.
Because when I have a virtual host fail (kernel dump), I want 15 "high availability" servers to all go down simultaneously, instead of one.
Grandpa: My Homer is not a communist. He may be a liar, a pig, an idiot, a communist, but he is not a porn star.
They mentioned preconfigured linux servers for cheap, to help people avoid the extra work in setup (?)
Etc. A jumble of suggestions for cheaper data centers, cooling many midrange servers, and so on.
I would've thought selling VMs on a power-efficient mainframe would be more up IBM's alley, but that's not what they are selling. Anyone got any better ideas?
(posting anonymously so as not to karma whore)
They cool their servers from the bottom to the top. Also sideways, so kinda diagonally, but they're getting excellent results. Sounds like an efficiÃnt idea to me. http://www.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/bluegene/ And why don't they use Western Digital GreenPower drives? They have an enterprise version of those don't they?
And we have the useless quote:I'm not going to claim that forced air is more efficient than bringing chilled water straight to the track, as it's not -- but the comparison is crap -- anyone who's had to manage a large datacenter will have had to balance ducts before -- it's not fun, I admit, but you don't just pump the air in, and expect everything to work.
Then there's the great density -- 82TB in 7U. I mean, that's not bad, but the SATABeast is 42TB in 4U (unformatted), and I'm going to assume a hell of a lot cheaper. (although, it's a lower class of service). And HP's not using MAID yet, but spinning all of the disks.
My suggestion -- skip the article. It reads more like a sales brochure, with very little on the actual technical details of what they're doing.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Maybe they figured that since we true /.ers never RTFA, they don't need to link us to them anymore.
98% of America's teens drink alcohol, smoke, and have sex. Put this in your sig if you like bagels.
This is Web 2.0 we're talking about here. You don't need any links! :)
I've always wondered why don't they just place the servers in places where it's cold all the year, imagine how much power they could save by using ducts to distribute the cold air from the outside in the server room. I mean, a solution like this can't be that hard to implement!
Check out my blog!
So called "Web 2.0" means JavaScript. JavaScript is run on the client side.
I fail to see why this requires supercooled servers, and until now I didn't even think it was possible to use the "Web 2.0" buzzword on hardware.
Actually VMware is the exact wrong way to go (although it does rock for many purposes). If your looking to put up a server farm for "web 2.0" apps, you want to have each box running as close to 100% efficiency with no extra overhead (VMware). As you scale up in a modular environment you'll gladly trade off the flexibility that VMware gives you for more efficiency. Redundant boxes provides high availability rather than extra software.
Specing hardware for an application farm usually means piles of blades or 1U boxes, depending on the application you probably don't even need redundant hardware, just replace the failed hardware and rebuild from scratch. If your going VMware you'll end up specing bigger mega CPU boxes with massive RAM.
In smaller shops where you require more flexibility to run servers/services that don't require farms VMware gives you a better bang for your buck. Nothing beats VMware for R&D either.
This seems like a good opportunity to mention the famous Web 2.0 FAQ by Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka on somethingawful.com. For those readers who are not entirely sure what web 2.0 is:
Question: What is Web 2.0?Answer: Web 2.0 is a combination of Web 1.0 and being punched in the dick.
Question: How do I know I'm using a website / service / product that is officially "Web 2.0" and not actually "Web 1.0" with various patches and enhancements added to it?Answer: Web 2.0 is made obvious by the addition of completely and highly unnecessary bells and whistles that don't do anything besides annoy you and make life more complicated. If Web 1.0 was the equivalent of reading a book, Web 2.0 is reading a book while all the words are flying around and changing pages as the book rotates randomly and sets your hands on fire. Also there's this parrot that keeps on flying towards your head in repeated attempts to gouge out your eyes.
Question: I read about this one website in Wired Magazine. Is that Web 2.0??Answer: Oh definitely. Wired won't even mention Web 1.0 sites. Every single site in their magazine is at least Web 2.0. Sometimes they're even up to Web 45.2 (such as www.ebutts-and-credit-reports-delivered-via-carrier-pidgeon.com)!
Question: My roommate said he "digged" a "wikipedia entry" about "the blogosphere" which mentioned "podcasting" as a viable form of "crowdsourcing."Answer: Your roommate is a faggot. Also, this wasn't technically a question.
Question: What's Web 3.0?Answer: It's a product or service planned on release in spring of 2008, and consists solely of websites enabling the user to create even more detailed Kirby ASCII art. (O'.')-o
Nah, what they mean when they refer to "Web 2.0" hardware is the same as Web 1.0... distributed stateless servers. Commodity replaceable parts, with software architectures designed to "run anywhere, we don't care where".
With that approach, the big SMP systems are now the detritus of technologies past. Everything is cluster this, cluster that, basically. Web 2.0 doesn't change this any, but it makes for a nice buzz word.
But never mind that. The article presents HP as having a storage solution at a "significant fraction" of the cost of their competitors. It goes on to state that "Current enterprise storage costs are around $15 per gigabyte".
Um. Hello?!? I get to see the no kidding per usable gigabyte prices of every significant vendor in the Gartner magic quadrants... even the most expensive vendors, top of the line, king of the kings, are no where near $15 per gig! WTF!?
If an HP salesman told me something like that, I might have to show him the door. "Lies do not become us."
And if they are targeting $2/GB, they really need to be looking at the competition. Seriously. Many vendors will be sub $1 before the end of the year.
C//
Web 2.0 really has nothing to do with 1u, or 2u servers being configured in any specific manner, nor the layout in the racks to be "sideways", upside down, or water-cooled. Web 2,0 is about moving the complexity required to support an application from the physical hardware into the application stack. This happens when an application provider builds resiliency and redundancy into the application and then the application utilizes the compute power of a series of systems merely as a process station. If a node goes offline, or fails, the application moves to the next logical set or online node. This really is nothing new to the industry, other than the capability now being available in the x86 platform. The hardware provider that will win in this space will be the provider that can build, design, and architect the highest possible compute spec while utilizing the least amount of both space and power. It's not virtualizing applications, or operating systems. It's about squeezing as many processing units into the smallest amount of space while utilizing as little power as possible and the application being architected in a manner that will utilize that. Gone are the days of needing to build fault tolerant hardware platforms, with back-up power-supplies, clustering,etc. Today we have smart applications that see that additional processing power is required, or that a process node is down, and the application fails over to the next node in line. This is really not new, what's new is the capability being available in the X86 space. that's a beautiful thing. that means the customer/consumer wins.
Uhm, yeah. Gotta tell that to my friends at work. Their VMWare-virtual hosts aren't constantly rebooting themselves and go down, crash in kernel, drift in clock etc. It just seems like it.
Also, the way they manage to get some 15 poorly performing servers out of hardware and software investments close to 50k Euro must be brilliant. We only get decent performing servers for some 1.5-2k Euro/Server (WITH full redundancy for the services that requires it, including separate disk-arrays).
Sorry, but I don't buy VMWare (or any other host-level virtualisation for that matter) as a solution to everything as many people tend to do nowadays. Host virtualisation is good for quickly jamming out test-environments for software integration and testing new and different software stacks and OS:ed.Possibly also virtual hosting for customers that needs to run their own OS. For other purposes the service/server differentiation in the standard OS/Process - model tend to work out pretty well. If you need to get fancy, OS-virtualisation may be an option.
Most racks are on the order of 2 ft. wide and 4ft deep. The iDataplex racks are 4ft wide, and 2ft deep, with two columns each 19" wide. The cooling is still front to back with 19" wide servers, it's just that the racks are less deep. They are doubled up presumably to be in some way conventional for shipping, marketing, whatever, but ultimately aren't as exotic as some would fear. They could have just as well had 'normal' 42U racks with only half the depth and logically be analogous. They also take some of the spare horizontal space and carve out 16U of vertically oriented U space.
As to the air cooling aspect, I think the discussion is tilted toward the extremes of bad datacenter design to sound better, but water-cooling is more efficient to pump the distance even with clear path for the air to go. Not saying this is specific to any particular vendor (the difficulty of sticking the converse of a radiator on the back of a rack seems like it would be low), but I think IBM is fishing for ways to take advantage of two-column racks in a remotely meaningful way. In this case, the ratio of usable surface area on the water pipes to unusable plumbing in the design is higher since they can be wider.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The servers are stacked pretty much like they have been before, but not as deep. The water cooling is contained within the door and does not go to the servers (as the article says, they thought that currently that was too pricey to be worth doing). Besides, they left their options open, it's easier to tack on a door or not based on the datacenter use of chilled water or not than it is to change system heatsinks, etc etc.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Unfortunately, there is one single definition of "Web 2.0", and that is the one of the guy who registered that trademark: Tim O'Reilly.
Now I'm not usually one to make a big fuss over using a word wrong, but this one is actually a trademark. Deciding to use it in any other way, is a bit like deciding to call my Audigy 4 sound card a GeForce or an Audi. It just isn't one.
And the extent to which both tech "pundits" and PHBs use it wrong, while (at least the latter) proclaiming their undying love and commitment to it, just leaves the impression that they use it as yet another buzzword. You don't proclaim your commitment to a technology, unless you actually understand what it is, how it can help you, and preferably how it compares to other technologies to the same end. Just going with a buzzword because it's popular, and ending up pledging your company to the camp of such a buzzword, is as silly (and often has the same effects) as making it your strategy to use scramjets in bicycles. Just because everyone seems to love scramjets lately, and you wouldn't want your mountain bike company to be left behind.
To get back to the actual definition of that trademark, it's not even about technology as such. It's about people. It's not techno-fetishism, as in liking cool new technologies for their sake, it's techno-utopianism: the mis-guided belief that you only need to give more internet tools to a billion monkeys, to get a utopia like nothing imagined before. Although said monkeys never created anything worth reading with a keyboard, if it's keyboards connected to the Internet, now that's how you hit a gold mine.
O'Reilly's idea is sorta along the lines of:
- forget about publishing content (e.g., hiring expensive tech writers and marketers for your site), it's all about participation, baby. Let users write your content. Hust put in some wikis and forums, and a thousand bored monkeys will do the work faster, cheaper and more accurate. (People will just flock to offer you some free, quality work, just because they like donating to a corporation, I guess. And if instead you discover comments about how much your company sucks, the CEO's sexual orientation, and his mom's weight, well, I guess it must be true, 'cause collaborative efforts can't _possibly_ be wrong.)
- forget about setting up your own redundant servers or dealing with Akamai, use BitTorrent. (Ask a lot of people how they felt about Blizzard's going almost exclusively through BitTorrent at launch. Nowadays their own servers serve a lot more of the content, if not enough other users are stuffing your pipe. I wonder why.)
- forget selling media on the Internet, teh future is Napster letting people pirate it, like happened way back then. (No, literally, the "mp3.com --> Napster" line is part of his own page explaining Web 2.0. I guess good thing noone told Steve Jobs that.)
- forget content management systems, use wikis. (I wonder in which alternate reality the piss-poor search engines of wikis can be compared to the capabilities of those systems.)
- for that matter, forget about structuring information in any way, like through directories and portals, just let the users tag it. (I'm _sure_ that the tags "humor, theft, oldnews, !news, digg" will so help me find the story about a manager stealing the server from earlier. Never mind that search engines were already dumping searching for tags, in favour of full text search, even at the time when he came up with that idea.)
Etc.
Basically, if you have the patience to sift through his ramblings, and don't give up at the "well, Google started up as a web database" intro, the meat begins at "Harnessing Collective Intelligence". That's what's it about. It's not as much about what technology you use on the web, it's about connecting a billion clueless monkeys, and believing that the result is something a billion times more intelligent and informed. Anything that helps connect those monkeys is good, anything else is irrelevant. Even whether you us
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
So, basically all we're doing is taking some mainframe tech and moving it to x86 servers. Add in some hardware-based virtualization (say, to run old code on different physical processor technology), mix it with virtualizing the rest of the hardware, and give it a proper hypervisor and you have....
A Z9 mainframe.
Maybe IBM should just make some nice REALLY low-end mainframe-type PC servers with a "clustering" port.
Mainframe tech is great, except it's just too damn expensive, especially when you're not doing enterprise-level data crunching.
I think you are very confused what they mean when they say $15/gig, that includes redundant load balanced raid controllers, the power required to run it all, any internal switching connected such as Infiniband, 10GigE, or FCP interfaces.
When you add all this up then yes, a 60tb SAN array is not going to cost the price of 60 1tb Hard drives.
Enterprise class storage with all the associated equipment does not come cheap even today.When your goal isn't just bulk capacity then you have to also consider the number of spindles necesary to get the best speed then things get complicated and the cost/gig rises quickly.
I buy redundant active-passive HA storage controllers, all storage attached to the system and networked to the storage controllers, with fibers, SFPs, RACKED, and with IP addresses inserted for me at the factory and turnkeyed for us, for under $2/GB... per usable gigabyte, that is, after the file system and RAID-6 overhead is removed... from one of the leading and most well known vendors in the storage community today.
That's for Tier-II. For Tier-1, it's in the $4.50 range. I am presuming that the HP solution was a SATA one, and hence my eye rolling at their fantabulous $2/GB figure.
Did I not tell you I get to see prices (as in quotes for multi-petabyte systems) from all the significant magic quadrant vendors? I did say that, didn't I?
I'll give HP a bit of credit, at least, for doing with PolyServe something that traditional NAS vendors can't yet do, and therefore perhaps some credit on pricing.
But $15/GB? Salesman, please step away from the crack pipe.
C//
"Gotta tell that to my friends at work"
By your comments I take it you mean you have experience with VMware workstation. Try using ESXi and coming back to me on that. You're out of date.
And come back up in seconds on redundant hardware or spare capacity running in the same VM cloud off the same SAN.
Strangely enough they though of that.
Please use the word 'latency' instead of 'lag'. Data centers do more than host video game servers, numbnuts.
My servers are still running Synergy and I see no reason to upgrade in the near future.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
Merely that the companies are the ones tinting the situation for their benefit. 'Web 2.0' has become a bit of marketeering, since the original definition doesn't help a lot of those companies sell more crap.
;) It's sort of ironic that the core meaning of Web 2.0 really allows it to not retain the meaning at all.
.com, come and buy your servers and services before it's too late!' after all the marketing groups got a hold of it. O'Reilly made the mistake of coming up with too catchy a phrase that accurately described aspects of key popular sites, and the only thing the business types see are the aspects that correlate to money.
However, to an extent, fighting for the original spirit/meaning of 'Web 2.0' to an extent is like fighting for correct usage of 'begging the question', while you may be in the right, the masses still adopt the common usage. And in Web 2.0 in the true sense of the word, the most popular opinion tends to win, and thus Web 2.0 isn't that anymore
Web 2.0 has deteriorated to mean 'second coming of
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Why not use mineral oil as a coolant? It has been used in transformers and other electrical applications to years. If it leaks, it won't do a whole lot of damage to the equipment or cause deadly electrical shorts.
If you have redundant hardware and a SAN, why not just use normal servers, and have redundancy for them? It is POSSIBLE to setup a nice ESX environment, but it's a challenge to keep current with their constant patches, their horrible support, and the gigantic machines that must be used to virtualize 15 production web servers. Load a resource-hungry application onto your farm, and watch it eat way more than it would without the overhead of the VM-layer. 4x 3.0 Ghz Xeons and 16GB/ram (each) load-balanced machines (web/app servers!) CRAWL on VMware ESX. One Migration (to MORE powerful hardware) went so poorly, half of our VMs are still sitting on old legacy hardware due to some sort of low-level driver incompatibility. (Win 2k/2k3 VMs on Linux ESX).
Grandpa: My Homer is not a communist. He may be a liar, a pig, an idiot, a communist, but he is not a porn star.
"If you have redundant hardware and a SAN, why not just use normal servers, and have redundancy for them?"
Because you don't need anywhere near as much redundancy. You don't have to double up every server, just have enoug capacity for if one or two real boxes fail.
I guess I live in a server software world where the software isn't all that hungry, but you want the high availability, server encapsulation and load balancing offered by ESX.
You forgot memory.
web 2.0 'applications' soak up gigantic amounts of memory on the webserver side. Thats not the database, thats just the webserver.
You'd be lucky to get away with 2 gigs of RAM on the webserver.
These things are disgusting bloated beasts.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Turn it sideways and watercool it? While you're at it, throw some D's on it.
Pancakes. Oh I blew it.
well.. as long as she doesn't urge on having all the community partecipating it should be fine
What Web 2.0 Means for Hardware and the Datacenter is precisely dick, apart from the fact that the people controlling the hardware and datacenter budget are likely to be impressed by stupid buzzwords, so buy your water-cooled blue-lit vertical-standing servers from us now! Glow-in-the-dark cables available soon!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Not sure if it's ESX or ESXi but no, it's not the workstation version. ESX 1.5 I think, if that helps. And the arguments still stands, host virtualisation is wildly overrated these days.
Web 2.0 is nonsense. Anyone who's done web design knows how it goes...
Client: I'd like a Web 2.0 site.
Me: Could you describe it for me?
Client: You know, something that plays by Web 2.0 standards. None of the old stuff.
Me: Do you mean you'd like a database-driven, dynamic web site?
Client: *fires up web browser and goes to, say, digg.com* No, like this.
Me: So you want a blue and grey color scheme?
Client: No, buttons that look like this with the jelly bean look!
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers