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."

Comments

RTFA...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd love to RTFA but there's no link...

Re:RTFA...

[CDMA_Demo]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/servers-hp-ibm,1937.html

Re:RTFA...

[GuldKalle]

There is no direct link to the story because there's no direct link between Web 2.0 and redundant hardware setups.

WTF ? The Web 2.0 approach to hardware?

[Colin Smith]

Web 2.0 is about a thousand layers above hardware, it does not in any manner, approach.

Re:WTF ? The Web 2.0 approach to hardware?

[tsalmark]

But if you run 2.0, your hardware wants to be on it's side, to um, well run better, because it's 2.0

Web 2.0

[77Punker]

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.

Re:Web 2.0

[Eponymous Bastard]

This is Web 2.0 hardware setup because users can add and modify servers as they see fit! Actually, I found this part interesting, from HP's offering:

When drives or the fans in the disk enclosures fail, the PolyServe software tells you which one has failed and where - and gives you the part number for ordering a replacement. Add a new blade or replace one that's failed and you don't need to install software manually. When the system detects the new blade, it configures it automatically. That involves imaging it with the Linux OS, the PolyServe storage software and any apps you have chosen to run on the ExDS; booting the new blade; and adding it to the cluster. This is all done automatically. Automatically scaling the system down when you don't need as much performance as you do during heavy server-load periods or marking data that doesn't need to be accessed as often, also keeps costs down. [emphasis mine]

I know, not what you meant, but a funny coincidence.

IBM is offering a more optimized rack, with shared and optimized power supplies, different arrangement for the fans, a heat exchanger in every rack for your building's air conditioner, (which Tom's interprets as water cooling) and a couple other things.

HP has a weird clustering software/hardware hybrid with large amounts/density of RAID 6 storage (for a flickr-style site, for example) together with a cluster of blades that can all access all the storage and can be added/removed at will. Interestingly they point at scaling down the system when load is low, to keep the costs down. I wonder if they put servers on stand-by automatically or something. They are also looking at not spinning all the disks all the time, but they're not there yet. I guess having some disks acting as a write cache could allow you to at least spin down the parity disks of the LRU sections or some such. You could even cache the read side if you're willing to put up with the spinup delay on a cache miss.

Supposedly this is Web 2.0 because you want a google-style cluster with lots of generic hardware where any one computer can go down and the whole thing keeps going. IBM wants to lower the maintenance costs, HP didn't show them the server side, but pushed their storage technology.

Re:No link

[ZenBased]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/servers-hp-ibm,1937.html

Web 2.0 and hardware

[gnuman99]

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.

Re:Web 2.0 and hardware

[Bodrius]

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.

This just in...

[discord5]

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.

So, after reading the article ... don't bother.

[oneiros27]

They mention 'sideways', and I thought they just meant rotating about the depth of the rack (ie, so a 19" rack would be about 11U wide), but the discussion is talking about the fans being 15" away vs. 25" ... which makes no sense, as they're mentioning servers being 47" deep. I think they're talking about side venting, which is what Suns _used_ to have, but you'd have to get these 30" wide racks (so there'd be ducts on each side for airflow in/out)

And we have the useless quote:

"In a data center the air conditioning is 50 feet away so you blow cool air at great expense of energy under the floor past all the cables and floor tiles," McKnight said. "It's like painting by taking a bucket of paint and throwing it into the air."

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.

Oh, honestly

[Anonymous Coward]

This is Web 2.0 we're talking about here. You don't need any links! :)

Web 2.0 FAQ

[trollebolle]

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

Re:Web 2.0 FAQ

[hampton]

Pretty good, but this has to be my favorite description of Web 2.0.

Re:Get on board or get left behind

[GuldKalle]

nah, I always order the -17dB milk

On the sideways thing..

[Junta]

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.

Unfortunately there's one single definition

[Moraelin]

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