IDEAS Insights

Sun Ray 2 is Worthy of a Closer Look

In the last few years, Sun has thoroughly redesigned the Sun Ray appliance to compete in the rapidly growing market for thin client desktop infrastructure. We recently had the opportunity to try out the new Sun Ray 2 in person at the Sun Executive Briefing Center in Menlo Park, CA and we were impressed. Sun has taken a product that has been around a long time and re-engineered it with all of the features customers expect today, plus some interesting capabilities that set it apart from the competition. Today’s Sun Ray 2 thin clients running Sun Ray Software 4 feature support for a wide variety of clients, enhanced security, and best of all the ability to runs Windows, Linux, Solaris, an Mac OS (or all four at once) equally well. The market has responded to these changes by buying Sun Rays at an ever increasing clip. According to Sun, sales have doubled from fiscal year 2006 to 2007.

One of the more interesting features of Sun Ray is its smart card authentication. Each desktop user in the organization has a credit card with an embedded Java chip that slides into the attached card reader. Users can show up at any Sun Ray in the company, log into their own account, and up will come their own desktop. When the card is removed without logging out, the desktop session remains suspended on the server until the card is inserted into another Sun Ray. Even days later from halfway around the world, the original desktop reappears, complete with all of the original applications. The Sun Secure Global Desktop Software provides this "Hot Desking" capability and also provides the ability to run multiple windows, each with a different application or operating system. For example, a Solaris 10, Windows, and Linux window can be open along with numerous browsers and desktop applications.

Management of thin clients has become increasingly important as IT departments deal with ever increasing complexity. Sun’s Desktop Manager 1.0 features an easy to use point-and-click web-based interface that makes centrally defining and configuring hundreds or thousands of desktops and their applications relatively quick and easy. The Sun Desktop Manager has three major components: configuration repositories that store configuration policies and organizational structure, management tools that help to enforce configuration policies, and agents residing on the client and fetch the configuration settings and apply them. It also features lockdown capabilities that prevent unauthorized people from making changes to configuration values or gaining access to unauthorized applications. Granted, this is a v1.0 product, but it seems to focus on what is truly needed in this space.

Overall, we are impressed with the improvements Sun has made to the Sun Ray. The current version is such a vast improvement over past iterations, it hardly seems fitting to continue calling it a "Sun Ray." Obviously, the entire thin client industry has improved tremendously in the last few years and there are now a number of excellent products from which to choose. But we feel Sun Ray 2 deserves special consideration in light of its smart card authentication and ease of management. If you are considering thin clients this year, and who is not, then you owe it to yourself to go down and try out the Sun Ray in person.

IBM Racks Up x86 Servers by the Boatload

The IT industry continues to trend towards hosting ever more massive workloads with scale-out architectures, in which large numbers of industry-standard servers containing x86/x64 processors are joined into clusters or grids. Much of the attention in recent years has been on scaling out with blade servers, which allow large numbers of servers contained in specialized modules to be deployed and managed in an optimal hardware footprint. Now, IBM has introduced a new server design, called the iDataPlex, which introduces a new level of density for cramming large numbers of processors into a small amount of space, using traditional rack-mounted servers rather than blades.

The iDataPlex concept resulted from a number of conversations IBM executives and engineers had with major web-based businesses and leading-edge financial services organizations. All of the major server vendors, including IBM, were pushing blade servers to these customers. But blades were too expensive for these massive scale-out deployments and traditional rack servers were not sufficiently customizable and lacked the required density. As a result, most of these customers ended up building their own server complexes simply because nothing on the market met their needs.

In designing the iDataPlex, IBM took a "clean sheet" approach that was inspired by blades, but uses the traditional rackmounted form factor. Server vendors like HP are pushing blades everywhere, and other companies like Dell and Sun are pushing a combination of rack and bladed servers. But no one had seriously looked at rack servers in years. IBM chose to use the same 42U standard rack envelope, but turn it sideways and shorten the servers themselves to 15 inches. That allowed up to 42 2U servers or 28 3U servers to be positioned into the same space that held half that many in a traditional rack design. A maximum of 672 processor cores per rack doubles the conventional rack density. Due to cost considerations, the iDataPlex has no backplane and relies on cables to carry all of the I/O. Each iDataPlex is entirely built in China in an IBM facility. Like mainframes, every system is custom built. It takes 3-4 months to sell and IBM expects that 70% of deployments will be in a new or redesigned datacenter.

For cooling, there are no fans attached to the processor boards themselves, only in the 2U/3U chassis, each of which contains 4 large fans. Further, IBM offers an optional rear-door heat exchanger for the iDataPlex that uses water cooling. The rack can be cooled sufficiently without the heat exchanger, which costs $75-100,000. However, when the water cooling is used, the demands on Computer Room Air Conditioning (CRAC) devices can be lowered or even eliminated in many cases. The result is a staggering 40% reduction in datacenter cooling costs today, and IBM is working to push that to 60% in the future.

Both rack servers and blade servers were designed back during the time when performance and performance density were key requirements. Reliability was also paramount and numerous redundancies and failover capabilities were added to ensure that applications would remain available even after a major server or component failure. The problem is all of the added redundancies pushed up the cost. With cloud computing, the old requirements have changed. Component reliability is no longer needed because the application itself can deal with failures. With tens of thousands of servers, failures occur all the time and bad servers can be swapped out on an hourly or daily basis. The cost of computing, and specifically the operating cost, is now the defining criterion. Anything that can save on the cost of electricity is a huge plus. IBM realized that this new market is now large enough to support a specialized server design that prioritizes low energy consumption and density over redundancies. Today, there are few customers demanding this type of solution, but the ones that do exist buy tens of thousands of servers at a time for deployments that can reach 100,000 servers or more. We at IDEAS feel that iDataPlex is a strong solution for this new class of customers.

All Threads Are Not Created Equal

This week, IBM and Sun each announced multi-threaded systems: IBM's 64-thread Power 595  and Sun's 128-thread "Victoria Falls"-based T5140/T5240. Although both support large numbers of threads, these servers have far different approaches to handling workloads, stemming from the design points of their underlying processor chips. The 32 chip (64 thread) Power 595 would seem a natural fit in the data-base tier and the two chip (128 thread) T5140/T5240 would seem most appropriate for web-serving. Understandably, IBM's flagship Power 595 will attack Sun's SPARC64-based SPARC Enterprise family more than battle Sun's "CoolThreads" systems. And, Sun's T5140/T5240 will set its sights on IBM's midrange Power Systems servers rather than facing the top-end 595. While these new servers may not directly compete, each highlights their multi-chip/multi-core/multi-thread features.

But, you shouldn't equate a POWER6 thread with an UltraSPARC T2 Plus thread. To avoid glazing over the eyes of all but die-hard chip geeks (as an ex-processor designer, I actually enjoy this stuff) I'll attempt a simple synopsis of the two approaches.

Basically, POWER6 follows a more traditional design, while UltraSPARC T2 Plus focuses on the high levels of parallelism found in many web-related applications. Running at 5 GHz in the Power 595, POWER6 has two cores per chip and two threads per core. UltraSPARC T2 Plus puts eight cores on each silicon die and supports eight threads per core, for a total of 64 threads per chip. Running at up to 1.4 GHz, UltraSPARC T2 Plus (as with its "Niagara" predecessors, the T1 and T2 chips) focuses on the aggregate performance offered by multi-core/multi-thread rather than the single thread performance of a high clock rate design like POWER6. POWER 6 offers far more performance per thread while UltraSPARC T2 Plus packages far more threads per rack. A quick look at SPECjbb2005 benchmark results would show that a fully configured, 64-thread, POWER 595 can deliver over 9 times the performance of a 128-thread T5240 (3,435,485 vs. 373,405 SPECjbb2005 bops). Of course, the 64-thread Power 595 fills a full rack (not including I/O racks) whereas Sun's T5240 is only 2U, which would allow 2,560 threads to fit into a 40U rack of T5240s. (With the 1U T5140, 5,120 threads fit in a rack.)

The clock rate differential (up to a 3.5 ratio) is hardly the only difference between POWER6 and UltraSPARC T2 Plus performance. Obviously, a POWER6 thread is not the same as an UltraSPARC T2 Plus thread. IBM's Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) design simultaneously fetches instructions from two threads for each core. And, both threads (per core) can be executing during the same clock cycle, as long as they do not need to use the same execution units. Since it has multiple execution units, each POWER6 core can simultaneously execute up to seven instructions across both threads, depending on which execution units are needed. Although the UltraSPARC T2 Plus can support eight threads pending per core, it only has two execution units per core and thus, at most, can execute instructions from two threads at a time. Be careful with terminology: although interchangeably used by marketing (and many analysts), strictly speaking "simultaneous" and "concurrent" do not mean the same thing to processor design engineers. Simultaneous indicates multiple things happening at the exact same clock cycle, whereas concurrent indicates that multiple activities could all be "active" but are time-sliced and interleaved such that not all are actually executing at the same clock cycle. A POWER6 core can support simultaneous execution of two threads; each UltraSPARC T2 Plus core can have eight threads concurrently active, but only execute two of them simultaneously. 

So, while "64/128 threads" may sound impressive, more relevant comparisons might look at performance per "U" rack unit, per watt (although energy consumption is hard to get accurately), and certainly price/performance. Naturally, the 16-chip Power 595 surpasses the two-chip T5240 for most workloads, but the T5240 fits in merely 2U (1U for T5140) whereas the processor cage (CEC in IBM terminology) for the Power 595 is 20U (and that is without I/O or the bulk power). The comparisons are not straightforward, but per rack mount "U", performance per rack, energy consumption per rack, etc. the systems each have their strong points. Admittedly, the Power 595 and Sun T5140/T5240 will not often face each other head-to-head. But Sun's latest "Victoria Falls"-based servers will compete against POWER6 chips in the Power 550 and Power 570.

Consolidation of workloads currently running on x86 is a goal of both IBM and Sun. Consolidation and virtualization go hand in hand. Both vendors offer a variety of virtualization approaches (AIX Workload Partitions / Solaris Containers, Micro-Partitions / LDOMs) to allow a single server to handle multiple workloads. POWER6's large caches (4 MB L2 per core and 32 MB L3 shared by two cores versus UltraSPARC T2's 4 MB L2 shared by 8 cores) seem better able to support more virtual images. And, IBM's dynamically re-sizable micro-partitions would seem best suited for workloads whose computing demands vary over time, compared to the statically defined LDOMs. Thus POWER6 would seem preferable for consolidating unpredictable, dynamically changing workloads. On the other hand, Sun's UltraSPARC T2 Plus offers so many inexpensive threads/cores per rack that worrying about efficient allocation of threads/cores may not be necessary.

Of course, the answer is "it depends" when determining which server might work best with which workloads. Customers need to consider the dynamic nature of workloads they intend to deploy on either POWER6 or UltraSPARC T2 Plus to understand which would best suit their needs.

Three Impediments to Virtualization

Earlier this week I attended an Infrastructure Virtualization Summit run by Informa in Sydney Australia. Such events are a great place to hear the arguments for adopting the topic at hand, in this case virtualization. But what I found interesting was the feedback from the floor and the common themes that emerged as to barriers to the adoption of virtualization.

• Lack of Necessary Skills
• Hidden Costs of Change
• Increased Risk Profile

Lack of Necessary Skills

Number one on the list was the perception of a lack of staff with the necessary skills. It was felt that virtualization brings with it a requirement for new skills and people with the necessary skill set are not easy to find. And when you do find them, they can be tricky to retain because they are in demand elsewhere. Good old supply and demand at work.

Hidden Costs of Change

There was a general feeling that there were hidden costs to adopting virtualization. It was clear that adopting virtualization within the organization is not just a technical challenge, but can also require changes to business processes. It was felt that the real cost of such change on an organization cannot easily be quantified up front.  Some felt these could easily cancel out the easy to identify up front and more tangible savings. The problem being the true total cost to the business isn’t known until afterwards. And although there are some quite well understood benefits, this still isn’t always enough to overcome some inertia.

Increased Risk Profile

The fear, uncertainty and doubt around putting all of your eggs in one basket was another perceived issue. Consolidating ten separate physical servers onto a single hardware platform with ten virtual servers for example, was seen as increasing the risks to the business, because a failure now can potentially take out ten applications instead of just one. Personally, I am not sure that this is a real problem, as computing environments today, even without virtualization are complex and thus prone to error, and it is debatable whether adding virtualization to the mix really increases the risks much more.  

However, real or not, the above are genuine concerns for potential virtualization consumers. The above outcomes are not the result of any formal research and were based on a relatively small sample of informal feedback, which may not necessarily be representative of the market. However, they are interesting all the same and possibly point to the industry needing to do a better job in addressing these concerns, along with promoting the more easy to sell benefits of virtualization it does today.

Redlands Community Hospital Rolls Out ClearCube Virtual Desktops

Ideas International has been a big proponent of thin client desktop computing in recent years. By moving the computing, applications, and data storage from the desktop to the IT department, a number of benefits can be gained, including higher levels of security, lower carbon emissions, lower cost, more efficient utilization of resources, and faster recovery from failures. Thin client computing has matured tremendously in the past three years to the point where it is ready to deploy in almost any environment, including mission-critical and life-critical situations. ClearCube is one of the leaders in this field, in our opinion. In 2007, ClearCube partnered with Teradici Corporation to totally redesign its VDI product, eliminating almost all of the problems customers had experienced with the previous generation.

We recently had the chance to talk with Richard Gagnon, the director of information systems at Redlands Community Hospital in California, about his experiences with the new ClearCube virtual desktop product. According to Gagnon, the hospital recently remodeled the Surgery and Maternal Child Services building and wanted to completely rearchitect the building’s computing resources to save electricity, conserve valuable floor space, provide for enhanced high availability, and protect access to confidential patient information. All of this had to be accomplished on a very tight timetable while the hospital remained functioning 24 hours a day. ClearCube was selected primarily because the Sentral VDI Management System had a lot of the right tools, simplifying management and allowing change to be effected very quickly. Previously, IT support personnel needed to put on surgical gowns and enter the operating rooms to service equipment. In fact, the hospital’s technicians had to run all over the hospital servicing laptops, desktops, and handhelds. Now, everything can be managed from the IT department.

We asked Gagnon about some of the problems with the prior generation of ClearCube, specifically distortion and network distance limitations. He responded that no one has experienced those problems with the new ClearCube. Network cables extend up to 300 feet in the building and the visual experience on the monitors is just like it was with local PCs. Redlands Community Hospital even developed a Web portal for the physicians so they could access the hospital systems from their homes. Medical records from the past five years were digitized and made available online, and newly gathered records are now all electronic. Finally, everything in the building is now wireless, including IV pumps and monitoring devices. When asked about potential EMF interference, he stated that digital TVs were the only devices they have found to date that interfere with wireless devices.

Despite its many benefits, the new ClearCube system was not without its issues. The staff needed to be trained on the new technology, specifically on how to handle power blips where the virtual desktop disconnects from the server. Through a relatively quick and simple procedure, the device can be reconnected and work can resume. A second issue was the implementation, which was somewhat complex and challenging. ClearCube support people worked closely with the Redlands IT staff to resolve all the outstanding issues. The system has been extremely stable since it went into production. A final issue involved the internal culture at the hospital. Many on the staff were skeptical of the new technology and wanted to keep things the way they were. That quickly faded as the staff grew to understand and experience the benefits that ClearCube offers.

Overall, this is a big win for ClearCube, Redlands Community Hospital, and thin client desktop computing. It demonstrates to us that thin client infrastructure is ready to deploy today, even in the most critical and demanding environments. If it can work in the operating rooms and delivery rooms of a hospital, it can work in a typical company environment. We at IDEAS have been predicting strong growth in thin client desktop computing market for some time, and this example is a clear confirmation of that prediction.