Geeks in Paradise | Brian Chee » October 2006

October 28, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Blade Shootout 2006: InfrastruXure setup!

TAGS: Toys and tools

Paul Venezia has joined me in Hawaii for our Blade Shootout 2006 where we're pitting Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard, and Dell against each other in our continuing effort to bring you solutions based comparitive reviews of enterprise grade IT tools. Far from the speeds and feeds world, we compare the entire solution with our performance section of the review based upon sound scientific methodologies that can be repeated by anyone that chooses to. In this case we're using SPEC Evaluation Technologies HPC Benchmarks to quantify performance. We add in things like management, ease of setup, value, and a host of other grading criteria to help decision makers out. It isn't my intent to steal any thunder from Paul's story, but here are a few snaps of the setup process...

1st and foremost...these blades generate a whole bunch of heat and each vendor had their own interpretation of how you should power their solution...some wanted L6-20 (20amp 208volt twist lock) some wanted L6-30 (30amp 208volt twist lock) with folks like Dell bringing a PDU (Power Distribution Unit) that could be ordered in various flavors to accomodate what you might already have in your data center. Our long time friends at American Power Conversion (APC) stepped up to the plate with their brand new InfrastruXure InRow SC cooling system which brings fast easy setup that doesn't require expensive building modifications. The scenario is that you can simply unpack the unit, roll it into place next to your racks, vent to the return air plenum (ie. return air ceiling) and turn it on. By supplying cooled air directly to the front of your racks (where the blades or server suck it all in) and pull the hot air from the back of the rack (where the blades and servers exhaust the hot air) you greatly increase the efficiency of the cooling system and reduce the mixing of the hot and cold air. Better to cool the gear than cooling the entire room. They even have special bolt on enclosures to contain the flow of the hot and cold air paths to further increase the efficiency.

 

Here's a diagram (thanks to APC) that shows two SC units on either side of a rack of blades with both front and back containment units used. So while the units are nominally rated at 5KW of cooling per unit, containing the air paths can possibly jump it to 7KW. (depending upon ambient temp of the cooling air, humidity, etc)

 

I should also point out that if you happen to be able to provide chill water, they also have their RC line that can take in chill water from your existing hard pipe (copper feed) and then using continuous PEX hosing (similar to what is used for water connections in RV's) to reduce the chance of leakage and allow you to place the cooling units right where you need it. The chillwater system is rated to around 20kw maximum.

 

We've previously installed APC's InfrastruXure line of computer room UPS and in ANCL's case we have a 20KW unit that is fed by 100amps of 208volt three phase power. This system has it's own breaker panel running to power whips terminated in whatever I could possibly need for connectors. This additional flexibility to quickly change breakers and connections has been a total godsend for testing, and gives me the flexibility to size my battery back and power conditioning needs to the application. Combine this with APC's unparalleled control options through the web/SNMP modules and I can sleep better at night knowing that auto shutdown will keep my precious test data from being corrupted.

Here's the SC unit still wrapped in plastic after I've taken off the plywood sides for its shipping container.

With ramps to safely roll the unit off the pallet and accessories wrapped up in a single container, this is one system ready to go once it arrives on site.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Truly solid shipping brackets!

 

Ready to roll down the ramp and into the lab...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The SC unit is 1/2 the width of a normal rack with the same footprint front to back...notice the symmetra like front control panel...

 

It's sitting right next to the lab's 20KW Symmetra, but since it's compressor based technology, we opted instead of use building power so that the spikes caused by the compresser wouldn't trip a breaker during startup inrush.

 

 

Since I don't have a drop ceiling in the lab...we instead opted to block out a window (using the plywood from the shipping container...recyling at its best!) Notice that we just cranked open the windows and lined up the hoses with the hot air exhaust on top and the cool air input one window pane below it. What came just after I took this picture is some screen stapled over the input to keep bugs/birds/trash from getting sucked in.

 

Here is APC's Brian Standley routing the condensate (translated the water that get sucked out of the air during the cooling process) hose to the top of the unit so that we can just let it pump the water out onto the roof.

 

We also uncoiled the supply air temp sensor so that we could clip it to the rack in front of the blade servers. Being able to monitor the temperature of the air feeding the servers allows the system to tailor the airflow based upon demand.

 

 

 

Here's some screen shots of the web console (SSH, telnet, SNMP are also available) from the unit we just setup...

The home page for the web console...

 
Hmmm...Radius or local authentication...

 
The two Brian's started here to tweak the thresholds to even out the airflow.

Posted by Brian Chee on October 28, 2006 02:05 PM

October 28, 2006 | Comments: (0)

yum update errors

TAGS: Testing notes

So while this is a bit of a re-hash on a problem folks have found a while back, it does warrant a revisit in that Fedora core 6 is now out and I'm anticipating a flurry of questions on why YUM Updates fail for all mirrors. It would seem that there exists some sort of bug in the SonicWall Security profiles that comes up with a false positive for a couple distros. I had it ONLY on disk 5 of the RHEL4-x86_64 version that Paul Venezia and I are using for our currently running Blade server shootout. However, it also blocked our attempts at updating Fedora Core 6 using Yum.

The solution was to turn off both Anti-virus and Anti-Spyware on my SonicWall 2040 running firmware SonicOS Enhanced 3.2.5.0-18e on ROM version SonicROM 3.1.0.2 Once BOTH were turned off, YUM updates worked fine. The good news was that we only had to turn it off at the top level, and not dig down to the individual interfaces. I'll comment on this base post once we figure out what the exact exclusion would be as a work around. This way we can leave anti-virus and anti-spyware running, but still be able to do YUM updates.

So to Warren Togami, thanks for all your efforts during your undergrad years on the Fedora project, and to Matt Szulik for the super cool Red Fedora and the memo. I wish we could have given Warren more than 3 credits for his ICS499 project that helped to kick off Fedora. Good luck to Warren in his new life with Red Hat.

 

Link to yum update errors

Posted by Brian Chee on October 28, 2006 01:02 PM

October 16, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Hawai'i rattles, then loses power statewide - The Honolulu Advertiser

TAGS: Industry Trends

 
Picture from the Honolulu Advertiser...the full article is at the link below...many thanks to the dedicated journalists at the Honolulu Advertiser.

Hawai'i rattles, then loses power statewide

Source: Hawai'i rattles, then loses power statewide - The Honolulu Advertiser
By Dan Nakaso
Advertiser Staff Writer

<Views from Brian Chee, Director of the Advanced Network Computing Laboratory>

So one of the prices of paradise is that I live in an active volcanic region and we get some tremblers once in a while. However not since the 60's have we had one quite this big. The wife and I were shaken out of bed around 7am HST with a 6.7 shake, then minutes later a 5 aftershock that had a longer duration tossing some books off a shelf and knocking a few pictures off the wall. The overall status is that no one was badly hurt in the quake and since Hawaii is an active volcanic region our buildings are designed to handle tremblers like this.

So what does this have to do with technology, well I'm glad you asked. KSSKRadio.com is our biggest prime time radio station (2nd only to a station in Los Angeles) and they were setup to stream to a maximum of 60,000 internet listeners. When news of the quake hit, their internet service provider found themselves in a rare situation where all 60,000 licenses were gobbled up within a couple hours of the initial CNN story. Even this Honolulu Advertiser article about the quake took me almost 5 minutes to load due to the huge demand around the world.

My favorite example is the Victoria Secret Lingerie show made infamous on the internet a few years ago. Load balancing is now a way of life, but just how much can you anticipate? The reality is that you can only load balance what you already have setup. What we're going to be examining in the Honolulu lab in the coming weeks is how data center virtualization could have solved this massive unexpected load. The scenario is to have the vendor migrate a monolithic server (ie. one that takes up ALL of a standard server) and migrate it to a virtual environment. Then based upon demand, move the virtual image to a dedicated blade, and as an optional feature, then add more virtual images on dedicated blades as demand grows. Maybe I should pay a visit to the folks at the Honolulu Advertiser to talk about just how this can work for them?

 

/brian chee

Posted by Brian Chee on October 16, 2006 11:51 AM

October 04, 2006 | Comments: (0)

oreilly.com -- Online Catalog: PHP Cookbook, Second Edition

TAGS: Book Reviews

 

YES! The second edition is out! With the huge popularity of the LAMP (Linux Apache Mysql PHP) environment dominating the shared web server environment, it's no wonder that PHP reference books have exploded. So while Ruby on Rails/Python/etc are gaining popularity, PHP is still one of the most prevelent scripting languages for web servers today. So even with a Computer Science background, I still learn best from examples, and that is what this refreshed edition is all about. So my fellow web hackers, this is the answer to those nagging questions on how to implement the usability features in your website that have been eluding you. (ie. email without using a mailto: command, killing that second accidental form submit click, pulling environment variables, dealing with time zones, etc)

Brian Chee is a Senior Contributing Editor with InfoWorld Media Group

PHP Cookbook, Second Edition

By Adam Trachtenberg, David Sklar
Second Edition August 2006 
Pages: 810 (More details)

Book description

When it comes to creating dynamic web sites, the open source PHP language is red-hot property: used on more than 20 million web sites today, PHP is now more popular than Microsoft's ASP.NET technology. With our Cookbook's unique format, you can learn how to build dynamic web applications that work on any web browser. This revised new edition makes it easy to find specific solutions for programming challenges.

Source: oreilly.com -- Online Catalog: PHP Cookbook, Second Edition

Posted by Brian Chee on October 4, 2006 03:52 PM

October 04, 2006 | Comments: (0)

oreilly.com -- Online Catalog: CSS: The Missing Manual

TAGS: Book Reviews

 

I'm a network geek and my website has never really caught up with what I'm really doing. So when I got a website template built for  me, I found a baffling array of HTML code in the artist's template. Out of self defense I've been carving off the learning curve one feature at a time and have gotten more than a bit frustrated at how much I've missed by not paying attention to concepts like inheritance, Doctype, and just the whole concept of separating the style sheet from my content. The O'Reilly Missing Manual series again comes to the rescue with a book on Cascading Style Sheets (aka CSS) and how some up front work can save you an incredible amount of time and help your technical site stay in your organization's overall look and feel.

Brian Chee, Senior Contributing Editor, InfoWorld Media Group

CSS: The Missing Manual

By David Sawyer McFarland
First Edition August 2006 
Pages: 494 (More details)

Book description

Cascading Style Sheets are now a reliable method for handling all kinds of Web page presentations -- from fonts and colors to page layout. But due to CSS's complexity most designers treat it as a kind of window-dressing to spruce up the appearance of their sites without tapping into the real power of CSS. CSS: The Missing Manual clearly explains this powerful design tool and how you can use it to build sparklingly new Web sites, or refurbish old sites that are ready for an upgrade.

Source: oreilly.com -- Online Catalog: CSS: The Missing Manual

Posted by Brian Chee on October 4, 2006 01:51 PM

October 04, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Syngress Publishing - Enemy at the Water Cooler:

TAGS: Book Reviews

 

It has been my experience that security is really 90% policy and while there are some terrific firewalls out there for external threats, the real danger comes from the inside. In the government world you hear the acronym M.I.C.E. (money, idiology, conscience and ego) in just about every conversation about internal dangers to sensitive information.  Enemy at the Water Cooler is one of those primers that anyone responsible for security policy should read.

Brian Chee, Senior Contributing Editor, InfoWorld Media Group.

Book Info:

Enemy at the Water Cooler:

Cover Price: $49.95
Syngress.com Price: $24.97

Trim Size: 7 x 9
Author: Brian Contos
ISBN: 1597491292

Table of Contents   |   Sample Chapter

Brian Contos has created what few security specialists can claim: a truly readable book about the threats to our businesses from insiders who know how to attack the critical components of modern business, the computers, applications and networks that make it all work. During the last fifteen years we have witnessed incredible strides in network centric business processes that have spawned the productivity of our workforce and the globalization of our supply chains. All of this progress is based on Information Technology advances that connect people and processes together to achieve more than our traditional approaches would have ever allowed… “Enemy at the Water Cooler is a must read for CIOs and security officers everywhere, but it is also part of the literature that CEOs and government leaders should read to understand how their businesses can be threatened by lack of attention to the fundamental IT infrastructure and its vulnerabilities to the insider threat.�—William P. Crowell, former Deputy Director of the National Security Agency (NSA)

Source: Syngress Publishing - Enemy at the Water Cooler:

Posted by Brian Chee on October 4, 2006 01:38 PM