Technical White Paper Solutions for HP Moonshot Systems

Technical white paper | Solutions for HP Moonshot Systems

Technical white paper

Solutions for HPMoonshot Systems

Table of contents

Abstract

Providing a solution for the new style of IT

HP Moonshot System

HP Moonshot 1500 Chassis

HP ProLiant Moonshot Server

HP Moonshot solutions for applications

Operating systems

Application descriptions

Performance and value proposition comparisons

Front end web server comparison

The HP Moonshot System advantage

Deploying, managing, and monitoring capabilities

HP Moonshot 1500 Chassis Management module

Firmware maintenance

HP Insight Cluster Management Utility

Conclusion

Resources, contacts, or additional links

Abstract

HP Moonshot System is a revolutionary server design that addresses the speed, scale, and specialization required for a new style of IT that is emerging around the converging trends of mobility, cloud, social media, and big data.

Today, almost any kind of device can include an embedded processor. These devices are not just smart phones and tablets but millions of sensors that are collecting data and communicating with each other. These devices run operating systems that are powerful enough to facilitate a wide range of functions and interactions. The result is that almost anything can connect to the Internet. The billions of connected devices that are gathering and processing information or providing a service while seamlessly interacting with other devices is referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT).

The IoT presents businesses with new opportunities to drive market differentiation, deepen customer relationships, and deliver profitability. These opportunities need IoT solutions for a new style of IT, one that can achieve optimal performance and efficient scaling. This paper describes how HP Moonshot System addresses the speed, scale, and specialization that this new style of IT requires.

For more information about the HP Moonshot System, go to

Providing a solution for the new style of IT

Traditionally, effective computing architecture advancements have primarily focused on increasing capabilities (speed) to resolve complex problems. This need-for-speed has led processor makers to focus on high-speed, multi-core processors to deliver ever increasing “single-thread performance.”

IoT solution requirements when placed on traditional x86 servers in the data center have exposed weaknesses in this current architectural direction. As businesses increasingly provide services over the Internet, these weaknesses have become a dominant factor in corporate data centers.

HP Moonshot System is the world’s first software defined server platform to deliver breakthrough efficiency and scale by aligning just the right amount of compute, memory and storage to get the work done, thereby enabling you to capitalize on the major growth trend of the IoT. The HP Moonshot System adopts a federated approach to server design that saves energy, cost, and enables extreme scale-out without a corresponding increase in complexity and management overhead. The HP Moonshot 1500 Chassis incorporates common components that include management, fabric, storage, cooling, and power elements and accommodates up to 45 individually serviceable hot-plug cartridges. To provide optimal results for a given workload, cartridges are designed for specific IoT solutions. The workloads can range from dedicated hosting, data analytics, web front end to more advanced functions such as graphics processing units, digital signal processors, and fieldprogrammable gate arrays. This focus enables businesses to maximize innovation and speed their time to market with new services while reducing costs and energy use.

HP Moonshot System is simple: Design servers that are tailored to a specific application and run at scale while using energyefficient processors to achieve radical savings in power, space, and cost:

•Adaptive business model—provides a workload-optimized system design with product release cadence, customer engagement, and partner collaboration

•Power—provides up to 80 percent reduction in power used by volume servers when working on the primary workload in the data center

•Space—provides a 75 percent reduction in the space required to do the same work as the volume servers

•Cost—provides a 50 percent reduction in the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), that is the cost to buy, own/operate, and manage, when compared to any server currently on the market

HP Moonshot System

HP Moonshot System is the world’s first software defined server accelerating innovation while delivering breakthrough efficiency and scale with a unique federated environment, and processor-neutral architecture. Traditional servers rely on dedicated components, including management, networking, storage, power cords and cooling fans in a single enclosure. In contrast, the HP Moonshot System shares these enclosure components.

The HP Moonshot 1500 Chassis is a 4.3U form factor that can support server cartridges, server and storage cartridges, storage only cartridges and a range of x86, ARM, or accelerator-based processor technologies.

HP Moonshot 1500 Chassis

As an initial offering, the HP Moonshot 1500 Chassis is fully populated 45 HP ProLiant Moonshot Servers and one HP Moonshot-45G Switch Module. A second HP Moonshot-45G Switch Module can be purchased as an option. Future offerings will include quad server cartridges and will result in up to 180 servers per chassis. The 4.3U form factor allows for 10 chassis per rack, which with the quad server cartridge amounts to 1800 servers in a single rack.

The Moonshot 1500 Chassis simplifies management with four iLO processors that share management responsibility for the 45 servers, power, cooling, and switches.

The Moonshot 1500 Chassis’ electrically passive design makes this completely hot pluggable design possible. The Moonshot 1500 Chassis uses no active electrical components, other than EEPROMs required for manufacturing and configuration control purposes.

HP ProLiant Moonshot Server

HP will bring a growing library of cartridges, utilizing cutting-edge technology from industry leading partners. Each server will target specificsolutions.

The first server cartridge now available is HP ProLiant Moonshot Server. This server design is ideal for light scale-out applications. Light scale-out applications require relatively little processing but moderately high I/O and include environments that perform the following functions:

•Dedicated web hosting

•Simple content delivery

The server includes the Intel® Atom Processor S1260. The Intel Atom is the world's first 6-watt server-class processor. In addition to lower power requirements, it includes data-center-class features such as 64-bit support, error correcting code (ECC) memory, increased performance, and broad software ecosystem. These features, coupled with the revolutionary HPMoonshot System design are ideal for workloads using many extreme low-energy servers densely packed into a small footprint. The server has dedicated memory and storage, with discrete resources.

For details and specifications on the HP Moonshot System, including the HP Moonshot 1500 Chassis or HPProLiantMoonshot Server, go to hp.com/go/moonshot.

HP Moonshot solutions for applications

A growing number of websites are delivering a diverse mix of content that includes static (cacheable) data. Content providers and e-tailers also recognize that their website performance has a critical and tangible impact on their users' experience, customer site loyalty, and revenue generation.

Building and operating scalable web architectures requires understanding the considerations and tradeoffs behind large-scale web sites. The key variables are: availability, performance, reliability, scalability, manageability, and cost. Balancing these variables can be difficult, particularly when the system is responsible for many dollars of revenue per hour. Creating the most suitable system architecture comes down to discovering and making the right tradeoffs.

The target applications for our extreme low-energy servers are highly parallel workloads that do not make effective use of all the CPU cycles available today in high-end processors. These are a new breed of applications, recently evolved for businesses that use them to generate revenue; they must be highly scalable and rapidly adaptable; the mobile environment, for example, is continuously creating opportunity for newly evolved web applications.

Using typical server x86 CPUs—designed for a wide variety of compute-intensive enterprise applications—in these environments means underutilizing compute capacity and wasting energy. Distributed workloads in cloud environments often run at low processor utilization levels of 20% or less. Virtualization can address low CPU utilization, however, it does not adequately address the needs of scale-out applications and web serving, where the IO component is much larger, and the amount of processing required per unit of data is much smaller. Another issue that overwhelms IT managers in hyperscale environments is the sheer number of devices they must manage, power, and cool. With today’s rack-mount x86 platforms, you can have between 20 and 40 servers in a 42U rack and each must be managed as its own independent server.

The HP Moonshot System takes a differentapproach of using energyefficient CPUs that balance performance and cost to match the needs of much more specific applications. The result can be a server environment supplying the same amount of application work but utilizing less power, less space, less environmental cooling and system management resource to operate. Overall, a platform designed from the outset scale at the efficiently to the levels of growth required to meet the challenges and opportunities created by the emerging Internet of Things connected environment.

Operating systems

The initial release of the HP ProLiant Moonshot Server is compatible with these versions of Linux:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4

•SuSE SLES 11SP2

•Ubuntu 12.04.1

Application descriptions

The initial HP Moonshot Systemsare well suited to the following application areas:

•Simple content delivery—web front-end servers for static content delivery or servers streaming video

•Large distributed memory caching—server clusters running software such as Memcached

•New entry-level dedicated hosting servers – dedicated servers hosted for smaller applications or web businesses not shared with any other business or customer (not virtualized).

These workloads and application types are common in the cloud and service provider environments today. They can operate as massively parallel scale-out applications and are constrained most often by I/O rather than by CPU or memory. This makes them ideal for HP Moonshot Systems.

Most web developers use the open-source LAMP software stack (Linux OS, Apache HTTP Server, MySQL database, and PHP/Python/PERL scripting) to build dynamic web sites and web servers. The Moonshot System is suited for light computational LAMP workloads, where fetching and delivering data is more important than computational power.

Apache, Nginx HTTP servers and Memcached servers are stateless and are independent of other instances. They do not interact with each other during their operation. Therefore multi-node throughput of these services scales smoothly with the number of systems applied to the workload.

Content Delivery Network

A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a large distributed system of servers deployed in multiple data centers in the Internet. The goal of a CDN is to serve content to end-users with high availability and high performance. CDNs serve a large part of the Internet content today, including web objects (text, graphics, URLs and scripts), downloadable objects (media files, software, documents), applications (e-commerce, portals), live streaming media, on-demand streaming media, and social networks.Web caches store popular content on servers that have the greatest demand for the content requested.

Front end web severs

The need for light scale out workloads is intensifiedby the arrival of Cloud computing and the advent of permanently connected devices. These devices includea combination of mobile clients and newer application architectures thatmaintain persistent connectionsfacilitating continuous client updates with news, tweets, and social media feeds.

Popular front end web servers, Apache and Nginx for instance, have evolved, addressing this issue by using event driven, multi-threaded server techniques, enhancing horizontal scaling. They provide key features necessary for bettermanagement of concurrency, latency processing, static content, caching, and connections. They also allow integrating directly with Memcached/Redis or other "NoSQL" solutions, to boost performance when serving a large number of concurrent users.

The use of HP ProLiant Moonshot Servers as front-end web servers leads to a cost effective implementation with high capacity horizontal scaling built into the architecture (Figure 1) to enhance the service for emerging digitally wired economies.

Figure 1.HP ProLiant Moonshot Server role in light scale out workload

Caching servers

Using load balancing,Web and App server responsibilitiesare easily duplicated and distributed across the system to improve throughput, however, the SQL database is not distributable can become a bottleneck. An approach to solve this problem is to add more and more powerful (expensive) servers to serve the database queries. An alternative approach is to add a tier of inexpensive caching servers to reduce queries to the database servers and substantially improve response time and throughput.

Memcached is an open source distributed memory object caching system, developed to overcome the SQL server bottleneck for mostly read only websites.It scales throughput and improves response time for read dominated websites by alleviating database load. It is widely used in Web2.0 applications from many high capacity social media, internet shopping and information sites.

For any website that does more reads than writes, executing a SQL query for every read is inefficient. Memcached complements the SQL database by reducing the load for read transactions, see Figure 2.Multiple, lower cost Memcached servers producing lower latency and higher throughput replace many SQL database servers.SQL databases require powerful servers. Memcached is an example of a light hyperscale application that is a good fit for HP ProLiant Moonshot Servers.

Figure 2.HP ProLiant Moonshot Server role in Memcached enabled web site architecture

Dedicated server hosting

Hosting companies offer dedicated servers to customers who want to run their applications on a system that is not shared with any other customers. Typically, this has raised the price of dedicated server hosting well above the level of virtualized server instances, where multiple customers share a single server.

HP ProLiant Moonshot Servers are well suited fordedicated hosting and open up a new, lower cost entry point for truly dedicated server hosting, see figure 3. This can represent new business opportunities for hosting customers requiring the increased reliability, consistent performance, added security, and multiple domain capability afforded them by dedicated servers;and offer significant savings in space and cost when compared with traditional x86 servers. Moonshot delivers45 dedicated servers per chassis and 405 dedicated servers per rack. Each server retains the unique dedicated hardware footprint for your customers while you reduce your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

Figure 3.Chart depicting server functionality versus cost

Performance and value proposition comparisons

By moving to low energyprocessors for these application environments, we can achieve better effective performance per watt by taking advantage of simpler, more energy-efficient, and less expensive CPU cores. System on a Chip (SoC) designs incorporated into HP Moonshot Systems simplify the main CPU design andfree up additional silicon real estate to bring more of the server resources onto low energy, space efficient SoC implementations.When the right workloads are matched to the characteristics of these lower cost, highly efficient servers, the resulting saving in space, power consumption, and system management complexity become very compelling.

The followingcharacterization makes a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) comparison between HP MoonshotSystems and traditional x86 rackable servers when running a web front workload serving static web content.

Front end web server comparison

HP engineering performed direct comparative testing of HP ProLiant Moonshot Servers and traditional x86 rackable (pizza box) servers. The testing consisted of running identical web front end workloads on each system to determine the resources and overall costs required for each to produce the same amount web serving work when running at scale. The approach consisted of serving the same number of static content web pages, while satisfying equivalent latency criteria. The webpage workload was created by drawing together multiple typical webpages served by popular internet search sites, marketplace sites, news, and information sites.

To draw a TCO comparison we take performance, power, and price into account. Assumptions used in the calculations are:

•Server acquisition costs amortized over 3 years

•Networking acquisition costs (top of rack switches and cables) amortized over 3 years

•3-year power costs

•3-year cooling costs

•Space costs amortized over 15 years

•TCO equation is unit cost + power cost + cooling cost

The testing utilizedthe Apache HTTP server-benchmarking tool (ab) to simulate multiple concurrent users making requests to the HTTP server.The testsmeasured both throughput and latency. Apache and nginx HTTP servers were both measured with the same workload. Both of these popular HTTP server applications were found to offer similar serviceperformance levels.The tests also required that the web pages served meet an acceptable latency limit -- the upper limit latency for this testing was 50milli-seconds.