Triforce | Home - Abstract€¦ · Web viewThe billions of connected devices that are gathering and processing information or providing a service while seamlessly interacting with

Technical white paper

Solutions for HP Moonshot Systems

Table of contentsAbstract.....................................................................................................................................................................................2

Providing a solution for the new style of IT.........................................................................................................................2

HP Moonshot System.............................................................................................................................................................2

HP Moonshot 1500 Chassis...............................................................................................................................................3

HP ProLiant Moonshot Server...........................................................................................................................................3

HP Moonshot solutions for applications..............................................................................................................................3

Operating systems..............................................................................................................................................................4

Application descriptions.....................................................................................................................................................4

Performance and value proposition comparisons.............................................................................................................6

Front end web server comparison....................................................................................................................................6

The HP Moonshot System advantage..............................................................................................................................7

Deploying, managing, and monitoring capabilities............................................................................................................7

HP Moonshot 1500 Chassis Management module........................................................................................................8

Firmware maintenance......................................................................................................................................................8

HP Insight Cluster Management Utility............................................................................................................................8

Conclusion................................................................................................................................................................................ 9

Resources, contacts, or additional links............................................................................................................................11

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Technical white paper | Solutions for HP Moonshot Systems

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 www.hp.com/go/moonshot.

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 field-programmable 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 energy-efficient 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.

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Technical white paper | Solutions for HP Moonshot Systems

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 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.

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

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 HP Moonshot 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 HP ProLiant Moonshot 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

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Technical white paper | Solutions for HP Moonshot Systems

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 different approach of using energy-efficient 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 Systems are 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 seversThe need for light scale out workloads is intensified by the arrival of Cloud computing and the advent of permanently connected devices. These devices include a combination of mobile clients and newer application architectures that maintain persistent connections facilitating 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 better management of concurrency, latency processing, static content, caching, and connections. They also allow integrating

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Technical white paper | Solutions for HP Moonshot Systems

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 responsibilities are 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.

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Technical white paper | Solutions for HP Moonshot Systems

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 for dedicated 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 delivers 45 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).

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Technical white paper | Solutions for HP Moonshot Systems

Figure 3. Chart depicting server functionality versus cost

Performance and value proposition comparisons

By moving to low energy processors 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 and free 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 following characterization makes a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) comparison between HP Moonshot Systems and traditional x86 rackable servers when running a web front workload serving static web content.

Front end web server comparisonHP 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

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Virtualized environment

Coming Soon!

HP ProLiant Moonshot Server

Future 4P server opens door to cost saving opportunities for Cloud

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Dedicated lower entry price

Dedicated 1U Rackmount

User Price

Technical white paper | Solutions for HP Moonshot Systems

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 utilized the Apache HTTP server-benchmarking tool (ab) to simulate multiple concurrent users making requests to the HTTP server. The tests measured 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 service performance 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.

The HP Moonshot System advantageTo illustrate the amount of savings the HP Moonshot System delivers when used for frontend web page serving at scale, we developed a target workload that requires 200 traditional x86 rackable servers. In our test, we used the HP DL380e x86 servers configured as they would typically be set up for static content webpage serving. We estimate a three-year total cost of ownership of $1.59 million.

To achieve the same performance with the Moonshot System, we need 340 servers with a three-year total cost of ownership of $603 thousand.

Figure 4 shows savings when using the HP Moonshot System instead of traditional x86 servers.

The HP Moonshot System advantage becomes apparent in the savings that are realized from the deployment density and power efficiency of the Moonshot implementation. The reduced cabling and management complexity and the overall datacenter utilization efficiency when deploying at scale further enhance these benefits.

Figure 4. Comparison of HP Moonshot System to traditional x86 servers operating in a hyperscale environment

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Configuration details:

• 340 servers

• 0.84 racks• 0 switches

Configuration details:

• 200 servers

• 10 racks• 10

Traditional x86HP Moonshot System

Total cost of ownership$603 thousand

Traditional x86Traditional x86 server solution

Total cost of ownership$1.59 million

HP Moonshot System83% less energy92% less space54% less cost96% less complexity

Technical white paper | Solutions for HP Moonshot Systems

Deploying, managing, and monitoring capabilities

This section discusses the deploying, managing, and monitoring capabilities for the HP ProLiant Moonshot Server.

The HP Moonshot System relies on a federated iLO system. Federation requires the physical or logical sharing of compute, storage or networking resources within the HP Moonshot 1500 Chassis. The chassis shares four individual iLO4 ASICs in the CM module with high-speed connections to the management network through a single management port uplink.

The CM provides a single point of management for up to 45 cartridges, and all other components in the HP Moonshot 1500 Chassis, using Ethernet connections to the internal private network. Each hot pluggable component includes a resident satellite controller. The CM and satellite controllers use data structures embedded in non-volatile memory for discovery, monitoring, and control of each component.

HP Moonshot 1500 Chassis Management moduleThe CM includes four iLO processors sharing the management responsibility for 45 cartridges, the power and cooling processor, two networks switches and HP Moonshot 1500 chassis management. We’ve federated the iLO system functionality by assigning certain iLO processors responsibility for managing certain hardware interfaces. We balanced the workload among the three cartridge zones in the chassis (physically separated by network switches), and dedicated one iLO processor to manage chassis hardware and the switches. Communication between the CM and the Satellite Controllers is an internal private Ethernet network. This eliminates the requirements for a large number of IP addresses being used on the production network.

The iLO subsystem includes an intelligent microprocessor, separate memory, and a dedicated network interface. iLO uses the management logic on each cartridge and module, and up to 1,500 sensors within the HP Moonshot 1500 Chassis, to monitor component thermal conditions. This design makes iLO independent of the host servers and their operating systems.

iLO monitors all key HP Moonshot System components. The CM user interfaces and API’s include a Command-Line Interface (CLI) and Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) support. These provide the primary gateway for node management, aggregation, and inventory. A text-based interface is available for power capping, firmware management and aggregation, asset management and deployment. Alerts are generated directly from iLO, regardless of the host operating system or even if no host operating system is installed. Using iLO, you can do the following:

• Securely and remotely control the power state of the HP Moonshot System cartridges (text-based Remote Console)

• Obtain access to each and all serial ports using a secure Virtual Serial Port (VSP) session

• Obtain asset and hardware specific information (MAC Addresses, SN)

• Control cartridge boot configuration

Firmware maintenanceThe CM handles routine firmware maintenance throughout the HP Moonshot System. All deliveries of flashable firmware components to the CM use existing iLO features and are HPSUM-based. Firmware updates can include any hot pluggable HP Moonshot System component.

HP Insight Cluster Management UtilityThe HP Insight Cluster Management Utility (CMU) is well suited for performing network installations, image capture and deploy, and ongoing management of large numbers of servers such as the density provided by the HP Moonshot 1500 Chassis.

HP Insight CMU helps manage, install, and monitor the compute nodes of your cluster from a single interface. You can access this utility through a Graphical User Interface (GUI) or a Command Line Interface (CLI). The CMU is optional; basic network installation of the OS may be performed using a standard PXE-based installation server. You can find more information on the CMU at hp.com/go/cmu.

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Technical white paper | Solutions for HP Moonshot Systems

Figure 3. HP Insight Cluster Management Utility GUI

HP Insight CMU is an efficient and robust hyperscale cluster lifecycle management framework and suite of tools for large Linux clusters such as those found in High Performance Computing (HPC) environments. A simple graphical interface enables an ‘at-a-glance’ view, figure 4, of the entire cluster across multiple metrics, provides frictionless scalable remote management and analysis, and allows rapid provisioning of software to all the nodes of the system. Insight CMU makes the management of a cluster more user friendly, efficient, and error free than if it were being managed by scripts, or on a node-by-node basis. Features include:

• One-to-N user interface - the industry’s leading cluster GUI and command-line-interface. A system admin can click-select a set of servers and groups for cloning, managing, or monitoring thousands of servers at once.

• Cloning - Choose one server and replicate its image over N servers in the cluster. CMU can clone a thousand servers in less than half an hour

• Remote management - Choose one set of commands or scripts and execute them on N servers with a single mouse-click.

• Monitoring - Choose, with one click per sensor, to display real-time metrics for N servers in a pie-chart format or in a 3D tubular display designed for optimal display of data-collections. Configure alerts to cause threshold-triggered actions

• Cluster diagnostics - Verify that the components, connections and interactions of the cluster infrastructure are all working correctly and at full performance.

• Extensible menu of common cluster operations - A default drop-down menu of commands includes power on/off, firmware installation, parallel-distributed shell and unattended Linux installation. Simple file-edits can be used to add operations to the menu

• Scalable performance - Hierarchical ultra-lightweight cloning and monitoring operations are automatically done in parallel.

Conclusion

The HP Moonshot System addresses the needs of data centers deploying servers from moderate up to truly massive scale. It changes the current hyperscale computing model with an innovative completely hot pluggable architecture that increases the value of your investment and reduces TCO. You get a significant reduction in power usage, hardware costs, and use of

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Technical white paper | Solutions for HP Moonshot Systems

space. You’ll see simplification in the areas of network switches, cabling, and management. The iLO Chassis Manager, with proven HP iLO management processors, gives you detailed reporting on all components while the Power and Cooling Controller manages the n+1 fan and power supply configurations. Dual network switches and I/O modules increase resiliency and flexibility, allowing you to stack switches. The HP Moonshot System is the first application-optimized server platform in the industry. Future releases will allow you to customize the HP Moonshot System to your application needs and workloads.

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Resources, contacts, or additional links

HP Moonshot System Homepagehp.com/go/moonshot

HP Insight Cluster Management Utilityhp.com/HPC/cache/412128-0-0-0-121.html?jumpid=ex_r1459_w1/en/large/tsg/go_cmu

HP ProLiant technical whitepapershp.com/servers/technology

Sign up for updateshp.com/go/getupdated

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© Copyright 2013 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.

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TC1211948, April 2013