E-Guide

HOW TO BUILD A SCALE-OUT INFRASTRUCTURE

HOW TO BUILD A SCALE-OUT INFRASTRUCTURE

Home Scale-up or scaleout: What fits best in your data center? Despite IT wishes, scale out architecture growing in data centers

uses servers to supply computing resources processing cycles, memory space, network and disk I/O that workloads need to function. However, as workloads and computing demands grow, server resources must grow simultaneously in order to meet those demands. In this e-guide, brought to you by SearchDataCenter.com, our experts answer the common questions about server scaling and discuss important considerations for an enterprise. Also, learn how powerful scale-up systems make way for scale-out architecture in the data center.
very data center
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SCALE-UP OR SCALE-OUT: WHAT FITS BEST IN YOUR DATA CENTER?

Home Scale-up or scaleout: What fits best in your data center? Despite IT wishes, scale out architecture growing in data centers

Every data center uses servers to supply computing resources processing cycles, memory space, network and disk I/O that workloads need to function. As workloads proliferate and computing demands increase, server resources must grow or scale to meet those demands. Well answer some common questions about server scaling and consider the implications on an enterprise. We hear the terms scale-up and scale-out servers used frequently, but what are they and what are the differences between them? Stephen Bigelow: There are two basic ways to scale computing (server) resources in a data center. The first is to add more servers or scale-out. Say a business has avirtualized server running five business applications and is using 80% of the servers physical computing capacity. If the business needs to deploy more workloads, the current server may not have enough resources available, so the business could purchase and deploy an additional server to support the new applications. Scale-out architecturealso includes clustered or distributed computing
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HOW TO BUILD A SCALE-OUT INFRASTRUCTURE

Home Scale-up or scaleout: What fits best in your data center? Despite IT wishes, scale out architecture growing in data centers

approaches where multiple small servers share the computing load of a single application. For example, a mission-critical workload may run on two or more servers, and the processing can be shared across those servers in an activeactive configuration. If one server fails, the other(s) can take over and preserve the applications availability. If more redundancy is needed, the cluster can be scaled-out with additional server nodes. But advances in computing power have vastly increased server resources in each new design. Today, it is possible toreplace an aging server with a model touting far more processing, memory and I/O capability than previous models yet occupies the same physical footprint such as a 1U or 2U rack chassis and often consumes less energy. This approach is called scale-up because the physical box can handle more or larger workloads. Consider the first example where one virtual server ran short of resources. It is possible to deploy a new server in the next technology refresh cycle with far more computing resources, migrate all of the workloads from the old server to the new one, take the old server out of service or allocate it to other tasks and be left with significantly more available resources to tackle additional production workloads without adding significantly to data center space or energy requirements. Its like youre slowly easing the older server into retirement.
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HOW TO BUILD A SCALE-OUT INFRASTRUCTURE

Home Scale-up or scaleout: What fits best in your data center? Despite IT wishes, scale out architecture growing in data centers

When is it best to use a scale-up server in the data center, and when should an organization opt for a scale-out server? Bigelow: There is no single best answer. Both scale-up and scale-out approaches are valid means of adding computing resources to a data center environment, and they are not mutually exclusive. A scale-out approach could be the right answer when a large number of smaller nodes are needed, perhaps for a web server farm or a server cluster where physically redundant hosts are required. Conversely, a scale-up server approach might be right for a major virtual server consolidation initiative where more workloads must reside on the fewer physical servers. How does virtualization play into the scale-up versus scale-out discussion? Bigelow: You saw a bit of this in the previous questions. An organization that deploys server virtualization can take advantage of server consolidation by moving a greater number of workloads onto fewer and more capable servers. This reduces the total number of servers that an organization has to buy and puts far more emphasis on the scale-up approach. The bigger issue is resource allocation. Poor or careless allocation can adversely affect scale-up plans. Virtualization allows you to provision a virtual
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HOW TO BUILD A SCALE-OUT INFRASTRUCTURE

Home Scale-up or scaleout: What fits best in your data center? Despite IT wishes, scale out architecture growing in data centers

machine for each workload and allocate computing resources to each virtual machine. If you provide excess resources to a virtual machine 2 GB of memory when only 1 GB is needed resources are wasted and the server may host fewer virtual machines than expected. Conversely, if an administrator doesnt assign enough resources to a virtual machine, that workload may perform poorly or even cause the entire server to crash. A business will get the most value from consolidating to a scale-up server if resources are properly allocated to meet each workloads needs. Dont scale-up servers present more disruptions for a data center? Bigelow: The potential for scale-up server failures and work disruptions is certainly real. When a powerful server runs a single application such as a database, there is little potential for extra disruption since an application crash or server failure only means that a single workload needs to be recovered. As long as the server is running or other suitable server hardware is available, it doesnt take long for skilled IT staff to recover the application thanks to the servers greater computing power. However, the matter is a bit different if the scale-up server is virtualized and consolidated with numerous workloads. If a server like that fails there could be many more workloads to recover and the process could take considerable
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HOW TO BUILD A SCALE-OUT INFRASTRUCTURE

Home Scale-up or scaleout: What fits best in your data center? Despite IT wishes, scale out architecture growing in data centers

time. Remember that as each workload is restored it will start using network and other computing resources on that box and effectively slow the recovery of subsequent workloads. Still, its important to put such disruptions into the proper perspective. Mission-critical workloads should be protected with some kind of resiliency strategy such as physicalserver clusteringor virtual workloadredundancyusing tools like EverRun from Marathon Software. When critical workloads are protected, they will continue to be available and will eventually synchronize with the original machine when it is successfully recovered. Only non-essential or non-critical workloads would bear the brunt of extended downtime. How does the reliability of scale-up and scale-out servers compare? Bigelow: The reliability of scale-up and scale-out servers typically compares quite well. The interesting thing is that many enterprise-grade servers are incorporating technologies designed to enhance reliability and avoid downtime. Techniques that were once in the domain of the most powerful and expensive systems are quickly filtering down to entry-level models. Even entry-level 1U servers include redundant power supplies so the server will continue to run even when one supply fails. Similarly, the presence of severalmulti-core processors means that only some workloads may be disrupted
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HOW TO BUILD A SCALE-OUT INFRASTRUCTURE

Home Scale-up or scaleout: What fits best in your data center? Despite IT wishes, scale out architecture growing in data centers

if a core fails, but the afflicted workloads can be restarted on another system or even on other available processor cores in the same system. Its the same when several network I/O ports are present. Workload traffic can failoverfrom a faulty port to a working port or the impacted workloads can be migrated to another server with minimal performance degradation. A measure of CPU and network port redundancy can be realized on entry-level enterprise servers. Memory is one of the last frontiers in server reliability because virtual machines reside as images in server memory. Entry-level enterprise servers like the Dell PowerEdge R510 supporterror correction code(ECC) memory which can correct common kinds of memory corruption, but ECC generally doesnt protect against outright memory faults. More sophisticated servers such as the Hewlett-Packard ProLiant family seek to mitigate downtime by including fault-tolerant memory techniques such as memory mirroring think RAID-1with disk storage--and spare memory modules online that can automatically take over for failed memory modules similar to hot spare disk storage.

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DESPITE IT WISHES, SCALE OUT ARCHITECTURE GROWING IN DATA CENTERS

Home Scale-up or scaleout: What fits best in your data center? Despite IT wishes, scale out architecture growing in data centers

Lately Ive noticed that IT trends within an organization and IT trends within a data center are like classical mechanics and quantum mechanics, respectively. If its been a while since your last physics course, classical mechanics govern the motion of large objects. However, once the object gets small enoughlike to the size of an atomall the rules change. Those new rules arequantum mechanics. Data centers are like that, too. Outside a data center, IT departments preach consolidation and centralization. They push data and processing back into the data center with virtualization and cloud computing. They even push the desktops into the data center with virtual desktop infrastructure. But within a data center, the trend is the opposite. Applications and systems that scale up with a Just throw hardware at it approach are yielding to those thatscale out. The result is a swarm of smaller machines working together versus a monolith, or local disk arrays orchestrated by software to provide the services of a more traditional centralized array.
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HOW TO BUILD A SCALE-OUT INFRASTRUCTURE

DECENTRALIZATION TRUMPS CENTRALIZATION

Home Scale-up or scaleout: What fits best in your data center? Despite IT wishes, scale out architecture growing in data centers

So the operative question is, why arent data centers following their own rules? Frankly, theres only one reason for this: cost. The cost of a traditional centralized disk array is enormous compared to the performance it delivers, especially when you factor in the complex way servers attach to it, and the way the storage systems and networks have to be managed and monitored. In contrast, local storage is easy. Absolutely everybody knows how it works, so its relatively immune to human error. Its fast enough for most workloads, especially with manyRAID controllersnow offering native solid-state drive caching (to inexpensive commodity drives, no less). And every server monitoring tool on the planet can monitor local storage, so its one less thing you have to pay for, be trained on, implement and manage. Systems that scale out are trendy for similar reasons. With a monolithic system, you need to size for peak workloads. The rest of the year, all that capacity is wasted, or at least hard to use. A scale-out system can be sized to exactly what is needed, with the capacity returned to a pool after peaks subside. This also appeals to organizations pushing workloads to the cloud. As hybrid cloud technologies mature, the idea of cloud bursting, or temporarily pushing
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HOW TO BUILD A SCALE-OUT INFRASTRUCTURE

Home Scale-up or scaleout: What fits best in your data center? Despite IT wishes, scale out architecture growing in data centers

workloads into a public cloud, gets more realistic every year. It also means the ability to take full advantage of concepts likeAmazon Elastic Compute CloudsSpot Instances to run workloads in EC2 when the price to do so is lower than your own data centers operational costs. Will the trend of internal data center decentralization continue, despite the trend of organizational IT centralization? Most things in IT are cyclical, so it wouldnt surprise me if, in 10 years, we started centralizing data centers again. Until then, I think we should get used to ITnotpracticing what it preachesfor the good of our bottom lines.

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Home Scale-up or scaleout: What fits best in your data center? Despite IT wishes, scale out architecture growing in data centers

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