WWDC2004 Session 626

Transcript

Kind: captions
Language: en
okay good afternoon
my name is Doug Broxson I'm product
manager for server hardware at Apple and
the sessions xserve deployment we take a
look two years ago actually at this
conference Steve Jobs gave us a little
teaser trailer of a new product
announcement that it turned out to be
announced the following week in
cupertino and that announcement turned
out to the xserve so extra was a product
line is just about two years old and it
introduced you know Apple technology you
know phenomenal at the time g for
processing power great networking and
storage capabilities headless management
remote management capabilities in Apple
one youth more factor or a form factor
not only great technology we happen to
kind of think it looks good as well but
since then we've come a long way I mean
if you think about two years ago we just
embarked on this journey and you think
of where we've come from a hardware in a
salsa perspective it's quite a bit
obviously we introduced what we like to
now call the slot load xserve kind of a
speed bump to the product the cluster
knows bringing a streamlined
configuration for clustering and more
compute centered application kind of
removing the things that you don't need
for non-traditional server applications
and of course most recently the xserve
g5 in January bringing g5 power and
technology into this one you'd form
factor so a big jump croma there in two
years and of course on the software side
just amazing innovation I like to think
the original xserve you think about a
chip with mac OS 10 15 and since then of
course Jaguar Panther and of course this
week hearing about new features and
Tiger just continuing to add to the pace
of innovation on the server software
side and of course x3 raid bringing
phenomenal capacity and performance and
a fibre channel attached storage device
really breaking the price barrier for
protected high performance storage and
also when you look at things like X and
introduced so we should
this fall bringing a San file system to
Mac os10 with really excellent storage
and shared storage capability it's going
to really what change the way storage
can be deployed on mac OS x server and
finally third party we've had phenomenal
third-party adoption in the in the
server and enterprise space over the
last two years more and more developers
bringing their product in the
technologies to Mac OS 10 is an exciting
growth in this kinds of solutions and
kind of ways you can deploy xserve and
so we see customer adoption really
taking off especially with the xserve g5
bringing this power and technology into
the end of the form factor really the
customers very excited in doing greatly
things with with exurbs again a lot of
that has to do with the g5 processor
bringing that computational capability
that bandwidth that through put into
that architecture but we also think it
goes beyond that in look at the whole
architecture as a whole really bringing
balance of performance storage and
networking along with remote management
and monitoring capability into just a
really well-rounded package and of
course we've had lots of great quotes
and reviews and this is one of the ones
that just came out recently which I
really love it was a review in bar
business against a windows 2003 server
and I think the last line really sums it
up to impressive the pack up is to pass
up which is one of my favorite reviews
recently so just phenomenal reception of
xserve in this state and of course
probably one of the best it's really
really fast so this is a review of
exergy 5 in computer world just recently
so what we're going to talk about today
well first of all kinds of the quick YF
serve touched a little bit on that and
touched very quickly on just xserve g5
and then really go into the deployment
side of this product have taken a look
at planning requirements deployment
strategies we're also going to hear from
some customers including apple's own
eyes
p group a little bit on how they have
deployed excerpt and the long delay
hopefully pick up some practices and
guidelines that may help you as you're
looking at the extra deployment so why
Xers well again you know we really think
with excerpt was really kind of broken
the mold of servers in the space really
bringing a great mix of processing power
networking I of storage all actually a
phenomenal one you form factor with
great value and great capabilities mac
OS x server and again the g5 really has
raised the bar and capabilities for
forex or really bringing 64-bit
computing power that we're continuing to
tap into with with mac OS x server and a
phenomenal architecture with exergy five
we really redesigned the architecture
inside the box to really bring higher
throughput a higher higher bandwidth
into the system it's not just about the
g5 processor it's about more memory
bandwidth ECC memory capabilities pci-x
capabilities serial ATA hard drive
phenomenal networking bandwidth and
that's just bandwidth but new features
like the land capability and more
hardware checks coming capabilities in
the chipset itself just really bringing
a really server based approach into this
architecture other really important
facts and we'll touch on this a little
bit more in the planning segment but
with the g5 we really have a great
advantage in that for the processor the
amount of power and he said it outputs
is significant lower than the
competition and you know i like to joke
you can put an X serve anywhere you can
put it in your office you can put it on
a shelf you can you put it really a
single extra just about anywhere but
when you start putting several these on
a single power circuit in
closed room he starts have to really
begin to factor out in 20 Asia the
environmental impact of that I had a
couple extra servers in my office over
the weekend planning for some of the
demos in this session and have my door
all closed up coming in over the weekend
the room with quite warm just that
wasn't built for the kind of cooling
that's required to move air through this
number of the machine and that's just
with the lower power and heat output of
X herb I also want to take a moment to
really comment on the thermal design of
the architecture this is something we
take when we design these systems very
very rigorous design in the thermal in
the cooling system we're very very much
purist in this respect it's a pure front
to back airflow very intelligently
monitored to fans and systems we're
leveraging the same technology that was
first introduced in the power mac g5
with intelligent thermal monitoring with
thermal zone and while we don't have
independent thermal zones we have
tremendous amount of monitoring data
coming off the flawed record to be able
to control how fast the fans should
should run and make sure everything's
cooled to optimum efficiency for best
performance if you heard a customer
comment one of the HPC sections we just
installed a cluster of 64 machines and
he first came into the room he thought
oh my god these things were really loud
and he turned out there were two dell
servers in the cord that he left on
turning them off it was much quiet and
then six before six before machine a
cluster so we're pretty pleased that for
the power and air that we're moving
through this machine it is as quiet it's
not quieter than the f slot logie for
this is a look at a power efficiency and
this again is a huge advantage of as we
as we look at this the processor and the
xserve g5 is best at about 55 watt so as
we look at competing processors we can
see literally twice the power
performance going through through those
systems and more power means more cost
you got to pay for that power it means
more cooling required you got to pull
the heat out of the room
and kind of the corollary to thermal the
heat of the system is reliability
because thermal management goes directly
into the reliability of the system
another thing about the xserve g5 is one
of the key differentiators about the
xserve is that this system is designed
from the ground up as a server platform
and that means not only really striving
at not just processor performance but I
owe performance it also means monitoring
and management and with xserve I Alexa
joke it's one of the most instrumented
1u servers in the industry we have last
count I think was 38 sensors in the
logic board including 10 temperature
sensors 8 fans sensors voltage and
current sensors throughout the system
we're literally monitoring temperature
of the incoming ambient air through the
front of the machine we're measuring the
processor temperature the core
temperature the memory temperature the
power supply temperature the PCI
temperature which gives you out
billionaire temperature as well it's
just a very well monitored server and it
gives you a lot of insight not only
about how the server itself is running
but the general air flow in your server
environment is the ambient air alone is
coming is too warm you're going to know
right away there's a air flow situation
cooling situations in your data center
and of course this data is wrapped up
into our monitoring tool server monitor
really providing point-and-click access
into the data coming off of exergy 5
name of the monitor one hour multiple
servers get email alerts you know kind
of the quick look green is good yellow
the warning condition Reza an error
condition and it will take advantage of
things like smart technology being able
to do pre failure analysis on the hard
drive is as a key feature in the server
monitor we've enriched server monitor
quite a bit with the new data that we're
now capturing off the xserve g5 for
example one of the new tabs and server
monitor is the memory tab which provides
detailed error reporting on eccie error
account and we actually provide that
information by individual dim so you can
actually see what individual did my
you need to see earth should you see any
and of course xserve of course comes
with mac OS x server so right out of the
box unlimited client license in our
server configuration a broad range of
server server services right out of the
box been able to handle a vast majority
of traditional server capabilities with
everything you need and of course the
tiger coming we have new capabilities
that are being brought to the platform
and of course you've heard all this week
about tiger so I'm not going to need to
go into any any more of it here but it
will highlight one or two key features
that I think it's going to be useful as
we look forward with extra deployment
with tiger server let's go into a little
bit about planning what about some of
the key things that should be is
concerned when you're looking at a
deploying excerpt even before you start
kind of screwing and gluing machines
together and connecting them up to your
network so the first thing i want to
touch on is physical requirement being a
rack based system there are different
things that should be accounted for and
things that can be looked at so let's
start with that so racking is probably
one of the most basic thing probably one
of the things they might take for
granted but it's kind of interesting to
look at xserve in the scope of industry
trends the continual convergence in the
service base towards thinner and thinner
servers is causing changes in the way
systems iraq we tend to see a lot more
systems put into a smaller amount of
space more room for cable routing and
things to come very very important now
with extra we designed it to provide a
pretty wide range of racking capability
but the reality is it's a 28-inch
enclosure we recommend a 30 or deeper in
track if you're doing a four-post rack
it does support to post for active
courses extra of raids not exactly
something a mountain and to post iraq at
about a hundred pounds apiece so really
for clothes racks are ideal for that and
of course we provide all hardware needed
right in the box to mount those
the systems both in English and metric
thread in the box a couple really
important things to consider even more
so as xserve g5 is that we're moving a
tremendous amount of air through the
system xserve g5 we've doubled the csms
through the box then the exergy for is
so pure front to back airflow is really
really important you don't want to put
too many units in small racks like this
that have an enclosed front you want to
make sure you have proper airflow coming
in through the front of the machine and
out through the back that becomes really
really important the other thing if
you're if you're planning deployments
with PD use power distribution units
going up the back of the rack you really
want to look at deeper racks the new
kind of data center trend is becoming
moving from 30 to 36 inches deep these
tend to be the more popular we're
accessing data centers that are being
put in now and those have a extra room
you might need for pdu deployment the
other thing that's important too to
begin to think about occur deploy more
than a few of these is wait extra of
itself is you know the dense servers
it's about 30 pounds of pop but when you
put a lot of these in iraq us a lot of
pounds per square foot that you need to
think about and if you add extra grades
to that i'd even adds more weight per
square foot at Apple we have a cluster
that we're installing at the 32 node
cluster in our executive briefing center
it's in a single rack and when we met
with the facilities people about
installing that the first thing they had
to do is pull out the blueprints of the
building to make sure we were over a
beam so that the floor could support it
it's actually something that you might
not think about but with the densities
that are happening in servers today that
becomes an interesting thought there's a
great section one of the kind of Bibles
for enterprise data center planning is
actually a book by son called fun
enterprise data center methodology it's
in their blueprint series and they talk
about planning for server deployments
and they they tell story about bringing
in an e 10k which is
big kind of mainframe SMP box and it
weighs a couple thousand pounds and they
they say if you wouldn't drive a BMW
3-series up on top of the race floor in
your data center you wouldn't want to
bring one of these boxes in so the kind
of thing is you need probably don't
think about the floor being able to
support this but it is something that
starts need to be thought about the
other thing that kind of goes along with
racking is good cable management and
again with the density and the air flow
requirements these all going
hand-in-hand with with good cable
management this is a picture of an extra
of deployment not exactly fully cable
managed another little store is talking
to a customer who had installed the
cable management arms in the back of the
machine and solve it the air flow or the
the cool the machines rain cooler when
the cables were properly managed and
they they thought for sure the cable
management arm as part of the cooling
solution of the of the xserve and
actually just turns out to be a benefit
of improved cable management be able to
have their flow through the system much
better so keep in mind cable management
is an important aspect of that you don't
want to be blocking a lot of rear panel
room with cables and things and with you
know multiple network cables and power
cables and fibre channel cables and all
the other cables that you might be
running out of the back of machine in a
1u space that's a lot of tables that
need to go somewhere so again good rocky
and also means good cable management the
other thing is just kind of the core
requirements now a reference for you to
a knowledge base article we published
all this information in our knowledge
base if you go to input a tackle calm
and search for exurban BTW you see all
this data published there in kind of
gory detail but x server is very very
efficient in its power and cooling but
yet you do need to account for it these
are some numbers for the various lexer
of configurations we provide numbers
based on stock configuration as well
fully loaded fully loaded meeting you
know three hard drives running full
complement of memory in the system and
you can see numbers anywhere from about
130 watts to somewhere in the 290 watts
of power consumption and somewhere
between 400 to 900 be to use an hour in
that range of power consumption and heat
output calculated by the xserve the
power supplies officially rated at four
amps although in typical usage
considerations you'll have a hard time
finding it go above about 2.2 amps in
the real world power consumption after
you calculate a bypass startup current
Maya fact the compute node is very very
efficient for the compute power delivers
at full processor load with memories
that system tends to be configured
really just as processor and memory you
know 1.8 amps is pretty pretty common
for for that system all this information
we published very explicitly in our
knowledge base not pointing to that for
for further detail let's take a look now
at system configuration how do i
configure the system what kind of things
should I be considering and pretty
common things like that one of the first
most basic things is how many processors
so when we sell our systems we have to
Baines server configurations a single
processor and a dual processor there's
some memory differences between the two
with the real differentiation between
the two systems and the two price points
is a number of processors and since the
processors aren't upgradable later
that's one of the first decisions that
you'll have to make now what's
interesting about the g5s that have so
much performance the signal processor
system now could solve a much broader
range of tasks it's actually a very very
powerful system for general purpose of
server activities what's interesting
though is I've talked to a lot of
customers who begin migrating from older
servers particular g3's or early g4
models up to xserve g5 and they're being
able to consolidate systems you know
three or four balloon-way g3s and the 1x
serve and so you know having the
processing power to back that up with
storage we put the network intrusion
compared to what those systems are
capable of you have have that
flexibility and again since we can't add
a second processor later for situations
where you want that flexibility to treat
them of growth later in having that
second processor is ideal the other
thing is storage now xserve g5 one of
the differences between NAT and the g4
is a change from 4dr two three and that
was done mainly to improve airflow and
meet the thermal requirements that we
had to meet for the xserve g5 now the
the implications are that was the larger
serial ATA drives that were working with
the actual net capacity is sold in seven
hundred fifty gigabytes you know there
are three quarters of a terabyte in a 1u
form factor there's actually a
tremendous amount of storage there what
it really changes though is the way you
deploy your raid configuration so with
software raid built-in you can do
mirroring and striking it built into the
system and I will talk more about raid
in a little bit and then we offer 80
gigabyte hard drives for basic boot
drives and so between three drives you
have a number of configurations and of
course you always have the ability to go
out the back through fiber channel two
extra raid which gives you a lot more
flexibility as a more raid level options
more capacity options a lot of
flexibility through fiber channel the
ability to add X fan initially or later
on and of course one of the big benefits
is you can have extra with extra fraid
so you can have multiple servers
attaching to the same extra raid unit so
as a simple example here we have 4x
oeuvres connecting to a fibre channel
switch to a single extra raid that we've
partitioned and sliced so that each has
their own little private volume on a
shared extra braid so again so for
certain level of stores this might
actually be a better solution than
stuffing more storage inside an xserve
itself matter of fact having
independence of your data independent
the server itself gives you tremendous
flexibility of you redeploy servers
change their roles my group services
come one server to another this
gives you tremendous flexibility as you
look at those options also wanted to
talk a little bit about the cluster node
configuration now as I mentioned up
front the cluster nodes the figuration
was really designed and tailored for
compute applications and you know
traditional clusters high-performance
computing clusters and things like that
but what's interesting is that it does
have a role for other other kind of
roles beyond just clusters you know keep
it in mind that the compute node is a
dual processor system with a single hard
drive it becomes really interesting it's
kind of the appliance versions xserve
it's really great for static services
like things like VPN servers network
services things where you don't need
storage but you might want to hear the
processing power and the networking
capability that it provides now one
thing you do have to keep in mind is
that it shifts with the 10 user license
of Mac OS 10 so probably not going to
employ this is a file server it's really
not the role there and by the time you
add that license you may decide just to
go up to the server configuration but
for a number of other applications
especially network services application
services where the the limitation on the
number of file user connections has no
impact all the other OS and services are
fully unlimited so again I use this is a
great VPN service for example and the 10
user license has no impact on that kind
of role so that's something also that
you can keep in mind because you can get
a dual processor system for a lot lower
price and take advantage of those
features if it's appropriate the other
thing about these systems that you have
a much greater RAM capability and for
applications that really appreciate RAM
you have a lot more Headroom in the
xserve g5 with panther server again we
can put up to 8 gigabytes of RAM it's
ECC ram so you have that protection
there and you know for applications that
will take advantage of that ram and
and excusing you happy you have that
capability and of course with Tiger
server being able to bring 64-bit user
space applications and to allocate much
larger memory we get even more
capabilities as we look down the road
toward toward tiger
okay another thing I want to talk a
little bit about is networking now with
with extra g5 we now have dual copper
gigabit ethernet ports right on the back
of the machine they're very high
performance gigabit ethernet ports with
a number of key capabilities they have
very large packet buffer so they have
the ability to do jumbo frames they've
added we've added them VLAN capabilities
into the operating system for VLAN
operations and so the bandwidth that
we're able to provide out of the machine
is much much greater of course you can
add multiple port ethernet card we have
a single port available from asshole
multiple port cards from other third
parties small tree communications in
particular has a number of cards that
are available on the on the platform the
one thing that we don't have in the
operating system that we're very excited
to see coming to Tiger is network link
aggregation so you'll see that in Tiger
server I think that's going to give you
a lot more bandwidth out of xserve g5
able to take these two ports and provide
more bandwidth and of course you can
also configure it in a failover
configuration so I'll be available to
you when when when tiger server app is
available of course that solution is
available today for Panther from a third
party that small tree also has that
software as an add-on so for people
looking for that capability now you have
a way to add that on to the operating
system and finally a number of options
that are available directly from apple
look particularly some of the new cards
pci-x credit card for example
dual-channel up to 320 card particularly
handy for busy base trades that you may
have in your ERP Chester already and
also very popular for backup devices in
particular I want to talk a little bit
about load and usage so this is a little
bit of a table out of a knowledge base
article again that we published on our
on our support site and got I'll point
you to that article for the nitty gritty
details this is a list of tested and
theoretical limits in in the operating
system we've got a lot of people asking
about scaling guidelines and you know
how many users can I put on an extra and
the reality is that's a really hard
problem to answer without knowing a
whole bunch of variables about your
network architecture about the kind of
data that they're moving back and forth
the frequency of Iowa operations and
things like that so this this table
provides kind of a baseline kind of the
minimum maximum capability in the
operating system asked as the big
guidelines and then beyond that there
have been a number of kind of informal
rules of thumb that have emerged that
can help provide further guidance on
that and wanted to provide a few here
that I wanted to point at from a file
server perspective you know one of the
things that really has heavy impact on
the number of users that a single server
can support is the the network
architecture the bandwidth and the
number the size of files that are being
moved on on and off the server for
example you know a user moving word file
saving work files occasionally it's a
lot different from the user moving in a
40 gigabyte Photoshop and which is back
and forth with home directories becoming
more and more popular that also has a
little higher load on the server and
that's something to calculate into in
mind as well also the move toward more
centralized directory services is
something to take a look at as yours
you're setting up directory servers the
number of users work centac ating could
currently become a factor that you need
to take a look at it was interesting
with exergy five that we've seen some
pretty phenomenal secale ability on on
net
servers we've seen a lot higher the
ability to put a lot higher number of
machines on that boot and Contessa we
been able to do you know still that
depends heavily on the level performance
and the networking that you're looking
for but we've had deployments where you
put as many as 150 clients i'm at
clients on a single xserve and that's
what that's a recommended configuration
but to know that it scales that high is
pretty phenomenal the other thing is
quicktime streaming the quicktime stream
is another one where you really need to
be able to look at the the size of media
that you're streaming into the bandwidth
that year you're able to provide you're
almost always limited by the network
bandwidth outgoing before the server
will be the limiting factor so let's
move on and talk a little bit more about
deployment so we've moved from planning
on into actual deployment so again kind
of the first thing is again looking at
the most common uses that xserve is
deployed upon and again if you look at
the list these are the services that are
again built right into mac OS x server
you know the interesting thing about
this class of servers that you know by
far the most typical uses are things
like file and print network services
mail services web services email
services and we so phenomenal network
services all right into the operating
system and this is of course some of the
most popular deployments use with with
with xserve a couple of important
important things get asked a lot about
software installation when you get a
brand-new exer you know do i need to go
ahead and reformat it right out of the
box the configuration that ships in the
factory after the whole factory process
was actually the exact same thing that
you get right on the hard drive but the
reality is most of some administrators
really prefer to reload the operating
system of know exactly how its
configured the other thing is the impact
of having to reconfigure the drives for
the software age levels that you're
looking for will require reinstallation
as well we're going to talk a little bit
about headless administration and
assistant in just a minute but with the
remote setup tools you actually have a
very robust way to completely set up and
get your server right out of the box
without ever needing to hook up a
keyboard in a monitor and these are
tools that we've worked really hard to
make sure that Heather's operation is
fully fully capable there and of course
a software update provides an easy way
to get your server up to date with the
latest security updates software updates
that are available directly from apple
the other thing is with when you deplane
multiple servers it's very common to
image a single server and clone that on
other machines with the removable drive
modules built in that becomes really
really easy but the capabilities right
in the operating system and of course
with front pet front panel target disk
mode being available to you literally
just with a short firewire cable clone
one complete server installation to a
second server right using front panel
firewire so that becomes a very handy so
speaking of front panel mode wanted to
provide a latest update on this one of
the new capabilities in XO g5 we've
actually added the new capability to the
front panel mode so by holding down the
front panel button on my dentists our
button on the front of xserve we can
perform almost all the operations you
used to be able to perform by holding
down you know special keys snag to you
know zapping the pier am target disk
mode things like that this is also
referenced in a knowledgebase article on
our website as well so obviously things
like net boost and capabilities like
that boot from CD a target discipline
are available you'll see though on
xserve g5 we added a new one option
number eight we reserve that one for
future use and this is that we've added
a diagnostic mode built right into the
xserve and so by selecting a diagnostics
mode you can actually have the system
boot-up over the network from a
diagnostic server and we run diagnostics
tools and so I wanted to tell you a
little bit about that it's a new feature
on extra g5
called extra remote diagnostics and
particularly handy if you have a larger
installation of xserve what you need to
do is set up a net budapest server turn
on the netbook feature and put the
diagnostics and activate the diagnostics
image on that and that server the
diagnostics tools are based directly on
the tools we use in the factory when
testing their own machines they're
extremely thorough and some of the most
robots tests that are available matter
of fact some of the tests that we use
for testing the CPU and the memory are
absolutely phenomenal they've been
papers written on the algorithm views
that we used to do things like testing
memory and so those tests are available
T now directly through these remote
diagnostics tool and so by holding down
the front panel you can put the machine
into a diagnostic mode if the machines
and a known running state you just want
to test it by using the command line
tool you can go in and activate it in it
will boot in diagnostics modem and
return to the known operating system
when complete if it isn't an unknown
state you know you've got a machine you
don't know if it's working right doesn't
seem to be booting right you can use
that front panel mode to trigger it and
then trigger this from a machine on your
same subnet to run the clients or one
with Diagnostics tools what's really
interesting about these tools is that
there's a configuration file we provide
out of the box to diagnostic tests a
short test and a long test and one kind
of a quick peek at a key functions and
one's a much deeper test these are text
files that you can configure and you can
configure these to run very specific
tests if you're really interesting you
got a new batch of memory and you just
want to run the memory tests over and
over to test the integrity of your
memory you have that ability just to
help tell the test create a custom file
that runs just memory tests and really
burn that memory and as you've added to
the system so very flexible and this is
something that we have a really excited
to get into the system so we're going to
talk a little bit more about remote
management and headless operation one of
the big things that we did with the
xserve g5 is that
we made the video card optional and been
a little bit of a issue with that people
who are used to having that video card
there in the and the exergy for this is
something that we've been working to and
where I finally at the point where we
believe the remote management tools are
really robust enough to give you a
number of ways to manage the system
obviously for people who want the video
card and want to be able to use it for
example kvm switches on your network
it's an easy option to add your system
but we've also worked very hard on
things like the remote management tool
the remote setup assistant to make sure
that you can do everything that you need
to do through those tools so out of the
box you have the ability without ever
hooking up a keyboard or amount to be
able to rack the system power it up on
your network and set it up remotely
through the remote setup tools matter of
fact was some of the new capabilities
that were introduced last year in
Panther server you can take advantage of
tools like auto server setup where from
a configuration file either on a sing
like an ipod a USB p or even an ldap
server you're staying up a large number
of machines the machines can go to that
reference file configure themselves
automatically and really simplify setup
for installing a number of machines the
other thing that becomes interesting is
alpha remote desktop for that the remote
screen sharing presence where you want
to really have that gooey management
perspective but want to be able to hit
it remotely apple remote desktop really
becomes a great tool to use here
especially the new version of apple
remote desktop version 2 that gives you
a number of new capabilities because I'm
a think of this as a virtual kvm switch
from a powerbook anywhere you can
connect remotely into your into your ex
urban manager matter of fact was the VNC
capabilities you could even manage your
ex serve with a GUI session from a pc
one B and C so it becomes very very
powerful that puts the ability to run
shell scripts and push up software to a
large number of machines make it a
really attractive way to manage
xserve something you might want to
consider adding your remote management
tool will do a demo in a little bit and
we'll be using apple remote desktop
what's neat about we've done in the
xserve setup as we've added Apple remote
desktop right in the remote setup
assistant so when you're walking through
the setup tools by turning on one check
box you can automatically enable apple
remote desktop for the system
administrator user that you create when
you go through the setup assistant so
from there on out you can manage the
system completely through apple remote
desktop and of course for the command
line users we have really made a lot of
effort in Panther add more command line
tools to upgrade the man pages really
make command line a very robust way to
management system so for commands online
users who want to script and automate
things and really take advantage of the
management tools at that level that
becomes a very equal waste management
system as matter of fact a lot of people
you might not be aware of this but we
actually provide off our install cds
boot CD one when we boot up that CD SSH
is actually enabled so you can actually
install the operating system and manage
it from the CD at that time while
booting from CD the username is the
roots of course because it's a single
user on the CD and the password just
like the remote setup assistant is the
first eight digits of the hardware
serial number so that becomes an access
method as well I want to point out
there's a phenomenal command line
administration guide that's available
from the server website and if you are a
command-line user and want to know all
the subtle nuances
some of the unique Mac os10 command
tools that might be a little bit
different from other other units
distributions if you're coming from a
linux or solaris environment and want to
become adept at some of the unique tools
that are available on mac OS 10 highly
recommend the the command-line user
administration guide it's just one of
many many documentation pieces that we
make available on our website for
download but it really goes into the the
depth of the command line tool so again
with the remote management tools that we
provide in the operating system server
monitor for monitoring the the hardware
it's fine an in-depth view into X server
itself server admin and workgroup maanta
manager all these tools can be managed
remotely from another Mac os10 client
they work over encrypted and
authenticated link and provide a great
remote management experience so with
that I'd like to introduce Greg Smith
he's going to come up and help me with a
of the demo here so we actually have two
excerpts here on stage and we're going
to pull up server monitor and take a
look at some of the new values that we
make available in server monitor so
looking at the first server here we have
an info tab and we can kind of get all
the high-level information about this
system we see here that we have a dual
two gigahertz system we have the serial
number available in a one button gets
you a complete apple/system profile
report which is a great tool for asset
management some of the unique things
that are in the new version for xserve
g5 or the memory tab as i mentioned as
extra of g5 we now have ECC memory in
the system we're actually tracking ECC
memory errors buying individual dim in
the system so should you ever see see
Sierra Council they should almost always
be 0 but you'll be able to see exactly
what dam is causing those problems and
of course they're automatically
corrected on the fly so you have to
necessarily worry about them but you
able to understand what's happening with
that individual dim the power tab has
added a tremendous amount of more
information we have many more sensors on
the board were able to monitor voltages
of many quarry six and the systems of
voltages coming off the power supplies
and one of the ones i really like is the
power pop up which provides real-time
types of it in power of the two cpus and
wat so we're able to calculate voltage
and power coming right into the cpu so
if you pull in the power supply they're
going to process your power at the top
stair greg's the time the power supply
tab or the power there we go well
actually see in real time the the
wattage being consumed by the dual
processors in the system so you
mentioned remember the earlier grass
that I mentioned that the processors are
typically about 55 watt max processors
well in Idols are sitting near here
there they're barely in the team you
know just sitting around idling so again
very efficient on power other tabs that
are interesting are the temperature tab
again we have about 10 temperature
sensors we can see the inlet
temperatures in the system coming in if
you go to blowers will see the real time
fan speeds and all the system different
temperatures there if we go to the
blower tab there Greg you see the
different blower beads that are in the
system now one thing you may notice on
this system is that we have a yellow
light on the car drive so if we click on
that we'll go instantly to the dr tab
and you'll see that we're running raid
here the system is actually booted from
a sock or raid mirror in the system so
it's two drives in the system that were
mirrored together we actually failed one
intentionally so you can see the Rays
status has shown is degraded so why
don't we explore that a little further
to go into apple remote desktop and go
into a remote control session on
on that machine we can actually launch
disk utility and find out a little bit
more about what's happening with that
system so if we click on the boot mirror
will see on the raid tab that we have a
drive this thing we actually lost the
drive in the mirror continuing to
operate normally what's interesting
those and now we need to solve that
problem now in previous versions of OS
10 we actually had to boot from the CD
and rebuild that mirror offline well one
of the new features that shipped in 10
32 that we got in for exergy 5 as we
build to rebuild a mirror online while
it's running so if we go ahead and drag
that spare drive in the system go ahead
and add it and click rebuild and go
ahead and confirm that what will
actually do is the rebuild process now
lives in in the car and the driver it
will actually go ahead and begin
rebuilding the drive now if the Navy you
drive is going to take about 30 30
minutes or so to rebuild oh it's
interesting about this is that we don't
even need to be running disk utility we
could actually quit out of disk utility
why that rebuild begins and you notice
our system is still running we're
starting that rebuild online and we can
actually be in copying data if we'd want
to copy data to that derive showing that
the drive is still fully operational
and if you go ahead and launch this
utility the hard screen and screen right
so that copies going ahead will go along
to go back into disk utility even though
we quit out of it before it you will
actually see that that rebuild is
continuing to take place so while we're
copying data we're serving data systems
still online the copy and the rage
continue to operate in parallel there so
[Applause]
therefore raid mirroring and we got you
covered with a great online rebuilding
about the event system so that's the
first sector we actually happen to have
a second extra in that rack and it has a
little option in it called the hardware
raid card so when we introduce the
xserve in january we announce that we're
going to offer a hardware raid card it's
a pci card that has a serial ATA
controller on it and a processor to
provide hardware RAID it actually
provides 015 capabilities 64 Meg of raid
controller cash and a backup battery and
very pleased to say that the software
just want final on it and so we're
actually able to demo that to you today
so the command line to the tool to
manage the hardware raid card is a
command-line tool so it will be accessed
and configured through the command line
and so by ss-18 into the machine
remotely we can actually take a look at
the machine we have a system here that
has three internal hard drives there are
250 gigabyte hard drives and so we can
see the three volumes that are available
we actually again failed a drive here to
show that it's awful it's degraded but
it continues to operate normally if we
go ahead and look at the configuration
itself one of the unique features of the
hardware raid card is it allows you to
create multiple logical volume so we did
is we created a 50 gigabyte boot volume
that's raid 5 protected and roughly 450
450 gigabyte volume that's on the same
physical drives but it's almost like
separate partition and that's a 400
around the corner 50 gigabytes volume
there and we have both those volumes
available now and again we're in the
process rebuilding those because it's
raid 5 protected we have that protection
available at the raid 5 system so we're
very excited about that and we'll be
able to get that shipping very very
shortly so it is real and coming to an
excerpt near you thank you Greg go back
to slide
okay last time I wanted to talk about in
the deployment section was a little bit
on backup now there was a whole backup
session here at the conference this year
and hopefully had an opportunity to
attend that one of the big things that
we're seeing is with backup is backup
continues to be a huge challenge in
server deployment the reality is is that
more and more data is being kept online
for a variety of reasons including legal
compliance reasons there's more data
being churned right when you're working
with large files or working with large
content the amount of data that needs to
be backed up on an adult sebassis is
becoming much larger and the reality is
is that you know there are no downtimes
server operation anymore right the 24 by
7 internet access world there's always
someone accessing your website always
someone accessing your data so the fact
is that the backup windows the
opportunities for backup are shrinking
shrinking the other really hard reality
is is that and I remember years ago I
back up my entire 40 gig hard drive on a
40 gig 40 megabyte hard drive excuse me
40 megabyte hard drive and single 40
megabyte papers are really easy to get
back up everything the fact is these
large large hard drives just aren't
keeping up or the tape capacities are
just not keeping up with these large
large hard drive in fact is while ray
provides tremendous data protection my
effect looking at the solutions that we
just looked at here rate is not back
office even a mirror if you get a virus
or some kind of corruption that appears
it happens on both drives the breed is
not back up great news is that we're
seeing a tremendous number of industry
solutions being available on the
platform and again if you heard if you
were able to attend the backup session
today you're seeing a number of
enterprise solutions available for
anything from single server local backup
to workers back up to enterprise back up
being available to you on Mac OS 10 in
fact a number of clients and server
solutions continues to grow and we're
seeing more and more options available
to you the main thing I wanted to just
touch on is the growing trend toward
this to this
so with with the capacity that our
servers are able to hold today
alternative backup strategies are
becoming very important and I've been
able to do things like just to this
backup staging server backup to disk for
performance and speed and quick
accessibility and as well as adding
capabilities like dis to the tape is a
trend that's not going away we're seeing
more and more software add capability
it's becoming very very attractive
they'll the low price point of storage
especially solutions like extra brain
becomes very very attractive for this
classes lots of backup so gives you a
way to provide NASA's backup at very
very high rate of speed something to
consider as you look at a large backup
requirements I thing I wanted to touch
on is high availability I started some
of the sessions this week tiger server
will add some new availability options
to the server operating system in
Panther because you need to have IP
failover capabilities to provide a
script driven failover operation between
key services running on your server
these a particular ideal for static
services for not things like file
services or more things like streaming
services and web services these are
built right into the operating system
and give you a great capability if we
look at it from a diagram standpoint you
can have a master server and a backup
server with a heartbeat between the two
such that if one interface should fail
the services would fall over to the
secondary server because it's all
scripture of any of the ability to
reprioritize load or even terminate
loads that you may not want to keep
around in that situation gives you a
very flexible way to manage those
services what's interesting our tools
like arcing now the IP field of
architecture self doesn't lose data but
with added services like arson give the
ability to replicate data between
services between servers themselves
effect you can use it for two-way
replication so that you have failover
both ways between two servers as an
example here well it's also very
interesting is that the technologies
like X and come to the market later this
year it's going to give you a number of
new ways to be able to scale out
services across multiple multiple
servers so been able to provide much
higher availability across a higher
number of the servers for higher
performance allows you to think kind of
differently in the way you deploy
servers in your storage in a large large
environment okay so we talked a little
bit about xserve deployment what I would
now like to do is introduce two guest
speakers we're going to talk a little
bit about their deployments first
customer I'd like to introduce is our
expense from S&W publishing going to
talk to you a little bit about how he's
using next service thank you I'm Eric
stem I'm the system support team leader
and network engineer at F&W publications
during the last year it's been very
exciting some of the technology
opportunities that we've had with or
some of the opportunities we've had with
these dis new Apple technology we're one
of the oldest and fastest-growing
special-interest publishers in the world
right now we publish nearly 60 magazines
we've got a huge book operation and our
portfolio is continuing to grow because
of this this is placing a load on
storage server growth across the
enterprise we've got operations
currently in Cincinnati iola Wisconsin
Devon England Boston Denver New York
Savannah and Herndon Virginia and
growing while 1,100 employees total
across these ten locations we've
currently got about 75 servers we only
have on-site IT presence at two of these
facilities we realize very very heavily
on remote management
and administration we've also got a
highly heterogeneous windows 2000 active
directory based environment we're
running exchange sequel server which
we're doing heavy database publishing
from we've got sons as400 and we're
running the oracle financial system
we're about two-thirds pc about a third
mac two-thirds of our macs have been
moved to OS 10 got about 10 terabytes of
online data right now and that's growing
at a very rapid pace the first
application that we've got with the
xserve has been in an enterprise file
print service sector right now in our
Iowa Iowa Wisconsin office we have a
single apple xserve and x-rayed we're
running OS 10 server 10 dot 3 we're
configured to do both ASP and SMB file
services the neat thing about this is
we're fully integrated with our multi
domain multi-site windows 2000 based
active directory services that were
provided we've currently got over one
terabyte of production critical data on
these systems continually being accessed
by over a hundred users we're backing
these systems up using Windows a windows
2003 backup server running veritas
backup exec 9 and our prepress director
is currently begging us to move the rest
of his production data over to these
servers the benefits that we're getting
from this this has this is drastically
less expensive per gigabyte than any
other solution that we've had we've got
higher performance than any other
platform that we've used currently
running on you no data was currently
running on a Windows 2000 high
availability file print cluster we're
seeing real world probably five to eight
hundred percent
performance increase in this migration
at about a third of the cost this has
also brought another interest
interesting aspect into our organization
this is the fastest server currently in
our environment to backup now again we
are using a windows 2003 backup server
running beareth hops backup exec 9 and
their agent on the xserve to do our
backup so it's integrated in with the
rest of our enterprise backup solution
one volume alone that we were struggling
with was our book production volume in
Wisconsin we cut an almost 24 hour
backup window down to eight hours once
we'd move the data over to the xserve
another exciting thing that we've been
doing with Xers because of their really
low cost and high performance from a CPU
standpoint is enterprise spam and
antivirus filtering we've got two apple
xserve with a gig of ram running OS 10
server 33 or 10 33 we're using one of
the leading open-source antivirus
solutions and we're also using an
open-source anti-spam solution called
ASSP we are geographically diverse and
load balanced with our servers the
services that are currently being
provided from this our enterprise wide
anti virus and spam screening for
multiple email domains doing hundreds of
thousands of messages per week and as
everyone knows with all the wonderful
joys of email those loads are
continually going up some of the
benefits that we've gotten from this is
it is a stable high performance open
source platform small 1u server
footprint so we're not putting large
appliances or configurations in our data
center and this is tens of thousands of
dollars less than any other vendors
solution that we considered and
evaluated since it's based on open
source software and leveraging the
performance of Apple servers in summary
bringing the excerpt into our
heterogenous IT environment has improved
performance and reduced cost again
everything that we brought the den
saving tens of thousands of dollars on
email screening five five to eight
hundred percent performance increase at
a third of the cost it's really
impacting our IT bottom line we're
continuing with further deployments
remote office deployments of the servers
because of ease of administration
remotely but the thing one of the things
we're most excited about are the new
features that Tiger are going to bring
with the ACL or a code base security on
the file system failover clustering and
cross-platform file locking this is
giving us an opportunity to take not
only our publishing and production data
but our business data and move this and
consolidate this down onto xserve and
use this as our enterprise wide file
print server solution
[Applause]
thank you are so I'd now like to
introduce Richard moon we've heard a lot
about this week or if you may have heard
reference to servers in the sky around
dot dot Mac services may be wondering
how you know where those assistants are
kept in operating and Richard is
responsible for data center operations
and our ICT group is going to talk to us
a little bit about excerpt deployment
they're here to talk about the RX serve
deployment play a little bit about our
IT environment at apple just give you a
brief REM you have a large data center
we I can key for apple just all the
infrastructure support for all of Apple
globally we have a three major region
Europe us in Asia our US data center
supports a.s.a.p CRN the apple retail
stores apple store online itunes music
store and the mac globally we have small
server rooms in court that's for Europe
and in Singapore for Asia and these just
support the small they support email and
language specific things for the regions
as well as made like he p and SN thing
so I'm going to steal Erickson Lanka's
line so we definitely were asked to
drink our own champagne and so it's much
better term that's been about dog food
so so currently we have a lot of 300 x
serves deployed in about 18 x rays
employed in in our datacenter and here's
some of the uses that we're using stuff
for web servers web application servers
dns st p e-- p.m. home directories using
AFP NFS server smtp mail relay server
email broadcast service code things like
that the emails coming from enews itunes
music tuesdays those are coming from
Xers messaging servers java application
servers cetera so the biggest challenge
of the boots migration for us off of the
in the data center so i'm an our data
center we have a lot of AI IBM EXO and
solaris environment for a production
data center our first gain for the
expert migrated xserve was optimal spin
hardware this has been a substantial
savings for Apple the performance from
going to his son detects herb has been
amazing we we have a lot of servers web
servers of reading that virtually Idol
the speed is excellent and this was a we
were really surprised the over
architected environment we weren't sure
of you know what the performance would
be like in the stability and that so we
do all our web servers and web objects
in clusters sitting behind a load
balancer so if we were to lose an xserve
we business wouldn't be impacted as we
do have to have a maximum uptime and
then we were very surprised with the
speed and at that time and we actually
are have them started going many web
servers on a cluster because the
performance and excerpt can handle it
with with ease the PASOK serves for us
could we run a lot of Java applications
on extra hour limitation was on the
memory and with the g5 xserve that's
really a problem our standard
configuration because we are
standards-based you know for the other
data center is to run dual cpu at the
time was all four drives marrying with
two gigs of memory so moving forward
with the g5 xserve we're going to be
deploying google v5
cpu with two gigs of memory and akt to
memory as a standard configuration and
then that way any job applications that
require a lot of memory or e
applications that do require a lot of
members footprints will migrate to those
the in the business yes sorry so when we
deploy dexter we were new customers as
anyone else we did get evaluation units
nuts but we weren't sure how to deploy
them in a cabinet and as i was talking
about there's a lot of power
requirements now and one of them we were
pretty much the 30 inch cabinets kind of
data center and we had to swap those on
go to 36 but wasn't only just a tech sir
but in the industry itself today there's
more powerful servers running more power
cheese and in center and more confined
spaces so we wanted to make sure that we
deployed and we could handle this the
flow and the power so in january of both
three we were able to power about 50
watts of square foot we did some
upgrades to the data center and look
last year or in july of last year we
were able to at that point power to
power and collective to 90 watts per
square foot we're now just going through
a data center expansion because of
apples success and keeping up with the
business we're go to power and cool up
to 120 watts per square foot so we're
making sure we stay on top of that and
i'll show you some some slides on how we
have it deployed this is a current photo
of the exurbs in our data center we call
it the x row or it's on display we do a
lot of scores and that and actually
we're migrating off of it all these x
servers are going to move into a new
area blue part of the data center and
we're actually going to go with on
recommendations to hot and cold road
so the the front of the exurbs or even
other data center of equipment will
actually face out for all the cool air
to come in and then go through the back
and then the arrow rise and go about the
back so that's a recommendation that
we're taking advantages and this is
there another close-up view of our
deployment so how we're managing
monitoring is so our primary tool for
the data center the HP openview IPO they
currently don't have an IPO agent but we
were easily able to get that is brought
into our monitoring tools we just rent a
perl script that is able to grab gather
the information the same information
that you're using IPO on other platforms
supported platforms and then we also
take advantage of all the apple server
applications like server monitor remote
desktop rate admin schools are very very
useful and those with ikea we're able to
monitor the systems closely in our
production data center we use tivoli
storage manager for backup and recovery
we worked with tivoli to beta test and
make their software much better and so
now there is an agent for the age of 40
s been on an excerpt and that's what we
have are our view of dexter or any
server in and the data center would be
you want to treat everything the same
way and we treat OSN as any other units
platform so in summary we've been
extremely pleased with performance of
the xserve you really caught off guard
of how well it was going to perform step
back here so we currently have about 24
Xers in a cabinet and the reason why we
decided to do that not to go with a full
rack because some issues it's powered
space but then we used to have a lot of
towers as well in the past the g3 and g4
towers and you can get eight in a
cabinet so we wanted to save a lot of
niggas
to lead and save a lot of foot space by
going to 24 to a cabinet so let's get a
3 3 to 1 ratio there this coming year
we're planning to add about 80 to 100
Xers we're going to add a between 1680 x
rays as well as the sword is cost
effective and very useful we have a lot
of projects that I couldn't list that
we're still in a prostitute of migrating
those from other platforms to the xserve
so the numbers just going to grow and up
Lamar needs to know whenever you go to
apple com or sort o com or even the
developer conference here all that is
served by excerpt and last I just want
to make sure that everybody takes
advantage of filing bugs and the team
did a really good job of keeping track
of those and working on your issues and
they're definitely listening thank
Richard thank you Richard we work very
closely sir I own eyes and key group I
like to joke there are some of our
biggest advocates with some of our
toughest customers because we may meet
with them on a regular basis and they
love to tell us give us credit good
advice and directions for more
enterprise-class interoperability and
it's been very very valuable working
with them so I just like to wrap up and
probably have a few minutes for Q&A I
know xserve g5 today can really tackle
very large class of problems that
servers need to solve today with great
price performance we just have even more
capabilities with the expand and tiger
server coming so so keep those in mind
as you look to the future hopefully
you've heard some ideas and things for
great great planning and things that you
can take advantage of for deployment and
you know really the capabilities of
especially with X of g5 and extra braids
really allow you to take advantage of
some of these new capabilities new
trends things like this back up and
things give you a lot more flexibility
so you know with that other thing just
worth mentioning is that as apples grown
more and more with with xserve and our
capabilities we've grown our service
support options as well from apple care
service programs to enterprise
consulting and engagements we have a
number of capabilities so should you
need assistance with your own
deployments we have resources at Apple
to help you with that so with that you
know have my email address I always
welcome to contact me schiphol evans is
our technology manager for server
process