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