Rentable Computing, part ii

I’ve been looking a little closer at EC2 and it seems like a very clean idea, giving simple building blocks to provide rentable computing. There are a couple howtos that are worth reading:

  1. Exploring Amazon EC2
  2. How To Create an Ubuntu Image

EC2 is using virtualisation system, providing the equivalent of a 1.7Ghz Xeon, 1.75GB of RAM and 160GB disk. It would be interesting to know exactly what platform they are using,
I suspect some version of Xen. With a decent generic para-virtualised kernel (as provided by EC2) you can support pretty much any Linux distribution.

With a tool like this I start wondering about the potential uses. Reduce the system by at 25%, install pre-configured asterisk, and you can start selling virtual PBX to groups of people on demand. I wonder if it might be possible to run a full Ubuntu desktop with NX. Suspend and resume your desktop on demand as you travel around the world.

I can see how this project is provide great value to Amazon internally as well. EC2 and S3 combined provided them with a scalable mechanism for providing an internal cost mechanism for managing their sizable investment in infrastructure. They “out-source” the cost of infrastructure internally, fixing the cost of computing. This gives a deterministic method for both production and development groups to plan and scale new projects. With a consistent metric to measure
the cost of computing, developers can instead focus on producing content.

On the other side of the coin it also sends pricing signals to competitors, by dictating the cost of computing and managing the ecosphere it runs within they give themselves a lift ahead of others.

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Firefox is going to kick Internet Explorers Ass

Extensions like this adaptiveblue:

With the blueorganizer Firefox extension, your browser becomes smarter. It helps you personalize your web experience based on what you already like. It harnesses your information to help you discover relevant new information and save time.

and S3Fox Organizer for Amazon:

This firefox extension(browser plugin) provides an user friendly interface for Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) . Its interface is very much similar to the FTP interface that lists local folders in the left panel and S3 buckets/files/folders in the right panel. Files/folders can be moved from the local computer to Amazon’s storage space and vice versa. Follow the pre-requisites & steps described below to start using S3Fox Organizer.

are just not possible or likely to happen with IE. The Firefox ecosphere of extensions makes the Internet a whole lot more interesting.

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Economics in Six Minutes

Everyone should spend a few moments and read Economics in Six Minutes:

Economics is the science of utility, which includes people’s preferences and the satisfaction and importance they subjectively derive from goods. Desires are unlimited, but people get less extra value from more and more units of the same good.

A good distillation of the key concepts.

From The Angry Economist.

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Photosynth

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Comments on Opteron 2000 vs Xeon 5100

Here is a few useful comments by Nick Anderson on the xen-users mailing list.

It depends on your application. Dont forget to look at residual cost of owning a Xeon 5100. I believe that it requires fully buffered dimms each pulling 9 to 14 Watt compared to non-fully buffered dimms for the new Opterons that support DDR2 which I think draw 2-3 watts per dimm. Plus even though the Xeon requires less power for the chip itself they dont take into account the fact that the Opterons have an on die memory controller. The Xeons have a separate memory controller which I believe draws another
2 Watts.

Kind of went on a tangent there … but really it does depend on the type of applications you are running. I seem to remember the Xeons whop up on the Opterons in single threaded applications, however I think the reverse is true when you start using threaded applications.

Obviously the figures from the review I mentioned yesterday aren’t so clear cut. However, now Intel are producing solid tech, there is no longer the bad taste from their hiding behind a market position and market power. It will be interesting to see what the Anandtechs and other tech-head reviewers say when they get this equipment. Better choice can only be good.

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moka5

I was cruising though an iscsi mailing list when I discovered this post.

Moka5 seems to be building some very similar to what I visualised in my post about Virtual Appliances. The are building what they call LivePCs for the deployment of software running on VMWare based VPUs. One of the cool bits of tech they have is the ability to boot a system before it has completed streaming to your VPU:

This player loads optimized virtual machines on-demand, and allows the VM to be executed before the entire image is downloaded. For example, a 1.3GB VM can boot up to the desktop after downloading just 60 MB (1/20th the amount of data). This took 10 minutes over a cable modem, instead of 200 minutes.

Sign up for their beta, check their library of existing appliances and see how it works.

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Xenoppix

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Virtualization in Xen 3.0

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Current Virtualisation Hardware

I’m doing some research on the current state of play for virtualisation hardware, as I need to build a basic VT or Pacifica system. This system is so I can do some testing between Xen and VMWare for hosting Windows 2003 TS. The Xen wiki has a list of the HVM capable CPUs and since I’d prefer something basic, I’ve been looking mainly at the desktop Intel and AMD solutions. Which are the Intel Core Duo and Core Duo 2, and AMD AM2 socket CPUs.

Given that the Core Duo is no longer available as a retail CPU in NZ, the only VT based Core Duo systems are laptops or Apple Macs. Since I want a lab system this choice is not as effective, lacking the option for additional HDDs or NICs. For the Core Duo 2 option according the Intel motherboard list and this review, the only Intel chipset that supports VT is the Q965/963. I’m still trying to confirm this, but if so it complicates matters as there are no Q965 based motherboards available in NZ at the moment.

There maybe non-Intel chipsets for the Core Duo 2 which support VT, but this is something I need further information on.

Conversely with AMD it seems that all AM2 socket systems support AMD-V (Pacifica) and these systems are readily available in NZ. That said, I’m not sure how good the AMD Athlon 64 X2 CPU is at supporting HVM. There are no reviews or howtos on AM2 motherboards which discuss AMD-V on the net.

With the lack of basic options, I’ve also considered server grade CPUs. The new Woodcrest 5100 Xeon and a simple Intel Server SC5400 chassis is at least twice the price of any potential Core Duo 2 system.

AMD have also recently released their new series of Opterons, the Opteron 1000, 2000 and 8000 series. Based this info from AMD and wikipedia, these are the only Opteron’s with AMD-V. Sun have also released this month two new x86 servers based on these chips: the x2100 M2 and the x2200. Both are SATA based and a x2100 M2 with a 1210 is pretty close to the price of a desktop white box solution, but a noisy rack system on my desk
as a lab machine is not very appealing.

A first up review of the Opterons vs Xeon, shows that Xeon 5100 series has really jumped forward with at least a 15% advantage for the same clock speed over the Opterons. It would be interesting to see if this improvement held out against the Opteron’s better 64bit mode. However, obviously the Opterons have lost their clear advantage.

So it seems right at the moment I have two options, an expensive Xeon 5100 or an unknown AMD Athlon 64 X2 system at half the price.

Update: The Sun Ultra 20 M2 might be worth considering as well. Although it gets a mixed review.

Update 2: Only the older single core Orleans and newer dual-core Windsor AMD Athlon 64 X2 CPUs support AMD-V.ร‚ย  Windsor Athlons are the only AM2 socket Athlons at present, but it might be possible to confuse them with the older models if you are not careful.

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Rentable Computing

Another indication that the future of computing is appliance oriented, Amazon S3… Building a Telco for only $0.15 per hour:

Your company doesn’t need to invest in a server farm to crunch numbers (example – monthly CDR conversions to customer bills), you can now via Amazon have Amazon S3 take your stored CDRs and send them to Amazon’s EC2 service (this is free…Amazon doesn’t care if this transfer of data is multi-terabytes…it’s still free) and EC2 will do the number crunching to generate your monthly customer bills.

From Amazon Web Services Blog.

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