Download - Constellation Technologies Providing a support service to commercial users of gLite Nick Trigg
Constellation Technologies• Constellation Technologies Ltd
– Spin out from Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
– Provide a commercial service to users of gLite• Enterprise grids/clouds
• Global grids/clouds
• SuperCloudTM
– Acess to initial development funding of > €300,000
– Early customer interest
– Looking for gLite developers
Rutherford Appleton Laboratory• Didcot, south of Oxford, UK
• Owned by STFC (The Science and Technology Facilities Council)
– Largest Particle Physics research lab in the UK
• UK Tier 1 site for WLCG
• NGS (National Grid Service) centre
Constellation SuperCloudTM
• Based on gLite– Additional proprietary higher level services– Robust, proven and global in scale
• Enterprise grids/cloud– Infrastructure independent– Storage and/or compute
• SuperCloudTM
– Virtual resource marketplace software• Market based resource allocation (reverse auction)
Improving Utilization
Hardware Servers: (-) low utilisation rates, scalability problems
Uti
lisati
on
Virtual Servers: (+) improved utilisation rates, better scalability, easy disaster recovery(-) increased number of servers to manage, incompatible virtualization platforms
Enterprise/Departmental Grid:(+) improves utilisation rates of physical servers, enables collaboration(-) limited scalability, lack of interoperability between vendors, limited efficiency of policy based mechanisms
100%
0%
Grid
Cloud Computing:(+) no need to own hardware, shared access, improved utilisation through pay-as-you-use(-) incompatible platforms, ‘fair price’ is dubious to users
The Grid/Cloud
Advantages
• Lower cost• Access to larger
infrastructure– Faster calculations– More storage
• Speed– Faster calculations– Easier provisioning
Disadvantages
• Very complicated• Security• Lack of confidence
– Trust– Compatibility
• No one size fits all
Facing New Challenges• Complexity of modern IT infrastructures:
physical servers, virtual machines, clusters, Grids, geographical distribution
• Cost of electricity• Credit crunch
• Further pressures to reduce costs• Openness to the acceptable security concept
Finding Solutions
• Improving utilisation rates through market based algorithms for resource allocation
• Accessing external infrastructures on-demand• Using a single management platform for all
computing resources
• Opportunity for gLite
Grid/cloud market structure
Hardware(owned)
Hardware(service)
Middleware
Applications
Customer
Net
wor
k
Competition
HardwareOperatingSystem
Virtualisation
EnterpriseGrid
EnterpriseCloud
Cloud
ConstellationTechnologies
Incompatible Standards
Creates pools
of resources
Higher
utilisation
rates
Incompatible Standards
Interfaces
Interfaces and Market Mechanisms
Key differentiators:• Open source – no vendor lock-in• Scalability
Constellation End Use cases• Financial institution
– Internal enterprise grid/cloud• Drivers
– Costs and speed• Issues
– Security
• Pharmaceutical giant– External compute cloud
• Drivers– Costs, speed and increased accuracy
• Issues– Security and data transfer
• Media company– External storage cloud
• Drivers– Costs and flexibility
• Issues– Security, flexibility and speed