Transcript Infostructure Directions: Technology and

Infostructure Directions:
Technology and Architecture
"If you don't know where you're going,
any road will take you there.”
TEG -NDC SysMgt Retreat- 23 Jul 01
Rejected "Road" Themes
• The Road Ahead -Bill Gates
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Every day is a Winding Road -Sheryl Crow
The Long and Winding Road -Beatles
What a long strange trip it's been -Grateful Dead
Embryionic Journey -Jefferson Airplane
Endless Road -Hoyt Axton
Carefree Highway -Gordon Lightfoot
Closer...
• What’s Goin’ On -Marvin Gaye
or
• What's Going On -Santana
Bingo!
• Without A Klugh -Michael Powers
Topics
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Architectural foundations
Architectural evolution/trends
Technology trends
Project priorities
UFOs and their prevention
System Architecture Goals
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Reliable
Effective
Efficient
Secure
Manageable
Architectural Context:
Outside-In Design…
• Desktop:
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HW
OS
Local apps
Network services
• Backroom…
– Front-end servers (e.g. compute, web)
– Back-end servers (e.g. file, transaction, DBMS)
– Support servers (e.g. DNS, Kerberos)
Baseline Apps
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Personal productivity (e.g. MS Office)
Email
Web
Calendar
Streaming/On-demand A/V
Collaboration/conferencing
Fedex
Application Requirements
VR
HD videoconf
HD-VoD
VideoConf
BW
SAN
VoD
MM-IM
Web
NFS/SMB
DBMS
Text-IM
Calendar
Email
Latency
Architectural Choices
(Where’s the network?
What to cache?)
Display
Client
App
Server
App
FileSys/
DBMS
Disk
Cache
Cache
Cache
Cache
Cache
Architectural Evolution
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Text terminal (timesharing)
PC as terminal
Client-Server
X terminal (GUI timesharing)
Web
p2p
asp/.net
Scaling Strategies
• It’s about managing complexity
• Optimum number of boxes?
• Divide and conquer
(airplanes and fault zones)
• Reducing contention for shared resources
• Design for diagnosis
Architecture Issues
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Whither Peer-to-Peer?
Commodity vs. data center disk
Backup: isolating the weak link
Thin clients: X-ng vs. mini-PC vs. handheld
Debugability
Simplicity
– e.g. unification of servers/services, accounts/Ids
• Security/disaster recovery
– PKI, server sanctuaries, SPoF studies, ECI
Hardware Trends
• Intel chaos for another year
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• AMD coming on strong, but behind on .13 micron chips
• Peripheral stagnation:
- builtin firewire, USB 2.0, Device Bay, DVI LCD, HD-DVD
• PCI successor: Infiniband??
• Disk drives: SCSI, IDE, S-ATA, or ??
• DVD burners: DVD+RW, DVD-RW, or DVD-RAM ?
• Handhelds coming on strong
• Thin clients??
Appliances/Thin Clients
• Specific use (e.g. Internet radio):
– Yes, but if price low enough
• Web surfing appliance (e.g. eVilla):
– Too expensive/limited compared to g.p. PC
• Thin clients have most merit where reduced
function is a feature; i.e. business
Network Trends
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IP/Ethernet continues to win
10GigE coming soon
Multicast, QoS, and IPv6 are hot topics
Wireless LAN: here now, 11b obsolete soon
Wireless WAN: busted business models
OS trends
• Win XP: advanced features (e.g. IPv6)
– but some troubling trends (activation, smart tags)
• Linux: solid in the backroom. Desktop?
– Where's Mozilla? StarOffice 6.0? Multimedia Apps?
• Mac OS X: niche as long as it's PPC only
• BeOS: eVilla is their last hope
Digital Rights Management
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Hot topic
Hollywood is in control
May constrain legitimate use
Questionable impact on piracy
Project Categories/Drivers
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Growth
Environment changes: HW, SW, Middleware
New service requirements
Security/robustness/disaster recovery
Working smarter vs. harder
– Architectural simplification e.g. consolidation
– Improved tools, e.g. canaries, FPTs
Priorities
• Reliability
– Function and failure isolation
– Complexity reduction… except:
– SPoF reduction implies more complexity
• Manageability: making it easier to...
– bring up new systems
– do routine mtce
• accts, s/w, disk mgt, backups
– know about problems; troubleshoot
UFOs and their Prevention
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Divide-and-conquer architecture
Canaries for advance warning
Finger-Pointing Tools for problem isolation
Communication mechanisms
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Capturing user experiences
Coordinating events
Coordinating experiments
Reporting status, new data
• E2E PI
SysMgt lessons from TMI
• Busted valve
– Had failed 11 times elsewhere; NRC mum
• Jammed phones
– Designers couldn’t talk to operators (users)
• Hydrogen bubble scare
– Wrong formula... but where were the sensors?
The Zen of Troubleshooting
• one seeing > 1000 tellings
• one doing > 1000 seeings
• one sniffing > 1000 speculations