Thoughts on Infrastructure : Windows Server

The New Moore’s Law

BjarneD — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 20:46:47 GMT

Times They are a-Changing

A new report from IDC lays out what should be obvious to anyone who has followed two of the biggest recent trends in the server market—multicore and virtualization—by suggesting that when you have two popular new technologies that are designed to let customers consolidate multiple servers into a single box, then server vendors can expect to sell fewer such boxes. In other words, when customers begin rapidly replacing multiple servers with single servers, server sales start to dip (http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2007/03/multicore-virtualization-and-a-shrinking-server-market-maybe-or-maybe-not.ars)

As some of you may know software has been riding what we refer to as Moore’s Law for a couple of decades. What you may not know is that this “observation” dates back to 1965.

Here’s what I found at Wikipedia:“Moore's law describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware. Since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958, the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has increased exponentially, doubling approximately every two years. The trend was first observed by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore in a 1965 paper. It has continued for almost half a century and in 2005 was not expected to stop for another decade at least.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_Law)

It seems that we should all fear progress doesn’t it? Just when Intel/AMD has started to take advantage of silicon in new and imaginary ways, somebody needs to paint a very bleak picture of our future. As if we need more bad news, right?

While I don’t disagree with the fact as IDC sees them I’m not sure about their conclusion and I believe they report is over-simplify the issue. In fact over a century ago, Mark Twain put it very succinctly “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”

No one is suggesting the way Moore’s will continue to manifest itself is by continuing to crank up the clock speed, we may actually see the clock speed go down a bit. In fact, both Intel and AMD are going to increase the power of the microchip by adding more cores. How many? How fast? That depends on how much you trust the two chip manufacturers ability to continue shrinking the size of the transistors on their CPU’s.

The public roadmaps from both Intel and AMD clearly shows that they are going to continue to add more cores, in fact everything points to that at least Intel will continue to double the numbers of transistors on their CPU as well as other innovative steps (I’ll get to that later). This would mean that we are going to see the number of cores on Intel CPU’s double every two years (as per Moore’s Law). If we start applying that to PC’s coming in the first part of the next decade, that means we’ll see cell phone with dualcore CPU designs, Laptops with 4-8 cores, desktops (or Workstations) with 12-16 cores and servers with over 512 cores.

In the next couple of years we will likely see Intel and AMD continue to take advantage of their ability to continue to shrink the transistors, but rather that use this to add more CPU like cores to the design, you will see them add more specialized cores to their CPU designs: Dedicated cores for IO, networking, and graphics (check out Intel’s Larrabee).

This will likely provide computer manufacturers with some very scalable designs. Think LEGO (TM) brinks.

We are also going to see Intel and AMD pull a fast one and reverse it. Huh? Well, think about the Atom CPU presently powering the ultra-compact laptops commonly knows as Netbooks. What Intel did what to take a single-core CPU and rather than adding more CPU’s to the die, they shrunk it. Everything we’ve seen so far indicates that Intel will continue that trend. This obviously means that we’ll get more powerful Atom (dualcore and beyond with more powerful graphics capabilities), but also smaller CPU’s as well as PC-on-an-chip designs designed for smaller devices such as smartphones and devices between the Netbooks and Smartpones, commonly known as MID’s (Moblie Internet Devices).

But all of this great stuff is all for naught, at least according to Gartner and IDC, right? No so fast!

Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 will both dramatically increase their multi-tasking (actually their multi-threading) capabilities when they become available. The redesigned kernel architectures that went into Windows (with 7 and Server 2008 R2) is believe to scale linearly by introducing a new scheduling design as well as a better way to control processor affinity (for more about this, check out this video interview with Mark Russinovich on http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Mark-Russinovich-Inside-Windows-7/) . To date the Server team has publicly demonstrated Windows Server 2008 R2 up to 256 cores (or logical processors) in a single machine the only thing holding the test team back is the relative scarcity of these monster servers.

And as most of us tend to run multiple applications, browsers, email clients and background processing such as anti-virus, you will continue to take advantage of the multicore CPU’s by way of Windows multi-threading capabilities. In fact, the real challenge moving forward may not be Windows (or any other OS), but the tools available to write applications. For more information about this check out what our Developer Tools Division is doing with the parallel extension and their recently announced next generation tools and compilers.

All of this is to simply suggest that we will continue to tweak our products capabilities, including Windows, to ensure our customers can take advantage of the power of Moore’s Law. Now, the Virtualization and Virtual Machine (VM) density on servers? That’s a different story!

Windows Server 2008 is called SP1 - a shameless plug

BjarneD — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 02:04:17 GMT

As I'm sure you're perfectly well aware, Windows Server 2008 just shipped. Let's try that again: Windows Server 2008 just shipped! The server companion of the much criticized Window Vista.

It's been a 4 year journey for a lot of people in our organization. But it's finally out and you can now enjoy the fruits of our labor.

Windows Server 2008 is both and end-point as well as the first station in a longer journey. Let me elaborate a bit on that:

Windows Server 2008 is the last 32-bit server operating system from Microsoft.

We said it before, and we will say it again, the next version of Windows Server is going to a 64-bit release only. In fact Bob Muglia first announced this during IT Forum in Barcelona a couple of years ago. We want to make sure that our customers can take advantage of the good stuff that AMD and Intel put in their CPU's. And transitioning to 64-bit will allow you to run more on a Windows Server, it will allow us to continue to make Windows Server a more secure OS.

Windows Server 2008 is the first deliverable towards modularizing Windows Server for particular workloads.

We worked really hard to start the process of both provide a better layering of the OS as well as ensure that you can deploy Windows Server 2008 for a particular workload (such as Virtualization) and not have to content with the extra baggage of the stuff you don't want, this is referred to as Server Core. The Server Manager will go a long way towards make it very simple to do this.

Windows Server 2008 is the first deliverable towards making Windows Server the best virtualization platform.

Even though Hyper-V didn't make it onto the CD for the release, a lot of effort has gone into making sure that when it is released, it will fit perfectly. Indeed, there's even a Server Core role for Hyper-V. The initial feedback from both beta testers and reviewers looks very good, and we will continue to make Hyper-V the best it can be.

If you're interested in the the journey of Windows Server and why Windows Server 2008's called Windows Server 2008 SP1, here a link to a blog from Iain McDonald explaining it:

http://blogs.msdn.com/iainmcdonald/archive/2008/02/15/windows-server-2008-is-called-sp1-adventures-in-doing-things-right.aspx

Windows Home Server Or What Is The Price of Peace of Mind?

BjarneD — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 03:06:22 GMT

Did you already hear about Windows Home Server? Well, maybe not. Let me give you a brief explanation as to what Windows Home Server is and why you want so it!

Windows Home Server (WHS) is a new member of the expanding Windows Server family. It's a product specifically targeting home users with broadband access to the Internet and more than 2 PC's that are networked. WHS is based on Windows Server and is designed to be very, very easy to administer. So much so that using words like administer, manage, and server would give you and home PC users in general the wrong impression. In fact, you should check out the Hewlett-Packerd WHS, it doesn't have a VGA or a keyboard connector, it is clearly design as a No-touch server. And it's SMALL, about the width of a 2.5" harddrive and twice the height of a soda can, even though it will hold up to 4TB (4 drives).

But I'm getting ahead of myself, let me explain why you want it by explaining to you how I am using the beta version of WHS in my house.

My family consists of 4 people (my wife, our 18-year old son, our 3-year old son, and me). Today we have 3 PC's: our oldest son has one, we have a MediaCenter PC in the living room, and my wife and I share one (that is placed in our home office).

A year or so ago, I set up a server using an old PC, bought a serial ATA RAID controller card and 4 250GB hard drives, and installed Windows Server on it. The main purpose was to buy me peace of mind. Backing up the 80GB of digital pictures and documents on our PC's was driving me mad, and worrying that the CD based solution I was using wasn't effective enough!

I set the server up with a boot drive and setup the 4 SATA drives in a RAID 5 configuration to maximize the speed of accessing the data on the server as well as ensuring that I wouldn't loose data.

As the server worked well as a backup solution, and as I had plenty of storage left on the server, I started to make the server the central storage device for everything. It continued to be the backup for all our documents, but it also became our movie server.

At a certain point late last summer, I decided that I needed to upgrade the server as it was starting to show it's age. At that point I started to hear that we were going to build a server product for home use (yeah, initially I thought it was a preposterous idea, too). But as the concept was explained a demonstrated to me, I warmed up the the idea that this would indeed solve some of my problems, without adding new ones.

the two thing that really sold me on the idea was the centralized backup and the expandability of the storage solution in WHS.

The fact that I could install the backup client of each of our PC's, set it up to backup certain things, and know that I would have access to every version of every document and picture on our PC's from a central location, without me doing ANYTHNG, is the one thing that I really, really appreciate about WHS. Plus the fact that the software allows me to do restore of individual files or full system restore. The backup of all the PC's happens at night, every night.

The other feature I liked is the implementation of the storage in WHS. It is based on how IBM's midrange mainframes (AS400) did storage a long time ago.The concept is very simple: You add as many physical drives to the server (SATA, eSATA, USB, FireWire, etc) and you can then add those to the storage pool as either data or server backup. To the users the server now had one, very big drive.

The only place you can see the actual drives is in the administration console. You can ask WHS to "protect" an individual directory/folder by marking it in the console, this will cause WHS to duplicate the content of that folder to a different physical drive. A very simple, and very intuitive solution compared to the RAID5 system that I had previously. Now I can ask the server to protect only the data that needs protecting.

Another couple of feature that I enjoy (although not as much as the as the two first) are:

Remote administration over the Internet and media sharing through Windows Media Connect.

Remote administration allows me to access the server from anyplace on the planet Earth over the Internet in a secure manner. Sometimes when I'm traveling, I wantto check the status of the backup or something else (I know: Geek), and being able to access the server and all our PC's securely over the Internet through it's webpage (and Remote Desktop) is a tremendous asset if something goes haywire when I traveling.

Media sharing is simply enabled by vitue of WHS supporting Windows Media Connect. Once you've enable the service, you can access the content (music, pictures, and video) from any device (or PC) that supports Windows Media Connect. This includes Roku's and D-Link's neat devices as well as Hewlett-Packard's new LCD TV's.

Today, the server is primarily for backup and document share, as well as our movie server. When I'm done with my install it will become the central hub for media, including all our pictures, videos, music, and recorded TV from our MediaCenter. I am considering adding either Windows Extenders, Roku's SoundBridge devices or PC's in other rooms in the house.

As my plans solidifies I'll keep you posted.