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

• 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 Gayeor

• What's Going On -Santana

Bingo!

• Without A Klugh -Michael Powers

Topics

• Architectural foundations

• Architectural evolution/trends

• Technology trends

• Project priorities

• UFOs and their prevention

System Architecture Goals

• Reliable

• Effective

• Efficient

• Secure

• Manageable

Architectural Context: Outside-In Design…

• Desktop:– 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

• Personal productivity (e.g. MS Office)

• Email

• Web

• Calendar

• Streaming/On-demand A/V

• Collaboration/conferencing

Application Requirements

Latency

BW

VR

SAN

NFS/SMB

HD videoconf

VideoConf

MM-IM

Text-IM

Fedex

Calendar

DBMS

Web

VoD

HD-VoD

Email

Architectural Choices(Where’s the network?

What to cache?)

Display

Cache

ClientApp

ServerApp

FileSys/DBMS

Disk

CacheCache Cache Cache

Architectural Evolution

• 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• 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 – (e.g. 845 DDR chipset not until 1Q02)

• 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

• 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

• Hot topic

• Hollywood is in control

• May constrain legitimate use

• Questionable impact on piracy

Project Categories/Drivers

• 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

• Divide-and-conquer architecture• Canaries for advance warning• Finger-Pointing Tools for problem isolation• Communication mechanisms

– 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