RAM | Reseller Advocate Magazine: Issue 65

By Chris Angelini

I KEEP RUNNING INTO THE SAME situation with my SMB customers and
can't help but think that other VARs are seeing the same thing. A small business grows to the point where it wants its first server—for many of my customers, this happened five or more years ago; others are just now moving away from a peer-to-peer network layout. The economy does well, everyone has more money to spend, and the organization sees exceptional growth. Some time later, a new line-of-business app comes online and piques some interest.

"We could really hit a new market with that," you hear from the owner. "But the vendor says it won't run on our existing infrastructure. Besides, I'd really like to keep it separate from everything else we have in place, just to be safe."

Now you're looking at another server. Third and forth boxes aren't far off from there when you start tossing around ideas for unified storage and separate security appliances.

All of a sudden, your customer is facing a mess of pedestal boxes sprawled in a wiring in a wiring closet somewhere. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to peek his head in the door and realize that any more growth will require better organization. The answer is higher density and well thought out space utilization. That's where rackmount servers come into play. Of course, transitioning from one form factor to the other isn't a modest undertaking. First, there's the question of utilizing old equipment: "We spent $20,000 on these three pedestal boxes here. What's to become of them?"

Then you have infrastructure issues to address. Finally, your cost-conscious SMB customer is put into the position of buying new servers, again spending money he'd rather put toward a vacation in Europe...or maybe his bottom line.

Shift gears away from your SMB customer's 90-person office to a much larger organization with 750 workstations. While a rack full of 1U boxes might epitomize efficiency in the SMB space, it isn't necessarily the way to go in such a large business. Different servers mean different hardware components, more troubleshooting nightmares, and higher management costs. Even if your larger customers have their own IT staff, the demands of non-similar servers add up quickly. This is when blades start making more sense. Ten individual "nodes," for example, packed into a special 7U chassis help condense more raw processing power into even smaller spaces. Blades are notoriously more power efficient than a rack full of conventional 1U servers, and they're easier to manage.

As you scale up from entry-level boxes, you'll find plenty of other solutions tailored to more specific needs. For instance, a direct-attached USB backup drive might turn into a self-contained NAS box and then evolve to include rackmounted SAN storage at some point down the road. Or you could start off with an SBS 2003 box running Microsoft's ISA Server 2004 for security, adopt a hardware firewall, and eventually invest in rackmount intrusion detection. So long as you help customers choose the best hardware for their application with a mind to what comes next, they won't be caught off-guard when it's time to take the next logical step.

Pedestal Power

Without question, pedestals make up the most convenient form factor available to SMB customers. They support themselves. They don't require special power considerations. In short, a pedestal box drops right into place and, so long as there's an Ethernet cable handy, does its job as-is. Not once have I ever taken a customer from a peer-to-peer setup to a rackmount configuration without first rolling out a pedestal or two. Adopting a server/client architecture is a big deal. Pedestal boxes help take some of the sticker shock out of investing in higher-end hardware.

"The benefit of starting with pedestal servers is a lack of infrastructure cost," says Tau Leng, director of marketing and system validation at Supermicro. "Small businesses and branch offices don't have access to server rooms with special cooling and power. You can put a pedestal in the corner of an office, though, and it'll run just fine."

Just because pedestals are where SMBs look when they need a starter box or where enterprises go for their departmental boxes doesn't mean they're limited to entry-level performance. When I'm in the position to build servers for a customer, big-name barebones are the way to go. Intel's Server System SC5400RA is a great example. The system's motherboard features two processor sockets that accept quad-core Xeons. Sixteen DIMM slots pave the way for up to 64GB of FB-DIMM memory. Onboard graphics, Ethernet, SATA RAID storage, and even a bundled 830W power supply make your qualification job much easier.

THE RACKMOUNT JUMP

The SC5400RA, like most other pedestal machines, is a pretty big piece of hardware. You'll generally get two or three of them into a back office before most SMBs start wondering about the organization of their IT infrastructure. While it's certainly important to keep one step ahead of those concerns, I find that many businesses underestimate the potential cost of condensing compute space down to a rack. So before they're even ready ready to make that transition, you're already getting hit with migration questions.

Fortunately, the Server Chassis SC5400 Intel uses to build the SC5400RA is equally at home standing upright as a pedestal or flipped on its side as a 5U rack-mount server. Though starting off a first rack by occupying 15U of space with three machines might not be ideal, at least your customer is able to recycle completely modern machines rather than replace them. It's much more painful to have to ditch a handful of older boxes because there's nowhere to put them.

So you've established that your SMB customer is going to adopt a new database app that needs to be online 24x7 with no tolerance for downtime. They want to keep their existing SBS 2003 machine and storage server but also feel that if this new application performs as expected, they might be adopting another three or four boxes over the next two years. Not only is it time to start thinking about racks, but you'll also want to take a look around and determine where the new equipment is going to go.

"When a business moves up to rack-mounted servers, they need a server room," says Supermicro's Tau Leng. "If it's a rack with 10 or 20 nodes, then conventional cooling will work just fine. In that setting, you can support an office of 80 or 90 people. As the company gets bigger, you're talking about a different level of support, though—cooling that comes from the ceiling and floor, 220V power, and bigger UPS systems. Under those conditions, you can support companies with anywhere up to 1,000 users."

Clearly, there are a handful of factors for a VAR to consider before guiding businesses in the direction of racks. Do they have somewhere to put the hardware, first of all? I've had a customer ask for help deploying a rack up in his building's attic, which had the power hookups and network connections but lacked cooling or the containment to keep out dirt from the company's parking lot. Without the partnerships in place to build a dedicated server room up there, I had to pass on the job. The same would go for an SMB without the right power configuration. Ditto for cooling. If you aren't sure whether or not your customer's setup makes the grade, spend some time talking to the vendors helping you out. I'll be the first to admit that it's intimidating—even foolish—to make recommendations outside your area of expertise. Sizing power solutions, evaluating the readiness of a server room, or helping pick out coolers are all areas where I'd just as soon have a specialist make the call.

Maximizing Capacity

Let's operate under the assumption that you're in your element. Your customer has a server room with a standard air conditioner and the proper power piped in. Now it's your job to maximize processing in a standard-height 42U enclosed rack. Do you go for larger 2U boxes? Or do you fill the thing up with 1U servers that each takes a hefty bite out of the power budget? Supermicro's alternative takes one page from traditional rackmount equipment and another from high-density blades by finessing two nodes into a single 1U box.

Each 1U Twin chassis includes two separate motherboards running as completely independent systems. Both accommodate a pair of Xeon 5000-series processors, up to 32GB of memory, a PCI Express x8 expansion slot, and optional InfiniBand for clustering. With up to 16 cores and 32GB of memory in a single server, you're working with a lot of potential muscle. Of course, consolidating so much space forces a handful of compromises. For instance, 1U boxes only have room for four 3.5" hot-swap hard drive bays, so each node is limited to a pair of SATA drives. The two nodes also share a single power supply. And naturally, there simply isn't as much room to upgrade in such a dense environment. But according to Supermicro, none of those concessions are all that significant.

"In cluster environments, customers want greater density for processing power rather than storage," says Supermicro's Tau Leng. "We're also finding that a majority of the customers who invest in high-density processing never change their configurations, so expansion isn't a big concern we've encountered either. Today's power supplies are very reliable as well. We use redundant fans as a precaution for cooling, but the chances of a PSU failure are very low."

Obviously, deploying a solution such as the 1U Twin opens the door to much more focused horsepower. There's also the issue of efficiency. Two nodes operating from a single power supply will more effectively make use of power than two 1U boxes. It's also possible to slow the need for a second or third rack by consolidating the servers in one. Although the 1U Twin isn't for everyone, it does enable some interesting channel opportunities not available using traditional rackmount hardware.

HITTING THE HIGH-END

As you cruise past the typical small business server, fly by the database machines used by many larger organizations, and start approaching a need for HPC (high-performance computing), typical pedestals and rackmount boxes fail to deliver ample power for the space they occupy. Instead, blade servers enable the maximum level of compute horsepower.

A blade configuration consists of an enclosure that slides into the server rack. Able to house 10 or more actual blade servers, the focus is primarily on concentrating potency. Thus, you'll probably be dealing with quad-core chips, lots and lots of memory, 2.5" hard drives, and Gigabit or InfiniBand interconnects. Instead of running an operating system like SBS, enterprises investing in blades load Microsoft's Compute Cluster Server 2003.

Although it sounds pricey (and it is), blades are actually a play on saving money. The initial cost is high. After all, blade enclosures have their own power supplies spanning up to 10KW that require some serious infrastructure considerations. Cooling is also a concern. But once those barriers to entry are crossed, blades give you the least expensive avenue to high performance, simplified management, and scalability. TCO drops as you add more and more hardware to a blade configuration.

Get Surgical

Prior to understanding the difference between a rackmount server and a blade server, I had a difficult time guiding customers anywhere after that initial pedestal phase. The only way to gain experience is to go hands-on, though, so I picked up a couple of 1U boxes, a 24U rack, and a power distribution unit for my own lab. As I watched my customers grow, it became easier to relate my interactions with rackmount hardware to their own applications.

Making that call to ditch pedestal servers in favor of rackmount hardware is still the hardest part of the scaling process, in my opinion. But you can make it easier by advocating pedestals able to lay horizontally and slide into a rack, such as Intel's SC5400RA. Form partnerships with local infrastructure organizations able to help design cooling solutions and run the right power to a server room too. You'll find it much easier to focus on processors, memory, storage, and management with those other building blocks addressed.