HPC & Big DataSolutions

Power Optimised Solutions forUltimate Datacentre Efficiency

CONTENTS

ABOUT BOSTONBoston is a global IT solutions manufacturer and systems integrator, specialising in industry leading power efficient infrastructure solutions primarily for the datacentre, HPC, media & entertainment and financial arenas.

For over 20 years, organisations of all sizes and market segments have leveraged Boston’s expertise in bespoke OEM and embedded platforms. Our state of the art lab facilities and qualified engineers lay the foundation for our long pedigree of award winning solutions. As a global technology provider, Boston has supported numerous projects around the world for mission critical, high performance applications.

Since its founding in London, UK, Boston has expanded operations globally. Following on from the successful launch of Boston IT Solutions India in 2009, Boston launched Boston Server & Storage Solutions GmbH in Germany a year later, with offices opening on the East coast of America in 2013.

BOSTON LABSBoston Labs is the highly innovative performance and benchmarking centre where next generation technologies are put through their paces prior to production release.

Boston has opened our R&D facilities to allow customers to try the latest platforms using their own tools or existing hardware. Understandably, some customers may not be able to visit our labs in person therefore arrangements can be made for test systems to be set up in our labs with remote access via RDP, SSH or other means; enabling you to trial our solutions from wherever you are in the world.

To stay up to date with Boston Labs visit us at www.bostonlabs.co.uk

2 About Boston

3 DCO Solutions

4 Low Power servers

5 Storage-on-ARM

6 Liquid Cooling Technology

7 Liquid Cooling Demands

8 Networking

9 Software Defined Storage

10 Hadoop and Big Data

12 Scale MP

13 Bright Cluster Management

14 Container Solutions

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TWINBLADEWhat would normally be 20U of rackspace, the Twin Blade houses 20 blades in a 7U chassis, offering unrivalled performance, density and power efficiency.

• Up to 20 blades in a 7U 19” industry standard rack

• Reduces server footprint within a data-centre

• Power, cooling and networking devices aggregated in the rear of the chassis

FATTWIN™The latest edition of Supermicro’s Twin Architecture Super Server solution providing high efficiency, highly effective cooling, lowering TCO.

• Available in high density 8/4/2 hot plug system node configurations

• Cooling architecture allows FatTwin to operate up to 47°C

• Fully customisable: front or rear I/O, memory capacities, hard disk drives, PCI and networking options

MICROBLADEThis modular blade architecture contains full-feature power-conserving servers in easily serviceable front access hot-swap Blade trays all in a 6U form factor.

• 112 ultra-low power 8-core Intel® Atom™ Processor C2000 based servers in 28 hot-swap micro blades

• High efficiency (95%) digital switching power supplies

• Intel® highbandwidth network switches and reduced cabling

MICROCLOUDBoston’s Cloud compute offering incorporates advanced software features to create an Enterprise class cloud solution.

• 12 Individually operating server nodes within a 3U chassis

• Ability to scale processing capabilities to mirror your requirements; saving you space, power and money

• Effective for cloud computing, data centre, web hosting and virtualisation environments

DATACENTRE OPTIMISED SOLUTIONS

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ARM®-BASED SERVERSThe days of the server market being dominated by X86 are numbered, with almost 2% of the world’s electricity consumption coming from data centres, the focus for many in our industry is on how to decrease their energy footprint, with the added bonus of a vastly reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Additionally there is an on-going shift from pure compute to data access—moving from heavy computational workloads to millions of relatively smaller workloads, perfectly suited to highly scalable smaller nodes connected through an ultra-fast network fabric. The Viridis will forever be the world’s first enterprise grade ARM-based server. Boasting a phenomenally low 5W per server under load (½W idle), Viridis is the forefront of the first real threat to X86’s stranglehold since X86 itself was a disruptive technology. The Viridis challenges the fundamentals of traditional servers – separate and poorly communicating components have been aggregated into one ultra-low power, ultra-high density chip - processing, network, I/O and storage controllers and network switching are no longer oversized, power-hungry individuals.

WILL MY APPLICATION WORK?Whilst we are still in the infancy of ARM-servers, Boston and its partners have been working hard with ISVs and open-source communities to encourage the growth of the ARM ecosystem. Fedora has been re-coded onto ARM using our systems, as well as CentOS and Debian. We have also worked with a number of smaller organisations to help them recompile their in-house applications. If you’re interested in testing the performance of your own application on the ARM architecture, we have a remote cluster available through Arm-as-a-Service where you can also benefit from industry-leading tracing and debugging tools and X86 emulators. For more information visit www.armasaservice.com

WHAT THE INDUSTRY IS SAYING“We’ve been slaves to the x86 architecture… now you can pick the hardware that’s right for your tasks and, thanks to free software, have a full selection of programs ready to use.”

“An energy-efficient way to quickly process high volumes of online transactions … arm servers could efficiently process fast-moving transactions such as search requests”

“The Viridis can outperform a whole rack of x86 servers while consuming one-tenth of the power...really cool.”

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CEPH STORAGE ON ARMCeph is an open-source, massively scalable, software-defined storage system which provides object, block and file system storage in a single platform. It runs on commodity hardware—saving you costs, giving you flexibility—and because it’s in the Linux kernel, it’s easy to consume.

OPTIMISED FOR ARMViridis servers deployed with Ceph enable storage servers that focus first on performance of the disk and network, critical in distributed storage appliances. The Ceph architecture is designed to distribute a storage cluster over multiple servers. Boston’s ARM-based servers enable Ceph clusters to have more servers and thus lower failure rates and more efficient healing, all in the same amount of space and with reduced power consumption. The result is that Viridis servers deliver better performance per dollar at reduced power consumption and better rack density. With specific applications, the overall combined performance of one 2U Viridis appliance can outperform a whole rack of standard x86 servers, yet at the same time consume 1/10th the power and occupy 1/10th the space making it an excellent investment for datacentres and enterprises alike.

• 4U enclosure up to 144TB per system• Leverages commodity hardware • No need for expensive RAID drives• Self-managing and self-healing• No single point of failure

CASE STUDIESCancer Research UK joined Eurocloud to achieve a high density but low-power server environment for ‘big data’ analysis workloads in the field of leading edge cancer research. The results were profound and positive impact on the model for HPC provision – paving the way for the achievement of Exascale computing.

The Fedora Project’s development for the broader implementation of deployment tools such as PXE and Kickstart on ARM systems. Reliable and performant enterprise-class ARM server hardware enabling physical consolidation into a uniform server environment. Fedora found the accelerated application development and deployment – lowering the barrier for porting and supporting the ARM software ecosystem.

LIQUID COOLING TECHNOLOGY

CoolIT’s Direct Contact Liquid Cooling DCLC technology moves the heat generated by today’s high performance processors efficiently by circulating liquid directly across the CPU and then transporting the heat away from temperature sensitive components. This is made possible by using pure copper micro-channel technology which allows for the efficient absorption of heat and by using the specially designed pump that continuously moves liquid through the system. It is important to note that there is no reservoir where liquid can settle in the head unit. DCLC eliminates the inefficient heat transfer of air solutions. CoolIT’s DCLC technology delivers products that will grow with processing demands and meet even the most aggressive performance, efficiency and density targets.

Flexible to fit, exceptionally efficient and the key to overcoming the obstacles of limited power and inadequate air-cooling, CoolIT’s solutions can be integrated into existing infrastructure. Circumventing the necessity to increase the physical footprint, using less power and getting better performance are factors that pave the road to the future of cooling technology.

Over 40 of CoolIT’s patents are related to thermoelectrics, cold plates, heat sinks, thermosyphons, pumps, control systems, manufacturing techniques and system level thermal solutions

HOW DIRECT COOLING WORKS

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COOLING SOLUTIONS FOR ALL IT DEMANDSExperts agree that Direct Contact Liquid Cooling is an important strategy for cooling efficiency and with over 1 million DCLC™ units sold, CoolIT can prove it. CoolIT’s Rack Direct Contact Liquid Cooling (RACK DCLC™) solutions apply well over a decade of liquid cooling experience and expertise to high performance and high frequency computing. Reduced dependence on expensive CRAC’s and CRAH’s, more servers per rack, lower system power requirements and accessing significantly higher performance potential translates into an effective and scalable cooling strategy that delivers a better bottom line.

80% INCREASED RACK CAPACITYMore CPU’s per rack and more CPU’s per datacentre.

25% DECREASE IN CAPITAL EXPENSEIncreased rack density means less IT and infrastructure to accommodate the same kW compute capacity.

22% DECREASE IN OPERATING EXPENSEReduced energy use in facility cooling infrastructure.

RACK DCLC™Increased density (more CPUs per rack), higher performance per CPU, and easy installation and maintenance. Configurable depending on your compute environment.

INTEL XEON PHI SUPPORTCoolIT DCLC now supports the Intel Xeon Phi co-processor, cooling up to 300w per add in card and dramatically increasing datacentre server density without the need for any changes to existing air cooled environment.

Air Cooling Cool IT

# of Racks100 55

Total IT Power1.5MW 1.5MW

Total Data Centre Power 2.7MW 1.8MW

IT Desnity 15kW/rack27.7kW/

rack

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NETWORKING

Mellanox continues its leadership by providing 10/40/56 Gigabit ethernet and SDN switch systems – the highest performing ethernet solutions for enterprise datacentres, cloud computing, web 2.0 and high performance computingThe Ethernet Switch family delivers the highest performance and port density with a complete chassis and fabric management solution enabling converged data centres to operate at any scale while reducing operational costs and infrastructure complexity. This family includes a broad portfolio of Top-of-Rack (TOR) switches that range from 18 to 64 ports, and support 10/40/56Gb/s per port. These switches allow IT managers to build cost-effective and scalable switch fabrics for small to large clusters up to tens-of-thousands of nodes.

Mellanox makes fabric management as easy as it can by providing the lowest latency and highest bandwidth. This allows IT managers to deal with serving the company’s business needs, while solving typical networking issues such as congestion and the inefficiencies generated by adding unnecessary rules and limitations when the network resources are sufficient.

12-PORT 40/56GBE, 48-PORT 10GBE SWITCH SYSTEM The SX1012 switch system provides the highest-performing top-of-rack (ToR) solution in a half-width 1U form factor by delivering up to 1.3Tb/s of non-blocking throughput with 10GbE or 40/56GbE form factor.

36-PORT 40/56GBE SWITCH SYSTEMThe SX1036 switch system provides the highest-performing fabric solution in a 1U form factor by delivering up to 2.88Tb/s of non-blocking throughput to High Frequency Trading and Enterprise Datacentres, with ultra-low latency.

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Boston’s Proposed Solution

Cost $/TB vs. Solution from competition

Competition $/TB

Price benefit reduction

Saved Cost per TB

dataScaler-SDS 14TB $2,188 S200-14.4T $4,785 2,2 2.2x

dataScaler-SDS 288TB$186 NL400-144T

(No HD equiv) $818 4,4 4.4x

SOFTWARE DEFINED STORAGEIT’S TIME TO FREE YOUR INFORMATIONExplosive data growth has stretched existing hardware storage—and IT resources—to their limits. It’s time to free your information from its aging infrastructure. The Boston dataScaler-SDS powered by Red Hat® Storage is an open software-defined storage solution that delivers a continuous storage platform across physical, virtual, and cloud resources. The dataScaler-SDS can now allow you to transform your big, semi-structured, and unstructured data from a burden into an asset.

DRAMATICALLY LOWER IT COSTSA better storage solution doesn’t have to be cost prohibitive. The Boston dataScaler-SDS, powered by Red Hat Storage provides a pre-integrated software defined storage solution on high density, high performance storage servers that can also be extended and integrated with your existing infrastructure.

INNOVATE FASTER WITH OPEN SOURCE CLOUD STORAGEWith open technologies and an extensible architecture, you can customise Red Hat Storage to your business needs. This empowers you to deploy innovative storage functions at the speed of your business not at the speed of proprietary hardware-vendor engineering cycles.

IMPROVE BUSINESS CONTINUITY AND DISASTER RECOVERYSoftware ensures the availability of the storage system and your data. So the failure of any individual server doesn’t compromise the system’s overall integrity or availability. Local and long-distance replication and self healing capabilities ensure high levels of data protection, availability and resilience.

HIGHLY EFFICIENT DEDUP TECHNOLOGYBoston dataScaler-SDS uses over an order ofmagnitude less memory compared to most existing solutions such as ZFS. This enables the use of smaller, more efficient, dedup objects (e.g. 16KiB) to improve storage utilisation. This high performance, low memory deduplication indexing also enables ultra-low latency operations with average latencies of 3-10μs per index insertion.

DATASCALER-SDS 14TB DATASCALER-SDS 288TB

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HADOOP & BIG DATA SOLUTIONSHadoop is an open-source project administered by the Apache Software Foundation. Hadoop’s contributors work for some of the world’s biggest technology companies. That diverse, motivated community has produced a genuinely innovative platform for consolidating, combining and understanding data. Enterprises today collect and generate more data than ever before. Relational and data warehouse products excel at OLAP and OLTP workloads over structured data. Hadoop, however, was designed to solve a different problem: the scalable, reliable storage and analysis of both structured and complex data.

As a result, many enterprises deploy Hadoop alongside their legacy IT systems, allowing them to combine old and new data sets in powerful new ways. Technically, Hadoop consists of two key services: reliable data storage using the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and high-performance parallel data processing using a technique called MapReduce. Hadoop runs on a collection of commodity, shared-nothing servers. You can add or remove servers in a Hadoop cluster at will; the system detects and compensates for hardware or system problems on any server. Hadoop, in other words, is self-healing. It can deliver data - and can run large-scale, high-performance processing jobs - in spite of system changes or failures.

BENEFITS VIA SUPERMICRO HADOOP INFRASTRUCTUREThe industry’s broadest line of Enterprise Hadoop Infrastructure & Server Building Block Solutions®:

• Wide range of servers based upon Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2600 series• Enterprise-ready compute and storage with high reliability, quality and performance at an

affordable price point• Hot Swap Direct Attach 4x, 6x, 8x, and 12x 3.5” Hard Disk Drives per Node• Up to Platinum Level (95%+) Efficiency - Redundant Power Supplies with PMBus• Remote Systems and Cluster Management with On board IPMI and included IPMI View• Cost effective Layer 3 10GbE Switches and Layer 3 1GbE Switches with 10GbE uplinks

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HADOOP FATTWINThe industry’s broadest line of Enterprise Hadoop Infrastructure & Server Building Block Solutions.

• Up to 8x 3.5” Fixed SAS/SATA + 4x 3.5” Fixed SATA HDDs per U

• 2x 1620W Redundant Platinum Level (94%+) Power Supplies

• Up to 512GB ECC Reg. DDR3 1600MHz SDRAM in 16 DIMM sockets

BOSTON HADOOP PILOT CLUSTERFully optimised turn-key Apache Hadoop Starter Cluster – a Horton Works certified solution.

• The perfect starter kit for doing a POC on hadoop

• 2 namenodes plus 8 data nodes, fully configured and setup

• Networking (Mellanox UDA accelerated), cables and rack

FATTWIN 4x DATA NODEEvolutionary 4U Twin Architecture that offers the industry’s best capacity and efficiency.

• 8x 3.5” Hot-swap SAS/SATA HDDs per U• 4x 1280W Redundant Platinum Level

(95%) Digital Power Supplies• 1x PCI-E 3.0 x16 (low profile) via riser

card and 1x Micro-LP PCI-E 3.0 x8 Expansion Slot

BOSTON HADOOP PRODUCTION CLUSTERFully optimised and certified Hadoop platform, ready to be rolled out in production.

• Enhanced performance with DP Xeon E5-2600 V2 series

• Optimised disk I/O performance with 12x HDD and 2x SDD

• 2x 1U 4x bay Name node and 18x 2U 12x bay Data Nodes

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XSCALER-VSMP

XSCALER-VSMP The Boston xScaler-vSMP, powered by vSMP Foundation™, aggregates multiple industry-standard x86 servers into one single virtual high-end system. This flagship product provides customers with an alternative to traditional, expensive multiprocessing (SMP or NUMA) systems and also offers simplified clustering infrastructure with a single operating system.

HIGHLY SCALABLE SMPWith up to 32,768 cores and 256 TB RAM by virtualising the aggregated resources of multiple nodes to a single VM, this breakthrough approach provides customers in industries such as energy, higher-education, research, life sciences, manufacturing and finance with computational horsepower for the most demanding applications and workloads, and dramatically lowers TCO by as much as 80%.

ON DEMAND SMP WITH VSMP FOUNDATION™ ADVANCED PLATFORMDynamically provision SMP capability based on workload demand. This provides greater utilisation by reusing the same systems for both distributed and shared-memory workloads. As workloads change, a datacentre with Boston’s xScaler-vSMP installed can react to these changing workloads. Large, virtual SMP’s can be created as needed for users who need access to hundreds of cores and/or Terabytes of memory. A virtual SMP can be created on the fly by using a number of popular cluster management applications. When the challenging workload decreases or changes to smaller resource intensive applications, the servers can be returned to the cluster to continue to do useful work.

The Boston xScaler-vSMP, powered by vSMP Foundation™ aggregates multiple, industry-standard, x86 servers into one single virtual high-end system.

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RAPID PRODUCTIVITY GAINS• Short learning curve: all tasks available

through intuitive GUI• Quick installation: one hour from bare

metal to compute-ready• Fast, flexible provisioning: incremental,

live, disk-full, disk-less, over InfiniBand, to virtual machines, automatic node discovery

• Comprehensive monitoring: on-the-fly graphs, Rackview, multiple clusters, custom metrics

• Powerful automation: thresholds, alerts, actions

• Complete GPU support: NVIDIA, AMD1, CUDA, OpenCL

• Full support for Intel Xeon Phi, including native and offload modes

• Fast customization and task automation: • powerful cluster management shell,

SOAP and JSON APIs make it easy• Seamless integration with leading

workload managers: Slurm, Open Grid Scheduler, Torque, openlava, Maui2, PBS Professional, Univa Grid Engine, Moab2, LSF

MAXIMUM UPTIME• Automatic head node failover: prevents

cluster downtime• Powerful cluster automation: drives pre-

emptive actions based on monitoring thresholds

• Comprehensive cluster monitoring and health checking: automatic side lining of unhealthy nodes to prevent job failure

SCALABILITY FROM DESKSIDE TO TOP500• Off-loadable provisioning: enables

maximum scalability• Proven: used on some of the world’s

largest clusters

MINIMUM OVERHEAD / MAXIMUM PERFORMANCE• Lightweight: single daemon delivers all

functionality• Optimized: daemon has negligible impact

on operating system and applications• Efficient: single database for all metric

and configuration data

BRIGHT CLUSTER MANAGERBright Cluster Manager® removes the complexity from the installation, management and use of clusters, without compromising performance or capability. Bright allows you to manage multiple clusters simultaneously, including HPC, Hadoop, storage, database, private cloud and workstation clusters — on premise or in the cloud.

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CONTAINER SOLUTIONSStandardised, pre-assembled and integrated datacentre facility power and cooling modules are at least 60% faster to deploy, and provide a first cost saving of 13% or more compared to traditional datacentre power and cooling infrastructureTraditional datacentres suffer from long construction periods, high energy consumption and high initial investment, so it is difficult for fast-moving businesses nowadays to manage rapid future expansion. To help resolve these issues, Boston has launched their container datacentre, which has a highly integrated power supply and distribution system, environmental monitoring, cooling systems, racks, cabling, fire control, security and other infrastructure facilities, all packaged in a standard shipping container. This solution complies with the diverse business needs of customers today.

KEY FEATURES & BENEFITS• Pre-assembled and factory tested to ensure quality and reliability• Custom designs available to meet individual site needs• Fully integrated power and climate systems for fast and easy installation• Accommodates a wide variety of equipment to support numerous applications • Remote monitoring to assist any service organization• Boston’s Global Services are available 24/7, 365 days a year, around the globe for installation

and support

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SERVICESCONFIGURATIONMeans we can offer you the exact cluster configuration solution required for your HPC environment. All aspects of the design have been qualified by Boston for compatibility, performance and stability.

BUILD AND TESTBoston’s in-house HPC configuration centre is purposely designed for large scale cluster integration and burn-in. Our cluster validation, build, test and QA procedures are second to none; however, we can augment these to reflect your specific needs.

ASSET MANAGEMENTFacilities allow us to tag and catalogue hardware as required with data recorded into a SAP database which can be interrogated by you as and when required using a secure online service.

TECHNOLOGY PARTNERS

DELIVERY AND INSTALLATIONOptions are available using professionally trained personnel. The services include timed deliveries through to out-of business hours installations should these be required.

WORLDWIDE SUPPORT AND MAINTENANCEOptions are available on a fully tailored basis, these include, RTB or On-Site options, with response times of 4 hours, 24x7 and 365 days a year.

UPGRADE, REPLACEMENT AND DISPOSALSolutions are available for all hardware sold. In partnership with WeeeCare® plc and as part of the WEEE Directive, we can offer earth friendly disposal options for your clients as and when these needs arise.

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sales@boston.co.uk

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© 2014 Boston LimitedErrors & Omissions Excepted

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