Microsoft Joins Open Compute Project, Will Share Server Designs 90
1sockchuck writes "Microsoft has joined the Open Compute Project and will be contributing specs and designs for the cloud servers that power Bing, Windows Azure and Office 365. "We came to the conclusion that sharing these hardware innovations will help us accelerate the growth of cloud computing," said Kushagra Vaid, Microsoft's General Manager of Cloud Server Engineering. The company is also releasing its Chassis Manager software that manages its servers, fans and power, which which is now available on GitHub. "We would like to help build an open source software community within OCP as well," said Microsoft's Bill Laing. Microsoft's cloud server hardware is built around a 12U chassis that can house up to 24 server and storage blades, offering a different approach from the current Open Compute server and storage designs."
Cloud (Score:2, Interesting)
"We came to the conclusion that sharing these hardware innovations will help us accelerate the growth of cloud computing,"
I really don't get this so perhaps someone can explain: What benefit does this have for anybody?
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1) Cloud environments are much less dependent on Windows than desktops, and favour open source like Linux or BSD
2) If all applications become server side, then application compatibility on the desktop is no longer relevant, making the OS that desktop runs irrelevant
Failure in Cloud is not an option for Microsoft, and the days of their lock-in are numbered.
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Pushing for cloud doesn't mean that all applications become server-side. It means that some of the logic is there, as well as e.g. document/setting storage, but the app itself is native on whatever platform it's running on - including e.g. Win8 and WP8.
Re:Cloud (Score:5, Funny)
I really don't get this so perhaps someone can explain: What benefit does this have for anybody?
I guess it could be therapeutic for people with exceptional nostalgia towards the days of mainframe computing.
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"I guess it could be therapeutic for people with exceptional nostalgia towards the days of mainframe computing."
Actually cloud has a lot of benefits. Say you need to run DNA sequencing and you do not have a super computer of your own or do not want to manage a super computer. Just use a compute cloud.
Even for storage it makes sense. You do do off site backups don't you?
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So yeah, you'll save money by outsourcing your IT staff and infrastructure to a cloud storage company, but when shit hits the fan you have no control over the servers you don't own.
What do you mean "when the shit hits the fan"? I mean i'm familiar with the expression but if there is a catastrophic hardware failure then whether it's their hardware or your hardware doesn't really make any difference, but at least if it's their hardware then you would have a clause in your SLA for restitution.
If cloud storage company X decides they need a higher payment to maintain your data, well you're kind of locked in and have to pay whatever they tell you too.
How are you locked in? It's just data, back it up somewhere else instead.
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It is called FUD. Slashdot is getting full of the tin foil hat crowd. One wonders what solution they would suggest for a small company that needs a 1000 node cluster to run one job a month?
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I just hope you only use public data in that DNA sequencing. If you are keeping any of it secret (like, before applying for a patent), you'll have bad news.
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Verses someone downloading it on a flash drive and walking out the door? Or maybe hacking your systems and getting the data?
Seeing the average network security I have as more trust in Amazon cloud than I do in your average network.
Re:Cloud (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Cloud (Score:5, Interesting)
Additional customer lock-in. Personally, I would like to see a service which (may already exist, please tell me if it does) where I can host my own data at home and then have various forms of access to it from my phone or laptop or tablet or whatever. It should not require a static or known/named dynamic IP address. I like the idea of a relay server out there on the internet which enables the two peers to connect whether behind a firewall or not. VPN linking to my home network would be a nice addition maybe.
So who's got something like this for free?
Re:Cloud (Score:5, Informative)
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Yup, but when I tried out OwnCloud I had some issues with file corruption. When I investigated a few months back it was a bit of a known thing, and a lot of comments were make sure your making backups, it's not fully ready yet, etc. Shame as it was really what I wanted. Might be better now.
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I don't know about free, but a ton of vendors have "personal cloud" offerings now. Western Digital network drives all have that kind of stuff now, basically all the consumer grade NAS devices do, complete with all the iphone/android apps to access it Dropbox-style and crap.
I'd be surprised if there isn't an open source stack that does it too, since the bundled hardware offerings are always a bit behind.
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You have described what my Synology disc station does (i've got the ds213j). Long story short, it's a linux box with a repo of cool stuff that people have hacked out for it.
I'm currently running mine as 'cloud' storage as well as hosting a django site, and have plans to make it my crash plan destination soon.
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But that would not give you an offsite back up.
And yes you can do it now over XMPP. http://socialvpn.wordpress.com... [wordpress.com]
It sucks that Google is dropping XMPP. I wish they had kept it
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Try Filr from Novell. It's pretty amazing. It won't solve the dynamic DNS issues but it does allow access to your data and uses the ACLs you set on your server. It's likely overkill for one person but it works well for my small company.
http://www.novell.com/products... [novell.com]
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Novell still exists? Even Firefox sees 'Novell' as a misspelling of 'noel'.
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Yep, they still exist. All the Identity and Security products moved over to NetIQ. The other infrastructure products are still with Novell.
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Ironically, this is exactly what I use Microsoft's own Skydrive for:
http://windows.microsoft.com/e... [microsoft.com]
Its free as in beer, but sadly, the host box has to be Windows so it might not be what you are looking for.
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Ask IBM. They make money hand over fist by charging people for the amount of processing power they use. The rates are extraordinarily high. You can reduce the cost by buying specialized processors for Linux, Java, etc, which are also incredibly expensive. There's a lot of money to be made by people if they can get people not stuck on the old mainframes to buy into the same trap.
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It benefits them?
Most of these companies don't make much money from the server hardware. And they'd benefit more from better server hardware. So it's better for them to share info so that server hardware improves as fast as possible.
Microsoft might have joined the party late because they had some concerns over whether potential customers might build their own hardware, datacenters and thus not use Microsoft's Azure stuff. But given that OpenComputer is already out there with decent designs, I doubt them sta
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The 'cloud' business will see a lot more embracing of 'open source' and sharing because the business is not so dependent on them.
Microsoft's play in cloud service is going to be based on its business clout, huge cash balance to spend on infrastructure, integration and management overlays...
None of this depends on the underlying technologies of the servers in the farms. It is in everyone's best interest to share whatever designs and optimizations they can in this area. Maybe a new design for cooling comes ou
Which one is this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Embrace, extend or extinguish? Which part are we on now?
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Well, given the MS history, yes, I'd say that pretty much sums up their practices. Doesn't matter what they say, if they get involved in any way, start taking extra precautions, and watch your back.
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When their actions stop having excessive malign effects, then I'll think more positively about them. As it is, usually they don't exactly lie, so much as weasel word things that they hope you won't notice. And since I'm not a lawyer, I don't read things like that for fun, so I judge them by their actions evaluated over a period of years. If they don't like that, then I'm happier if they stay away.
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OK, I'll bite. Here's my "devil's advocacy".
Isn't Microsoft the company that made billions selling software (and now services) on a very popular open platform, the PC? So, maybe there's no evil agenda here (say it isn't so!): maybe it's as simple as opening up something they don't plan to sell - server hardware designs - in order to reduce costs by increasing economies of scale, or to get the benefits of free improvements from the community. (Hey, I thought you folks liked that kind of thing...) Put in
Apache 2 License? o.o (Score:3)
They have to... (Score:3, Interesting)
MS sees an overwhelming trend of Linux oriented software for operations management. They don't have the same mountain of people working to do similar stuff but with .Net. They want that mountain of companies and people building an ecosystem around .Net, but it's not happening naturally. MS has only the hope of putting out there and hoping to prime the pump.
Re:Apache 2 License? o.o (Score:5, Insightful)
I doubt this is really a Microsoft business decision. It's written by one person, and he is perhaps enthusiastic about open source (PhD student at PSU). His supervisor probably okayed it. Just because some division of MS does that, doesn't mean the top of the hierarchy decided/steered this decision.
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Actually, most (all?) Microsoft open source projects these days are released under Apache License 2.0, and even the stuff that was previously under MS-PL or other custom licenses has been relicensed to AL (in particular, ASP.NET MVC made a doing so a few years ago). [arstechnica.com]
All Azure SDKs (.NET, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, node.js) are also under AL and on GitHub [github.io]. So is TypeScript (the open sourced parts - i.e. the compiler, not the IDE support). So are Python and Node.js Tools for Visual Studio.
I can't actually think
Re:Apache 2 License? o.o (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry but infrastructure management software will not have wide acceptance with a GPL license. It would also not make much headway with MS-PL. If you actually want it to be used then it has to be BSD/Apache.
The great thing about standards... (Score:5, Interesting)
So many to choose from. On the hardware side, they didn't like the current hardware design that Facebook liked (with good reason) and so provided an entirely different set of design sensibilities. This isn't about enhanced standardization, this is about a nice-sounding venue by which to deliver requirements to bidders for MS datacenter equipment. I will say at first glance, I like MS's requirements better than Facebook requirements. The points that I'd worry about would be firmware requirements (MS tends to get insane with network protocols) and the unique IO design which limits the market of compliant equipment (basically, the same that can be said of IBM bladecenter, flex, Dell M1000, etc etc).
On the software side, you'll note that it's in .Net. It's very much not in the realm of typical open source datacenter operations projects. MS once again is stuck having to build the infrastructure themselves for lack of a wider community using their tooling for the purposes MS needs. Of course, MS has historically impressed me with how well they manage to do while being a 'lone wolf'.
We've seen this before... (Score:1)
Prior to Sun open sourcing java, there were also open reimplementations of the runtime. Those reimplementations only kind of worked if the developers targeted them explicitly.
Similarly, GNUStep and OSX can compile the same code... if the developer is careful to target both....
Of course, there is also wine. A project that after decades in the making does an admirable job, but the confidence of a particular application running perfectly is still not a given until you try.
Mono is in the same boat, trying to
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Of course, MS has historically impressed me with how well they manage to do while being a 'lone wolf'.
I would think that almost everyone is a lone wolf when it comes to highly specialized server designs. Google's servers [cnet.com] are designed to highly efficient in terms of space and power consumption. While they use an x86 architecture, the custom servers also have individual battery backups instead of a rack level UPS. While not many details are known about the motherboards (except that they are made by Gigabyte), it looks to me that they have stripped out all unnecessary parts like extra USB ports, extra SATA
Too little, too late (Score:3, Insightful)
The 'chassis manager'. (Score:2, Informative)
It looks like the skeleton of code to put into 'firmware' of the chassis manager. This suggests they believe the chassis manager should be running Windows as the embedded solution... Holy shit what a terrible idea for a standard, the cost of the module would increase to start with (a hardware design for that role runs 40-50 bucks, moving to atom doubles that) and the cost of the OS to run on top of it would be more than the hardware cost total.
hahaha (Score:1)
Every single time it the same with these guys.
They arrive late to the party, but when they do they bring with them their own music CDs.
Its like the arrival of the vaguely creepy older guy who likes to hang around younger people.
Nobody's got the nerve to turf them out, but at the same time nobody wants to interact with them either.
Later on, everyone says how creep-guy's arrival ruined the party.
While creepy-guy's telling everyone who will listen how awesome it was.
decent.. (Score:3)
this isn't your father's Microsoft.
An Azure Cloud (Score:4, Insightful)
An Azure Cloud is the suffocating bluish smoke belched out by an engine that is reaching the end of it's useful life.
Microsoft is courting Linux workloads to run on their bluish smoke servers. Why would someone who has a business application that runs on Linux want to trust that to a company that has tried to destroy Linux and open source and is actively continuing to do so to this very day?
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Slashdot itself is suffocating bluish smoke.... The rest of the world is moving on...
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There goes the neighborhood (Score:3)
Ah, I remember when Microsoft did the same thing with the OpenGL ARB and more or less poisoned it, leaving OpenGL for dead once they had completed their mission. Also, W3C, Java and pretty much every other standard group they've sabotaged^H joined usually end up the same way.
So forgive me if I see this as yet another attempt at killing off open standards.
More reading [vanwensveen.nl]
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Microsoft was also on the consortium to develop H.264 and then they almost ruined it and coincidentally created their own video standard that was kind of like it. This was also about the time that DivX got started and I'd be curious how many algorithms it "borrowed."
I think it's kind of a risk to let them partner with a group they have a vested interest in destroying, given their track record. Who knows, maybe they've changed, maybe they haven't.
That's assuming... (Score:2)
The 'standard' is in a non-sabotaged state already. 'Open'Compute was mostly Facebook saying 'this is the right way to address the only requirements that matter (Facebook's). Now MS managed to get their word in and it just gets slipped in, without the slightest hint of trying to reach a consensus on anything.
OpenCompute has been full of either things uselessly specific to one user's needs or alternatively useless problem statements that are blatantly obvious without a hint of a proposed solution.
Basically
There goes the rest of the hardware market... (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft isn't giving their server designs away out of the goodness of their hearts. They have a huge interest in getting people to move their workloads to Azure. The first step for most places has to be getting them off of VMWare or KVM onto Hyper-V/Windows Server. Next step is convincing enterprises to buy these whitebox server designs to save money on their on-premises stuff. Finally they'll make Azure too good a deal to pass up for the CIO crowd with the usual argument that you can fire most of your IT department. It's already super-easy to publish your applications right from Visual Studio to Azure...again, not an accident.
I actually think the whitebox design method is a good thing...IF...you have a dedicated staff working 24/7 to repair/replace sickly boxes, and the workload is such that a box is a box is a box. This works perfectly for large scale web apps backed by a SAN, or hypervisor hosts. It doesn't work as well for standalone application stacks that have semi-permanent physical server dependencies. Renting 3 servers in the cloud doesn't make as much sense as renting 3,000.
My company does a lot of standalone deployments of applications around the world, in places where network connectivity doesn't permit easy cloud access. It's getting harder to find vendors who aren't trying to steer us to the cloud. Microsoft is making it very difficult to purchase perpetual licenses of software, with the price of a negotiated Software Assurance deal being set less than the equivalent one time license fee [1]. Now that IBM just bailed out of the x86 server market, HP is pretty much the only vendor left making decent hardware for non-cloud applications.
I totally get why AWS, Azure and public clouds make sense. When you're running the back-end for an iPhone app, and need 40,000 web servers all cranking out the same content, it makes sense to rent that. But a lot of companies don't seem to get that it's more expensive to do the cloud thing if the servers are going to be permanent and you're hosting one of those boring line-of-business apps. Hopefully people will realize this before the last decent x86 server vendor quits selling non-cloud-optimized servers.
[1] Licensing SQL Server on multi-socket physical boxes is insanely expensive now compared to VMs. I had to add ESXi to our solution for a recent deployment just to save thousands of dollars on the database license for a low-powered app.
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Facebook didn't manage to 'get rid of the rest of the hardware' market, and an incompatible Microsoft addition to it won't. The specifications in this case are pretty damn tightly coupled to microsoft (an x86 SoC to run windows in an embedded context, active directory being a hard requirement, and others).
Now that IBM just bailed out of the x86 server market, HP is pretty much the only vendor left making decent hardware for non-cloud applications.
They sold it to Lenovo. IBM's PC share at the time of sale to lenovo was trivial. Lenovo turned that business around to dramatic effect. As much as some people bitch and moan and look for fault, Lenovo
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:a non-addition to the team. (Score:4, Interesting)
1. You just need a Microsoft Account. It can be created with any email address and not necessarily a Microsoft TLD. There is nothing specific to IE. The entire process can be done with Firefox.
2. It is not unreasonable to have to verify a new subscription via email. This is common place in environments where security is rather important.
3. The fact that you have Linux as an option is rather surprising. Azure is primarily a Windows cloud computing environment which a very large group of businesses are interested in. If you're looking to deploy an enterprise cluster of Linux servers and services, you're probably in the wrong place.
4. Seriously? Why would you navigate away from a "provisioning your server" processing dialog? You didn't have an extra browser tab to peruse Slashdot with?
5. I've never seen this occur, but I'll take your word for it. If it was a mistake, then they clearly deserve some criticism. But are you suggesting you want them to provision your new server for you? Do you expect them to be logging every configuration change you made so they can reproduce every thing you did on another server instance in another datacenter? I'll concede that this is an unfortunate error on their part, but honestly, you can delete and re-create servers with a few clicks of the mouse.
6. There is not "an ocean" of more capable cloud computing environments available. Particularly if you are have strong ties to a Windows environment. Active Directory is included in all of the subscriptions for free. Use it if you want, or ignore it. It's your choice.
Your rhetoric is the only thing that is "bad comedy" here. Like it or not, MS has a pretty successful enterprise software business. I don't see how them sharing some of their insights into this industry as anything but a positive for the open source community. Or do you believe their massive research investments should be kept under lock and key? Or maybe you believe that a huge team of talented engineers has absolutely NOTHING to contribute to OCP because the company they work for has produced a few unsuccessful products. Either way, I think attitudes like yours are detrimental.
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The fact that you have Linux as an option is rather surprising. Azure is primarily a Windows cloud computing environment which a very large group of businesses are interested in. If you're looking to deploy an enterprise cluster of Linux servers and services, you're probably in the wrong place.
It's not at all surprising, and yes, Linux is a supported option [windowsazure.com], and MS will hook you up with companies that provide support for that kind of configuration.
Azure was MS- and Windows-specific a few years ago, but it tries hard not to be that anymore. It's not just about Windows vs Linux, but also e.g. making SDKs for many programming languages on many different platforms [github.io]. Then there's stuff like cloud backends for mobile platforms [windowsazure.com], which includes iOS and Android support.
Granted, most people who go to Azure
Trust (Score:1)
On second thought; fuck that: never trust Microsoft, F/OSS folk!
Microsoft Contributions (Score:1)