This article is more than 1 year old

HP's great cloud server cattle roundup with Foxconn begins

Pet carriers not wanted for whitebox stampede

Accepting failures

Times, though, they are a changin', and there’s a growing meme in data centers that failure is acceptable and you can’t obtain 100 per cent perfect uptime on everything.

You accept failures as statistically normal things. It therefore follows, you can’t built a data center of tens of thousands of machines using the same, best-in-class kit.

It’s also starting to follow that you allocate different hardware to different workloads: it’s something that’s starting to be referred to in the data center world as “pets and cattle” and you define the feature set of your servers to match your mindset.

With pets, you care what happens so you want the best server performance guarantees and resilience. With cattle, if things fail it’s not a big deal. The former might see you run traffic on HP ProLiants, the latter on Cloudlines.

Think this is just the latest vendor buzz phrase?

The next time Gmail isn’t responding for you, you know why

Google, not an HP server customer but running ten of thousands of servers, is thinking this way.

In a forthcoming paper, Google will describe it’s calculated a 2,000-machine service such as Gmail will suffer more than 10 machine crashes in one day.

Causes of the outages at Google? One per cent are DRAM errors, between two and 10 per cent are disk failures, machines crash less than twice a year and upgrading the OS causes outages between two to six times a year.

However, operating at the scale of Google, Mountain View has determined these numbers are more than just OK – they are fact of life.

James Wilkes, principle software engineer for technical infrastructure at Google, speaking at QCon 2015 last week, called this “normal” and “not a problem".

That’s why HP is extracting the cream of the ProLiant’s features on Cloudline. “In world of hundreds of thousands of servers a small number of server fails doesn’t impact their environment,” HP Cloudline group manager Dave Peterson told The Reg.

Cloudline is being thrown by HP at potential cloud service providers running multi-tenant systems, not your regular ProLiant user in the enterprise.

“ProLiant is great, but these folks are saying ProLiant is more than the need, Peterson said.

Next page: Back to Foxconn

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like