Constellation Technologies Providing a support service to commercial users of gLite Nick Trigg

Constellation Technologies Constellation Technologies Ltd –Spin out from Rutherford Appleton Laboratory –Provide a commercial service to users of gLite Enterprise grids/clouds Global grids/clouds SuperCloud TM –Acess to initial development funding of > €300,000 –Early customer interest –Looking for gLite developers

Rutherford Appleton Laboratory Didcot, south of Oxford, UK Owned by STFC (The Science and Technology Facilities Council) –Largest Particle Physics research lab in the UK UK Tier 1 site for WLCG NGS (National Grid Service) centre

Constellation SuperCloud TM Based on gLite –Additional proprietary higher level services –Robust, proven and global in scale Enterprise grids/cloud –Infrastructure independent –Storage and/or compute SuperCloud TM –Virtual resource marketplace software Market based resource allocation (reverse auction)

Cloud vs Grid From the customers/end users point of view They are the same

Improving Utilization Hardware Servers: (-) low utilisation rates, scalability problems Utilisation Virtual Servers: (+) improved utilisation rates, better scalability, easy disaster recovery (-) increased number of servers to manage, incompatible virtualization platforms Enterprise/Departmental Grid: (+) improves utilisation rates of physical servers, enables collaboration (-) limited scalability, lack of interoperability between vendors, limited efficiency of policy based mechanisms 100% 0% Grid Cloud Computing: (+) no need to own hardware, shared access, improved utilisation through pay-as-you-use (-) incompatible platforms, ‘fair price’ is dubious to users

The Grid/Cloud Advantages Lower cost Access to larger infrastructure –Faster calculations –More storage Speed –Faster calculations –Easier provisioning Disadvantages Very complicated Security Lack of confidence –Trust –Compatibility No one size fits all

Facing New Challenges Complexity of modern IT infrastructures: physical servers, virtual machines, clusters, Grids, geographical distribution Cost of electricity Credit crunch Further pressures to reduce costs Openness to the acceptable security concept

Finding Solutions Improving utilisation rates through market based algorithms for resource allocation Accessing external infrastructures on- demand Using a single management platform for all computing resources Opportunity for gLite

Grid/cloud market structure Hardware (owned) Hardware (service) Middleware Applications Customer Network

Competition Hardware Operating System Virtualisation Enterprise Grid Enterprise Cloud Cloud Constellation Technologies Incompatible Standards Creates pools of resources Higher utilisation rates Incompatible Standards Interfaces Interfaces and Market Mechanisms Key differentiators: Open source – no vendor lock-in Scalability

Constellation End Use cases Financial institution –Internal enterprise grid/cloud Drivers –Costs and speed Issues –Security Pharmaceutical giant –External compute cloud Drivers –Costs, speed and increased accuracy Issues –Security and data transfer Media company –External storage cloud Drivers –Costs and flexibility Issues –Security, flexibility and speed