Мотивация
Направи ми впечатление, че повечето дипломни работи, проучвания, научни трудове, статии… започват със мотивация на изследването.
Айде и аз да не изостана, начатках за половин час следното:
As a student which is graduating soon I wanted to do a case study about MPI applications in real life situation. This led me to researching various sources of information about high performance computing (HPC) solutions. All-in-all discussions held, had primary focus on virtualization, as being the next cost-and-performance effective solution.
CPU engineering companies (AMD and Intel) have both introduced platforms which are fully virtualization capable and optimized.
Aspects of virtualization nowadays are so popular, that different hardware vendors (Dell, HP, Transtec) be it big or small, offer optimized Hypervisor support in all their latest products.
On 1st of June 2009, VMWare introduced their new virtualization solution – vSphere, which should bring cloud computing closer to the small/medium enterprise users. Taking a quick look on the Virtualization outline, we notice that the structure of vSphere deploys simple High Availability (HA) as a solution to consolidate hardware and software, thus eliminating single points of failure and combining them in a redundant, fail-safe system. Further improvements such as resource sharing and load balancing are not interesting to me, as to a VM implemented solution is never able to reach the full performance of a native supported application.
However one of the biggest consumers of IT backbone infrastructure is the office-line, which doesn’t have high performance requirements. Indeed, office line applications are idling and are a perfect subject to be implemented in a virtual environment.
But the whole virtualization magic has a major drawback – storage. When it comes to the store of the whole cloud, VMware team draws a nice cloud with storage-like barrels, which may lead one to the false concept of redundant storage.
In fact VMware needs extremely expensive storage solutions like iSCSI or proprietary solutions like HP Eve or EMC which will cost considerably more than a blade solution for the needs of a small business.
And if one tries to use a direct attached storage solution (DAS) to minimize costs, which one would be the most efficient? Adding multiple drives in a proprietary hardware RAID array and stop by the church every night to pray that nothing happens to your data? Not the best solution if you ask me, therefore I’ll try to present the concepts of different Hard disk based storage solutions. Bear with me, ok?
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