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

• SuperCloudTM

– 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 SuperCloudTM

• Based on gLite– Additional proprietary higher level services– Robust, proven and global in scale

• Enterprise grids/cloud– Infrastructure independent– Storage and/or compute

• SuperCloudTM

– 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

Uti

lisati

on

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

Net

wor

k

Competition

HardwareOperatingSystem

Virtualisation

EnterpriseGrid

EnterpriseCloud

Cloud

ConstellationTechnologies

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