# Presentation: 724668

## Rackable SystemsOverview

**Mike Hoey**
**Sr Director, Northeast Sales**

## About Rackable Systems

**Leading Provider of Servers & Storage for Large-Scale Data Centers**

**Notes:**
We win customers for 3 primary reasons – 
- we have a high degree of configuration flexibility and control
- we have differentiated designs that offer real benefits in terms of density, thermal management, power consumption
- we make it easy for the people who have to deploy and maintain large scale server systems with a turnkey deployment approach, industry leading remote management tools, and an ability to integrate with the customer’s data center automation strategies of choice

## Vital Stats

- Founded in 1999, based in Silicon Valley, CA
- 4th largest x86 server vendor in North America                    (IDC & Gartner)
- Fastest-growing x86 provider worldwide (IDC)
- Successful IPO in June 2005 (Nasdaq: RACK)
- Distinguished by our highly differentiated chassis, cabinet and power designs (patents & awards)
- The first to launch DC power solutions for wide-spread data center adoption (patents pending)

## Rapid Revenue Growth

- (1) 12 months ended September 30, 2002.
- (2) Midpoint of recent guidance range.

**(2)**

**Rapid Revenue Growth**

**(1)**

## 250+ Leading CustomersAcross Many Verticals

**Internet**

**250+ Leading Customers****Across Many Verticals**

**Entertainment**

**Enterprise Software**

**Semiconductor Design**

**Biotech & Pharma**

**Fox**
**Sports Network**

**Top 10 **
**Global**
** ****I-Bank**

**UCSC Human Genome Project**

## Old Way

**Old Way**

**Rackable Way**

**A Vast Improvement**

**Notes:**
Here’s what we do, in a nutshell

## The Data Center Dilemma

**The Data Center Dilemma**

** ****Density**

** ****Power**

** ****Heat**

** ****Operations**

**Notes:**
I think one of the reasons we’ve been so successful is because our solutions focus on addressing the most pressing issues associated with scale out deployments:

Maximizing density
Addressing increasing power needs
Managing heat output
And figuring out how to deal with the escalating costs of maintenance

## Maximum Density

- Highly differentiated server & cabinet designs
- Half-depth form factors for back-to-back mounting
- 2x density levels = 88 servers per cabinet = 352 cores
- Ability to cool fully populated cabinet of systems

- Back-to-back mounting
- 352 cores per cabinet

- Back-to-back and side-to-side mounting
- 352 cores per cabinet

## Total flexibility and configurability
Open architecture, X86 designs
Customer and order specific bill of material
Rapid new technology adoption
Range of memory, disk formats (SCSI, SATA, IDE, SAS) and RAID configurations
Leading edge development around AMD and Intel chipsets
Best-of-breed partners 
Full support for range of software platforms
World-class OS expertise
Linux, Windows, Solaris

- Open architecture, X86 designs
- Customer and order specific bill of material
- Rapid new technology adoption
- Range of memory, disk formats (SCSI, SATA, IDE, SAS) and RAID configurations
- Leading edge development around AMD and Intel chipsets
- Best-of-breed partners
- Full support for range of software platforms
- World-class OS expertise
- Linux, Windows, Solaris

**Flexible Configurations**

## Lower Power Consumption

- Reduce power consumption in the server
- Use low wattage parts (CPU, memory, fans)
- Eliminate unnecessary components
- Map designs to data center power availability
- Less power = less heat = greater reliability
- Reduce losses associated with getting power to servers
- Industry’s first DC Power technology
- AC-to-DC conversion at cabinet, row and data center level
- 10-30% lower power draw*
- 20-40% elimination of heat at server level*
- Maximize density to available power in legacy data centers
- Only supplier to provide Direct DC powered servers and storage
- In AC systems, carefully match power supply to system power draw

- *Source:  Lawrence Berkeley/California Energy Commission, 6/2006

## Which would you rather have in your server? 

- Which would you rather have in **your** server?

_**Rackable Systems DC Power Supply**_

_**Competitors’ AC Power Supply**_

**Small:  29 cu in (no moving parts!)**
**2 million hours MTBF**
**Dual power feed **
**93% efficiency**
**Very low thermal signature**

**Big:  240 cu in**
**100,000 hours MTBF**
**Need (2) for Dual power feed**
**73% efficiency**
**High thermal signature**

**Choose the cooler, more efficient, more reliable solution:**

## Cabinet DC Power Technology

- Highly reliable DC power supply (93% efficient) replaces standard AC power supply (73%  efficient)*
- Rectifiers convert AC input to DC power for 10% increase in power efficiency
- DC distribution bars inside cabinet deliver N+M redundant DC power to individual servers
- 20-40% elimination of heat*
- Deployed in any existing AC data center

- *Source:  Lawrence Berkeley/California Energy Commission, 6/2006

**Power Cost Savings and Higher Reliability**

## Row Level
One rack used to power entire row of cabinets
Added redundancy, reduced cost
Reduce number of circuits
Eliminate need for AC PDUs in data center

- Row Level
- One rack used to power entire row of cabinets
- Added redundancy, reduced cost
- Reduce number of circuits
- Eliminate need for AC PDUs in data center

**Row & Data Center DC Solutions **

- Data Center Level
- Additional efficiency benefit (up to 30%)
- Improved thermal shift/corresponding HVAC benefits
- Maturing technology

## AC – DC  Greenfield Building Comparison

| Power
Design | Bldg | Watts | Raised Floor | Cost | Construction | Energy | Processing |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
|   | Size (Sq Ft) | Per Sq Ft | Space (Sq Ft) | SF/Raised FL | Cost | Cost/yr | Capacity |
|   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |
| AC | 200,000 | 100 | 100,000 | $1,200  | 120MM | 17.5MM | X |
|   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |
| DC | 133,000 | 100 | 100,000 | $1,000  | 100MM | 17.5MM | X+30% |
|   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |
| DC | 123,000 | 70 | 100,000 | $900  | 90MM | 12.3MM | X |
|   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |
|   |   |   |   | Savings |  30MM  |  5.2MM  |   |
|   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |

**Data Center Level DC Power**

## Customer Case Study

##  DC Power Testimonials

- “Rackable has allowed us to increase our global hardware capacity by more than 50% without increasing our electricity costs.” – CIO of Webex to* Forbes Magazine, June 2006*
- “DC Power keeps the units considerably cooler within the chassis themselves and saves us somewhere between 10 and 20 percent over the AC-powered alternative."* *– Lead Engineer at University of Florida to* CNET, March 2006*
- By purchasing a DC-powered solution, eWEEK Labs believes organizations will increase server reliability while lowering monthly power costs. – *eWeek Labs, March 2006*
- “We saw the power savings right away when we put in the Rackable Systems servers.” – President of Spectrum to *eWeek, March 2006*
- “Using DC powered [servers], we're saving money on energy, while receiving 20% more compute power in the same footprint." – VP Technology of Right Media to *Tech Target, Jan 2006*

## Cooling Strategies

- Better heat evacuation
- Back-to-back mounting enables central air plenum in cabinet
- Louver system allows vectoring of air to returns (either upward or downward inside plenum)
- Elimination of ‘hot aisle/cold aisle’ phenomenon
- Reduces requirements on air handlers
- No additional power needed to evacuate hot air

- Every 100W of power consumed by a server requires 70W power for HVAC to cool it
- Reduced power = less heat = reduced HVAC costs = higher MTBF

## Operational Savings

- Better serviceability
- I/O in front for easy access
- RoamerTM remote management
- Modular power mating
- Elimination of rail kits & clean cabling
- Turnkey deployments
- Designed to meet customer-specific data center space and power requirements
- Fully racked, stacked and cabled
- System/cabinet-level power optimization
- Configurations specific to customer
- Comprehensive support and sparing packages
- World-class technical consulting

## Low Total Cost of Ownership

**Low Total Cost of Ownership**

## Global Service and Support Capabilities

- Choice in domestic or global support
- Complete 24x7 North American capability, 4 hour onsite support from network of 3,000 engineers
- We currently support customers in Beijing, England, India, Ireland, Japan, Luxembourg, Malaysia and Taiwan
- Self-service support portal for customers
- Unified case management infrastructure
- Use SF.com infrastructure
- Many customers provide automated input via SOAP APIs
- Custom support models available globally
- Build-to-order service and support options
- “Fix in Place”
- Sparing
- Self-maintenance

## Rackable Systems Advantage

**Rack & Roll ! – full turnkey deployment**
**Open architecture – COTS**
**Built-to-order, **_**NOT**_** “Cookie-Cutter”**
**Superior cooling & power management**
**Best Rack Server Density in Market**
**Superior TCO**
**Easier serviceability**
**Full Customer Support choices **
**On site sparing / field inventory**
**Worldclass Linux support**
**Short lead times - Rapid deployment **
**	****(3,000 server order in 7 weeks !)**

## RapidScaleTM High-Performance Clustered Storage Systems 

## Accelerating Application Throughput

**CPU MIPS (12X)**

**Application **
**throughput (4X)**

**2000**

**I/O interconnect (10X)**

**Memory bus MHz (8X)**

**2004**

**Source: ****www.top500.org**

***RapidScaleTM***
***closes the gap***

**Scalable applications are NOT commodities...even if most hardware is**

**Notes:**
The graph highlights the underlying disconnect between the new server cluster compute paradigm and legacy storage solutions.  While processors and interconnects and buses and disk drives have gotten continually faster, application throughput has not improved at anything close to the same rate.  The RapidScale architecture helps to improve application performance by delivering data to the cluster nodes at faster rates than are otherwise possible.

## The RapidScale Storage Solution

- Enhances application engine performance
- Eliminates expensive SAN arrays
- Minimizes use of slower NAS protocols
- Eliminates complex parallel file systems
- Reduces storage administration effort

**Notes:**
A key point relates to minimizing the use of expensive, complex fibre channel SANs and legacy NAS protocols.  To this point in time the Network File System (NFS) protocol has been the preferred means to share networked data in Linux and Unix environments; the Common Internet File System (CIFS) protocol is the Windows equivalent.  However, NFS and CIFS are “heavyweight” protocols, and thereby limit the amount of data that can be moved across the network.  (Note:  several competitive cluster storage solutions in the market are simply NAS aggregators, and therefore suffer from inherent NAS protocol performance limitations.)  As a rough rule of thumb, an NFS server can utilize only about 70% of a Gigabit Ethernet network connection (CIFS utilization ranges from 50-60%), and the fastest NAS servers today can only move roughly 150-170MB/sec across the network.  
The RapidScale architecture can easily deliver an order of magnitude better performance, using lower cost hardware platforms and leveraging existing network fabric.  By using standard Linux tools and commands, there is no “learning curve” to managing a RapidScale deployment.  This is explained later in the presentation.

| 

                     NAS | 
Clustered 
Storage |
| --- | --- |
| 

DAS | 
SAN
 |

**Price / Performance**

**Capacity**

**Evolution to Clustered Storage**

**Notes:**
Over the past few years, the deployed computing model has dramatically changed from small numbers of monolithic SMP machines to large numbers of (relatively) small cluster server nodes.  But the storage model hasn’t changed in the past 10+ years!  Legacy NAS/DAS/SAN solutions no longer fit the prevailing compute paradigm, and the inability of those solutions to deliver data to the cluster fast enough leads to wasted compute cycles.  RapidScale has developed a new storage model to solve the “data delivery delay” problem.  RapidScale customers get a better return on their compute cluster investment as those compute cycles are more fully utilized.
The following slides are illustrative of the changing compute and storage paradigm, and set the stage for an understanding of RapidScale’s cluster storage solution.

## Next Generation of Storage Networking

_**Clustered Storage**_
**No data silos; all nodes access the same *****global name space***** file system **
** ****Highest performance**
** ****Excellent capacity utilization**
** ****Data ****sharing**** across nodes**
** ****Lower capital and operating costs**

**Notes:**
Today, the compute/application server has changed 180 degrees; moving from small numbers of relatively large SMP machines as depicted in the previous slides to very large numbers of relatively small machines.  The challenge that exists today is that we are still trying to feed those application servers with the same legacy storage model.  But it’s no longer practical to deploy DAS or segmented SAN solutions; and the performance limitations of NAS protocols lead to lost CPU cycles as those engines are forced to wait for data delivery.
A new storage model is needed to meet the demands of the cluster computing world.

## RapidScaleTM Clustered Storage

** ****Parallel data access improves**
**   ****application performance **
** ****Global name space file system**
** ****Ethernet switches become virtual**
**   ****multi-ported RAID controller**
** ****Linear performance scaling**
** ****Simple management**
** ****Highly Available configurations**

**RapidScale Storage Appliances maintain cache coherency across clients **

**Notes:**
A RapidScale implementation looks very much like the “truly parallel” approach depicted earlier.  All clients can access all data residing in a single name space / global file system. 

In fact, a RapidScale deployment looks very much like that of the preceding “truly parallel”  slide.  All clients access a global name space data repository without first having to query a meta data controller, and no inter-node communication exists between clients or storage appliances.  The RapidScale model is that clients aren’t aware of other clients, and storage appliances aren’t aware of other storage appliances.  With no dependence on in-place resources, as new resources are added performance scales linearly.

By using iSCSI as a building block, each client “sees” each storage apppliance as a (very large) physical disk drive.  All clients each believe that he is the owner of those virtual “disk drives”, and communicates with what appears to be a local file system on those drives.  Under this model then, a client writes data to a collection of virtual disk drives using standard software RAID functionality, RAID0 striping or RAID-Linear concatenation.  Of course, there is a layer of abstraction between client and storage in that the client thinks he is writing a RAID0 or RAID Linear stripe across a collection of local disks; in reality data is written to large numbers of network attached disks using a RAID5 parity implementation.
To ensure data integrity an “on demand” cache coherence exists between client and storage, analogous to SMP coherence between processors and shared memory.  This mechanism guarantees that a client will always access the correct current representation of a data block.

## Capacity 
Up to 8TB (16 x 500GB drives) per appliance
Aggregate to 18 exabytes

Performance
200+ MB/sec (Infiniband)
Aggregate to over 10 GB/sec

Networking Support
Ethernet, Infiniband, Myrinet

Power
DC or AC

- Up to 8TB (16 x 500GB drives) per appliance
- Aggregate to 18 *exabytes*
**Performance**
- 200+ MB/sec (Infiniband)
- Aggregate to over 10 GB/sec
**Networking Support**
- Ethernet, Infiniband, Myrinet
**Power**
- DC or AC

**RapidScale Storage Appliances**

**           **_**RapidScale SA3100**_
** ****AC power**
** ****Up to 8TB per appliance**
** ****Up to 112TB per cabinet**

**           **_**RapidScale SA2150**_
** ****DC power**
** ****Up to 4.5TB per appliance**
** ****Up to 126TB per cabinet**

**Notes:**
Self explanatory

## RapidScale Performance Monitor

**Easy to use monitoring tool**
** ****ID RapidScale Systems**
** ****Monitor performance**
** ****Tune network and application hotspots**

***Small scale array running***
*** ******at 1GB/sec!***

**Notes:**
RapidScale comes with a performance monitor that helps the administrator maintain the health of the array.  The radial arms in the graphs represent individual bricks, making it easy to determine the load level being satisfied by each brick.  It is possible to record and replay time intervals in order to review historical data, making it possible to identify hot-spots or error conditions and to be used for capacity planning purposes.

## The RapidScale Value Proposition

**Modular Solution**
-    **Add capacity/performance by simply adding more Storage Appliances**
**Simple Installation and Deployment**
-    **Easy to deploy and manage using well-known**** ****Linux tools**
**Greater Return-on-Investment**
-    **Increased cluster efficiency improves**** ****application performance**
**Faster Results **
-    **Better application performance streamlines and improves business  **
**   ****decisions**
**Most Environmentally Friendly Solution**
-   **DC power will save up to 30% in power consumption and up to 40%  BTU   reduction while back-to-back / half-depth provides double density and cuts floorspace in half !**

**Notes:**
Self explanatory

## Thank You