IBM Announce Sale of x86 Server Business to Lenovo

As many of you will have seen, IBM announced, on the 23rd January 2014, the proposed sale of its x86 server business to Lenovo. This is subject to regulatory approval.

 

The threat of sale has been hanging over the x86 business since it was first reported nearly twelve months ago; there is now clarity that this will happen with Lenovo confirmed as the purchaser.

Peter Reakes, Sales Director at Celerity commented “This is positive news for both Celerity and more importantly for our customers.

 

“Lenovo has a proven track record of working with IBM including the purchase of their Desktop business some nine years ago. Since then Lenovo has invested in the products and taken the brand to ‘No.1’ worldwide. This should give us all confidence that our investment in System x and PureFlex technologies will be safeguarded moving forward.

 

"There are still a number of areas which need clarification, not least how the inclusion of PureFlex in the sale will affect the overall Pure portfolio. Celerity will keep their customers informed as the answers become clearer”, added Peter.

 

IBM will continue to invest in their System z brand, power technologies and storage and has also announced a major investment in the 'Watson' technology.

 

Your Celerity account manager will keep you abreast of developments in person but should you have any other questions or concerns please do not hesitate to contact us.

 

To view the full IBM announcement please click here.

 

 

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What's New in SQL?

SQL Server is Microsoft’s flagship relational database platform. This article looks at some of the new and enhanced features that will be included in the new release due out in the next version, namely SQL Server 2014.

 

Below are what I consider to be the top 5 features coming to a SQL Server near you sometime in 2014:-

 

1. Cache frequently used data on SSD

Officially known as ‘Buffer Pool Extension’. This functionality allows the integration of solid-state drives (SSDs) into SQL Server 2014 to use as a non-volatile random access memory (NvRAM) extension. In non-techie speak this means that SQL Server 2014 will be able to use the SSDs to cache frequently used data on fast storage that otherwise would have to be retrieved from the slower disks. This feature will work with clusters too as each cluster node can have its own SSDs.

 

My current thinking is that this will probably be version specific; Microsoft uses maximum memory capacity as one of the differentiators between their Standard and Enterprise versions and since this will allow you to extend the amount of available memory it stands to reason that it is probably going to be an Enterprise only feature.

2. AlwaysOn Availability Groups

AGs have been around for a while now, and are a great way of scaling out the read operations on a database system. The fairly significant limitation with AlwaysOn in SQL 2012 was that should your primary fail, or should your cluster lost its quorum, then it would automatically take down the readable secondaries too.

 

With SQL Server 2014, this will no longer be an issue; the secondaries will remain online even if the primary is no longer available. There are obviously a few caveats to this, the main one being that you will not be able to query the AG listener and will have to connect to the replica’s server name instead. This is a fairly easy thing to work around if you create individual DNS records for the readable replicas, but it is something that you will have to keep in mind. Additionally, you can now have up to 8 secondary AlwaysOn servers (previously 4), albeit with the increased cost in Enterprise licenses too.

 

3. Failover Cluster Support Enhancements

In the olden days (i.e. prior to SQL Server 2014), if you had a SQL Server Cluster then you had to accept the rule that only one node could access a volume at a time. This node effectively ‘owned’ the volume and no other node was, therefore, allowed to read from, write to, or for that matter see it.

 

However, from SQL Server 2014, you will be able to take advantage of using Clustered Shared Volumes in your cluster; this gives you a much greater flexibility and allows multiple cluster nodes to access the same storage volume at the same time. You will no doubt be aware that this technology been available in Windows and Hyper-V for a while now and it’s good to see the same functionality coming to SQL Server too. The biggest gain that I can see with this feature is that should one node of your SQL cluster lose connectivity to its storage, it should still be able to read and write data over the network to the storage a via a different nodes connection. Obviously this would be slower than if it did it directly, but it is still a quantum leap over and above the functionality we had with traditional clustering.

 

4. Specialised in-memory OLTP tables

If your organisation has a truly large dataset (the term ‘big data’ springs to mind), then this feature may be of extreme interest to you.

 

Hekaton is apparently Greek for a hundred, which is the performance improvement goal that Microsoft set out to achieve when they started with this new technology. Hekaton is best suited for storing ‘hot’ (heavily used) tables in memory effectively removing the need for latches and locking to occur, which in turn should then result in a significant overall performance increase.

Obviously with this sort of potential improvement, it is not going to be as simple as enabling the feature and away you go. There will be structural changes required to implement it properly. For instance, Hekaton does not support the use identity columns, which means that you may need to consider changing your primary clustered key to a GUID instead.

 

Also, you will hopefully have already considered that keeping specific tables resident in memory will mean that you have less of it available for the rest of the system to use. This may not be a problem if you have a monster server or two with terabytes of RAM available, but for the less ‘Olympian’ administrators out there you should at least look at whether you need to max out the memory capacity for your servers before turning this feature on. You definitely do not want to run out of available memory with this feature.

 

5. The Cloud

Although already mentioned previously in passing, Microsoft is also investing heavily in their cloud offering Windows Azure. New features and functionality in SQL Server 2014 will allow you create hybrid database environment that allows for easy wizard based movement of databases between on premise and Azure in both directions.

 

This functionality also extends to AlwaysOn groups, sending backups directly to Azure storage and for that matter it will even be possible to create an on premise database, with the data and log files held in Azure. Whilst I am the first to say that I am not exactly sure as to why you would want to do this last one, I sure that there are some scenarios whereby this would be a desirable thing.

 

Final Thoughts

As a former SQL DBA, used to managing multi-terabyte databases, I can see a number of potentially significant performance improvements that will be coming in SQL Server 2014. It’s good to know that whilst Microsoft are advancing with their Cloud vision, they are also still investing heavily in improving their on premise versions too, providing administrators with new features to allow them to implement a hybrid on premise/cloud environment when you’re ready.

 

Whilst there is no pricing information for SQL Server 2014 available from Microsoft at present, I think it is reasonably safe to say that it will not be any cheaper than you are currently paying for SQL Server licensing.

 

If you have the time, I would suggest that you download a copy of the latest preview and have a play. Microsoft have stated that if you have a database that currently runs on SQL Server 2012 you should have no problems running it on SQL Server 2014.  I would take that with a pinch of salt as there are always going to be exceptions, but give it a go and see what performance gains are there to be had out of the box. I think you will be suitable impressed.

 

Please note: The information in this article is based on the latest community technology preview and the feature set included in the final build is subject to change until SQL Server 2014 goes to RTM.

 

Should you require any further information regarding SQL or to discuss your requirements please do not hesitate to contact us.

 

Mike Metcalf, Technical Consultant, Celerity Limited

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What is Scrum?

Historically a large proportion of companies have used Prince2 or a derivative for their standard project methodology. However, over recent years the move of companies to a more dynamic and flexible approach to projects has increased. There are a variety of these new approaches e.g. scrum, lean etc., which generally are more about being adaptive.

 

Scrum is a framework for managing projects that is focused on a flexible holistic strategy where a team works as a unit to reach a common goal as opposed to a "traditional, sequential approach". This method was originally designed for use within application and product development, but can also be used in other areas. Scrum enables the creation of self-organising teams by encouraging co-location of all team members, and verbal communication among all team members and disciplines in the project.

 

A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that during a project the customers can change their minds about what they want and need (often called “requirements churn”), and that unpredicted challenges cannot be easily addressed in a traditional predictive or planned manner. The focus is on maximizing the team's ability to deliver quickly and respond to emerging requirements.

 

There are only three roles involved in this methodology:

 

• Product Owner – this is the person responsible for the Product Backlog i.e. contents, priorities and availability

• ScrumMaster – this is the equivalent role to a Project Manager from a responsibility prospective, but has major differences in that this is more of the facilitation role rather than a management role

• The Team – is responsible for the process of each iteration during the project and the project itself

 

Scrum projects generally start with a vision, which might be vague at first, but will then become clearer as the project moves forward. The Product Owner is responsible for delivering the vision that maximises the ROI and formulates the Product Backlog.

 

The Product Backlog is a list of functional and non-functional requirements for the solution delivery by the project. The Product Backlog is never complete as it evolves from an initial estimate of the requirements through management identifying changes to make the product improvements. The items are then prioritised so that the items can then be grouped into proposed releases.

 

All work is done in Sprints, which are manageable chunks of work (maybe 2-30 days) where the objective is to get a ship-ready state.

 

Sprints generally begin with a planning meeting and end with a review meeting.

 

A Sprint Backlog is a list of tasks to be completed during the sprint and assigned to individuals. These are the actual decomposed items from the product backlog. This list must be agreed to by the entire team prior to the sprint actually beginning.

 

The Scrum is a short regular meeting, which is quite often daily, where the usual brief is to answer the following three questions:

 

• What have you done on this project since the last Scrum meeting?

• What do you plan to do on this project between now and the next Scrum?

• What impediments stand in the way of you achieving your commitments to the project?

 

A Burndown Chart is a monitoring tool, which shows the amount of work remaining across time and is a good way of visualising the correlation between the amount of work remaining at any point and the progress of the Team(s) in reducing this work.

Scrum can be implemented through a wide range of tools. Many companies use universal tools, such as spreadsheets to build and maintain artefact’s such as the sprint backlog. There are also open-source and proprietary packages dedicated to management of products under the Scrum process. Other organisations implement Scrum without the use of any tools, and maintain their artefact’s in hard-copy forms such as paper, whiteboards, and sticky notes.

 

Should you require any further information on Scrum please do not hesitate to contact us.

 

Kevan Dix, Project Manager, Celerity Limited

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