IBM Power8 and Ubuntu. How can people deny that IBM Power is the best performing platform in the industry after watching this video. Installing full versions of Hadoop, Websphere, Haproxy, SugarCRM, Memcached, and 3 others on Power8 in less then 3 minutes. Mark Shuttleworth says in the video “Power is extraordinary, JuJu is magic. The Combination is really quite good.”
Learn how POWER8 and Ubuntu create an extraordinary combination for easy migration to Linux on POWER8. Listen in as Canonical Founder Mark Shuttleworth joins IBM Power Systems General Manager Doug Balog to discuss the relationship between the two companies and shows how easy it is to port applications in minutes.
Video Transcription
Doug Balog: Mark, tell us about this relationship between Canonical and Ubuntu?
Mark: Well Ubuntu is the vision of Linux that most companies adopt when they move to the cloud. If you look across all of the major public clouds; the IBM cloud, Amazon, Azure, most of the Linux workloads for enterprises, and for startups is all Ubuntu. So we really know the cloud, and we’ve brought all of that cloud knowhow and tooling to Power8.
Doug Balog: That’s fantastic. Thank you for that. It’s great to have this partnership. So how has Ubuntu gained so much momentum and success in the cloud space?
Mark: Well we focused on scale. We make it really easy to orchestrate complex distributed systems at scale in dynamic environments like the cloud. But rather than talk about it, why don’t we show folks Cloud Magic happening live on stage on Power for the very first time.
Doug Balog: Actually after this morning I’m a little nervous about that, but let’s go do it Mark.
Mark Shuttleworth: Maybe the demo gods will be with us this time.
Doug Balog: Let’s hope for that. Let’s hope.
Mark Shuttleworth: Let’s have a look. Right. So here we have an open source orchestration environment. It is called Juju. It works across all the clouds, and now it works on Power8 as well. That blank canvas represents a small cluster of power servers with no software installed. So what we’re going to do is drop an orchestration template onto Juju, and let the magic happen. Now my colleague behind the curtain is going to kick things off. That is software that we’ve chosen for this demo. We could have used hundreds of different components, but we’ve picked these eight. That software is being installed from scratch, there was nothing running before we started this conversation. Each of those boxes comes from what we call a charm, which is like a package for the cloud. Juju uses those charms to deploy the software across machines in the cloud, but also bare metal and here now on Power.
Doug Balog: So Mark, that looks pretty great. How many of these charms are coming to power?
Mark Shuttleworth: All of them.
Doug Balog: I like that answer.
Mark Shuttleworth: We could have done hundreds of them. 40,000 packages in Ubuntu have been ported. These eight though are particularly interesting. So we have here a big data story, Apache Hadoop, coming up installed from scratch. That has been optimized. That charm is used on bare metal today at some scale, thousands of nodes. But that charm is now optimized on power to use IBM Java. This is IBM Java being installed for Hadoop on power. We have a websphere, so a typical IT workload. The great story here is just now the devops, the speed of the duration for developers, that same charm can be used on a laptop for the developer iteration, it can be used on the cloud, software of the clouds for test purposes, and it can be used bare metal now on power as well for production. Then there’s a third story there, which is an open source line of business application, Sugar, which is a CRM application. That’s backed by MariaDB for SQL, Memcache for acceleration, key value, and HAProxy for scale out. So all of those are being installed. It will take a few minutes.
Doug Balog: It will take a few minutes. So while Antonio runs those, why don’t you spend a few minutes and tell me why are clients choosing Ubuntu for their infrastructure?
Mark Shuttleworth: Well we’re the new enterprise Linux. We’re leaner, more cost effective at scale than traditional enterprise Linux. So that’s why guys like Google have made extensive use of Ubuntu, and now telecos, banks, media companies, are following suit. We’re also known as the lead platform for OpenStack deployments, so people building clouds both public and private.
Doug Balog: I mean certainly one of the things I see is as companies move to the cloud, they actually become more open to different platforms. Is that what you see as well?
Mark Shuttleworth: Right. The cloud is essentially an infrastructure reset. People certainly want to look with fresh eyes at the infrastructure as they make that transition. You don’t want to bring necessarily all of your baggage at scale, and foster operations, you probably want to think about how you want to design your infrastructure, and how you want to operate that infrastructure, and take inspiration from companies like Google. Tools like this; Ubuntu, OpenStack, Juju, allow people to have that efficient operations on any cloud or bare metal.
Doug Balog: Earlier on I was talking about openness, right? So I mean describe for perhaps the audience, besides power systems, or in addition to power systems, how is Canonical kind of working across the spectrum with IBM?
Mark Shuttleworth: Well we’re working across IBM, and also with independent ISVs to charm their software, and to port their software, so that people can have this level of agility with any software on any cloud, or on Power8. So we’re really connecting the Power ecosystem to the gene pool of innovation, which is now on the cloud.
Doug Balog: That’s great. So what has been your experience with bringing Ubuntu to power? How hard was it to move that over?
Mark Shuttleworth: Well we saw fantastic commitment from IBM. But 40,000 binary packages are part of Ubuntu on Power. Those 40,000 packages were all built from scratch over about five months, which equates to about 250 packages ported and built per day. On the new Power8 architecture, it really is a recompile and run in most cases for Linux software.
Doug Balog: So I think perhaps the demonstration might be ready for you to describe the results.
Mark Shuttleworth: Right. Well it looks good. So that dashboard over there is telling me that each of those pieces of software believe that they’re installed, and configured, and connected from scratch. What I’ll ask Antonio to do is to go in and have a look. What we’ll have to do is go and find out where they were installed, because this is all dynamic cloud style. So let’s start with SugarCRM. What we’re going to do is go in and have a look, find out where it is, because each time we do this it will come up in a different place. It’s very cloud like. We have Sugar up and running. Now Sugar is a PHP web workload, all open source. PHP of course runs straightforwardly after PHP was recompiled, straight recompile. Behind that we’ll go and log in just to make sure that it’s really working. It looks like we’ve got [? 06:15]. So that tells us that the database MariaDB is up and running, memcache up and running. It looks like everything is good, so let’s move on. Websphere. We’ll start with the Websphere dashboard. Again, we need to just go and find out exactly where it was deployed. So this is live. Now how many of you have seen Websphere deployed in minutes from scratch? Power is extraordinary. Juju is magic. The combination is really quite good.
Doug Balog: I think that is the secret to why this is working, they’ve got Power underneath it.
Mark Shuttleworth: So this is the standard Websphere dashboard. But we also put a little app in there, so this is a little sample app. This will just tell us, if this works this will tell us that again, all of the pieces connected up. There we go. So everything is working there. Let’s move on to Hadoop. Now Hadoop is obviously a big data analytics story. So what Antonio would have done is if Hadoop came up right, he would have then spun off a terasort. So we haven’t just installed and configured Hadoop, but we also should be able to show the results of a terasort, which is a little stress test, a quick revelation. So that’s Hadoop. Not very pretty, but that’s the Hadoop dashboard showing a cluster. With a little more work I can show you the management service, which will also show us the load spike essentially for terasort. So everything up and running by the looks of it.
Doug Balog: That’s pretty exciting stuff. What, that took about three minutes or so, right, to go from bare nothing, to having three pretty compelling workloads up and running.
Mark Shuttleworth: That’s right. So we really are connecting that kind of clouds dynamic, that instantaneous vibe of the cloud to the power ecosystem. Then in a sense also bringing power to the cloud.
Doug Balog: Mark, that’s fantastic. Congratulations on your announcement, and thanks for being an Open Power Foundation partner, and a partner with IBM.
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