Checking-In with Linux NetworX

By Steve Fisher, Editor in Chief -- News of Linux NetworX graces the pages of Supercomputing Online fairly regularly, but it had been awhile since we’d spoken to anyone at the company. To rectify that situation we recently sat down for a chat with Joshua Harr, Linux NetworX chief technical officer. SCO: Linux NetworX has had a few recent announcements. One of which is new and enhanced features to your cluster appliance ICE Box. Please give the readers some details on the new features, upgrades, etc. HARR: ICE Box is an award-winning cluster appliance from Linux NetworX that fully integrates with our cluster management software ClusterWorX to provide advance power monitoring and power control. ICE Box’s new features provide increased performance, higher scalability and improved reliability. Greater Reliability - Improved Update Procedure - In the event of a power outage, network problem or other problem while updating ICE Box, a failsafe program is implemented that will restore the ICE Box to a previously healthy state. ICE Box now buffers out-of-band data per node. The buffer history allows the ICE Box to store a node's console error while the administrator isn't connected. ICE Box has the ability to remotely debug a kernel through the Magic SysReq key sequence. ICE Box functions are now also available through SNMP. This will enable many customers to leverage much of the ICE Box cluster management functionality through their existing management frameworks. SCO: Another recent announcement was ClusterWorX Lite as well as the latest version of ClusterWorX, Version 2.1. Tell the readers about these cluster management offerings. HARR: Linux NetworX released ClusterWorX Lite to provide organizations with cluster systems of 16 nodes or less an alternative cluster management software package with the basic functionality of ClusterWorX, but without some of the enhanced features required for larger systems. ClusterWorX Lite can easily be upgraded to the full ClusterWorX version to gain additional features like the programmable Event Engine, and the ability to create and control sub-groups of nodes within the cluster. ClusterWorX 2.1 is also being released by Linux NetworX to provide new features, such as enhanced network management capabilities, as well as improvements on existing features. SCO: Why Linux NetworX products over the competition? What's sets your product offerings apart? HARR: Linux NetworX provides turnkey Linux clustering solutions, cluster management tools, and clustering expertise and professional services. Turnkey Solutions: For clustering, installing a standard Linux distribution, or even one optimized for clustering often isn’t enough. Most customers have a set of specific requirements or desire a level of integration that can’t be offered by simply installing an operating system. Linux NetworX has the ability to help configure the cluster and has professional services to ensure the cluster is running to the customer’s satisfaction. ICE Cluster Management Tools: Competing tools don’t have the level of sophistication of ClusterWorX. ClusterWorX is the only management suite that provides programmable event capability, easily extensible plugin interfaces, and other such advanced capabilities. These are all integrated into a remotely available GUI. Clustering Expertise and Services: Linux NetworX has been delivering professional Linux cluster systems and services longer than any other company. Our support and engineering team has the experience to help with customer problems or questions, or can help optimize code. Most other vendors only support hardware. We’ve covered some of the features of the Linux NetworX offering, but let’s talk about benefits. Organizations purchase Linux clusters systems because they have a specific need, such as crunching seismic data, drug discovery research, or even high availability applications for example. The cluster is a means to an end. With this in mind, Linux NetworX products provide the following benefits: Time and money savings Allows the customer to focus on their core competency (instead of cluster administration) Reduces the risk of adopting clusters Administrator peace of mind The less time an organization has to dedicate to system administration the better. Our Evolocity cluster systems and management tools simplify administration, ultimately saving time and money. As an example, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) recently stated that our cluster management software ClusterWorX is a key component in saving time. In the event of a hardware failure, with ClusterWorX he can resolve the problem in less than five minutes. Without ClusterWorX the same task would take more than an hour. A simple example, but we all know time is money - and if other people’s work is affected by downtime, this time/money factor can be significant. The right cluster management tools allow organizations to dedicate resources to its core business or research, instead of spending time integrating, configuring and managing complex Linux cluster systems. Our turnkey cluster solutions are installed onsite, so the customer can focus their efforts on their specific application. In the end, the right clustering solution and management tools reduce the risk of adopting Linux clusters. Organizations can receive the most return on their Linux clustering investment by training and empowering its administrators and this ultimately leads to peace of mind for the administrator and a lower total cost-of-ownership for the organization. SCO: Any recent customer success stories you'd like to share with us? HARR: Linux NetworX recently delivered a 120-processor Linux cluster to Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, one of the leading drug development companies in the world. They are currently using the cluster to help predict the suitability of certain molecules in potential drugs. One of the reasons Boehringer Ingelheim chose Linux NetworX is because the ClusterWorX software helps save time and money. SCO: You folks were at the recent Commercial HPC show in Orlando. How'd it go for Linux NetworX? What was your impression of how the show went as a whole? What was the turnout like? HARR: Because this was the first year of Commercial High Performance Computing, Linux NetworX wanted to have a presence to show support for events that encourage development in this industry. Like many technical conferences and shows during this economic downturn, attendance wasn’t quite as strong as I’m sure they had hoped. However, the speakers at the show were very knowledgeable and shared some exciting advancements taking place in the high performance computing industry. SCO: Is there anything you'd care to add? HARR: Linux NetworX has a strong engineering team focused on advancing clustering, making clusters easier to adopt and helping our customers maximize their clustering investment. As we discussed in this interview, Linux NetworX is continuing to improve our cluster management tools ClusterWorX and ICE Box, and are working on other projects like LinuxBIOS to make clusters more powerful, manageable and scalable.