INDUSTRY

Daniel Kim, CEO of leading high-performance and enterprise computing solutions provider Appro, talks to SC Online about future computing trends and strategies and how Appro is moving proactively to capitalize on these trends. He also shares his vision for the supercomputing market, identifies potential growth areas and discusses opportunities for Appro’s new Xtreme products. SC Online: How is Appro addressing the growing high-performance cluster computing market? DK: High-performance clustering technologies are maturing; scalability and availability are becoming crucial elements for critical business functions. Our customers are demanding more price/performance computing, reliability, availability, flexibility and compatibility while demanding less complexity and incompatibility. Appro has been listening to our customers and is gathering important product design requirements. The XtremeBlade, Appro’s next generation blade server, addresses the need for higher performance and reliability by integrating InfiniBand and Ethernet gigabit switch technologies into the blade and providing redundancy of its key components. It offers greater processor scalability and flexibility by making it possible to mix node configurations from dual to quad processing in the same rack cabinet. SC Online: How are clustering and blade servers related, and why is Appro betting on the acceptance of blade servers as the cluster node of choice? DK: The rapid growth in clusters has been driven by users’ desire to integrate nodes that are smaller, easier to replace and less expensive. The primary advantages of blade systems over traditional clusters are cost and system density. It also enables the use of existing infrastructure without the need for building additional floor space in the datacenter. This is possible due to less infrastructure being built into a blade than in a standalone system. Also, blade systems can be configured with more processors per rack than can be achieved with a cluster. The reduction in infrastructure also tends to reduce costs. By talking to our customers, we see the market adopting standard technologies as a way to drive down costs and also benefit from economies of scale. Leveraging blades as the node of choice fits with our company’s direction to drive standards across all parts of customers’ IT infrastructure. IDC also notes that blade servers are quickly gaining acceptance in commercial markets. In 2004, blade servers nearly doubled their penetration and blades are expected to represent over 25 percent of all server shipments worldwide. As the follow-on to Appro HyperBlade, XtremeBlade is positioned for both enterprise and high-performance computing markets. Appro is specifically targeting enterprise high-performance computing industries that also have strong database requirements. Blade server clustering provides tremendous value to our customers by improving price/performance and TCO through standardization, system consolidation and reliability. SC Online: How does clustering with InfiniBand compare to other types of clustering solutions and what are the advantages and disadvantages? DK: InfiniBand provides a high-performance interconnect built on an open standard that is supported by multiple vendors. As an interconnect, it offers high bandwidth and low latency for cluster computing up to thousands of nodes. As an enterprise interconnect, it is able to run fiber channel and TCP/IP protocols on the same wires, thus providing connectivity to existing storage and network equipment in the datacenter. Therefore, the user benefits from a high-speed network without having to entirely upgrade the datacenter at he same time. On the flipside, bulky cables and cost are disadvantages of InfiniBand. However, cost is decreasing as the market starts to embrace this technology, and cables can be eliminated by tight integration of InfiniBand to the blades. Appro worked closely with Mellanox, a leader in the InfiniBand-based silicon and system solutions to provide a best-of-breed InfiniBand solution to our customers. The XtremeBlade provides 10Gbps InfiniBand performance advantages through an integrated design and outstanding InfiniBand fiber management software. This delivers the high-performance and low-latency infrastructure required for next-generation datacenters. According to IDC, InfiniBand saw rapid adoption in the HPC market in 2004, and IDC predicts the total market for InfiniBand switches could reach US$324 million in 2008 – roughly a 400 percent increase from 2004. SC Online: Cluster remote management capabilities are becoming critical to IT system administrators. What monitoring and management software does Appro offer to address their needs? DK: Appro is proud to provide an excellent management tool for our products. Appro’s BladeDome remote management software is an integrated software suite that not only provides hardware level management functions such as power cycle and system monitoring, but also offers provisioning management. This enables system administrators to rapidly, reliably and remotely deploy operating systems, applications, patches and more across all servers simultaneously – saving hours of administrative time and reducing human error. SC Online: How do you see the adoption of Linux in a blade server cluster versus Windows environment? DK: Clustering applications have traditionally been evolved from the UNIX environment, and in the old days, every clustering application ran on a UNIX machine. Now with Linux, developers can almost seamlessly migrate the cluster application from UNIX to Linux with minimal effort. For this reason, UNIX played a big role in the fueling the rapid adoption of Linux clustering in high-performance computing. Windows traditionally comes from the desktop, but Microsoft has continued to invest in high-performance computing. Windows is more popular in the enterprise market. As applications begin to take advantage of clustering, we will see more implementations of Windows clustering in the enterprise moving forward. SC Online: What are customers asking for in terms of new product features, and when will Appro address the requirements? DK: Appro provides the latest cluster solutions so our customers can build high-bandwidth clusters today on an infrastructure that is flexible and easy to scale. Appro will soon be announcing its new 1U and 3U server products that will complement Appro’s Xtreme products in Q3/05. These new products will double the memory availability for both dual and quad processor servers currently not supported in any other server platforms. SC Online: Finally, how do you see Appro developing in the future? DK: Appro has made significant deals in the high-performance and enterprise computing markets that have demonstrated the company’s innovation in clustering computing, and we will continue to serve these markets. In addition, Appro’s Xtreme products will address needs for greater performance, reliability and availability for compute-intensive applications for high-performance computing and database markets. For the desktop replacement market, Appro and Avocent Digital Desktops are important players in this market. Appro offers Blade PC solutions to traders, financial services and government facilities. The Blade PC solution represents a viable substitute for standard desktop PCs in enterprises that value tighter security, better optimized floor space and lower operating costs. Appro plans to grow in this market, as this represents an enormous revenue stream opportunity. Appro has its headquarter in Milpitas, California, R&D and manufacturing center in Asia and a sales and service office in Houston, Texas. We are planning to expand and add another sales and service office on the East Coast to be closer to our customers in the financial and federal government verticals. We see great opportunities for Appro to exceed our customers’ expectations and needs by offering the next generation of compute solutions based on our innovative design and technology.