Building a low cost virtualized computing grid for scale

By Bradley D. Brown, TUSCOracle Certified Advantage Partner

The Oracle Experts

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Bradley D. Brownhttp://bradleydbrown.blogspot.com

TUSC Founder, Author, Chief Technology Officer

University of Denver Adjunct Professor Graduate Class – New Venture Creation

Clients IntelliReal, OAB, EventConnex, Jepp, Sun, …

Groups YPO, OOW, IOUG, ODTUG, LAOUG, RMOUG, etc. Oracle Fusion Middleware Director/Ace IOUC Fusion Council

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Agenda

Startup 101 N-tier grid

architecture Why build a grid? Scaling

considerations Then and Now Lessons Learned

Moving to Production

Competitive Benefit Cloud computing

and other reference material

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Startup 101 for Startup #10

Failure 101 Purchased software

of failed entity Denver MSA only,

MySQL and Delphi, Russia

Focused on small market (appraisers)

Goal / Vision Best valuation and

real estate intelligence in the USA

MUST be nationwide

Prototype / POC $20k All Oracle and ApEx Denver MSA only

People loved what we were about to deliver to the market

B2B is key, $ while sleep

Primarily “fixed” costs, low variable costs Conserve cash, retain

equity, build a scalable platform

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Beyond the Prototype into Beta

Next stages - $1M+ Procure data Differentiator - MLS Full development

Oracle SE One Numerous MySQL

databases for scaling services, etc.

Purchased 25 servers, 30TB of storage for about $50K

Light weight SOA Web Services

Business to Business Used iPerspective to

expose data and business logic as Web Services

Write it once Use it everywhere

Customers UI Internally

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The Concept and Reference Arch.Building an N-Tier Grid Architecture Approach and

architecture for UI layer and for B2B

Robust, scalable computing environment

Limitless scaling and redundancy in this architecture

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Grid Architecture

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Why Build a Grid?

Virtualization Call one service Loose coupling

Scale Redundancy Failover Backup, slower,

lower priority data access

Cost Open Source

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Grid and Scaling Considerations Oracle SE One

$5000/socket 2 sockets max No DB size limits

4TB database 100M rows “Wide” rows, many

tables 400Gb de-normalized

No partitioning No clustering (RAC) Expensive to move

to EE

Oracle Express Free Very Limiting Limited to 1

processor 4 GB of DB space 1 GB of memory

MySQL Free No limits Oracle version 5

Index optimization? Physical partitioning Partitioning better

now

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The Grid – then and now

Physical Partitioning 800 partitions initially 10,000+ partitions today Could be different drives or different boxes Partitioner moves the data from Oracle to MySQL MySQL replication moves it to all 10 boxes

10 small Dell 850s - $2k, 4Gb, 1Tb Initially partitioned 5 ways by County (800 counties) with 2

deep for failover and performance Later 1 way, 10 deep and by zip codes

Queries get directed based on partition and prioritized round robin technique through boxes Tiers (best data - Oracle, older - MySQL, etc) Prioritized per box

Upward scalability

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Lessons Learned – “The Ugly”

Initially boxes were crashing regularly Took time to rebuild Virtualization (VMs)

solves this to a large degree

Can be a lot to support on your own if you don’t purchase software to manage

Extra processing was required Constantly reading

the master database with 10 Partitioner threads Extra “master”

processing Network bandwidth

Replication chews up network bandwidth too

Recommend Open Source ETL approaches such as Pentaho

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From Concept Into Production

Took $1M more… Gave up some

equity Focused on core

Better values, data More services Benchmarks MLS data

Quick changes based on customer demands

Extensible API for customers

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Blowing Away The Competition

Big companies Slower to move to

new technology Slower to integrate

new data sources They have a flywheel

$20k today is valued at $30M – 2 more years, $100M

Why? Quick response to

market needs Focused on core, not

context Displaced the market iPerspective

Write in language you know, takes years to master a language

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Cloud Computing and Virtualization Amazon EC2

Powerful Grid

Oracle Cloud Uses EC2 and S3

SaaS

Deploy and scale your app in hours without changing code

Provision, monitor and manage operations with just a browser

Scale from a fraction of a server to hundreds of CPUs in days

Get your life back -- no more late night rushes to replace failed equipment

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Periscope Virtualizes Google’s Web ServiceSELECT *

FROM google

WHERE searchstring = ‘RMOUG Brad Brown’

RMOUG Brad Brown – 8 records

RMOUG – 374 records

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Good Papers, Presentations, …

Step-by-step Web Service Creation Web 2.0 & Apex Presentations Watch my Blog

http://bradleydbrown.blogspot.com

IntelliReal Case Studies

Java-based Oracle Web Development Java Server Pages JavaMail Java for the PL/SQL Developer Web Cache – achieving 150 the performance 9iAS Installation, Configuration, and Tuning Wireless

Practical Portal Practices Implementing JSP in Portal UltraSearch Search Engines Utl_smtp and Utl_http iFS JavaScript Top DBA scripts for Web

Developers Security

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Summary

Startup 101 N-tier grid

architecture Why build a grid? Scaling

considerations Then and Now Lessons Learned

Moving to Production

Competitive Benefit Cloud computing

and other reference material

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Questions?

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Copyright Information

Neither TUSC nor the author guarantee this document to be error-free. Please provide comments/questions to bradley_d_brown@tusc.com.

TUSC © 2008. This document cannot be reproduced without expressed written consent from an officer of TUSC.