OREANDA-NEWS. September 26, 2011. Fujitsu Laboratories Limited today announced the construction of a next-generation server that, using resource pool architecture, is the world's first to succeed in the simultaneous delivery of high performance and flexibility.

In datacenters used to provide cloud services, ICT systems are configured to enable the efficient delivery of web services and other tasks. As cloud services become increasingly diverse, however, the ability to configure systems to upgrade performance and flexibility has become a pressing issue.

By pooling CPUs, hard disk drives (HDDs) and other hardware components that comprise the ICT infrastructure, and connecting these resources together using high-speed interconnects, Fujitsu Laboratories has enabled the delivery of high-performance server and storage capabilities as needed without losing any of the hardware's original functionality or performance.

This technology makes it possible to configure high-performance ICT infrastructure that can flexibly handle a variety of services. By consistently being able to rapidly configure optimal server and storage resources to fit the unique requirements of the task at hand, whether it is delivering the type of web services currently provided via the cloud, or new services yet to emerge, the new architecture makes possible higher value-added services. As a result, a variety of services are anticipated, including new ICT services, such as those involving the processing of huge sets of data, known as "big data," an essential component of human-centric computing.

Background

With the spread of cloud computing, the role expected of datacenters delivering cloud services is significantly changing. For example, in addition to traditional web services, new services being offered are making backend technologies ever-more important. Furthermore, big data, transmitted by large volumes of sensors in such fields as lifelogging, medicine, and agriculture, is collected in datacenters and put to use. Those changes drive the datacenters to meet the needs of efficient and flexible processing for an increasing diversity of services.
Technological Issues

In datacenters that deliver cloud services, the ICT infrastructure is built by connecting multiple servers and storage machines through a network. In most cases, the configuration of these servers and storage machines is tailored to the delivery of cloud-based services, such as web services. Now, however, in line with the diversification of cloud services, the need to offer services from datacenters is rising. This includes database services requiring high I/O performance or large-scale data processing tasks that use the local disks of servers, as well as for other services requiring a level of performance that had been difficult to satisfy with configurations geared toward traditional cloud systems.
About the Newly Developed Technology

Fujitsu Laboratories has developed a resource pool architecture in which the hardware components, such as CPUs and HDDs, are linked together with high-speed interconnects (Fig. 1). This marked success in building the world's first next-generation server prototype that can be configured either as a server equipped with local disks or as a system with built-in storage capabilities.

In comparison with typical system configurations tailored to traditional web services, the new prototype delivered a benchmark performance of approximately four times higher I/O throughput as well as increased performance of about 40% when running actual applications.