Case study: OpenBlockS266

This website runs on OpenBlockS!

Achieving easier administration and a 70% reduction in energy consumption with our own product

Plat'Home Co., Ltd.

It says a lot about a company's trust in their own products if they use them in-house for real (and even more if they don't). For us, it's a matter of pride. And it is even better if what we make increases the reliability of our systems and reduces our energy bills. See the following example of what "eating our own dogfood" did for us, and what I could do for you.

In August this year Plat'Home reorganized the servers for its Web services with the goal to straighten and clear up the structure and increase the effectiveness of the administration. As an added benefit, the goal was to reduce energy consumption and increase reliability. A total of eight Intel architecture 1U rack servers were reduced to just two rack servers and five OpenBlockS units.

With a staggering 70% reduction in energy consumption, we managed to reduce the carbon footprint of our server systems and an their running costs.

Outline of the new system

The starting point of our system revision were six rack mounted Intel architecture servers (*1). There were a total of 24 virtual machines running on these servers. The systems on these servers included three company web site frontends, our global site, the Japanese site and an e-commerce platform, each with a release version and a test version (*2), for a total of 6 servers. Other virtual machines included our secondary DNS server, as well as groupware, timekeeping system and other internal services, which totalled 17 virtual machines.

Two separate rack servers that were running our primary DNS server and a proxy server were also replaced with OpenBlockS units.(*3) See the image below for a diagram of the hardware setup before and after replacements.

Click to enlarge

A. Virtual system (6 rack mount IA server)	old	=>	new
Web front end server	VM (6)		OpenBlockS266 (2)
DNS secondary	VM (1)		OpenBlockS266 (1)
timekeeping, groupware etc.	VM (17)		TRQX-1/50SA (2)
B. proxy server	old		new
	Trus-G11 (1)		OpenBlockS266 (1)
C. DNS primary	old		new
	Trus-G10 (1)		OpenBlockS266 (1)

The five OpenBlockS266

As can be seen on the right-hand image, all five OpenBlockS units are neatly lined up on the optional rack-mount kit. This makes the system structure visible on the outside. All services that were running on a total of 8 rack mount servers, are now implemented on these 5 OpenBlockS and only 2 remaining rack mount servers.

Reasons for the adoption

With the system reorganization, the web front-end that ran on six virtual machines was switched to OpenBlockS. What was the reason for separating the hardware for the frontend and backend (application server)?

The Plat'Home Web server environment is separated into three stages: The first is the Apache web front-end server directly behind the firewall, in the demilitarized zone. This server receives the user inquiries and hands them over to the back-end. The second stage is the back-end server, placed within the Intranet, and running Ruby on Rails. This server processes the inquiries, retrieves the necessary data from the database and returns the output to the front-end. The third stage is an Oracle database system to store various data such as product information.

This structure is duplicated six times, for the published and test version of each site.

Click to enlarge

The actual load of the front end server, who hands over the access request of the website visitor to the back end, and serves the contents from the back end back to the user, is rather small. The Intel-based rack mount server that was previously used for the purpose had a lot of wasted surplus processing power. For the front end, a low-spec system offers sufficient processing power. The tough demand on the hardware, on the other hand, is durability and reliability, and 100% maintenance-free uptime.

Yuji Sagano

The advantage of separating the hardware base for front-end and back-end is that if there is a problem in the back-end, the front end will continue working. While the backend is being restored, minimum service can be kept up and at least a maintenance message can be displayed to website visitors.

Yuji Sagano, Information Systems Engineer at Plat'Home, reports the following about his experiences with the OpenBlockS:

"You can increase reliability and flexibility of your Web service by setting up a front-end server. We found that the OpenBlockS was perfect with its robust, stable and maintenance-free operation and its sufficient specs to utilize the merits of such a setup."

Added values of the OpenBlockS

While the OpenBlockS was selected as the best-fitting solution to fulfill the requirements in the case of the front-end server reorganization, the added values of the unit brought benefits elsewhere when revamping the whole system.

"The chance of the system suffering damage in an outside attack is staggeringly low in contrast to ordinary IA servers, because of the PowerPC architecture of the OpenBlockS. In addition, it's energy saving capabilities are pretty impressive. Right now, we needed to revamp our systems to achieve a great reduction in energy consumption to fulfill the ISO 14001 (*4) environment standard. With this replacement, we achived results in that area."

A servers energy consumption is around 250 W for a run-off-the-mill rack mount server, and around 90 W for energy saving models (*5). In comparison, the OpenBlockS consumes only a thrifty 4.5 W. Looking at the energy consumption of all replaced systems, including the servers for the Web front ends, the proxy and the DNS primary server, their energy consumption was 1,893 W. The new system's value of 586.5W means an astounding 70% decrease in energy consumption.(*6)

Benefitting from all merits

"As we were already using OpenBlockS units for our internal DHCP and CVS servers, the replacements were easy. Administration is also easy, and we easily get developer support from across the office (laughs).

"Another big point is that the debian Linux distribution, which we were already using in our section, supports the units by default. From the perspective of the ITIL IT management concepts (*7), runnning an entire system under a common operating system environment carries a great value. We wanted to replace systems with OpenBlockS units from the start, and we could do that without changing the system structure. So we didn't consider any other product.

"As for running the system, there were no troubles at all, of course (laughs). The server we used before that showed a performance that was up to its specs, but for all services that we ran on them, the OpenBlockS was sufficient. It saves space and maintenance time. Adding that to the low power consumption, it's a server hardware that offers lots of merits."

That way, with the replacements described in this case study, a reorganization and performance upgrade of the server environment was achieved through the many added benefits of the OpenBlockS266. There are many merits of replacing an Intel architecture rack server with the OpenBlockS.

*1 The energy consumption of the individual servers the virtual machines are running on, broken down:: 1. Plat'Home TRDX-1/50SA * 2: Intel(R) Xeon(R) Processor 5110 (1.60GHz DualCore) * 2, 1GB, 160GB SATA; 282W * 2 = 564 W; 2. Plat'Home TrusP4-1U/GCS: Intel(R) Celeron(R) Processor 2.0GHz, 256MB, 80GB 7,200rpm; 240W; 3. Plat'Home TrusP4-1U/875P SATA: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 Processor 2.80E GHz, 256MB, 80GB SATA; 89 W; 4. Plat'Home Trus-G10: Intel(R) Pentium(R) III Processor 1.13GHz-S, 512MB, 40GB E-IDE; 250 W; 5. Plat'Home Trus-G11: Intel(R) Pentium(R) III Processor 1.14GHz-S, 513MB, 36GB SCSI; 250 W
*2 Global site: http://www.plathome.com; Japanese site: http://www.plathome.co.jp; E-commerce site "Plat'Online": http://online.plathome.co.jp
*3 Proxy Server: Trus-G10 DNS primary server: Trus-G11
*4 Plat'Home was certified for the ISO 14001 environmental management standard on Aug 22nd, 2008.
*5 Plat'Home rack mount Intel architecture server TRQX-1/50SA: 282W Energy saving model TrusP4-1U/875P SATA: 89W
*6 Old system: combining the energy consumption of *1, *3 and *4: 1,893 W New system: Web frontend server: OpenBlockS266 (4.5 W) * 3 = 13.5 W Timekeeping etc.: TRQX-1/50SA (282 W) * 2 = 564 W Proxy, DNS primary: OpenBlockS266 (4.5 W) * 2 = 9 W Sum: 586.5 W
*7 ITIL: Information Technology Infrastructure Library A de facto standard for managing IT, published by the British CCTA (Cental Computer and Telecommunication Agency) in 1989.