Axibase

AWS Solution Provider">Axibase selected as AWS Solution Provider

Posted on 19. Aug, 2010 by admin in News

Axibase Joins Ama­zon Web Ser­vices Solu­tion Provider Pro­gram Axibase has teamed up with Ama­zon Web Ser­vices (AWS), a lead­ing provider of infra­struc­ture as a ser­vice (IaaS) cloud com­put­ing solu­tions, to deliver industrial-grade per­for­mance report­ing for enter­prise IT customers.

Axibase Cor­po­ra­tion has today announced that it has joined the Ama­zon Web Ser­vices (AWS) Solu­tion Provider Pro­gram to deliver per­for­mance analy­sis and capac­ity plan­ning solu­tion for the grow­ing num­ber of IT orga­ni­za­tions and devel­op­ers endors­ing AWS as their pre­ferred cloud provider.

“This is a strate­gic deci­sion for us,” noted Sergei Rodi­onov, Pres­i­dent and CEO of Axibase. “Our enter­prise cus­tomers are increas­ingly adopt­ing cloud com­put­ing as the cost-efficient exten­sion of their exist­ing dat­a­cen­ter foot­print. With the intro­duc­tion of Axibase Cloud Reporter, we’re com­mit­ting our­selves to pro­vid­ing our cus­tomers with a con­sis­tent set of tools regard­less of the under­ly­ing deliv­ery plat­form. We believe that the vast major­ity of enter­prise appli­ca­tions will be dis­trib­uted across both in-house (pri­vate) and pub­lic resource pools, and our strat­egy is to cover this land­scape end-to-end.”

The Ama­zon Web Ser­vices team care­fully reviewed Axibase appli­ca­tion and now includes Axibase Cloud Reporter in the Solu­tion Provider direc­tory acces­si­ble at http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/solution-providers/axibase/

About Axibase Corporation.

Founded in 2004, Axibase is a proven leader in per­for­mance analy­sis and capac­ity plan­ning for the enter­prise IT. The company’s cus­tomers include the world’s lead­ing com­pa­nies and ser­vice providers such as CSC, NetApp, ING Bank, Sun­corp, Exper­ian, State of New Jer­sey OIT.

About Ama­zon Web Services.

Ama­zon Web Ser­vices (AWS) deliv­ers a set of ser­vices that forms a reli­able, scal­able, and inex­pen­sive com­put­ing plat­form in the cloud built upon the same tech­nol­ogy that Amazon.com uses to run its global web prop­er­ties. These pay-as-you-use ser­vices include Ama­zon S3, Ama­zon EC2, Ama­zon Sim­pleDB, Ama­zon SQS, and Ama­zon FPS. Launched in 2006, AWS has pro­vided com­pa­nies of all sizes with a web ser­vices infra­struc­ture plat­form to power their Web sites and work­flows — every­thing from SaaS appli­ca­tions to social net­work­ing sites.

About AWS Solu­tion Providers Program.

The AWS Solu­tion Providers Pro­gram serves a grow­ing com­mu­nity of Inde­pen­dent Soft­ware Ven­dors and Sys­tems Inte­gra­tors that offer a rich set of solu­tions and con­sult­ing ser­vices on AWS. The AWS Solu­tion Providers Pro­gram is designed to help com­pa­nies expand the capa­bil­i­ties and mar­ket­ing poten­tial of their solu­tions and ser­vices through expo­sure by AWS and build­ing rela­tion­ships with fel­low providers in the AWS ecosystem.

EC2 monitoring: the case of stolen CPU">EC2 monitoring: the case of stolen CPU

Posted on 22. Jul, 2010 by admin in Blog

When the top com­mand dis­plays 40% CPU busy but Cloud­Watch says the server is maxed out at 100% — which side do you take? The answer is sim­ple (Cloud­Watch is cor­rect, top is not) but it raises a ques­tion about how to mea­sure per­for­mance of vir­tual machines if you can no longer take oper­at­ing sys­tem sta­tis­tics at face value. How do you define thresh­olds, raise alerts, and cre­ate man­age­ment reports if the under­ly­ing data appears to be misleading?

CPU Usage dis­played by top

CPU Usage reported by CloudWatch	CPU Usage reported by Tivoli OS agent

If you’re an IBM cus­tomer with a pSeries frame these ques­tions aren’t entirely new to you. When IBM intro­duced shared pools and micro-partitioning back in 2004 it rad­i­cally changed how CPU usage is mon­i­tored in the AIX part of the world. In fact, since CPU capac­ity is allo­cated to a log­i­cal par­ti­tion dynam­i­cally, the tra­di­tional CPU break­down by system/user/wait i/o has become irrel­e­vant for capac­ity plan­ning. What mat­ters is CPU con­sump­tion in proces­sor units as well as the ratio of CPU units con­sumed to CPU units allo­cated. The ratio can be greater than 100% which is not a scalability-on-demand fea­ture that Ama­zon cus­tomers can enjoy as of this writing.

The XEN hyper­vi­sor pow­er­ing Ama­zon EC2 infra­struc­ture has made great progress of adding flex­i­bil­ity to resource allo­ca­tions, but it’s still years behind IBM POWER hyper­vi­sor in terms of gran­u­lar­ity. Nev­er­the­less, there are still some options left to cor­re­late OS and hyper­vi­sor met­rics for the ini­ti­ated observer and an aspir­ing cloud guru. For exam­ple, you may notice that the top out­put con­tains an addi­tional met­ric called stolen CPU (st for short).

CPU Stolen dis­played by top

The met­ric is exposed by the XEN hyper­vi­sor and in the above exam­ple it’s equal to 56.9%.  Stolen CPU means how many cycles were re-claimed by the hyper­vi­sor because the vir­tual machine has reached the max­i­mum allo­cated num­ber of proces­sor units of the under­ly­ing proces­sor core. In the exam­ple above, the m1.small EC2 instance was allo­cated 0.4 proces­sor units and so 40% CPU busy means the per­cent­age usage of the under­ly­ing core. How­ever because 40% is the max­i­mum CPU share that can be allo­cated to this VM, the effec­tive CPU usage is 40%/40% = 100%. Which is the num­ber dis­played by CloudWatch.

Another option that can used to retro­fit the exist­ing agent– or SNMP– based mon­i­tor­ing tools, that don’t inte­grate with Cloud­Watch, is to use the CPU idle met­ric. All you need to do is to re-write rules to mea­sure CPU idle instead of CPU busy. E.g. if you have a >75% thresh­old defined for CPU busy, cre­ate a <25% rule for CPU idle. If CPU idle is 0, then your server is CPU bound.

CPU Idle dis­played by top

If you’re won­der­ing where does 40% comes from, the math is pretty sim­ple. The m1.small linux sys­tem is enti­tled to 1 EC2 com­pute unit which pro­vides the equiv­a­lent CPU capac­ity of a 1.0–1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon proces­sor. Since the VM runs on a machine with 2.6 GHz clock speed, it’s enti­tled to 38.4% — 46.2% proces­sor share on this par­tic­u­lar XEN node. You can run cat /proc/cpuinfo com­mand to find out CPU archi­tec­ture behind your EC2 instances.

Find­ing out CPU clock speed on Linux EC2 instance

By the way, there is an ongo­ing indus­try dis­cus­sion about the ‘stolen cpu’ or ‘steal time’ term. Obvi­ously, the word itself car­ries a con­no­ta­tion that might make some AWS cus­tomers won­der if their fully-paid CPU time was some­how stolen by rogue EC2 instances run­ning on the same phys­i­cal node. Rest assured, the rules of the game are fair. The best way to describe stolen CPU time to your peers is to think of it as shared CPU time belong­ing to other AWS customers.

Axibase Cloud Reporter beta open

Posted on 30. Jun, 2010 by admin in News

We’re launch­ing a pub­lic beta for Axibase Cloud Reporter today. Axibase Cloud Reporter is a per­for­mance analy­sis and capac­ity plan­ning tool that runs on top of Ama­zon Web Ser­vices and pro­vides web-based, PDF, and email reports on Ama­zon EC2, RDS, EBS and ELB resources. You can signup at https://atom.axibase.com/acr if you have an active Ama­zon Web Ser­vices account.

No credit card is required for signup.