The University of Alabama at Birmingham implemented an OpenStack and Ceph-based platform to centralize and manage growing research data, addressing productivity issues caused by distributed data management. The partnership with Dell/Inktank facilitated this transition, allowing for scalable and cost-effective solutions for researchers. The implementation led to improved cloud adoption, flexible storage solutions, and enhanced computing capacity for complex research applications.

1. Case Study: The University of
Alabama at Birmingham
OpenStack , Ceph, Dell
Kamesh Pemmaraju, Dell
John-Paul Robinson, UAB
OpenStack Summit 2014
Atlanta, GA

2. An overview
• Dell – UAB backgrounder
• What we were doing before
• How the implementation went
• What we’ve been doing since
• Where we’re headed

3. Dell – UAB background
• 900 researchers working on Cancer and Genomic
Projects.
• Their growing data sets challenged available resources
– Research data distributed across laptops, USB drives, local
servers, HPC clusters
– Transferring datasets to HPC clusters took too much time
and clogged shared networks
– Distributed data management reduced researcher
productivity and put data at risk
• They therefore needed a centralized data repository for
Researchers in order to insure compliances concerning
retention of data.
• They also wanted scale-out cost-effective solution and
hardware that could be re-purposed for compute &
storage

4. Dell – UAB background (contd..)
• Potential solutions investigated
– Traditional SAN
– Public cloud storage
– Hadoop
UAB chose Dell/Inktank to architect a platform that
would be very scalable and provide lost costs per GB
and was the best of all worlds that provide compute
and storage on the same hardware.

5. A little background…
• We didn’t get here overnight
• 2000s-era High Performance Computing
• ROCKS-based compute cluster
• The Grid and proto-clouds
• GridWay Meta-scheduler
• OpenNebula an early entrant that connected
grids with this thing called the cloud
• Virtualization through-and-through
• DevOps is US

6. Challenges and Drivers
• Technology
• Many hypervisors
• Many clouds
• We have the technology…can we rebuild it here?
• Applications
• Researcher started shouting “Data”!
NextGen Sequencing
Research Data Repositories
Hadoop
• Researcher kept on shouting “Compute”!

7. Data Intensive Scientific Computing
• We knew we needed storage and computing
• We knew we wanted to tie it together with an
HPC commodity scale-out philosophy
• So August 2012 we bought 10 Dell 720xd servers
• 16-core
• 96GB RAM
• 36TB Disk
• A 192-core, ~1TB RAM, 360TB expansion to our
HPC fabric
• Now to integrate it…

8. December 2012
• Bob said:
Hearing good things about open stack and ceph at this week at dell world.
Simon anderson, CEO of dream host , spoke highly of
dell, open stack, and ceph today.
He is also chair of company that supports
He also spoke highly of dell crowbar deployment tool.
I

9. December 2012
• Bob said:
Hearing good things about open stack and ceph at this week at dell world.
Simon anderson, CEO of dream host , spoke highly of
dell, open stack, and ceph today.
He is also chair of company that supports
He also spoke highly of dell crowbar deployment tool.
• I said:
Good to hear.
I've been thinking a lot about dell in this picture
too.
We have the building blocks in place. Might be a good
way to speed the construction.

10. Lesson 1:
Recognize when a partnership will help you
achieve your goals.

11. The 2013 Implementation
• The Timeline
• In January we started our discussions with Dell and
Inktank
• By March we had committed to the fabric
• A week in April and we had our own cloud in place
• The Experience
• Vendors committed to their product
• Direct engagement through open communities
• Bright people who share your development ethic

12. Next Step…Build Adoption
• Defined a new storage product based on the
commodity scale-out fabric
• Able to focus on strengths of Ceph to aggregate storage
across servers
• Provision any sized image to provide Flexible Block
Storage
• Promote cloud adoption within IT and across
the research community
• Demonstrate utility with applications

13. Applications
• Crashplan Backup in the cloud
• A couple hours to provision the VM resources
• An easy half-day deploy with the vendor because we controlled our
resources a.k.a. firewall
• Add storage containers on the fly as we grow…10TB in few clicks
• Gitlab hosting
• Start a VM spec’d according to project site
• Work with Omnibus install. Hey it uses Chef!
• Research Storage
• 1TB storage containers for cluster users
• Uses Ceph RBD images and NFS
• The storage infrastructure part was easy
• Scaled provisioning, 100+ user containers (100TB) created in about 5
minutes.
• Add storage servers as existing ones fill

14. Ceph Rebalances as Storage Grows :)

15. Lesson 2:
Use it! That’s what it’s for!

16. Lesson 2:
Use it! That’s what it’s for!
The sooner you start using the cloud
the sooner you start thinking like the cloud.

17. How PoC Decisions Age Over Time
• Pick the environment you want when you are in
operation…you’ll be there before you know it
• Simple networking is good
• But don’t go basic unless you are able to reinstall the fabric
• Class B ranges to match the campus fabric
• We chose a split admin range to coordinate with our HPC admin range
• We chose a collapsed admin/storage network due to a single
switch…probably would have been better to keep separate and allow
growth
• It’s OK to add non-provisioned interfacing nodes…know your net
• Avoid painting yourself in corner
• Don’t let the Paranoid Folk box-in your deployment
• An inaccessible fabric is an unusable fabric
• Fixed IP range mismatch with “fake” reservations

18. Lesson 3:
The fabric is flexible. Let it help you solve your
problems

19. Problems will Arise
• The release version of the ixgbe driver in Ubuntu
12.04.1 kernel didn’t perform well with our 10Gbit
cards
• Open source has an upstream
• Use it as part of debug network
• Upgrading the drivers was a simple fix
• Sometimes when you fix something you break
something else
• There are still a lot of moving parts but each has a
strong open source community
• Work methodically
• You will learn as you go
• Recognize the stack is integrated and respect tool boundaries

20. Sometimes a Problem is just a Problem
• Code ex

21. Lesson 4:
The code *is* the documentation

22. Lesson 4:
The code *is* the documentation
…and that’s a *good* thing

23. Where we are today
• OpenStack plus Ceph are here to stay for our
Research Computing System
• They give us the flexibility we need for an ever
expanding research applications portfolio
• Move our UAB Galaxy NextGen Sequencing platform to
our Cloud
• Add Object Storage services
• Put the cloud in the hands of researchers
• The big question…

24. …how far can we take it?
• The goal of process automation is scale
• Incompatible, non-repeatable, manual processes
are a cost
• Success is in dual-use
• Satisfy your needs and customer demand
• Automating process implies documenting process…great for
compliance and repeatability
• Recognize the latent talent in your staff today’s system
admins are tomorrows systems developers
• Traditional infrastructure models are ripe for
replacement

25. Lesson 5?
You can we learn from research
and engage as a partner

26. Want to learn more about Dell +
OpenStack + Ceph?
Join the Session, 2:00 pm, Tuesday, Room #313
Software Defined Storage, Big Data and Ceph -
What Is all the Fuss About?
Neil Levine, Inktank &
Kamesh Pemmaraju, Dell