Making big ones out of small ones: RNA networks

Early adopters

In one case, a customer using RNAmessenger was able to increase transactions per second by over 8x, giving them an edge in trading. As importantly, the performance was highly predictable, with very little variation in latency under wildly varying transaction loads. RNA also showed me a case where use of RNAcache improved time to completion by 20x on average, with datasets that varied from 125GB to half a terabyte.

Early adopters have tended to be financial service companies, for whom performance is king. For them, it’s worth almost any amount of money to get fast time-to-solution and time-to-execution. The ability to use commodity boxes in the RNA solution is a bonus. For other customers, like those who will be adopting predictive analytics in a big way, the TCO angle will loom larger, I think. In appealing to the broader market, RNA has a strong pitch based on application performance, price/performance, and the business benefits arising from the capabilities that RNA software can provide. However, there are clouds on the horizon.

The spate of companies offering mechanisms to turn small boxes into large virtual systems didn’t come about by chance – they’re responding to problems they see arising from the straitjacket that is x86 system architecture. We know for a fact that Intel and the major system vendors see and understand this problem.

With this in mind, how long will it be before they do something about it by uncoupling x86 system components and allowing them to be scaled independently? It’s a big change in the architecture, one that would make x86 more mainframe-like than anything else. While it would take a lot of effort and potentially require significant changes in the entire x86 ecosystem, it’s certainly possible to pull it off.

X86 marks the spot

If Intel and their partners came up with an architectural change that decouples x86 system components, it would certainly cause a lot of difficulty for companies like RNA, ScaleMP, 3Leaf, and a host of others.

However, there are some factors arguing against this. First is the return-on-investment question. This kind of change will be expensive to engineer and not have an immediately apparent return – in other words, there isn’t some huge set of customers who will suddenly buy loads of gear just because of the new architecture.

The vast majority of the customers who need this capability are already buying Intel-based systems and will continue to do so. Their need to have systems that aren’t bound by the x86 motherboard is clearly there, but it’s not a universal need for everything running in the data center.

Achieving maximum theoretical efficiency in terms of utilization and performance requires that all inputs to production (CPU, memory, storage, I/O) can be independently and dynamically scaled to fit each and every workload. However, getting anywhere near this level from where we’re at right now won’t be quick, easy, or cheap.

Plus there are other ways to get around architectural restrictions: on a grand scale, cloud computing is a potential solution that’s available today; at a lower level, there are mechanisms like those we’ve talked about above. I think companies like RNA, ScaleMP, 3Leaf, and others are pushing innovations that can potentially fuel big changes in our definition of what a ‘system’ really is. It will be interesting to watch the evolution….

Oh, and the snow – yeah, it stuck. Five inches of it in one afternoon: a freak occurrence for Portland, Oregon. Our 25-minute drive back from RNA Networks took 2.5 hours which, sadly, was not a freak occurrence here in the land of hills, ice, and residents who abandon their cars at the first sight of a snowflake. Fortunately, the GCG Mobile Analysis Unit turned in another flawless road performance.