Week 2 – Cast Study 1
Robert Dickens
Dr. Romy Lu
0001VA016-1138-001 – Advanced Computer Architecture
20 October 2013

Digipos is a company that provides infrastructure solutions specifically tailored to retail oriented companies. Digipos provides a wide range of hardware platforms that include displays, mobile ecommerce solutions, systems, software, and even third party integration solutions. Digipos traditionally recommend that their clients perform a hardware upgrade every five to seven years. This hardware upgrade usually required a complete hardware change which would require a system outage as the old systems are pulled out and the new systems are put in place. This is definitely quite a task to accomplish that can introduce several critical problems. Typically, a hardware replacement requires a “burn-in” period to ensure that the hardware electronics are all stable and not going to fail. Typically this is done before the product is shipped to the client but isn’t always followed and may have to be done on site which would require a risky period of time where their equipment could very possibly fail. Another point of concern is the software and processes that run on the system might have a conflict with the new hardware, but again, this should be fully tested in a lab environment at DigiPos rather than on site at the client’s location. DigiPos decided that these outages were impacting their customers in a negative manner and decided to make changes to their hardware and process by using swappable blades. Blade technology was a huge push forward in server and network environments by allowing customers to swap only specific hardware to upgrade their systems and even more importantly, to easily swap out failed components of a system. This allows the client to quickly and effectively replace a failed part of the system (CPU, Hard Drive, NIC’s ect..) in addition to reducing the cost to have onsite spares to provide a quick turnaround in the event of an actual hardware failure which causes a total system outage. Blade technology also provides standby/redundant configurations allowing hardware to easily failover in the event that the primary card fails. This technology would allow the client to replace the primary card while the standby has the load and then manually fail the cards back over during an off hours maintenance window. Since DigiPos has adopted this new technology, it has allowed their clients to extend their hardware time of life to over 10 years as well as reducing the outage time required to perform these upgrades. These chassis systems also allow the client to try new technology easier by selecting different blades and plugging them into the chassis which also increase DigiPos’ sales numbers since they can easily supply products to their customers for evaluations and possible purchases. There are several alternative solutions that DigiPos could have used in order to upgrade their clients while lowering the impact of the outage. DigiPos could have opted to build the server upgrades in a lab environment on site at DigiPos. The lab environment would be an exact replicate (as close as possible) to the production environment of the client. DigiPos would then “burn-in” the hardware for a predetermined amount of time and then begin building the new servers by installing the appropriate OS images and client software. Once this work has been complete, they would provide the clients access to the system (on site or remotely) to begin testing the software and hardware to identify any possible incompatible conflicts between the software and the new hardware. Once the testing has been completed and the new systems have been certified, the systems would ship to the client site and be installed on site. Since the servers have all been built, this process should be fairly quick and smooth with a robust test plan taking the longest amount of time. DigiPos released the Quantum blade in the last quarter of 2009. The Quantum blade provided clients with all of the same benefits of the Retail blade in addition to providing a sixty percent increase in energy efficiency as well as a thirty percent increase in performance. This upgrade a was a huge step for clients as it provides cost saving in power requirements as well as boosting performance resulting in quicker machines or even possibly less machines doing more work. The Quantum blades achieved this energy and performance increase by using the ultra-low-voltage (ULV) Intel Atom processor D510. This new processor generates so little heat that it does not require fans on the heat sink and instead, transfers heat away from the processor by dissipating it through two aluminum blocks. This new technology removes the needs for fans which reduces power requirement (which is not much) but more importantly removes a point of failure from the system which is critical considering a failed fan could result in even more damage in the form of a melted CPU or motherboard. Another great step forward in the Quantum design is the introduction of solid state drives (SSD) to the hardware design. A solid state drive is capable of much faster read/write time and is more durable due to no moving parts which increase the time of life of the product as well as reducing the heat generation of the system. The only downside to a solid state drive is the additional cost. Typically a user will pay around .10 cents per gigabyte of hard drive capacity for a standard HDD drive, this costs increases to around .60 cents per gigabyte for solid state drives. DigiPos is able to lower the total cost of ownership through several avenues in the product design. The first of these was by increasing the lifecycle replacement of the product by introducing blade technology. This means users will pay the same price for hardware that will last longer resulting in a reduced total cost of ownership. Secondly, DigiPos was able to reduce total cost of ownership by reducing the energy required to power their systems. The sixty percent efficiency increase in the hardware saves a business around 57.00 a month per blade and per system which results in huge savings for a small business or global corporation. Finally, DigiPos reduces the total cost of ownership in processing power. Faster systems result in less systems needed to do the same job which means the client could possibly accomplish the task at hand with one system instead of two.

References:
Advantages and Disadvantages – SSD vs HDD. Retrieved from: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2404260,00.asp
Blade Servers – Big power for small businesses. Retrieved from: http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2012/032612-cdw-blade-servers-257637.html
The pros and cons of tower, rack and blade systems. Retrieved from: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/the-enterprise-cloud/the-pros-and-cons-of-tower-rack-and-blade-servers/