360is Builds VDI for InnovateUK

UK Satellite and GIS Imagery

The UK Satellite Applications Catapult (The Catapult) was established to promote growth in commercial applications of satellite technology. Its mission is to accelerate the take-up of emerging technologies by businesses and in so doing, drive UK economic growth. The Catapult offers expertise and facilities that will bring strategic benefit to the community of industrial companies working in the sector.  

How did the project come about? 
Making facilities and information assets easily available to potential users of their services is part of the Catapult's mission. Satellite analysts routinely work with heavyweight applications like ESRI ArcGIS, GE Smallworld, and Raytheon VIIRS. The Catapult wanted to see how such applications performed on a modern, fluid, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). 360is was challenged to build a system capable of multi-user, multi-screen VDI for satellite applications using thin clients while providing a dedicated workstation-like experience.

What did 360is do?
After interviewing end users, 360is built a VDI system using Citrix XenDesktop, XenServer, and NVIDIA GPU hardware and a suitable WYSE thin client. This combination of technologies allowed for maximum flexibility.

• Physical GPUs may be partitioned into virtual GPUs Virtual Desktops are booted on demand.
• Users are allocated VDI's with different vCPU/vGPU capabilities depending on a profile.
• The platform may be optimised for user density or performance.
• Server GPUs work with client GPUs to enable a high-quality end user experience.
• Network bandwidth is minimised using caching and compression.

As this was a proof of concept demonstration, 360is chose components and settings for maximum stability. End users can quickly form a negative opinion if a new technology is not completely reliable and this system was to be used for live demonstration.

How successful was the platform in meeting the project goals?
Multi-screen multi-user GPU VDI was delivered. 0.5Mb/s to 1.0Mb/s of network bandwidth was required per client while running in excess of 60fps. Up-to 64 concurrent GPU-powered VDI's could be provided by the system, this could be increased to 128 with different choices of hardware. The thin client CPU (capable of driving up-to 6 monitors) proved to be the limiting factor. High-density, GPU VDI is now within the reach of most organisations. Specialist scientific applications no-longer need to be excluded from the virtual desktop projects.

About 360is
360is builds multi-user, multi-monitor, high-resolution and GPU-enabled Virtual Desktop Infrastructure for Scientific Technical and Creative Industry organisations. Our engineers can address all aspects of the project from storage, to networking, to hypervisor configuration and application performance tuning. If you would like to talk to one of our engineers about deploying scientific and GPU applications to demanding users, get in touch via our contact page, Email, or message us on twitter.

If you want to know more about the UK's Satellite Applications Catapult and the great work they are doing to help grow the £7B annual turnover of the UK space sector, take a few minutes to find out more:

360is Brings VDI To UK's Innovation-Lead Companies

Cambridge Display Technology is a UK-founded company that is leading the development of display technology based on polymer organic light emitting diodes. Their technology is used in mobile devices, screens and lighting. The company employs hundreds of scientists, engineers, and supporting staff around the world.

The company needed a high performance desktop virtualisation solution that would make supporting a distributed workforce easier. Constraints were space, power, CAPEX and a lack of availability of shared storage. End users were running a mixture of office automation and scientific applications.

A 64-bit Operating System was required in order to support the 6GB RAM desktops demanded by end users. Each hypervisor node was to support between 40 and 80 of those users. The only way to achieve the user-density required while meeting the constraints, was to use dedicated Virtualisation Appliances. The platform chosen provided an integrated IOPS sink, continuous performance and heath monitoring, and a redundant N+1 configuration. The solution was designed to support expansion, including applications that require virtualised GPU capability.

Where once only basic "office" desktops could be supported in any number, and the hardware (in particular shared storage) required to do so was prohibitively expensive, it is now possible to support far more specialised classes of user and application. Furthermore, such users can be supported at high-densities without the necessity of expensive shared storage, thanks to the in-bult IOPS sink and performance management features of Virtualisation Appliances.

360is End Of Year Message, 2011

2011 was another year of growth for 360is and for many of those with whom we work. Our base of Financial Services clients has seen a rebound since the darker days of 2009, and we have continued to expand into Scientific and Research Intensive sectors with several new projects and clients in Cambridge. As a result of this, we were pleased to welcome another Cambridge-based senior consultant to the practice. We continued to execute Virtualisation, Security, and Performance-related engagements for our clients, and maintained our focus on short term, (less than 3 month) fixed-price, projects, with a vendor-independent, client focused approach.

Inside 360is in 2011

• Security work consisted mainly of Security Assessments, Penetration Tests, and Post Incident work, but grew to include Application Security Assessments, with significant new clients in the online gaming sector. We have also seen an increase in Distributed Denial Of Service (DDoS) mitigation projects. More companies with an online business model established themselves as brands, and therefore attracted the attention of extortionists, activists, and attention-seekers.

• Virtualisation made-up almost 50% of projects, however the emphasis shifted from 1st-time production roll-out to 2nd or 3rd stage "3-5 years on" projects. We recently doubled the density of an already-virtualised estate of 500+ VMs as part of a hardware refresh cycle. Service Provider Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) projects also grew in 2011. 360is worked in partnership with client's Architecture and DevOps staff to deliver industry-leading high-density, high-margin, VDI to tens of thousands of users.

• Performance-related projects were driven by a combination of CAPEX freezes and business growth, and were concentrated around storage systems. Due to continued difficult economic conditions in the UK, and recent shortages in hard drives, we expect this trend to continue into Q1/Q2 2012. In the last 18 months, data volumes have increased dramatically in Media (HD and 3D), Geo Sciences (ultra-wideband sensors), and Life Science (faster, cheaper, sequencing). These trends drive up data volumes and the demand for performance, as the bottlenecks move downstream.

360is Outlook For 2012

The outlook for 360is in 2012 is good.  Industry trends favour our long experience, technical capability, and vendor-neutral approach to problem solving. 

• There will be fewer new infrastructure projects in 2012 (semiconductor sales were essentially flat in 2011). Supply chain disruption caused by floods in Thailand will provide even greater incentives to extend the life of existing platforms through careful optimisation and tuning. Although hard drive prices are stabilising, availability remains poor unless you take spindles as part of a large purchase from a major vendor. 360is can help you grow in spite of these difficulties, engage us to execute the following projects:
• Storage Consolidation/Re-Tasking
• Storage Performance Tuning
• Storage Tiering

• Rising energy costs and the practicalities of power distribution will continue to constrain some projects and have a significant impact on hosting and colocation costs. A recent study by 360is revealed that those renewing 3-year contracts for data-centre space typically saw a 40%-50% increase in annual charges, with colocation customers under pressure to migrate to higher-margin higher-price fully managed hosting contracts. If you have already virtualised some years ago 360is consultants can help you find an encore, we can further streamline your operations, deliver greater VM densities and lower OPEX costs through the use of new methods and technologies.
• High Density, Low Power Virtualisation Appliances
• Data Centre selection and evaluation
• Cloud or hosting provider selection and evaluation

• Recent wide-scale civil unrest across UK cities brought Disaster Recovery and Contingency Planning into focus in 2011. Further disturbances are set to occur as a variety of protest and pressure groups plan disruptions in 2012. Whether it be city-wide riots or attacks against individual organisations, it is now more important than ever to make sure you have a solid, rehearsed, Disaster Recovery or Business Continuity plan. 360is consultants have executed many of successful projects in the areas of DR/BC.
• Secure hosting/colocation outside London
• In-house Disaster Recovery Infrastructure
• Replication and High Availability or Fault Tolerant Systems
• Denial Of Service Mitigation

If your team is challenged to deliver any of these projects, 360is can help you do so, on time and on budget, in a way that is tailored to your organisation's individual circumstances. We look forward to working with you in 2012.

Welcome To 2011, Year Of The Rabbit

This year our normal New Year message to clients and partners comes exactly one month late. Another way to look at it (with the Chinese New Year starting February 3rd) is that we are bang on time.

一个好年头 (Another Good Year)

2010 was another year of growth for 360is with more clients in new sectors and a formalised datacenter performance practice. We deepened our profile in Private Equity with more virtualization projects (VMware and XenServer), and in mainstream Investment Banking with more VDI (VMware View and XenDesktop) assignments. Our Security practice continued with steady growth, and included new business from UK-based online gaming and "dotcom" sectors. 360is now counts among it's clients several of the UK's fastest growing and "best to work for" companies. While the UK Economy may have disappointed in December (particularly retail), through 2010 we saw our Financial Services, Mining/Metals, and Hi-tech Manufacturing clients rebound.

年更强 (Stronger In 2011)

The outlook for Q1 2011 is better than many thought. For the services sector at least, it looks like the December 2010 disappointment really was snow related, or was everyone at home with flu? This year promises more investment activity, increasing demand for raw materials (China again), and growing orders for our UK Hi-tech manufacturers.

We expect the trends of 2009-2010 to continue for 360is:

• Increasing average project size
• Steady rate of new client acquisition
• Increasing number of projects per client
• Steady geographical focus on UK, South East
• Increasing client diversity beyond historic finance/telecoms base
• Steady ratio of bookings to billings to backlog, no credit risk
• Conservative recruitment strategy focused on "talent" not "resource"

科技是一个礼物 (The Gift Of Technology)

What technological gifts did 2010 bring our clients, and how can we best use them to increase their prosperity in 2011?

Multi-Core Systems

Multi-core systems have been around since at least 2005. One fact of which you may not be aware is that x86-64 CPU manufacturers have long since given up on making CPU cores go faster. Faster cores require more exotic materials, more expensive cooling apparatus, more complex micro-architectures with only marginal performance gains, and present all sorts of problems with manufacturing yield. That last point frightens shareholders to death. Instead, today, Intel and AMD devote most of their efforts to making more cores per square millimeter of silicon. More cores means more processing capability. Problem solved, right? Not really.

While increasing the numbers of cores (made possible as transistors get smaller) does increase theoretical performance, in practice this must be balanced with the right amount of memory bandwidth and core-to-core interconnect design. Even then, our problems have only just begun. The fact is most software does not take great advantage of multiple cores, more serious still is the fact that most programmers lack parallel programming skills. Finally, there are many classes of computational problem which are serial in nature, and are never going to gain much from running on a multi-core CPU.

Wont Microsoft/Oracle/IBM/VMware sort all this out for me? Not really.

While technologies like virtualization (whole-system or zone-based) allow you to run many workloads on a single CPU (keeping many cores occupied at once) they do nothing to speed up the execution of any one task or thread of activity. In order to speed up your IT from the end-user's perspective you may have to resort to more carefully considered system performance tuning, and that may require a deeper understanding of systems hardware and application software than your staff posses. The really big gains in performance can't be had by simply adding a product here and a patch there.

360is consultants have extensive experience in squeezing the maximum performance out of an infrastructure. Using a toolkit of repeatable intellectual property we are often able to increase performance even for serial, single threaded processing through our formal methods approach. Find out more about our performance practice.

Non x86-64 Servers And Other Novel Hardware

If like most of our clients, you are in the UK, then IBM Power CPUs calculate your insurance premiums, Oracle SPARC processors compute your taxes, and Intel Itaniums keeps your commuter train running on time (mostly). If you are out of work, then it's an IBM z10 CPU that you have to thank for paying your benefits. While Intel or AMD x86-64 systems dominate in the front office, the back office is more mixed, and with good reason. No, these particular systems do not run Windows, or Linux.

This year x86-64 front-office systems will be joined by new servers based upon ARM, Loonsong, Atom, and SPARC-T3 CPUs. So the next time you visit your hosted/colocated systems in a shared datacenter, keep an eye out for them. If you want to know how these systems might provide a competitive advantage to your business, get in touch. 360is has a record of working with novel hardware platforms that increase the profitability of our clients.

The Inevitable Spread Of Productivity Services

Technology vendor's continue to channel hundreds of millions of pounds a year from their marketing budgets into rebranding products and services "for the cloud". At 360is we call this "cloudwashing", it's much like the "greenwashing" that the same vendors underwent a few years ago. However, through the fog of cloudwashing there is value and real adoption happening in the world of cloud services. At 360is we are users of cloud-based productivity tools like Evernote, Dropbox, ManyEyes, and Google Chrome (as a tool to access other Google services). These productivity services offer an inbuilt ability to work anywhere, on any device, over any network. Whether or not they conform to your security policy, your users will soon be using services like these. If they make life easier then they will spread in the same way that instant messaging spread a decade ago.

360is can help you select and standardise upon productivity tools and provide secure remote access to your confidential information.  

VDI - Virtual Desktops - Desktop As A Service

Virtual Desktop deployments continue to grow in number as both large and small clients display increasing acceptance of this method of desktop delivery to end users. The primary drivers for VDI deployment remain:

- Avoidance of desktop hardware refresh 

- Ease of migration to Windows 7 from XP

- Stronger Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity

- Ability to manage/maintain more desktops with fewer/static IT staff

360is have executed a number of virtual desktop projects using all the major vendor products for large and small organisations in the public and private sector, using a variety of endpoints including thin clients, tablets, and mobile devices. Find out how.

If you would like to discuss any of what you have read about with one of our consultants then we would be happy to meet with you at your offices or at our London or Wokingham sites. Simply get in touch.

All that remains is for us to say is Happy New Year and finally"gung hay fat choy"(*)
(*)"may you become prosperous"

360is wins Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Contract at Wren Academy

Wren Academy is a new 1000-place secondary school in the London Borough of Barnet. The Academy, specialising in Design and the Built Environment, offers state-of-the-art ICT facilities. Over £1 million will be spent on hardware and infrastructure supporting the aspiration that every student will have plentiful access to Information Technology.

360is is rolling out a complete campus-wide VDI solution for students and staff. The Citrix XenDesktop solution is based upon a mixture of thin and thick clients, and virtualized server-side. 360is drew upon prior experience of implementing complex VDI projects in the public and private sector to win the contract.