Sun Microsystems Blade Servers ~ Case Study
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This case study shows examples of the user interface specification and design deliverables that were produced as part of two year project for Sun Microsystems first blade-server platform, the Sun Fire B1600 Blade System. This was an international project, where I coordinated between the developers based in Taiwan, the Corporate Approvals Bodies and Usability Specialists in California and the project management team in the UK. The requirements for the web-based user interface were that it presented the same functionality as the switch's Cisco-based command line interface, but in a manner that was easy to use by a system administrator rather than a network administrator. It was also a requirement that the web interface conformed to Sun's User Interface Guidelines. This was the first Sun embedded Web Application, developed by an external contractor, that met these guidelines. |
Internet Data CentresA typical data centre network architecture is composed of a number of tiers from the Edge of Network right into the Heart of the Data Center. At the edge of the network, the data centre joins to the User Tier (the Internet) by means of a Firewall. At Tier 1 the load balancers, routers distribute internet traffic to horizontally scaled services (mail servers, web servers, intelligent storage, network lookup services, etc). At the heart of the network are the Tier 2 Back End Servers that run application servers, databases, authentication services, etc. Horizontal Scaling Horizontally scaled applications achieve high performance by dividing the application load from the clients between replicated instances of the application running on each server. This works for stateless applications where successive or multiple current requests may be served by multiple application instances. Static data and low coupling between instances meaning that requests can be processed in parallel. This is achieved by using load balancers to distribute the traffic across the blades. An Internet Data Center is made up of corridors full of racks of servers. Depending on the environmental and type of hosting package that a machine is being used for will vary whether the rack is locked in a cage, air conditioned, remotely monitored. One model is of multi-tenancy, where a number of clients may share the same hardware resource but run different service instances.
"Internet Data Center Servers are serviced by Pizza Delivery Boys."
Project Conceptualisation During the initial phase of the project, I worked with the platform architect and other key stakeholders to define a concept for a high-density blade server platform for use in horizontally-scaled environments. My role was to define the system management strategy and user interfaces for the platform. The brief was to provide cost effective, high density Tier-1 and 2 solutions for the service provider and internet data centre markets, including enterprises such as financial institutions who create web-based services internally to their operation. During the explosion in the internet, the market was fuelled by the requirement for higher density (more processing power in less space) solutions. The Sun Fire B1600 answered this need by replacing half a rack of 1U servers with a 3U blade server chassis. The market was highly sensitive to the total cost of ownership of racks of servers and the need to build network architectures that could cope with the needs of dynamic provisioning of customer services. I was responsible for a technology evaluation for a system management solution for the blade server platform that enabled the lights out service management, the dynamic provisioning of operating systems and applications and simplifed change management of hardware resources. Sun subsequently purchased a company called Terraspring to leverage their technology to produce N1 Grid Provisioning Server Blades Edition. Conforming to Standards and Guidelines Sun's user interfaces have a strong branding and consistent look and feel. User Interface Developers are required to conform to Sun's comprehensive GUI Guidelines which define colour palettes, logo's, layouts, UI components and accessibility goals. Usually conformance to these guidelines is achieved by using the Sun GUI library toolkit. However as the Sun Fire B1600 GUIs were embedded, each component had to be handcrafted to meet the guidelines. I was responsible for co-ordinating with the Usability experts within sun and representing the platform's GUIs at the corporate approvals committees. In addition, I represented Sun at an industry-wide forum defining SMASH, the Systems Management Architecture for Server Hardware, as part of the DMTF Server Management Group. WBEM, SNMP, ISO standards |
Lowering Total Cost of Ownership
Interface Design and VirtualisationLearning how switches work , Conforming to the Switch Standards for network management, yet modelling and virtualising the switch services. Interaction design GUI requirements: Service tasks from initial deployment and configuration of data centre, deployment of services, setting up monitoring, connecting to network manager such as HP OpenView. Some customers write their own specialist software. Most customers just wanted to know what their system was, if it was still running and if a fault has occured. Although lots of detailed info is different. They don't need that level of information. Fit into their standard network environment, HP OpenView, Tivoli but be ready for highter value N1 system. Software deployment |
Project Deliverables Presentations for strategy committees, detailed pixel perfect specification document, explaining the standards and how they should be implemented in terms of this interface. In order to present as much information on the home page, we decided to use hover tags to provide a brief description/comment on the keywords. This allows the user to "dip their toes in the water" without committing by clicking on a link. In addition, to the wireframes for the home page and the other pages, I created two concept interface designs to illustrate our discussions. Project Advocacy looked at environment, types of users Accessibility guidelines, internationalisation (wasn't going to be done) Platform ReleasePresto, preparing the product for international release, dealing with legal issues, copyright, licences, encryption etc. |
