May 2017 UK User Group Report

OK, OK, its been a while and I apologise for the delay in getting this written up (sorry Claire!), so many things have got in the way in my real job!

So the UK meeting this year saw a move from London to Manchester, but still saw a strong following of Spectrum Scale UGers attending. First off, lets talk about the elephant, or rather pillar in the room…. yes the conference venue had THE largest concrete pillars in the space … something to do with it once being a 1970’s office block so I’m told. But we managed, and DDN’s Vic even had some fun with laser pointers and the mirrors mounted on the pillars. Continue reading “May 2017 UK User Group Report”

UK May 2017 User Group: Registration

We’re flattered that we’ve seen some advertising us as the Global Spectrum Scale user group event, and its great that we’re doing well. This year’s event will be bigger than ever with space for up to 200 attendees, we’ve had to move out of IBM Client Centre in South Bank and are heading north to Manchester!

The UK Spring user group will take place over two days on 9th and 10th May 2017 at the Macdonald Manchester Hotel, Manchester. We’d like to thank IBM and our sponsors for supporting the event and the evening networking/social event on the evening of 9th May 2017.

As usual, we will have a packed agenda with speakers from the IBM development teams, user talks as well as technical talks from our sponsors.

The hotel where the event is taking place has reserved a limited number of rooms for the night before the event (8th May) and the night of the event (9th May). The rates are £115 B&B and £145 B&B per room per night respectively and if anyone wishes to book they can call the hotel 0344 879 9088 and quote code OCFP090517 to benefit from these rates. Please ensure you have confirmed your ticket via the registration page before booking your hotel room.

The agenda for the day is a bit further down the page and we are looking for users to do a short presentation on their use of Spectrum Scale/GPFS. Please contact us if you’d like to volunteer. These are often the most valuable talks of the event so please don’t be shy!

Sponsors

We’d very much like to thank the following sponsors for supporting the user group meeting by providing funding to support the evening social event:

ArcaStream
DDN
Ellexus
Lenovo
IBM
Mellanox
OCF
Seagate

Media Sponsor:

Agenda

Day 1 – 9th May 2017

09:00 – 10:00 Registration & Networking
10:00 – 10:30 Opening & Welcome – Simon Thompson (UG), Michael Daubman (IBM)
10:30 – 11:20 Spectrum Scale Update – Ulf Troppens (IBM)
11:20 – 11:40 ESS Update – Christopher Maestas (IBM)
11:40 – 12:00 Sponsor Talk 1 – Ellexus: Catching rogue jobs before they overload shared storage: an I/O profiling case study – Dr. Rosemary Francis
12:00 – 13:00 Lunch & Networking
13:00 – 13:20 Customer Talk – “The UK Research Data Facility” – Kieran Leach (EPCC)
13:20 – 13:40 Sponsor Talk 2 – DDN: AFM Case Studies – Vic Cornell
13:40 – 14:30 Spectrum Scale Cloud Deployments – Christopher Maestas (IBM)
14:30 – 14:50 Licensing – Carl Zetie (IBM)
14:50 – 15:20 Coffee and Networking
15:20 – 15:40 Sponsor Talk 3 – Arcastream: Automated Data Curation and Discovery with Spectrum Scale and ArcaStream – Jez Tucker & Barry Evans
15:40 – 16:30 Problem Determination – Simon Lorenz (IBM)
16:30 – 17:20 Best Practices – Olaf Weiser (IBM)
17:50 – 18:00 Wrap up
18:00 Finish
19:00 Evening Social Event, drinks and food – Manchester Museum of Science and Industry

Day 2 – 10th May 2017

08:30 – 09:00 Coffee and Networking
09:00 – 10:00 Parallel Breakout/workshop session 1

  • Integration with Spectrum Protect for Backup – Fabian Kulhl (IBM)
  • Docker Support / Update on metadata sizing – Olaf Weiser (IBM), Indulis Bernsteins (IBM)
  • CES Authentication / Spectrum Scale Security (Meet the Devs) – Sandeep Ramesh (IBM)
10:00 – 11:00 Parallel Breakout/workshop session 2

  • Introduction to AFM and Use Cases – Nils Haustein (IBM)
  • Object, SwiftHLM and OpenStack (cloud) – Sandeep Ramesh (IBM), Simon Lorenz (IBM)
  • GUI and REST API (Meet the Devs) – Alexander Wolf (IBM)
11:00 – 12:00 Parallel Breakout/workshop session 3

  • Automation of Storage Services – Nils Haustein (IBM)
  • Container and Virtualisation support (Cloud) – John Lewars (IBM)
  • HDFS Support (Meet the Devs) – Piyush Chaudrhary (IBM)
12:00 – 13:00 Lunch & Networking
13:00 – 13:20 Sponsor Talk 4 – Mellanox: RoCE and Spectrum Scale – RDMA support and performance over Ethernet – Darren Harkins
13:20 – 13:40 Customer Talk – AFM Migration – The road to perdition – Mark Roberts (AWE) & Laurence Horrocks-Barlow (OCF)
13:40 – 14:00 Sponsor Talk 5 – Seagate: Accelerating Spectrum Scale with an Intelligent IO Manager – Ray Coetzee
14:00 – 14:20 Customer Talk – TBC
14:20 – 14:50 Coffee and Networking
14:50 – 16:00 Research Topics – Sven Oehme (IBM)
16:00 – 16:30 Wrap-up and feedback – Simon Thompson (UG), Michael Daubman (IBM)
16:30 Finish

Registration

To register for this year’s event, please use our EventBrite event page at:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/spectrum-scalegpfs-user-group-spring-2017-tickets-32113696932

Registration is now open.

Please note that we are currently limiting registrations to 3 per organisation to ensure as many organisations as possible are able to attend and places are strictly limited due to room capacity. We will be operating a wait list, so if you can’t get a ticket now, then we’ll hold details in case they become available nearer the date.

We look forward to seeing you in May!

Save the date! SSUG UK

Please save the date for a two-day user group meeting in Manchester, UK.

Date: Tuesday 9th & Wednesday 10th May 2017 Venue: Central Manchester, UK

Details of the agenda and for registration will follow here very shortly and via the Spectrum Scale user group mailing list.

Meet the Devs Cloud Workshop @Birmingham, UK

Meet the Devs returned this October with a trip to University of Birmingham (OK, so I didn’t have to travel very far…).

This time, we focussed the day as a workshop on cloud and Spectrum Scale, Dean Hildebrand (IBM Research, Master Inventor, Senior Research Scientist) was in the UK speaking at another event and we were lucky enough to catch him for a meet the devs. We were also joined by John Lewars (IBM, STSM) who flew in pretty much for the day, and also MTD usuals, Ulf Troppens and Dan Kidger.

For those not familiar with Dean, he worked on pNFS, AFM and the OpenStack integration when they were all part of IBM Research. I’ve been lucky enough to know Dean for a couple of years and he was extremely helpful with getting the right contacts when I was developing CLIMB (www.climb.ac.uk) a few years back and using Spectrum Scale as an infrastructure.

Continue reading “Meet the Devs Cloud Workshop @Birmingham, UK”

UK Meet the Devs – Cloud Workshop

Back by popular demand! We are holding a UK ‘Meet the Developers’ event to focus on Cloud topics. We are very lucky to have Dean Hildebrand, Master Inventor, Cloud Storage Software from IBM over in the UK to lead this session.

IS IT FOR ME? Slightly different to the past meet the devs format, this is a cloud workshop aimed at looking how Spectrum Scale fits in the world of cloud. Rather than being a series of presentations and discussions led by IBM, this workshop aims to look at how Spectrum Scale can be used in cloud environments. This will include using Spectrum Scale as an infrastructure tool to power private cloud deployments. We will also look at the challenges of accessing data from cloud deployments and discuss ways in which this might be accomplished.

If you are currently deploying OpenStack on Spectrum Scale, or plan to in the near future, then this workshop is for you. Also if you currently have Spectrum Scale and are wondering how you might get that data into cloud-enabled workloads or are currently doing so, then again you should attend. To ensure that the workshop is focused, numbers are limited and we will initially be limiting to 2 people per organisation/project/site.

WHAT WILL BE DISCUSSED? Our topics for the day will include on-premise (private) clouds, on-premise self-service (public) clouds, off-premise clouds (Amazon etc.) as well as covering technologies including OpenStack, Docker, Kubernetes and security requirements around multi-tenancy. We probably don’t have all the answers for these, but we’d like to understand the requirements and hear people’s ideas. Please let us know what you would like to discuss when you register.

Arrival is from 10:00 with discussion kicking off from 10:30. The agenda is open discussion though we do aim to talk over a number of key topics. We hope to have the ever popular (though usually late!) pizza for lunch.

WHEN Thursday 20th October 2016 from 10:00 AM to 3:30 PM
WHERE IT Services, University of Birmingham – Elms Road Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT
REGISTER Please register for the event in advance: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ssug-meet-the-devs-cloud-workshop-tickets-27725390389 Numbers are limited and we will initially be limiting to 2 people per organisation/project/site.