Day 1 - the ponytail worked....
Wife took off for India, left me behind with two fiesty little girls. Guaranteed I will have a new found respect for all womankind before this episode is over. Day 1 is almost over, just dinner remains. Have not broken them yet, ponytails worked for school (I think) and sugar intake is just a tad over average. OK so they are watching a movie, which is supposed to be a Sat treat.... I don't think mom is reading this blog!
On to some work stuff. We have been doing some interesting work with Solaris Containers for the Securities and Investment Banking customer base. Most view Containers as a technology for consolidation, or for running Linux binaries unmodified on Solaris. That works, and works very well. Tons of examples in the Finance industry where folks are doing this.
My team views Containers as something even more interesting - as a way to reduce latency between applications that communicate with each other. If there is an application that consumes data, and another that generates this data, typically the producer would dump the data onto a messaging bus (Tibco, 29 West seem popular), and the consumer would pick it up. Obviously there is network latency introduced between these components.
If you run the two applications on two Containers instead... an order of magnitude improvement in latency. Amjad from my team ran a simple test. UDP ping pong between 2 systems, vs. between 2 Containers. Results are below.
For applications that are attempting to lower latency, the system backplane outperforms any existing networking technology. Based on this premise, we are looking at using systems with 8 or more cores to consolidate applications such as the various components of Reuters RMDS and their consumers on a single chassis. The fact that quad-core CPUs are pretty much ubiquitous - the Niagara 2 CPU has the equivalent of 64 cores (kinda sorta) - and most enterprises buy minimally dual-socket boxes, we are already talking minimally 8 cores on the smallest system in an enterprise!
Use Containers to consolidate, use Containers to lower latency.
Now that the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang soundtrack has gone around for the fourth time, its time to go. The weekend is coming up, wish me luck!
