Ubuntu with Redis Labs, Altera and IBM Power supply new NoSQL data store solution

by John Zannos on 10 October 2014

Big Data, scale and cloud are the big topics of technology today. Canonical with Ubuntu continues to drive innovation through commitment to openness and building a collaborative ecosystem. The key elements of this disruption include: innovation, automation, lower TCO, greater density, optimised power/performance ratios and new architectures like OpenPOWER.

Earlier this month, as part of its POWER portfolio, IBM announced new IBM Power S824L servers that are built on IBM’s POWER8 processor, the world’s first processor optimised for the most demanding Big Data workloads. Powering each of these servers is the latest Ubuntu Server OS 14.04, which is the only operating system ready to run every class of Linux-only POWER8 scale-out server. Also, IBM announced, the IBM Data Engine for NoSQL, bringing together innovation from OpenPOWER members IBM, Redis Labs, Altera and Canonical. This solution enables a significantly lower cost basis for deploying NoSQL data stores. The solution combines Redis Labs software, Canonical’s Ubuntu operating system, Altera’s FPGAs and IBM’s unique CAPI-enabled Power Systems S822L with IBM’s FlashSystem 840.

Managing tens to hundreds of nodes of a scale-out architecture in a cost-effective way benefits from a completely new approach to provisioning and management. This is exactly what Canonical and IBM have partnered to deliver on the new POWER systems with Juju service orchestration and MAAS (Metal-as-a-Service) automated provisioning. These tools make it simple to deploy, manage and grow complex workloads like LAMP, OpenStack and Hadoop.  It’s now possible to get full deployments running in minutes.

At IBM Enterprise 2014, IBM with Canonical demonstrated a TurboLAMP solution based on Ubuntu, along with fellow OpenPOWER Foundation partners – Mellanox, MariaDB and Zend. This is the first time this unique set of companies have come together to create a LAMP solution tailored and optimised to take advantage of a hardware platform.  The ultimate goal is to make mobile and web apps like Magento and WordPress run faster and better.  TurboLAMP is a solution stack based on Ubuntu, the Apache web server, an open source relational database MariaDB, and the PHP programming language.  The TurboLAMP Stack is unique, with its tight level of integration across LAMP, and with the optimisation of each component for the Power hardware platform.  To further accelerate the deployment of the stack, Ubuntu’s Juju orchestration tool is used to deploy the optimised LAMP charm bundle.  Deployment experts from MariaDB, Mellanox and Zend documented their operational best practices and knowledge from past customer engagements into software patterns distilled into a Juju charm. The unique interactions and dependencies between the software packages were captured and built into a charm bundle that makes it a single (and simple) deployable stack. Overall the speed and performance experience of the Power TurboLAMP solution make it live up to its TURBO name – read more about it TurboLAMP Whitepaper.

We have partnered with IBM to meet customer demand for performance, openness and choice. With Power’s new scale out servers, we are bringing new innovation to the server marketplace. This partnership has led to Ubuntu being the first, and currently only OS available for the new POWER8 scale-out servers, and will enable our joint customers to confidently deploy massively scaled-out workloads. Our goal continues to be to provide best in class solutions and an excellent customer experience.