IBM and ESRI hybrid solutions on the new IBM PureFlex System

Transcription

1 IBM and ESRI hybrid solutions on the new IBM PureFlex System Using PureFlex System hybrid capabilities, integrated networking, storage, and unified administration for joint IBM and ESRI Smarter Cities solutions ESRI IBM Maximo Spatial IBM Intelligent Operations Center IBM Systems and Technology Group, ISV Enablement April 2012 Copyright IBM Corporation, 2012

2 Table of contents Abstract...1 Introduction...1 PureFlex System and Smarter Cities...2 Intelligent Operations Center architecture...3 Intelligent Operations Center software architecture... 4 Intelligent Operations Center hardware architecture... 6 The IBM Maximo Spatial and ESRI solution...7 Maximo Spatial and ESRI software architecture... 7 Maximo Spatial and ESRI hardware architecture Solution functional testing...11 Intelligent Operations Center / ESRI testing Maximo Spatial and ESRI testing Summary...17 Resources...18 Trademarks and special notices...19

3 Abstract This paper discusses two IBM solutions, Intelligent Operations Center and Maximo Spatial, both using geospatial functionality provided by ESRI. It shows how the hybrid capabilities of the new IBM PureFlex System synergizes the hybrid platform requirements of these solutions and how these multi-server solutions, including significant storage requirements, benefit from the PureFlex System networking throughput. The target audience of this paper are solution architects who are comfortable with software and hardware architectural diagrams, and the flow and interaction discussions relative to those architectures. The paper explains the software architectures of the two solutions, and the hardware requirements of them. Introduction IBM Smarter Cities solutions are targeted at increasing the efficiency of a city s resources, infrastructure, and public safety. IBM Intelligent Operations Center and IBM Maximo Spatial are two solutions that are designed to address those requirements. The Intelligent Operations Center solution is targeted at any operations center, whether it is geographically based (city, county, regional) or organization-structure based (emergency / public safety, government agency, building complex such as a hospital, office park, planned community) or venue based (stadiums, airports, convention centers). The Intelligent Operations Center software stack (applications that make up the solution) is also the core for IBM Intelligent Water and Intelligent Transportation solutions. These solutions concentrate on measuring the cities current usage patterns and providing real-time status. For example, traffic sensors measure the volume and velocity of traffic throughout the city. When that information is aggregated at the Intelligent Transportation hub, it can provide rerouting information in near real time, predictive analysis (displaying 15 minutes to downtown), collection of data used for efforts such as future road infrastructure planning, and disaster recovery. In the disaster recovery case, these solutions identify exceptions and have the ability to send those exceptions to the Intelligent Operations Center for centralized disaster recovery management. IBM Maximo Spatial is a solution that bridges geospatial objects with asset management. This provides customers with a visual layout of their resources, such as traffic cameras or water lines, with the ability to perform workflows (such as inspection rollouts) on those resources. ESRI provides geographic information system (GIS) services, giving customers visual representations of their data. This visualization helps customers realize relationships, patterns, and trends in the form of maps, globes, reports, and charts and is a key component in IBM Intelligent Operations Center and Maximo Spatial solutions. 1

4 Figure 1: Intelligent Operation Centers IBM Intelligent Operations Center solutions use ESRI in a multitude of ways, from registering and tracking disaster recovery events to monitoring transportation activities and mapping water utility resources, such as water mains and water meters, in the geographic mapping tab of the Intelligent Operations Center dashboard. The IBM Maximo Spatial solution uses ESRIs data store for access to customer resources and resource attributes. IBM Maximo Asset Management can then use those resources and attributes for managing those resources as assets. IBM Maximo Asset Management can create, update, or delete the resources in the ESRI data store for activities performed on those assets, such as updating the inspection dates after the inspections have been performed. This paper highlights the Maximo Spatial and IBM Intelligent Operations Center architectures and explains how they use ESRIs geospatial services. It also explains the solutions on the IBM PureFlex System and then describes how the PureFlex System complements the hybrid characteristics of these complex solutions. For the Maximo Spatial solution, you can run the spatial bridge between Maximo Asset Management and ESRI ArcGIS. This is a critical data path between the two technologies and one where you can use the IBM PureFlex System platform advanced networking and its hybrid compute node (IBM POWER and x86) capabilities. PureFlex System and Smarter Cities Smarter Cities customers are typically independent entities that do not have their own data centers, neither do they have very experienced IT skills. The characteristics tends to make them good candidates for solutions to be run on third-party hosted cloud environments, but due to a myriad of issues, legal, internal policies, bandwidth, and so on, several of these customers initially tend to be on-premise customers, which tend to make fit-for-purpose systems a good fit. Fit-for-purpose systems, in this case, are a combination of the software solution, additional software assets and hardware designed and sized for that solution. These systems are typically self contained, small footprint, cable free, and use standardized power. Both, the IBM BladeCenter and the PureFlex System chassis fit in a 14U rack (basically the size of a mini-fridge), and provide IBM POWER processor- 2

5 based server, x86 server and storage nodes. The PureFlex System trades more energy consumption for enhanced storage, networking, and server capacity. As these customers can be as small as communities to as large as counties, states, and regions, IBM has predefined hardware configurations for them. Currently they are entry- and mid-level configurations based on BladeCenter technologies. The PureFlex System is a great fit-for-purpose system, picking up where BladeCenter technologies start running into limitations in networking, storage, and hybrid server capabilities, for medium- to high-end customers. In addition, the customer can also get the benefit of working with the unified administration of the PureFlex System as opposed to the more conventional administration utilities of IBM BladeCenter. The following PureFlex System advantages are specific to these hybrid solutions: Networking advantages: The PureFlex System provides up to four times the speed (10/40 Gb) with Gigabit over Ethernet and up to twice the speed (8/16 Gb) with Fibre Channel. Storage advantages: The PureFlex System IBM Storwize V7000 Unified equivalent storage node supports 24 hard disk drives (twice that of the BCS), close to 1 million IOPS (with clustering), 8 GB data cache, RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10 and includes IBM System Storage Easy Tier hot-data caching. Compute node advantages: The PureFlex System supports x86, IBM POWER7 and multitiered environments. The x86 compute node supports up to 16 cores, 768 GB RAM and 8 solid-state drives (SSDs) for a half width node. The IBM POWER compute nodes can support up 16 high speed POWER cores, 256 GB RAM and two SSD or hard disk drives (HDDs) for a half width node and 32 high speed POWER cores, 512 GB RAM, and four SSDs or HDDs for a full width node. Administration advantages: The Flex Storage Manager (FSM) provides a world-class user experience with a truly single pane of glass approach for all chassis components, featuring an instant resourceoriented view of the Enterprise Chassis and its components. The FSM provides vital information for realtime monitoring. An increased focus on optimizing time-to-value is evident in features such as: Setup wizards, including initial setup wizards, providing intuitive and quick setup of the FSM Chassis map - provides multiple view overlays to track health, firmware inventory, and environmental metrics Configuration management for repeatable set up of compute, network, and storage devices Remote presence application for remote access to compute nodes with a single sign-on Quick search providing results as you type Intelligent Operations Center architecture While the dashboard operations for the Intelligent Operations Center are intended to be simple and intuitive, the architecture supporting the Intelligent Operations Center is a little more complex. This section drills down from the business operations for Intelligent Operations Center customers to the functional and nonfunctional servers that support those business operations. You can then map those functional and nonfunctional servers to IBM hardware. 3

6 Intelligent Operations Center software architecture Figure 2: Business Function Diagram of the IOC The Intelligent Operations Center is driven by events and standard operating procedures (SOPs). Events can be entered manually by an operator through the Intelligent Operations Center dashboard or can be electronically received from a resource, such as a traffic or water sensor through the Data Integration Broker, as shown in Figure 2. These events are persisted in the local database and used by other functions within the system. For example, an event that shows a bus mechanical failure can get stored in the local database. The dashboard picks up and presents the event to the Intelligent Operations Center operator. Usually, this is done visually using an interactive map and in a tabular form. A SOP can be activated to define the operator steps involved with bus mechanical failures, such as dispatch a new bus, dispatch repair crew to the stranded bus, and so on. Analytics can be performed with the event to evaluate bus reliability, predict new bus arrival, and so on. These business operations are enabled by several technologies under the covers. The dashboard is aggregated using the IBM Portal and is populated with portlets. The map and mapping services are provides by ESRIs ArcGIS services. IBM WebSphere Application Server is a key component of the application and integration services. This paper does not provide details about all of these server products but points out that each of these services are independent servers that can run in parallel and can be activated by incoming events and Intelligent Operations Center operators, where operators might be hundreds of concurrent users. 4

7 Figure 3: Functional Components of the IOC Adding users and administrators add two other services to the solution: authentication and authorization through an access server and a system management server (called out in green in Figure 4). Figure 4: Access and Systems Management Functional Components of the IOC 5

8 The events, SOPs, analytic processing, dashboard updates, and operators contribute to determining the system workload, which in turn defines the required storage, processors, and memory for each customer implementation. Now that you have the server instances and an understanding of the workloads you can next look into the Intelligent Operations Center hardware architecture. Intelligent Operations Center hardware architecture Figure 5: Functional Components overlaid on the Pure Flex System Each of the Intelligent Operations Center servers is contained in a virtual machine (VM). The hypervisors supported are kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) and VMWare. The operating system running on the virtual machines is Red Hat Linux 5.0. The geospatial server from ESRI is purchased separately from the Intelligent Operations Center. The test team created an ESRI RHEL 5.0 VM for the Intelligent Operations Center functional testing, although there are several ways to integrate the geospatial functionality. Alternatives include running the ESRI server remotely, which is sort of counter to the fit-for-purpose system defined earlier, or adding a node specifically for ESRI support and installing it directly, that is, not in a hypervisor. The ESRI VM included the ArcGIS server and ArcSDE. For this effort, the test team installed the same virtual machine used in the ESRI / Maximo Spatial solution functional testing. 6

9 The virtual machines per hypervisor ratio used depends on the amount of cores and RAM you want to dedicate to each of the servers. The setup used in this functional testing was similar to the current Intelligent Operations Center entry-level configuration based mainly on the prega hardware available. This configuration consists of two 8-core compute nodes with 32 GB of RAM. Each node was installed with the ESXi 5.0 hypervisor containing four VMs. The test team performed systems management from an independent server, again due to limitations of prega resources. The PureFlex System configuration for the Intelligent Operations Center functional testing effort consisted of two x86 compute nodes, 10Gb Ethernet and an external IBM Storwize V7000 Unified system. The x86 nodes had two 8-core processors and 64 GB RAM. As the PureFlex System storage node is based on the Storwize V7000 technology, the test team used the Storwize V7000 for the functional testing efforts. The PureFlex System storage node, when available later this year, is expected to be used for the production configuration. In a mid- to large-production system, the test team might have four or more nodes. The reason this is called out is that when the virtual machines are spread across the physical nodes, the networking bandwidth becomes more important. The PureFlex System provides networking performance boost up to four times and this can be used immediately from the Intelligent Operations Center s high degree of server to server intercommunication over its data integration broker. Two terabytes of storage was dedicated to each compute node and shared across each compute node s eight virtual images. The storage area network (SAN) and logical volumes were configured through the PureFlex System administration. No SSDs were used. The cores, RAM, and storage per VM were configured through the VMWare VSphere Client. The IBM Maximo Spatial and ESRI solution This section describes the software and hardware architecture of the Maximo Spatial and ESRI solution. Maximo Spatial and ESRI software architecture IBM Maximo Spatial Asset Management System provides users with the visibility to view complex GIS information and access dynamic GIS functionality, instead of just viewing a static map. This allows organizations to maintain data outside of their GIS systems but still be able to correlate their data to features in their GIS systems. Further, Maximo Spatial provides a robust, secure, and highly customizable interface to align with specific business needs. Figure 6 shows a snapshot of the Maximo Spatial interface showing how queries can be issued and information can be displayed visually, based on data stored in both ESRI and Maximo. 7

10 Figure 6: Snapshot of the Maximo Spatial interface The Maximo Spatial and ESRI solution consists of the following components. ArcMap ArcCatalog ArcGIS Server ArcSDE ESRI Database Maximo Spatial Maximo Application Server Maximo Database DB Link Figure 7: Components in the Maximo Spatial/ESRI solution 8

11 The Maximo Spatial and ESRI solution consists of the following three major components: ArcDesktop System The ArcDesktop System provides access to applications, such as ArcMap and ArcCatalog. ArcMap is an application that is used to create, edit, and validate maps. Maps can include different layers that contain features, such as water meters, water hydrants, water lines, and others for a typical water utility application. ArcCatalog provides a means of connecting to the ESRI GIS database, where the detailed information is maintained about each feature. ArcCatalog provides a means to directly access the ArcSDE layer and to create, store, and retrieve feature data. ArcGIS Server System The ArcGIS Server System has a ArcGIS server, ArcSDE layer, and a geodatabase that contains the GIS data. Maximo Server The Maximo Stack consists of a database server such as IBM DB2 that serves as a data store for Maximo Asset data, an application server and Maximo Asset Management System overlaid with the Maximo Spatial plug-in that provides for asset data management coupled with GIS integration. Maximo allows for asset data creation, manipulating, and report generation based on various parameters. Maximo records can be linked to the GIS feature classes through the database link. This allows Maximo to not only query and retrieve information about features but also create new features in the ESRI database through the link The client-side browser can be used to access and manipulate the GIS feature classes through the ESRI interface and the Maximo interface. The Maximo Spatial interface provides a way of correlating GIS data to more detailed asset information, without data duplication and processing cost of having to maintain this data in the GIS database. Maximo also has powerful report generation tools that help retrieve and display asset. 9

12 Maximo Spatial and ESRI hardware architecture Figure 8: Maximo Spatial Applications Mapped to the Pure Flex System The PureFlex System configuration for the Maximo Spatial functional testing effort consisted of one x86 compute node, one POWER compute node, 10Gb Ethernet and an external Storwize V7000 Unified system. The x86 node had two 8-core processors and 64 GB RAM. The POWER compute node had two 8-core processors and 128 GB RAM. As the PureFlex System storage node is based on the Storwize V7000 Unified technology, the test team used the Storwize V7000 Unified system for the functional testing efforts. When the PureFlex System storage node is available, it will be used for the production configuration. This hybrid configuration allowed the test team to use the optimization of WebSphere Application Server on POWER and take advantage of the inherent faster processing speeds of the POWER architecture for the Maximo and Maximo Spatial applications, while at the same time interact with the ArcGIS and ArcSDE servers on the x86 node. The POWER compute node s operating system was IBM AIX. Oracle was installed as the database of choice for the spatial community, although, DB2 and other databases are supported. WebSphere Application Manager 7.0 was installed as the web application server environment. Maximo and Maximo Spatial web applications were installed on WebSphere Application Manager. 10

13 Two terabytes of storage was dedicated to each compute node. The SAN and logical volumes were configured through the PureFlex System administration. No SSDs were used. Solution functional testing Due to the complex nature of solutions and the number of software products installed and configured, only functional testing was performed on these solutions. The functional testing was targeted at the visual aspects of both the solutions, more specifically, the generation of new objects in the maps associated with each solution. This was to ensure that the test team exercised the geo-spatial code paths. Intelligent Operations Center / ESRI testing The functional testing for the Intelligent Operations Center was targeted at the creation of events that can show up in both: the tabular form and visually mapped in the operator dashboard. These events use the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP), which is part of the OASIS open standards organization. The following example is a markup of a CAP event. The section highlighted in blue italic is the geographical mapping of the event and how it gets displayed in the Intelligent Operations Center dashboard map. // Fill in the capmessage string based on the CAP Specification // String venueattendanceopen[] = { "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\"?> <cap:alert xmlns:cap=\"urn:oasis:names:tc:emergency:cap:1.2\" xmlns:xsi=\" xsi:schemalocation=\"urn:oasis:names:tc:emergency:cap:1.2 CAP-v1.2- os.xsd \"> <cap:sender>ibm.com/ioc/capsender</cap:sender> <cap:identifier>305b a-4e09-b8f1-2097e6c1feed</cap:identifier> <cap:sent> t15:00:00-00:00</cap:sent> <cap:status>actual</cap:status> <cap:msgtype>alert</cap:msgtype> <cap:scope>public</cap:scope> <cap:info> <cap:category>other</cap:category> <cap:event>venue Gates Opened</cap:event> <cap:urgency>expected</cap:urgency> 11

14 <cap:severity>minor</cap:severity> <cap:certainty>observed</cap:certainty> <cap:description>the Entertainment Venue Gates have been opened. Please begin monitoring turnstile activity and potential security and safety alerts.</cap:description> <cap:area> <cap:areadesc>west Gate</cap:areaDesc> <cap:circle> , </cap:circle> </cap:area>" <cap:area> <cap:areadesc>east Gate</cap:areaDesc> <cap:circle> , </cap:circle> </cap:area>" </cap:info> </cap:alert> }; These events can be entered manually by an Intelligent Operations Center operator or can be received over the Intelligent Operations Center data bus. For function testing, the test team used the Intelligent Operations Center-defined portlets that might be used manually by an Intelligent Operations Center operator. To do so, the Intelligent Operations Center operator logs in to the Portal Server with administration privileges. The operator clicks Verification Tools and then Sample event publisher, and then will be presented with three options: Sample Events, New Event, and New Notification. 12

15 Figure 9: Creating a new event in the IOC Sample events are predefined events that the Intelligent Operations Center provides with the product. In a production environment, these samples would be replaced with customer-specific events. A new event allows the operator to generate both: a new type of event and an instance of that event. This is used for the functional testing. Using the New Notification tab, an operator can manually generate alerts. The test team did not use alerts in their functional testing. The test team created the Chemical Spill (PureFlex System) event and submitted it. After submission, you can view the event in the Events and Incidents tab of the operator s dashboard. Figure 10: Validating the new Event 13

16 The New Event portlet does not provide fields for geospatial locations. This information either has to be added to the CAP event manually or for functional verification. You can use the sample events which have default geospatial information embedded within the CAP event. Figure 11 shows the map with the two sample Chemical Spill events (2, 12) added. Figure 11: Map showing the sample chemical spill events Maximo Spatial and ESRI testing The functional testing for Maximo Spatial consisted of creating and updating an asset from Maximo which will be updated on the ESRI database. The sample New York City (NYC) utilities data set was used for the functional testing. This consists of a number of water utility objects, water meters, water mains, water lines, and so on in a subsection of New York City. This data set was installed on the ESRI server through the ArcGISManager application. 14

17 After the data set was installed, the ESRI objects were mapped to IBM Maximo Assets. Figure 12 shows an Edit menu that allows you to place the asset on the map (created through the map manager in IBM Maximo). The little blue box indicates where the asset will be placed in the map presented. This creates a Maximo record and also creates a new feature in the GIS / ESRI database that will be associated with this Maximo record. Figure 12: Creating a new Asset from Maximo The asset is actually created in the database on the ESRI Server. To validate the creation of the object, you can access a browser-based application using the ESRI JavaScript API. From there, you can find the new ESRI object, hover over the object and notice that the MXASSETNUM is the PureFlex System_TESTOBJ that was created in Maximo. 15

18 Figure 13: Validating the new asset from a browser connecting to ArcGIS 16

19 Summary IBM Intelligent Operating Center and IBM Maximo Spatial with ESRI geospatial services take advantage of multiple platforms to use both: new x86 and POWER computing nodes of the PureFlex System and highthroughput networking among them. Both of these solutions require high capacity and intelligent storage which can be used from the Storwize V7000 Unified storage node, and the unified administration reduces the hardware, networking, and storage setup and configuration time. The PureFlex System allows customers to consolidate and optimize these solutions. IT departments can more efficiently consolidate the servers and applications of these solutions to reduce operating expenses, and cut lifecycle maintenance time to half (with no downtime). The PureFlex System also provides maximum flexibility with the choice of architectures and open standards. The hybrid capabilities of the PureFlex System allow to use the best platform for the service provided, in this case, POWER for WebSphere Application Manager, Maximo, and Maximo Spatial, while using the x86 platform for ESRI GIS services. The solutions take advantage of the PureFlex System leading-edge networking with their high rate of server to-server intercommunication over their enterprise service bus across their server and SAN services. The robust integrated storage offering of the PureFlex System provides the scalable storage requirement for the large amounts of transactions and GIS data that these solutions might generate. The single management interface for compute, storage, and networking can help provide up to 70% management and administrative cost savings. The hybrid capabilities, leading-edge networking, integrated storage, and single management interface make it a synergetic fit for fit-for-purpose solutions, such as IBM Intelligent Operating Center and IBM Maximo Spatial solutions. 17

20 Resources The following websites provide useful references to supplement the information contained in this paper: IBM Systems on PartnerWorld ibm.com/partnerworld/systems IBM Redbooks ibm.com/redbooks Maximo Spatial ibm.com/maximospatial ESRI IBM Intelligent Operations Center ibm.com/software/industry/intelligent-oper-center 18

21 Trademarks and special notices Copyright IBM Corporation References in this document to IBM products or services do not imply that IBM intends to make them available in every country. IBM, the IBM logo, and ibm.com are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. If these and other IBM trademarked terms are marked on their first occurrence in this information with a trademark symbol ( or ), these symbols indicate U.S. registered or common law trademarks owned by IBM at the time this information was published. Such trademarks may also be registered or common law trademarks in other countries. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the Web at "Copyright and trademark information" at Java and all Java-based trademarks and logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Microsoft, Windows, Windows NT, and the Windows logo are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. Intel, Intel Inside (logos), MMX, and Pentium are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the United States and other countries. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds in the United States, other countries, or both. Other company, product, or service names may be trademarks or service marks of others. Information is provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. All customer examples described are presented as illustrations of how those customers have used IBM products and the results they may have achieved. Actual environmental costs and performance characteristics may vary by customer. Information concerning non-ibm products was obtained from a supplier of these products, published announcement material, or other publicly available sources and does not constitute an endorsement of such products by IBM. Sources for non-ibm list prices and performance numbers are taken from publicly available information, including vendor announcements and vendor worldwide homepages. IBM has not tested these products and cannot confirm the accuracy of performance, capability, or any other claims related to non-ibm products. Questions on the capability of non-ibm products should be addressed to the supplier of those products. All statements regarding IBM future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice, and represent goals and objectives only. Contact your local IBM office or IBM authorized reseller for the full text of the specific Statement of Direction. Some information addresses anticipated future capabilities. Such information is not intended as a definitive statement of a commitment to specific levels of performance, function or delivery schedules with respect to any future products. Such commitments are only made in IBM product announcements. The information is 19

22 presented here to communicate IBM's current investment and development activities as a good faith effort to help with our customers' future planning. Performance is based on measurements and projections using standard IBM benchmarks in a controlled environment. The actual throughput or performance that any user will experience will vary depending upon considerations such as the amount of multiprogramming in the user's job stream, the I/O configuration, the storage configuration, and the workload processed. Therefore, no assurance can be given that an individual user will achieve throughput or performance improvements equivalent to the ratios stated here. Photographs shown are of engineering prototypes. Changes may be incorporated in production models. Any references in this information to non-ibm websites are provided for convenience only and do not in any manner serve as an endorsement of those websites. The materials at those websites are not part of the materials for this IBM product and use of those websites is at your own risk. 20