ezeep Hub brings Universal Print to any printer

by Contributed | Feb 11, 2021 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

With ezeep’s Hub for Universal Print any existing printer can support Universal Print. The Hub can service single printers in home offices as well as fleets of printers in offices.

While printer manufacturers, many of which ezeep partners with – are working to add support for Universal Print to new printers there are millions of printers and even more users out there that could greatly benefit from Universal Print’s capabilities. Adding support to existing printers is cost effective, ecological, and quick.

ezeep Hub is the best way to connect existing printers to Universal Print. It is an affordable, solid-state micro-appliance that can be deployed to home offices, offices, and remote locations alike. With just an Ethernet connection and power needed it detects printers on its local network and adds them to a Universal Print account so they can be assigned to the users.

ezeep Hub was developed because software connectors require too much know how to be rolled out and a computer or server has to be set aside, maintained, secure and kept running at all times, costing around $2000 per year according to Quocirca. That is significantly less economic and ecological as a solid-state micro-appliance that can be powered with any micro-USB power cord, configured with a simple web interface, and doesn’t need maintenance or security updates thanks to a customized, locked-down and hardened OS.

Each ezeep Hub is tied to a Microsoft Azure account and its printers are accessible only from within this account ensuring printers can only be used by authorized users and print data cannot be seen by unauthorized parties.

Creating an outbound connection, to avoid complex firewall configurations, from its location ezeep Hub authorizes with Microsoft Azure and reports the printers it detected – particularly stubborn printers can be added manually – to the organization’s account where they can be assigned to the respective users and appear within their Universal Print interfaces.

Once a user initiates a printout their job is sent as a securely sent from Microsoft Universal Print to the respective ezeep Hub which routes the job to the printer on the local job. This setup also keeps printers and the sensitive data they process shielded from direct connections to the internet.

ezeep Hub for Universal Print also offers an upgrade path to the full ezeep solution for customers looking for extra features like support for MacOS, iOS, iPadOS and Android as well as secure printing and others.

ezeep is part of the ThinPrint family of products and draws on more than 20 years of experience in providing print management and optimization to more than 30,000 customers in 126 countries around the world with solutions for single users as well as for deployments are large as 300,000 users.

Visit our site to learn more about ezeep Hub for Universal Print.

Performance impact of enabling Accelerated Networking on HBv2 and HC virtual machines

by Contributed | Feb 11, 2021 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Azure Accelerated Networking is now available on HBv2, HC and HB virtual machines (VMs). Enabling this feature improves networking performance between VMs when connecting over the Ethernet-based vNICs, which is useful for scenarios like high-performance filesystems created on Azure VMs and mounted against client compute VMs. In this article we measure the network latency, bandwidth and I/O performance connecting HPC VMs to an NFS server, with Accelerated Networking enabled and disabled to see the impact. This article also covers network tuning to get the best performance with Accelerated Networking on HBv2 and HB VMs.

Ethernet network latency and bandwidth benchmarks

The ntttcp tools was used to perform Accelerated  Networking bandwidth tests.

The following command line parameters were used

ntttcp -r -m 64,* –show-tcp-retrans –show-nic-packets eth0   (on receiver)
ntttcp -s -m 64,*,$server_ip –show-tcp-retrans –show-nic-packets eth0  (on sender)

 Network latencies were measured using the linux sockperf tool.

/usr/sbin/sysctl -w net.core.busy_poll=50
/usr/sbin/sysctl -w net.core.busy_read=50
sockperf server -i $server_ip –tcp -p 8201   (on receiver)
sockperf sockperf ping-pong -i $server_ip -p 8201 -t 20 –tcp –pps=max  (on sender)

NOTE: CentOS-HPC 7.8 was used for all network latency and bandwidth benchmarks. The HBv2 network 
      bandwidth test applying the network tuning described below did not achieve the expected ~38 Gbps,
      but using CentOS-HPC 7.7 we were able to achieve ~38 Gbps. An updated version of CentOS-HPC 7.8
      will be released at a later date to correct this performance problem.

Ethernet network tuning for HB120_v2 and HB60

On HB120_v2 and HB60 some manual network tuning is needed to see the performance benefits of accelerated networking.

NOTE: Network tuning will be included in future Marketplace HPC images

 Here are the manual network tuning steps

• Change the number of  multi-purpose channels for the eth2 network device. The default number of multi-purpose channels on HBv2, HB and HC SKU’s is 31. In out testing, 4  multi-purpose channels gives the best performance.

ethtool -L eth2 combined 4

•  Pin the first four multi-purpose channels of device eth2 to vNUMA 0

To get the first four multi-purpose channel indices

ls /sys/class/net/eth2/device/msi_irqs

Map first four multi-purpose channel to vNUMA 0

echo “0” > /proc/irq/${irq_index[0]}/smp_affinity_list
echo “1” > /proc/irq/${irq_index[1]}/smp_affinity_list
echo “2” > /proc/irq/${irq_index[2]}/smp_affinity_list
echo “3” > /proc/irq/${irq_index[3]}/smp_affinity_list

NOTE: There is a script called map_irq_to_numa.sh in the azurehpc git repo to do this automatically. (here)

• Pin your executable (i.e ntttcp) to vNUMA 0

taskset -c 0-3 ntttcp <ntttcp_args>

I/O Performance benchmark 

We performed synthetic I/O benchmarks (FIO) on HC44 and HB120_v2 connected to an NFS server, to determine the performance impact of Accelerated Networking on network storage I/O performance.

NFS server configuration

D64s_v4 (6 x P30 disks)
NFS server used CentOS 7.8 and HPC I/O clients used CentOS-HPC 7.8
Expected theoretical peak I/O performance = ~1200 MB/s (Due to D64s_v4 and P30 disk limits)

NOTE: In this I/O benchmark an NFS server was used in which the D64s_v4 and P30 disk limits restricted I/O performance
      even though the network had more bandwidth to go faster. If a network storage solution is used with faster disks
      or higher throughput, greater gains in I/O performance would be expected by enabling Accelerated Networking.

Summary

• Enabling accelerated networking on HPC VMs has a significant impact on front-end network performance (latency and bandwidth).


• HB120_v2 and HB60 SKUs require network tuning to benefit from Accelerated Networking.


• Accelerated networking improves network storage I/O performance, especially read I/O at lower client counts.