Three Taiwanese companies are building their IT—and their businesses—with the Intel® Xeon® processor 5600 series:

• Blackmagic Design gets the power of efficient, compact, and high-performance rendering with Intel® Xeon® processor 5600 series.
• Panasonic Taiwan builds an energy-and cost-efficient enhanced virtualized environment through high-performance servers based on Intel Xeon processors 5600 series.
• Taiwan Taxi uses a cloud computing system powered by Intel Xeon processor 5600 series  to give passengers and drivers a comfortable and safe riding experience.

Designed for industry-leading performance and maximum energy efficiency, the Intel Xeon processor 5600 series delivers versatile one-way and two-way 64-bit multi-core servers and workstations that are ideal for a wide range of infrastructure, cloud, high-density, and high-performance computing (HPC) applications.

As always, you can find many more success stories like these on the Intel.com Business Success Stories for IT Managers page  or the Business Success Stories for IT Managers channel on iTunes.  And to keep up to date on the latest business success stories, follow ReferenceRoom on Twitter.

Please note: A version of this article originally apeared on The Data Center Journal

Every server in a data center runs on an allotted power cap that is programmed to withstand the peak-hour power consumption level. When an unexpected event causes a power spike, however, data center managers can be faced with serious problems. For example, in the summer of 2011, unusually high temperatures in Texas created havoc in data centers. The increased operation of air conditioning units affected data center servers that were already running close to capacity.

Preparedness for unexpected power events requires the ability to rapidly identify the individual servers at risk of power overload or failure. A variety of proactive energy management best practices can not only provide insights into the power patterns leading up to problematic events, but can offer remedial controls that avoid equipment failures and service disruptions.

Best Practice: Gaining Real-Time Visibility

Dealing with power surges requires a full understanding of your nominal data center power and thermal conditions. Unfortunately, many facilities and IT teams have only minimal monitoring in place, often focusing solely on return air temperature at the air-conditioning units.

The first step toward efficient energy management is to take advantage of all the power and thermal data provided by today’s hardware. This includes real-time server inlet temperatures and power consumption data from rack servers, blade servers, and the power-distribution units (PDUs) and uninterrupted power supplies (UPSs) related to those servers. Data center energy monitoring solutions are available for aggregating this hardware data and for providing views of conditions at the individual server or rack level or for user-defined groups of devices.

Unlike predictive models that are based on static data sets, real-time energy monitoring solutions can uncover hot spots and computer-area air handler (CRAH) failures early, when proactive actions can be taken.

By aggregating server inlet temperatures, an energy monitoring solution can help data center managers create real-time thermal maps of the data center. The solutions can also feed data into logs to be used for trending analysis as well as in-depth airflow studies for improving thermal profiles and for avoiding over- or undercooling. With adequate granularity and accuracy, an energy monitoring solution makes it possible to fine-tune power and cooling systems, instead of necessitating designs to accommodate the worst-case or spike conditions.

Best Practice: Shifting From Reactive to Proactive Energy Management

Accurate, real-time power and thermal usage data also makes it possible to set thresholds and alerts, and it introduce controls that enforce policies for optimized service and efficiencies. Real-time server data provides immediate feedback about power and thermal conditions that can affect server performance and ultimately end-user services.

Proactively identifying hot spots before they reach critical levels allows data center managers to take preventative actions and also creates a foundation for the following:

• Managing and billing for services based on actual energy use
• Automating actions relating to power management in order to minimize the impact on IT or facilities teams
• Integrating data center energy management with other data center and facilities management consoles.

Best Practice: Non-Invasive Monitoring

To avoid affecting the servers and end-user services, data center managers should look for energy management solutions that support agentless operation. Advanced solutions facilitate integration, with full support for Web Services Description Language (WSDL) APIs, and they can coexist with other applications on the designated host server or virtual machine.

Today’s regulated data centers also require that an energy management solution offer APIs designed for secure communications with managed nodes.

Best Practice: Holistic Energy Optimization

Real-time monitoring provides a solid foundation for energy controls, and state-of-the-art energy management systems provide enable dynamic adjustment of the internal power states of data center servers. The control functions support the optimal balance of server performance and power—and keep power under the cap to avoid spikes that would otherwise exceed equipment limits or energy budgets.

Intelligent aggregation of data center power and thermal data can be used to drive optimal power management policies across servers and storage area networks. In real-world use cases, intelligent energy management solutions are producing 20–40 percent reductions in energy waste.

These increases in efficiency ameliorate the conditions that may lead to power spikes, and they also enable other high-value benefits including prolonged business continuity (by up to 25 percent) when a power outage occurs. Power can also be allocated on a priority basis during an outage, giving maximum protection to business-critical services.

Intelligent power management for servers can also dramatically increase rack density without exceeding existing rack-level power caps. Some companies are also using intelligent energy management approaches to introduce power-based metering and energy cost charge-backs to motivate conservation and more fairly assign costs to organizational units.

Best Practice: Decreasing Data Center Power Without Affecting Performance

A crude energy management solution might mitigate power surges by simply capping the power consumption of individual servers or groups of servers. Because performance is directly tied to power, an intelligent energy management solution dynamically balances power and performance in accordance with the priorities set by the particular business.

The features required for fine-tuning power in relation to server performance include real-time monitoring of actual power consumption and the ability to maintain maximum performance by dynamically adjusting the processor operating frequencies. This requires a tightly integrated solution that can interact with the server operating system or hypervisor using threshold alerts.

Field tests of state-of-the-art energy management solutions have proven the efficacy of an intelligent approach for lowering server power consumption by as much as 20 percent without reducing performance. At BMW Group,[1] for example, a proof-of-concept exercise determined that an energy management solution could lower consumption by 18 percent and increase server efficiency by approximately 19 percent.

Similarly, by adjusting the performance levels, data center managers can more dramatically lower power to mitigate periods of power surges or to adjust server allocations on the basis of workloads and priorities.

Conclusions

Today, the motivations for avoiding power spikes include improving the reliability of data center services and curbing runaway energy costs. In the future, energy management will likely become more critical with the consumerization of IT, cloud computing and other trends that put increased service—and, correspondingly, energy—demands on the data center.

Bottom line, intelligent energy management is a critical first step to gaining control of the fastest-increasing operating cost for the data center. Plus, it puts a data center on a transition path towards more comprehensive IT asset management. Besides avoiding power spikes, energy management solutions provide in-depth knowledge for data center “right-sizing” and accurate equipment scheduling to meet workload demands.

Power data can also contribute to more-efficient cooling and air-flow designs and to space analysis for site expansion studies. Power is at the heart of optimized resource balancing in the data center; as such, the intelligent monitoring and management of power typically yields significant ROI for best-in-class energy management technology.

Two questions never fail to come up whenever I’m talking about cloud computing:  What are best practices for cloud security and what are you Intel folks doing together with McAfee to address it?    So when we commissioned a study and cloud security survey on IT perspectives on cloud security, I didn’t think that I’d find too many surprises.   Seeing that 87% of companies surveyed said that they had substantial concerns regarding public cloud security certainly didn’t surprise me, but the fact that 69% had similar levels of concern around private clouds did.

While security obviously isn’t just a challenge for public clouds, 65% of respondents believed they had a higher number of security breaches in public clouds vs private ones.   I know many of the leading cloud service providers in the industry and they do a very solid job of managing security and continuously enhancing their features.   But regardless of whether their security feature set is superior to the average enterprise, when it comes to purchasing decisions, perception is reality and apparently we need to help build confidence in IT’s use of public cloud services.

To address this need, we’ve been working with McAfee to develop combinations of Intel hardware-enabled features that are exposed and management by McAfee tools to enhance the security capability for both public and private clouds.  In fact, we’ve taking on the joint mission to make security in the cloud as equal or better as best-in-class enterprise security.

As an example of some of the capability we’re jointly enabling, we want to enable secure, trusted server pools and allow policies and access tools to recognize when those servers have been secured.   At Intel, we’ve enabled Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) in our latest Xeon E5-based platforms.    This allows virtual environments to boot with hardware-enhanced security features.   We’ve worked with Trapezoid Digital Security to demonstrate how TXT can be combined with McAfee’s e-Policy Orchestrator to demonstrate how to manage permissions based on whether a server has an established hardware root of trust.    This is just one of the elements that we’re highlighting in our joint McAfee and Intel security briefing today.   You can see some of the other solutions and highlights at www.intel.com/cloudsecurity.

Want to hear more or see how some of your peers are addressing cloud security?  Then join me at Forecast 2012 – a unique event led by the Open Data Center Alliance (a group of over 300 datacenter and IT professionals) – where both your peers and solutions providers will share their latest thinking on cloud security and best practices.

I'm a lover of quality animation, so I was excited to have a chance to have Derek Chan, head of technology for global operations for DreamWorks on Chip Chat talking about how the technologists at DreamWorks are using cutting edge technology to provide a world where the only thing holding back animators is the limits of their imaginations.

Designed for industry-leading performance and maximum energy efficiency, the Intel® Xeon® processor 5600 series delivers versatile one-way and two-way, 64-bit, multi-core servers and workstations that are ideal for a wide range of infrastructure, cloud, high-density, and high-performance computing (HPC) applications. Learn how four companies are putting it to work in these new business success stories:

• Healthy Outcomes for Cerner: RISC migration to Intel Xeon processors 5600 and 7500 series improves up time, performance, and savings for Cerner's mission-critical healthcare applications.
• Mindspeed Technologies Moves to a Platform for Growth: Standardizing on Intel Xeon processors 5600 series helps Mindspeed Technologies consolidate, reduce costs, and support continued business expansion.
• Versant Boosts Performance: A high-performance database developer completes tests around 80 percent faster with standardized IT based on Intel Xeon processors 5600 series.
• Virtual World Comes to Life Quicker for Virtalis: A leading virtual reality company delivers a high-performance solution based on Intel Xeon processor 5680, reducing lead times on customized workstations by approximately 25 percent.

As always, you can find many more business success stories like these on the Intel.com Business Success Stories for IT Managers page or the Business Success Stories for IT Managers channel on iTunes. And to keep up to date on the latest business success stories, follow ReferenceRoom on Twitter.

Before we jump into discussing cloud security frameworks, I’d like to thank all who responded to my first blog on InformationWeek.com through Twitteror LinkedIn. It’s rewarding to know that you found my initial blog on cloud security frameworksworthy of comment. I hope you continue to find my ideas interesting.

Now let’s consider today’s topic. While attending the University of Southern California, I was introduced to the concept of systems engineering and management. The premise of this discipline is disarmingly simple. First, the boundaries of any system are defined—sometimes erroneously—by the collective perspective of those participating in the effort. Second, the more complex the effort, the greater the interactions and the more difficult the solution. Finally, if you try to focus on a single technology or business component of that system to the exclusion of others, the success and effectiveness of the effort will likely suffer.

In theory, this approach makes sense. But from a more realistic perspective, business, technologists and technology vendors often decide to focus on a single element of a solution and—perhaps intentionally—ignore or overlook proposing solutions from an end-to-end perspective.

I wrote about the potential impact of this approach in a blog titled Cloud Lessons and LeMans. The key takeaway was that to build a workable cloud solution framework, you must understand and react to considerations larger than IT and the data center. In many respects, cloud security requires exactly the same considerations.

Organizational Behavior

A typical IT organization has a stratification of skills, responsibilities, and associated budgets. These are generally structured along platform, operations, and increasingly, lines of business.

Stratification is an inherent byproduct of organizational dynamics and how the success of each group is measured (and, in turn, compensated). In this environment, each group becomes detached from the needs of other groups and tends to define trust and risk based on their needs.

The cloud is a community of players made up of many diverse groups.  These can include cloud service providers, telco service providers, and perhaps thousands of end users running any number of platforms. If you look at it this way, you begin to understand that the business problems associated with cloud security are significantly harder to resolve than the technical challenges.

Are Security Breaches Linear?

So let’s say security breaches are linear in nature (subject to discussion). How does a typical organization defend itself?  In a blog written by Billy Cox that discusses security air gapsto separate systems, one might envision this defense as a string of very strong fortifications, erected around your platforms or line of business units, which are purpose-built to keep the bad guys out. I like to call this approach the Fort Knox Syndrome. (While I wish I could claim this term as my own, that honor goes to Ed Gerck, PhD, in a paper titled End-To-End IT Security that was originally published in 2002 and later republished in 2009 by Network Middleware Applications (NMA), Inc.)

Otherwise known as the United States Bullion Depository, Fort Knox is a fortified vault in Kentucky that can hold 4,577 metric tons (147.2 million oz. troy) of gold bullion. As you might imagine security in and around the building and its grounds is impressive.

Given the stratification of skills, responsibilities, and budgets described earlier, it shouldn’t come as a great surprise that for most organizations, security means building the equivalent of a Fort Knox-type fortification around their platforms and, by default, their application portfolio.

Figure 1 shows how this might look at a platform level.

Figure 1. Typical Enterprise Security Platform

Although the slide is a bit busy, it shows how the Fort Knox Syndrome works in many enterprises today. Each component is protected by its own firewall (represented by the red line surrounding each of the blue ovals). Within each component of the framework, nobody is really concerned about how their firewall impacts any other component of the system. This acknowledges some of the group-based detachment I mentioned earlier. Each component of the model demands some level of security compliance and ultimately has the right to determine who will—or will not—play within their domain.

The small cylinders in the figure—which represent identity, policy, and compliance—are the enforcers. Think of the identity cylinder as a simple device authentication capability. The policy cylinder represents a set of rules defining who can have access, the conditions, and under what criteria a device or its user is granted access. The compliance cylinder enforces policies such as maintenance of patch levels, firewall uptime, anti-virus definitions, and configuration vulnerability throughout the infrastructure. In a centralized IT shop today, it’s likely the data center component of this framework drives compliance of the associated elements.

But even with this simple model, problems are plentiful. When was the last time your organization experienced some type of security glitch when one component was updated and perhaps not fully tested against the umbrella security framework? I think it’s safe to conclude that the more federated your framework becomes (via a cloud ecosystem), the more the problems the Fort Knox model generates.

Please join me as I explore the topic of cloud security across upcoming blogs. For now, and reserving the right to add or modify these topics as we move forward, here are the areas I’ll address in the coming months:

1. Current state security
2. Security as a factor of cost
3. Business issues surrounding security
4. Evaluating new-world security model Investments
5. Security, data architecture, and big data
6. Security in Depth (E2E Frameworks)

I’m interested in your feedback on today’s blog in general and, specifically, how your enterprise is approaching E2E security and E2E cloud security. Do you consider the two topics as separate but equal or as one and the same discussion?

The Intel® Xeon® processor E5 family makes IT more efficient, productive, and secure for enterprises of all types and sizes. Download these new real-life business success stories to see how it can help you meet your toughest IT challenges:

• Clemson University Has Fast Throughput for Big Data: Clemson expects 1.5x more bandwidth and 2x faster floating point performance with the Intel Xeon processor E5 family.
• Duke University Gets Adaptive Performance: Intel® Turbo Boost Technology 2.0 shows the steady addition of up to 0.4 GHz for Intel Xeon processor E5-2680.
• Genci Uncovers the Secrets of the Universe: A French organization builds one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers using the Intel Xeon processor E5-2680.
• Lufthansa Systems Soars Above the Competition: Lufthansa Systems optimizes IT services with Intel Xeon processor E5 family, improving quality while maintaining costs.
• Purdue University Accelerates Science and Research with a Supercomputer: A new supercomputer based on the Intel Xeon processor E5 family triples the performance and doubles the density of the university's high-performance computing (HPC) platform. (Watch the video here.)
• RADVISION Has a Future Vision: RADVISION optimizes multi-party video conferencing to run on Intel Xeon processor E5-2680.
• RENCI Speeds Storm Surge Analysis: Intel Xeon processor E5 family doubles the wall-time performance of workhorse ADRIC code for RENCI.

You can find more stories like these here. As always, there are many more business success stories on the Intel.com Business Success Stories for IT Managers page and the Business Success Stories for IT Managers channel on iTunes. And to keep up to date on the latest business success stories, follow ReferenceRoom on Twitter.