The industry has been waiting for Intel's new product, codenamed Nehalem - and for good reason.  With the recession in full swing and all of us re-thinking our spending habits, we are only spending our hard-earned money on the best and most important products and services ... and everyone is looking for a deal.

The Xeon 5500 based server is one of those products that is going to make IT, business leaders, financial accountants and Corporate Executives take notice.

Why? ... because an investment in a new server, used to replace nine aging single core servers, can pay for itself in an short as 8 months while dramatically reducing infrastructure space consumption, power & cooling requirements and operating costs.

For Finance, that means that a capital investment today, could create a positive cash flow stream within a year

For IT, that means newer, in-warranty servers delivering more performance per server simplifying operations and maintenance, with lower risk of problems

For Facility Managers, that means reduced power / cooling requirements and the ability to consolidate data centers and avoid new construction or retrofits

For the Corporate Executives, this means a more efficient business, with lower costs and more innovation that can spur business growth

Read My blog on the Server Room titled "Top 10 Reasons to Buy in a Recession"

View the 8 month payback calculation here

Read more about the collaboration of industry solutions in the Server Solutions Insider Forum and view the innovation from intel in the server room

Chris

With the Nehalem architecture-based processor server/workstation launch just around the corner, customers are demonstrating how quickly they can take advantage of the performance afforded to them by our newest processor. One recent example was a Philips* CT demonstration of a beating heart at the major European IT show, CeBit*.  According to the Philips demonstration, they were able to render the human heart twice as fast using our upcoming Nehalem workstation processors as compared to the previous generation Intel® Xeon® processor 54xx series.  Check out the beating heart demonstration video in this link using our Nehalem architecture-based workstation processor.

For those of us with no medical background,  3D imaging is a tool enabling doctors to visualize the human body without invasive tools.  The patient is scanned, data is acquired, and a 3D model is assembled and they are able to show what going on in the human body without touching it.  CT tools are able to produce thousand of pictures or slices per second.  This results in large datasets that take time to process.  Software running on a server or workstation processes this vast amount of data to generate detailed 3D images and then can be interpreted by medical staff.   The primary challenge is managing large datasets generated by large volume acquisitions while speeding time to diagnosis.

The heart is a particularly challenging to visualize using CT scanning.  It is a very fast moving organ, with little control over its movement because is involuntary, and the heart needs to be frozen in time to get accurate anatomical picture.  Another challenge for volume rendering is high level image quality necessary so that anatomical structures of the heart can be depicted in an accurate way.

One interesting aspect of Philips CT solution is that image rendering takes place in the in the CPU which means that the performance of their solution is not restricted to by the memory available on a graphics card and is not slowed down by transfer of data between the CPU and the graphics card.  The Philips’ rendering software is multi-threaded and is able to take advantage of Intel advances in multi-threading /multi-core processing technology and software optimization tools for best performance improvements.

I believe Philips’ demonstration is just one example of how Nehalem architecture-based processors will provide meaningful advances in 3D visualization, not just in medical fields, but other areas such as manufacturing and digital content creation.

Jimmy Leon

*Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

That’s right, now you can buy a supercomputer that fits right under your desk. The PSC’s (Personal supercomputer) of today would have been #1 on the Top500 http://www.top500.org in November of 1996. ASCI Red would have been the first system to overtake the performance these small supercomputers can provide today.

So why do you need one of these high performance bad boys? Well, if you are trying to keep up with technology, beat out your competition, and do it at the lowest cost possible then you just better think about buying one. Whether you are in manufacturing, engineering, financial services or life sciences, the benefits offered are huge. You can now simulate vs constructing expensive prototypes, you can do more work at your desk vs. waiting to schedule the job on the oversubscribed cluster and most importantly, it provides the competitive advantage you most dearly need to keep up with your customer’s demands for lower pricing.

There are a couple of very interesting solutions on the market right now that should be considered. One is the Cray CX1. This little monster can support up to 16 quad core processors! With Nehalem soon to launch, that is one heck of a lot of performance.

http://www.cray.com/products/CX1.aspx

The CX1 is also ICR (Intel Cluster Ready) certified. This certification helps to ensure end users the system will provide a positive out-of-box experience. When you install the system and turn it on, it just works. You are maximizing your investment. The last thing a small business needs is to make the investment and then spend days getting the system up and running.

http://software.intel.com/en-us/cluster-ready/

With today’s economy, many businesses are reducing cost and putting off capital expenditures. You have decided to be like many other businesses and wait just one more year to upgrade your current computing system. Your competition decided not to wait. Instead, they purchased a PSC that was Intel Cluster Ready Certified and are now more productive than ever before. They made the investment and are now turning out new designs faster and at a lower cost than ever before. You scratch your head wondering how they do it. As you try to save your business they are growing and winning new business. Sometimes, being aggressive in a difficult time is the prudent thing to do…

Still wondering if this is right for me? Concerned you don’t have the IT staff to support such as beast? You don’t have the budget? Is there software out there I can use? All are good questions/concerns, but the ICR certified PSC minimizes if not eliminates the need for an IT staff. The PSC is one of the most affordable cluster solutions on the market today. It plugs right into your wall socket…you have tamed the beast! As for software, if you are purchasing an ICR certified system, then there are numerous applications available and most likely, one you are already familiar with.

When you are getting ready to make your next workstation or high-end PC purchase, I strongly recommend you consider one of the new kids on the block, the PSC. If it is Intel Cluster Ready Certified, you can rest assured the solution you do buy will just work.

The storage world is getting quite a bit of press lately. As IT organizations seek to reduce costs, streamline their management tasks, save power, increase capacity and access to their data and improve security, new types of storage solutions are being introduced continuously The growth rate of storage revenue is blistering, and the number of companies scrambling for the piece of the pie is impressive.

As with any hot area of technology, there are a lot of technological developments to keep track of, and of course there are disputes about which new trends will maintain dominance, and which technologies will end up carrying the day. I’ve writtenin the past about some of the potential improvements coming along with the introduction new Data Center Ethernet (DCE) [aka, Data Center Bridging (DCB)] IEEE standard improvements. These layer 2 improvements coupled with Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) can bring to the storage world a converged story for networking. However, noticeably missing from my previous post was a discussion of iSCSI. The iSCSI standard has been around since 2003, and many vendors including Intel have been selling adapters with various levels of support for iSCSI for quite some time. Microsoft has an iSCSI initiator built into their server OS stack, and VMWare also supports iSCSI in their virtualized system environments. This isn’t a comprehensive list, but just a summary to show that iSCSI is ‘real’.

So the question is how does FCoE fit in with iSCSI? Are they competing technologies, or complimentary, or neither? Did I leave iSCSI out of my earlier discussion because I believe the technology is doomed? Hardly…

The basic case for FCoE is pretty straight forward. If you have an FC SAN in your datacenter, as you roll out a new rack (for instance) you can eliminate the top-of-rack FC switch and also the need for two adapters in each of servers (one for Ethernet, and one for FC). There are additional potential savings as you move FCoE further and further into the network, but I think to keep the discussion simple, the key thing to note is “if you have an FC SAN…”; then you care about FCoE and can potentially gain from it. If you don’t, well then FCoE will not necessarily be your technology of choice. FCoE is not an Ethernet capability that will drive you to use Fiber Channel, but it may make expanding and growing your FC network cheaper, lower power, and more convenient, especially with virtualized blade servers.

To elaborate, today the iSCSI SAN market is growing quickly, but it is growing in areas where FC is not generally a popular solution. It is usually chosen where storage over IP on existing Ethernet was viewed as acceptable given the cost tradeoffs. In contrast, FC is deployed where key IT knowledge, and its higher cost hurdles are still overcome by its performance and high reliability; this is generally only the case in fairly large datacenters. iSCSI on the other hand tends to be used in smaller enterprises and potentially in Tier 2/3 datacenters. The question of iSCSI or FC/FCoE is likely not getting decided by the network card in the host initiator. It is decided by organizational needs, and the cost structure / ROI of the storage target deployment including IT personal / expertise. If an organization has FC deployed, FCoE makes sense. If you are designing a new datacenter, FCoE isn’t exactly going to drive your decision (although you may still want to use it). The better way to consider FCoE is that it is another storage over Ethernet option, specifically for FC (to add to iSCSI and NAS). So decide which is the best storage system solution for your Data Center and know that you can connect any of these solutions over Ethernet to your servers.

Finally, as the improvements in Ethernet proliferate and these DCE capabilities become mainstream the landscape may change for iSCSI and FC deployments, but the simple fact is that in most cases, the main commonality is that Ethernet is chosen fabric to deliver storage over the network. Whether the storage protocol that is used is iSCSI, or FCoE will be determined by a lot of things within an individual companies’ IT shop. The idea that iSCSI and FCoE are a pair of competitive technologies has been raised in various places around the tech industry, but in reality, these arguments are driven more by people who have some bias toward one solution or the other, it is not fundamentally driven by the end user demands for storage. Both technologies have their place, and both will be supported in varying ways by Intel as well as other ecosystem vendors in the future.

So iSCSI or FCoE? I think the answer is: Both.

As we move to 10 Gigabit networking, IT decision makers will have something great with both of these capabilities; convergence, and choice. Only Ethernet can deliver this.

Ben Hacker

I was thinking about a catchy title when I suddenly recalled the ‘Look Who’s Talking’ movie series from a while back. After all catchy titles are key for blogs!.

Previously I shared some thoughts on overall TCO savings that could be achieved, performance benefits that can be realized and how to migrate from RISC to Intel architectures. We all agree that making a change for the sake of change is never a good thing and justifying a change in the current economic environment can be a challenging path. So let’s look at who is changing and the benefits they are realizing from making a change. (I do apologize for over-use of word change, this is not a political commercial)

• BMW Group wanted to simplify management of their environment and reduce TCO of their proprietary RISC server infrastructure. BMW moved their SAP environment and achieved 2.75-3xperformance gains and greater energy efficiency and drove down cost.
• Telefonica a major Telecom Service Provider in Europe migrated their mobile online billing system and achieved a 428%performance gain.
• Florida Hospital moved their disaster recovery system and got higher availability, reduced recovery time and lower system maintenance costs

Changing architecture does not mean that you have to change the operating system and solution stack. In some cases IT organizations are choosing to retain their Solaris environment.

• BT Vision wanted to triple their Data Center capacity without increasing their power consumption or consuming more space in their DataCenter. Deployed Solaris on Xeon and achieved 10xfaster performance in Solaris Applications, 25-50%increased availability and 80%savings on their underlying equipment

Hopefully these examples help in some way to show that you will not be the first trailblazer trying out something new and unproven.  IT Organizations have moved and are reaping the benefits of the change.

Finally being March 17^th and Irish, I would like to wish you all a Happy St Paddy’s day!

As usual, after swimming in the morning, I thumbed through my Blackberry.  On the small glass screen, I saw the email from a friend, “Hi, For: Did you send this email to me?”  I was very puzzled by what she meant that I quickly scrolled down to see the full text below her message: “Dear friend, I would like to introduce a good company who trades mainly in electronic products…”  I looked at the “From” line.  It is from my personal email account!  I knew immediately that some hacker hijacked my address book and used my email name to send out spam email.  But how did that happen?  How could I clean up this mess? I suspected that my not-so-strong password was hacked and I corrected it right away.  Since the send box identified who were the recipients. I then sent an email to explain the situation.  My sister-in-law shot me an email afterward: “I though it was a little strange. ” 

This cyber identity theft really makes me mad at the intruder and myself not taking more precaution measures.  I use my web email account everyday, save my personal data in the “cloud”, and provide my VISA card number to purchase online.  With the social media network, I may disclose even more personal information on the web.  This incident wakes me up that I need to protect myself diligently by adopting caution behaviors such as using the strong password or making sure confidential data are encrypted.  I also realize how much trust I have put in the datacenter and service provider that I may not even realize until I am personally affected.  Do the servers enforce strong passwords only?  How do I know the communication between my personal computers and the servers are secured?  Can the service provider be trusted?  It takes both the consumer end and the service providers together to create a secured environment.  Service provides have the fiduciary duty to protect their customers and their investors by focusing on datacenter security issues.  It may take only one security compromise to shake up the trust of the customers. 

I have been with Intel’s server group for the last 13 years and experienced many server technologies from form factor to power saving that have transformed the datacenters.  With our upcoming server platforms, we will be placing more focus on helping datacenters to secure their infrastructure.  We would like to see a day that no one will need to send an email to their friends to say: “I didn’t send that spam!”  

What is your story and resolution regarding security issues in cyber space and datacenters? 

Go Beyond the Kernel:

Refocusing HPC Benchmarking on Total Application Performance

Want to improve application performance by 10x or 100x? Few HPC customers would say no. Yet in some cases, the promises of tremendous performance improvements from accelerators, attached processors, field-programmable gate arrays, and the like evaporate when total application performance is evaluated. Benchmarks that focus on kernel or even partial application performance provide incomplete picture with respect to the impact on total application benchmarking.  While difficult, HPC customers should look to test total application performance.

Why benchmark?

Benchmarking is an essential means for helping end users choose and configure HPC systems. An end user has a problem and needs to know the best way to solve it. More specifically, the end user has a specific workload to run and needs to find hardware that can deliver the best performance, reliability, application portability, and ease of application maintenance. As Purdue University researchers wrote in a recent IEEE article that argued for real application benchmarking, an HPC benchmark should, among other things, produce metrics that help customers evaluate the overall or total time to solution for their problems.

The claim of a 10x to 100x improvement from a particular product can easily grab someone’s attention. But what does that 10x measurement really mean? In many cases, these claims are derived from kernel or partial application benchmarking, which might fail to tell the whole story. While an increase in floating-point performance or the addition of a CPU accelerator could deliver a significant improvement for one kernel, the total application improvement depends on additional HPC system elements. As one participant argued in a recent HPC conference reported by IDC, solution time can be represented as an equation:

Solution time = processing time + memory time + communication time + I/O time – all four combine to form total application time.  The Caveat Emptor is to make sure you analyze your application; understanding what you are measuring and ensuring that you have the balanced architecture to deliver the best performance.  I am biased but I think Intel’s soon to be announced Nehalem processor delivers just that. 

Kernel benchmarking has its place, but benchmarking total (or “real”) application performance is critical for accurately evaluating HPC systems.

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore made a prediction, popularly known as Moore's Law, stating that the number of transistors on a chip will double about every two years. Intel has kept that pace for nearly 40 years. For IT, this translates into a roadmap that enables IT to buy new servers that cost roughly the same as the previous server but performs so much better. Compare Intel’s 4 Socket MP server performance introduced in 2006 (Intel Xeon processor 7000 series) to today’s server introduced in 2008 (Intel Xeon 7400): 3x more performance throughput as measured by SPECint*_rate_base 2000*, 2.4x more ERP users as measured by SAP-SD* and 2x more database transactions as measured by TPC-C*.

Now, introduce a global economic downturn into the mix and suddenly IT is forced to cut costs and projects (i.e. delay or cancel upgrades and non-revenue generating projects). New articles start popping up from magazines like the Economist that take Moore’s Law and propose flipping it on it’s ear: instead of products providing more performance at roughly the same price, provide products that offer the same performance as IT is already experiencing, but now at a lower price. Call it “inverting Moore’s law” where IT takes the dividend it provides in dollars vs. extra performance.

So here’s something to think about: You can also “invert” Moore’s Law by making new targeted IT investments today that offer attractive payback scenarios tomorrow - giving you similar performance but at a much lower cost. With mortgage rates dropping, you may have already benefited from a rapid payback in your personal life (i.e. I recently refinanced a house down from 7% to 5.25% 30-year fixed rate that I had continuously made additional principle payments for. The ~$5k up front investment (i.e. closing costs) will be “paid back” to me after 5 months due to monthly mortgage payment savings.

Here is a server refresh example that explains how you can also get an attractive payback for your IT department.

Oracle Database Refresh: Let’s next look at a hypothetical example of an IT department running current Oracle Database Enterprise Edition on 12 servers purchased in early 2006 (dual-core Intel Xeon 7041 based servers introduced in 2005) and assess the total cost of ownership difference in moving to new servers.  We’ll assume the IT manager is paying per processor licensing fees for Oracle Database. We’ll compare the old server equipment to new 4-core Xeon 7440 based servers that offer up to ~3x more database performance (Xeon processor 7400 Series come in flavors of 6-core and 4-core versions).  This should enable consolidation ratios of 3:1, enabling the IT manager to reduce from 12 servers to 4 new servers. 

First the new investment: 4 New Xeon 7400 based servers at roughly $20k each = $80k.  Add another $5k for Network, Server Maintenance and Install Costs.  Remove ~$2k in tax implications associated with the expense in year 0.  Total investment ~$83k. 

Next, let’s look at the savings: The IT Manager is paying $41.8k yearly on Oracle maintenance/support costs x 12 dual-core MP servers today, that is $501k.  The 4 new quad-core servers will have larger Oracle database maintenance/support costs because of the core count ($83k x 4 servers = $334k) but this will still result in $167k SW savings each year (difference between $501k and $334k) which my calculations show about $669k savings over 4 years.  Moving from 12 to 4 servers also reduces about $72k in network, server maintenance, and utility (power/cooling) costs over 4 years as well. In addition to all of these costs savings over 4 years, my calculations show that the original investment of ~$83k has a payback of 9 months.

Targeted IT investments today can offer attractive payback scenarios and cost savings tomorrow - giving you similar performance but at a much lower cost.   Let me know what you think?