Cloud Builder Forum

Intel® Xeon® Processor 5600 Series Helps National Chi Nan University put Desktop Services on the Cloud

webadmin@intel.com — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 23:21:44 GMT

Taiwan’s National Chi Nan University (NCNU) needed an easy way to distribute and manage software for its 6,500 staff members and students. NCNU began to roll out VMware View 4* for desktops on their virtual private cloud, deploying the VMware vSphere* virtualization platform. After running various compatibility tests and performance benchmarks, the team discovered that servers running on the Intel® Xeon® processor 5600 series delivered the best results. They then started offering cloud computing services hosted on these servers.

“With VMware View 4* cloud desktop system supported by Intel Xeon processors, all types of personal computers at Chi Nan University can now be used to run complex software titles,” explained Hong Zhengxin, NCNU’s Data and Network Center director. “We’ve also decreased maintenance costs, reduced our utility bills, and managed our software assets centrally, providing increased flexibility. This has added value for our users and helped us realize cost reductions in terms of management.”

For all the details, download our new NCNU business success story. As always, you can find many more like this on the Intel.com Business Success Stories for IT Managers page or the Business Solutions for IT Managers channel on iTunes. And to keep up to date on the latest business success stories, follow ReferenceRoom on Twitter.

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

Arsys Uses IBM and Intel® Xeon® to Develop CloudBuilder Platform

webadmin@intel.com — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 00:20:03 GMT

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Arsys is a leading Spanish provider of hosted IT services with over 250,000 small and medium-sized customers across 100 countries and a core of enterprise-size customers. Its services range from hosting websites to cloud computing, managed hosting, and IT infrastructure solutions. This also includes application delivery, back-up, and systems management. The company wanted to significantly expand its cloud-based services, specifically its infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering, so its customers could benefit from lower IT costs, greater flexibility, and always-available services. It turned to a platform consisting of IBM System x3850 X5* servers powered by Intel® Xeon® processors 7500 series and the Intel® Xeon® processor E7 family.

“The development of this cloud computing platform has generated important benefits from the business perspective… [and] has allowed us to reduce power consumption by 20 percent and significantly reduce our operational costs,” said Olof Sandstrom, chief operations officer for Arsys.

For all the details, download our new Arsys business success story. As always, you can find many more like this on the Intel.com Business Success Stories for IT Managers page. And to keep up to date on the latest business success stories, follow ReferenceRoom on Twitter.

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

OpSource Builds Customer Confidence in the Cloud with Intel® Xeon® Processor E7 Family

webadmin@intel.com — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 00:36:45 GMT

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OpSource provides cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and managed hosting solutions that enable businesses to accelerate growth, scale operations, control costs, and reduce IT infrastructure support risks. OpSource standardizes on Dell PowerEdge* servers and Cisco Unified Computing Systems (UCS*) based on the eight-core Intel® Xeon® processor X7560, Red Hat Enterprise Linux*, and VMware vSphere*. OpSource also deploys EMC VNX5500* unified storage platforms with storage controllers based on the Intel Xeon processor 5600 series. John Rowell, OpSource’s chief technology officer, says he looks forward to deploying the Intel Xeon processor E7 family, particularly for the benefits of Intel® Trusted Execution Technology (Intel® TXT) and Intel® Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions (Intel® AES-NI).

“How often do you get excited about a processor?” said Rowell. “We are actually excited about the Intel® Xeon® processor E7 family because of Intel® TXT and the ability it gives us to segment and isolate VMware hypervisors. We see a lot of value in that capability, and we’re pushing the vendor community to provide broad support as soon as possible.”

For all the details, download our new OpSource business success story. As always, you can find more like this one on the Intel.com Business Success Stories for IT Managers page.

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

GNAX Builds a Cloud for Healthcare

webadmin@intel.com — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 23:15:08 GMT

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Global Net Access (GNAX) provides a range of colocation and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solutions with a special focus on healthcare. With demand for services growing, the GNAX team decided to build a multi-tenant cloud environment that could provide the flexibility and security that healthcare customers require while delivering the density to support efficient growth. GNAX chose Intel® Xeon® processor 5600 series as the platform for the new environment. Built-in security capabilities help GNAX provide a multilayer approach to security without sacrificing performance. At the same time, the processors help GNAX maximize server density to support fast-growing environments while controlling power, cooling, and real estate costs.

“The fact that Intel and VMware have such a close relationship made it easy to select Intel Xeon processors,” explained Matt Mong, vice president of marketing for GNAX. “We knew we could go to market faster with our secure cloud offering, with fewer integration issues, by selecting the Intel platform.”

For all the details, read our new GNAX business success story. As always, you can find this one, and many others, on the Intel.com Business Success Stories for IT Managers page.

Hotelplan Group's High-Performance Private Cloud Solution Means Happy Travelers

webadmin@intel.com — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 23:55:08 GMT

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The Hotelplan Group owns a range of travel and tourism companies that specialize in vacation packages—including adventure holidays, skiing, and luxury breaks—across Europe. Over the last decade, the Group has implemented a number of innovative applications to handle its customer interactions, all hosted at its data center in Switzerland. This increasingly complex suite of SAP*-based applications requires an ever-growing amount of processor power.

“The Intel® Itanium® processor 9000 series works with our virtualization layer to allow us to use our server farm as a private cloud,” explained Heini Kalt, director ICT infrastructure for Hotelplan Group. “This gives us the flexibility to allocate processor power to the changing demands of our applications on-demand and ensures we are always using our resources most efficiently.”

For all the details, download our new Hotelplan Group business success story. As always, you can also find this one, and many others, on the Intel.com Business Success Stories for IT Managers page.

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

Shanda Games Cuts Internet Data Center Costs with the Cloud and Intel® Xeon®

webadmin@intel.com — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 00:05:08 GMT

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As a leading Chinese online game developer, operator, and publisher, Shanda Games, Ltd., serves gamers by continuously launching diversified online game products. When Shanda launched new games, its strategy was to purchase new servers to support them. But with more games coming online, this strategy led to a continuous increase in Internet data center expenses and server maintenance costs. Shanda lacked flexibility to allocate its computing resources, which was affecting its business.

The solution was virtual server clusters based on the Intel® Xeon® processor 5600 series that can consolidate servers from 6:1 to 8:1 and operate multiple Shanda online games. Adjusting the server use model lets Shandaflexibly distribute and allocate its computing resources, reducing Internet data center operating costs by about 80 percent. Integrating resources and simplifying the infrastructure of the game operating system also lowered server maintenance and administration costs.

“Intel's cloud platform reference architecture provides a reliable technological architecture for us to rapidly deploy a cloud platform for our gaming operations,” explained Chen Guixin, director of Shanda’s Technical Support Center. “Today, not only are the computing resources of each of our servers being fully utilized, but our basic infrastructure has been simplified, the quantity of physical servers has been reduced, and our Internet data center cost has decreased because of the application of Intel virtualization technologies.”

To read all about it, download our new Shanda Games business success story. As always, you can find this one, and many others, on the Intel.com Business Success Stories for IT Managers page (www.intel.com/itcasestudies).

Building Cloud Infrastructure & Interoperability with Oracle & Canonical

webadmin@intel.com — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 17:34:46 GMT

The Intel Cloud Builders Program continues to expand new cloud reference architectures and new members frequently. How can you keep up with all of the new items? Where can you get a deeper dive on the new reference architectures posted by the likes of Oracle and Canonical? Here in the Intel Cloud Builders Forum, of course!

Recently, Oracle and Canonical shared new discussions and demonstrations of their reference architectures on Channel Intel on YouTube.

In the video below, Oracle and Intel discuss the challenges that face organizations that deploy private cloud infrastructure in a secured environment, and how you can solve them. You can learn more with the Oracle reference architecture.

Canonical also shared the details and a demonstration of their reference architecture with Channel Intel. In this video, Canonical and Intel discuss the challenges for organizations trying to build interoperability into their private cloud solution. To learn more about Canonical, check out their Conversation in the Cloud on Private Cloud Solutions or their reference architecture.

Lowering Blood Pressure in Today’s Data Centers

webadmin@intel.com — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 19:15:57 GMT

In today’s data centers, many organizations maintain an Ethernet network for core networking and a Fibre Channel network for storage traffic. As just about everyone knows, this well-established approach to networking comes with its challenges—in the form of different protocols, different hardware, different management tools, and different skills sets for administration.

In an exploration of the solution to these data center and network challenges, the animated narrator of a new video from Intel expresses the problem in simple terms: “The results are often high complexity, high costs, and high blood pressure.”

So what do you do to lower these dynamics in your data center? This how-to video offers a simple prescription: unified networking based on Intel® Ethernet 10 Gigabit (10GbE) products.

In particular, this video demonstrates how to configure a Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) storage solution using products from Intel, NetApp, and Cisco. The video uses animated graphics and many screen captures to walk you through the process of creating a unified network based on a tested reference architecture. Along the way, the narrator offers helpful tips to smooth out deployment wrinkles.

If you’re considering moving to a unified network, this video is a great place to begin your planning efforts. In just 17 minutes, you’ll gain an up-close view of how it’s done—and just how easy it can be.

Truthfully, though, we can’t promise that unified networking will lower your blood pressure. But it can sure make life simpler for your network administrators.

For the deeper dive, check out Unified Networking with Intel® Ethernet 10 Gigabit Server Adapters and NetApp Storage. --

It’s now playing on a YouTube screen near you.

The new "Outsourced CIO"

webadmin@intel.com — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 13:35:59 GMT

This post originally apeared as an Industry Perspective on Cloud Computing on Data Center Knowledge.

I had a chance this week to speak with the CEOs of a number of small companies. One of the things that really jumped out at me is how hard it is for these small companies to get a “CIO”. Of course, they could hire they person but most are not large enough to justify a full time CIO. But what really came out to me, is that, thanks to cloud, the role of this “outsourced CIO” for these companies has a different meaning than even just a few years back.

1. The “outsourced CIO”, being the face of an IT organization, is tasked with creating value through IT. We (Intel) built a CIO white paper that makes this point: IT is a part of the value creation machine (not a cost center). For the small or medium business, this means that whoever is acting as the CIO for the small company has to really help drive their partners business, not just run their IT. For the myriad of resellers and SIs that act as ‘outsourced’ IT for small and medium businesses, this is a fundamentally different view of their role – assuming they aspire to be their partners “outsourced CIO”.

I would argue that cloud has not only made this kind of role practical but it has made the need for this role essential. It is practical since the “outsourced CIO” is far more likely to understand the options and nuances of selecting services for the business than the business itself would be. It is essential since the small or medium business can not afford to spend time or money learning IT (after all, they do have a business to run).

2. Outsourcing has been around for a long time. But until salesforce.com made the SaaS model practical and popular for all businesses, the concept of outsourcing a specialized function was a rare business model. Now, with cloud, we have a multitude of specialized functions to select from, all of which are delivered as a SaaS meaning that no hw is purchased and in some cases may not even require a contract.

For the “outsourced CIO”, this means a LOT more partners and a lot more interpretation of the business requirements in that ocean of options.

For example, it means that the security requirements of the small or medium business need to be very well understood. In a traditional enterprise model where everything was hosted ‘behind the corporate firewall’, it was easy (“just buy more servers”). However, in the cloud or SaaS model, we have to actually evaluate the security requirements of an offering and make a judgment as to the suitability. Alas, the days of “just buy more servers” are long gone.

If you are the CEO of a small or medium business: Who is your CIO?

If you find yourself in the role of “outsourced CIO”: Are you acting like a CIO, or just the manager of IT?

Cloud security: What you need to know and do

webadmin@intel.com — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:18:04 GMT

When it comes to protecting the security of your assets in a cloud environment, the core questions are: What do I need to know and what do I need to do?

These are questions I, together with Brian Foster from McAfee, will address in an upcoming session—“Do I need a private cloud?”—at the McAfee FOCUS Security Conference, taking place Oct. 18-20 in Las Vegas. While we can’t explore these questions in depth in this post, we can at least get started down the path.

Before we start though, we need to have a clear picture of the “asset” we are securing. If your company produces highly specialized, high value products, then the asset has high value and demands greater protection. If your company produces open source software, then perhaps a lesser degree of protection would suffice. With this in mind, consider the following:

1. Understand the services you are consuming and the associated risks.

Many organizations don’t have a clear view of the cloud services they are consuming and the risks those services pose to the organization. Let’s take a simple example: Are you using Gmail or hosted Microsoft Exchange for your company’s email? While both email services are reasonably secure, Exchange is generally considered to be more appropriate for corporate environments.

Once you have a clear picture of the asset, you will then need to make certain that the security of the services is appropriate.

2. Provide the proper security training for all employees.

Your own people are one of the keys to overall security, and one of the risks. If, for example, a single employee opens a malicious attachment on an email message, you could end up with a significant breach in security.

This reality points to the need for ongoing security training and awareness efforts. When it comes to the security of your systems, applications, and data, all employees are on the front lines.

3. Build a secure infrastructure.

Cloud security is a multi-layered problem that requires multiple layers of security at both the client and the data center level. Some of these layers overlap, such as network firewalls and intrusion prevention systems that help protect both client and server systems.

At the client level, you want to take all the usual steps, such as requiring all client systems to run anti-malware software that automatically updates itself on a regular basis and is optimized for the client to minimize system performance impact.

At the data center level, you need to put trusted compute pools in place to create a security foundation. This hardware-level security is enabled by technologies such as Intel® Trusted Execution Technology (Intel® TXT), which protects IT infrastructure against software-based attacks. It does this by checking the consistency in behaviors and launch-time configurations against a “known good” sequence.

Complement this launch-time security with a well coordinated approach to security across your network, servers, data, and storage that helps you identify and stop attacks in real time. By connecting policies and controls across physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructures, your data center team can enable secure, elastic, on-demand services without compromising on compliance or jeopardizing availability.

While they may seem obvious, these simple steps are extremely important. If you haven’t fully covered them, you’ve got holes in your cloud security strategy.

We’ll talk more on this at the data center track session on Oct. 20 at 2:30 p.m. at the FOCUS event. In the meantime, push forward with your security efforts.

The 5 things I learned at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF)

webadmin@intel.com — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 14:00:42 GMT

1. OSPC for OpenStack

We demonstrated OpenStack with Intel ® TXT and Node Manager integration along with an Intel IT developed user interface and portal. We ultimately offer the user interface and portal to the OpenStack Dashboard project.

The momentum behind OpenStack is growing with more and more contributors and end customer interest. The commercial cloud operating environments continue to increase in capability as VMware demonstrated 2 weeks ago at VMworld (very impressive). The open source communities continue to grow their capabilities as well, not just in Xen and KVM, but also in cloud operating environments such as OpenStack. We look forward to working with the community to significantly extend and mature the OpenStack capabilities.

In the context of the larger Intel Developer Forum, Matt Weinberger from Talking Cloud captured it quite well in his blog on IDF and Cloud Computing on Thursday by noting that much of the focus at IDF was on consumer innovations (some of which are really cool) with little attention being paid to the cloud. In my meetings with customers and partners, it is clear, however, that our efforts in advancing the state of the art in cloud are not going unnoticed, regardless of the broader marketing message.

This is my second OpenStack related activity in a bit over a week. Last week I was in China helping kickoff the China OpenStack User Group where over 350 people attended the conference. It is really exciting to see so much energy being applied from such a diverse audience.

2. Memcached performance optimizations

In Justin’s keynote (where I had the pleasure of a short walk-on part <grin>), we demonstrated an optimized version of memcached delivering ~800k reads/sec compared to the previous published rate of ~560k reads/sec. Latency also decreased from ~1ms to ~450us. While the transaction rate increased significantly, the power per transaction is also improved.

One of the tricks in this optimization was to stay “real world”. It is easy to get really big numbers if you create a lot of independent instances of memcached on a single server. For real world applications, this is not an optimal solution, as it means that application would need to be modified to direct requests to many memcached services rather than just one. Our optimization maintains a clear focus on performance, but for real-world applications.

From where I sit, this is further evidence that the cloud will drive innovation not just in new areas such as Hadoop and memcached, but also in optimizations that will improve our everyday experience using the cloud.

3. Solution Provider Innovation

I had a number of meetings with Solution Providers this week. There is clearly a transition happening from ‘hw focused’ to a broader base of consulting including things like connecting their customers to service providers. Any transition is challenging especially when it touches the basic business model. In this case, we are also seeing examples of innovation where these solution providers are being proactive in helping their customers effectively and materially use the cloud.

For example, I pleased and somewhat surprised to hear that some of the solution providers are pro-actively refactoring some of their applications so that they can be more cleanly deployed in a cloud (private and public). They are eager to take advantage of the benefits this compute/storage model offers.

However, it is also clear that the impact of the move to more of a ‘devops’ model is still very early and not well understood.

4. Keynote == beret

We all learned from Justin that if you want to do a keynote at IDF, you need a beret. I recon my cowboy hat will just have to do.

5. Solar power CPU’s

The era of solar power computing may be upon us. With the use of Near Threshold Voltage designs, we can get the power level so low, you only need a solar cell. Ok, maybe it was only a technology demonstration but it works for me!

Czech Broadcaster Turns to Intel® Xeon® Processor 5600 Series to Launch Cloud-Based IT Services

webadmin@intel.com — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 23:09:28 GMT

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České Radiokomunikace is a modern broadcasting and telecommunications company with nationwide operations across the Czech Republic. It was the first company in the country to offer digital TV broadcasts. Alongside its TV and radio broadcasting services, it also provides a full range of voice, data, and Internet services. Looking to develop and strengthen its market segment position by continually improving services, it recognized the value in offering cloud-based services to Czech companies and built a data center from which to launch them. To ensure top server performance, security, and energy-efficiency, it implemented the Cisco Unified Computing System* powered by Intel® Xeon® processor 5600 series.

“Entry into the information communications technologies services market segment was a big challenge for us,” explained Marcel Procházka, head of business development and strategy for České Radiokomunikace. “We carefully chose collaborators who could deliver cloud computing solutions. Intel, together with Cisco, offered not only an optimal technical solution in the form of the Cisco Unified Computing System equipped with Intel® processors, but also wider business cooperation and IT knowledge to help us succeed in a highly competitive market segment.”

To learn more, download our new České Radiokomunikace business success story. As always, you can find this one, and many more, in the Intel.com Reference Room and Survival Kit.

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

NaviSite’s Dense Cloud Environment Produces 10 Times the Revenue per Rack of Managed Services Thanks to Intel® Xeon® Processor 5600 Series

webadmin@intel.com — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 17:42:30 GMT

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NaviSite, Inc., a Time Warner Cable Company, is a leading worldwide provider of enterprise-class, cloud-enabled hosting, managed applications, and services. When the company launched its cloud computing solutions, it used Intel® Xeon® processors as the foundation, building a dense cloud environment that delivers more than 10 times the revenue per rack of non-cloud services. By expanding the environment with the Intel Xeon processor 5600 series, the company has further increased server density and enabled customers to move more and larger workloads to the cloud.

“The Intel Xeon processor 5600 series enables us to capitalize on greater core counts and memory capacity per server,” says Chris Patterson, senior product manager of cloud and hosting services at NaviSite. “As a result, we can accommodate more and larger workloads without significantly increasing our footprint.”

To learn more, read our new NaviSite business success story.

Joyent Delivers Performance and Profitability with Real-Time Cloud and the Intel® Xeon® Processor 5600 Series

webadmin@intel.com — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 17:02:20 GMT

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Joyent is a multi-tenant cloud innovator that serves the stars and rising stars of social network gaming, real-time mobile applications, and other dynamic Web segments. It meets their performance and scalability requirements with Intel® Xeon® processors and cloud software that Joyent developed over years of running a public cloud. Company executives say that moving from the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series to the 5600 series helped Joyent effectively double its capacity and revenues, and that Joyent’s ability to support 400 virtual machines on a server is the envy of its competitors.

“Density equals revenue for us,” says Jason Hoffman, Joyent’s co-founder and chief scientist. “By increasing our core density and memory density, we can put more tenants on a server, which means higher revenues.

To learn all about it, download our new Joyent business success story.

Expedient Communications Expands into the Cloud and Cuts Energy Use in Half with Intel® Xeon® Processor 5600 Series

webadmin@intel.com — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 16:33:54 GMT

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Expedient Communications has added infrastructure as a service (IaaS) private cloud computing to its managed services portfolio, choosing the Intel® Xeon® processor 5600 series as a foundation for scalable, secure, and efficient cloud services. Upgrading from servers based on the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, Expedient’s IT leaders say they gained a 100 percent increase in compute capacity and density. They also cut their watts consumed per GB of memory, a key indicator for energy efficiency in the cloud, by almost 50 percent.

“When we moved from the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series to the 5600 series, we essentially doubled our compute load and density per pod,” explained Alex Rodriguez, vice president of systems engineering and product development for Expedient Communications. “When we bring in a pod based on the Intel Xeon processor E5 family, we expect to see a 130 percent increase.”

For the whole story, download our new Expedient Communications business success story.