Blog Posts From Cloud Builder Forum Tagged With energy_efficiency

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

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.

Automate and Simplify Your Cloud using Power-aware Provisioning and 10 GB Ethernet

webadmin@intel.com — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 20:53:36 GMT

"Automated" is one of the three cornerstones of Cloud 2015 vision. At the highest level, cloud automation means provisioning your workloads automatically with guaranteed service level agreements while optimizing power and compute resources. Automated cloud computing services can be specified, located, and securely provisioned with very little or no human interaction.

Two critical constraints of data centers today are power and network. Here's a brief overview of how to optimize your cloud infrastructure on power and network. You can find out more by reading the white papers. Also, feel free to contact me by posting a comment.

Achieve power aware provisioning with Intel® Node Manager and partner tools

The white paper "Policy Based Power Management with Dell and VMware" describes a policy power management reference architecture based on Intel, VMware*, and Dell*. The goal of policy power management is to get the most out of each watt of power and space in the data center to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO). This paper shows how Intel® Intelligent Power Node Manager technology, Dell servers, and VMware products provided power savings and rack space optimization through dynamic migration of workloads—something hard to do manually.

We describe these use cases in detail along with the experimental results and data for:

Real-time server power monitoring
Optimization of rack density
Power-optimized workloads
Disaster recovery/business continuity
Data center energy reduction

Simplify the cloud and reduce costs with 10 GbE unified networking

Cloud brings efficiency in compute by consolidating multiple services in a multi-tenant environment. An often-ignored implication of this usage is the increased demand on network bandwidth. Up to 6 to 12 network connections are common in a cloud or virtualized environment today, which impacts data center capex and opex due to the complexity of the arrangement. The transition to 10 Gb Ethernet (10 GbE) allows consolidation of multiple separate Ethernet ports into fewer 10 GbE ports. This greatly simplifies the data center network, reduces costs, and simultaneously provides greater overall platform networking bandwidth capability. If Fibre Channel has been used in the past, this additional Ethernet capacity can be effectively used to consolidate separate storage network traffic onto a common 10 GbE unified networking infrastructure, which drives an even simpler and more cost effective data center.

If you are part of an IT organization tasked with building a cloud storage solution, this white paper should be of interest: "Unified Networking with NetApp: 10 GbE FCoE and iSCSI". Intel and NetApp* worked together to implement and test cloud storage architecture. The white paper is a complete, step-by-step guide to building the two most common block-level storage protocols, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI), run over 10 GbE from end to end. Today, most IT departments deploy separate LAN and storage networks, with storage often divided between network-attached storage (NAS) for file-based applications, and SAN fibre channel and iSCSI for block-based applications. The goal of unified networking is to allow a single-fabric infrastructure, based on 10 GbE, to carry all of these disparate traffic types.

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