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At TDWI: Finding a middle way between Hadoop and relational data warehousing

webadmin@intel.com — Fri, 17 May 2013 22:23:37 GMT

If you’re thinking big data analytics will solve all your BI challenges, you may be looking at it wrong…

I realized this when I was in Chicago the first week of May, attending The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) conference, where the theme was “Preparing for the Practical Realities of Big Data.”

There are high expectations around big data at the moment. Many people in marketing, product development, and analytics teams can’t wait to get their hands on big data intelligence to better understand and target audiences.

However, TDWI isn’t their show. At TDWI, the focus instead is on traditional database administrators, data analysts, and data scientists, and it’s a very technical conference firmly based on OLAP and OLTP analytics and hands-on issues of data warehousing.

With this in mind, I attended the keynote address by Ken Rudin, director of Analytics at Facebook—a leader in cool, cutting-edge big data processing and analysis addressing a conference of (what some would consider) old-school DBAs. The message from Rudin, who has held senior leadership positions at Zynga, Salesforce.com, and Oracle, was fascinating: Don’t get caught in the tyranny of either/or when it comes to data analysis—businesses need both traditional relational database processing and Hadoop*-based big data analysis.

@krudin said that Facebook started out relying almost solely on Hadoop and big data when the social media giant first launched, but now is increasingly incorporating OLAP and OLTP processes into its analytics. Hadoop is best at exploring huge data sets—putting all the data into one system to discover patterns. Traditional relational data analytics is best at business, looking at focused data to derive metrics and more actionable, granular analysis. Both are valuable technologies: which one is best depends on what kind of impact you are looking for.

So the question is not, how do you get from old-school to cutting edge as soon as possible. Rather, ask which technology is right to generate impact out of data.

This was a conclusion that appealed to many at TDWI, as several people I spoke to registered a bit of skepticism about the value of Hadoop as an engine for analytics. For them, the main attraction of Hadoop is its potential to act as a backend data storage mechanism, where unstructured data can be warehoused.

Then the question becomes: What’s the best way to integrate data stored in Hadoop into a traditional OLAP or OLTP infrastructure for processing? The answer is just around the corner.

At the SAP booth, I presented a discussion of the newly released joint solution from SAP and Intel that has optimized Intel^® Distribution of Apache Hadoop* software for the SAP HANA* in-memory database. Using SAP Smart Data Access* (watch for availability in coming weeks), this big data solution is able to leverage all types of data for processing in analytical applications.

And since it’s built on Intel^® architecture, and leverages the full power of Intel^® Xeon^® E7 processors, HANA has hardware-enhanced performance and security built in, with solid-state drives and cache acceleration for blazing speed and stability. Watch this interview from TDWI to learn more about SAP HANA and how the database helps address big data challenges.

If you’re looking for the technology to get the most impact out of analytics, look no further.

Follow Tim and Twitter @TimIntel and the SAP analytics team at @SAPAnalytics.

Additionally, @TDWI has some very interesting DW feeds.

IBM Impact 2013: Heroes of IT, Please Take a Bow

webadmin@intel.com — Thu, 16 May 2013 16:39:05 GMT

At last week’s IBM Impact conference, the focus was on “Technology in Motion,” and the keynote presentations were both inspiring and thought-provoking. The program celebrated some of the 400 IBM Champions from around the world who, as heroes of IT, help open new horizons and new audiences to technology.

Wednesday’s keynote kept with the “tech in motion” theme, and the most stirring presentations involved how IBM is helping open up access to computing for underserved communities. Doug Schmidt of Pearson Publishing described how his company uses innovative technologies based on IBM WebSphere MQ*, IBM Message Broker*, and IBM Operational Decision Management* to bring higher education to students in over 70 countries and in a variety of formats.

We also viewed a video presentation from P-TECH, the Pathways in Technology Early College High School, an innovative collaboration between New York public schools, the City University of New York, and IBM. The P-TECH schools (which include branches in Chicago and Idaho in addition to the original location in Brooklyn) bring together private-sector partners to design an academic program that’s heavy on high tech workplace skills. Students all have IBM mentors to help make sure they get the skills to land good, technology-oriented jobs. P-TECH program has been so successful that President Obama highlighted it in this year’s State of the Union Address: “We need to give every American student opportunities like this,” he stated. Is there a P-TECH school in my town for my kids?

As the focus of Impact is WebSphere middleware, IBM highlighted some recent testing between generations of Xeon^® processors and just upgraded IBM WebSphere* 8.5 vs. 8.1 performance gains. The nearly 260% performance gain with newer versions of software and hardware is huge for the middleware community and hopefully will be sufficient reason to upgrade both processor middleware versions. Details of new SPECjEnterprise2010 test results are detailed here: spec.org/jEnterprise2010.

Intel and IBM have worked together for over 15 years to optimize software performance on the Intel infrastructure, and their collaboration and co-engineering on IBM WebSphere 8.5 has led to very impressive performance gains. And when it comes to technology in motion, it’s this kind of optimized joint engineering that creates new IT heroes. Watch this interview with our Intel hero, Pauline Nist (@panist), general manager of Enterprise Software Alliances, and learn more about the growing collaboration between Intel and software partners such as IBM.

Follow Tim on @TimIntel and @IntelAdrenaline.

SAP and Intel Showcase Big Data Solutions at Sapphire 2013

webadmin@intel.com — Wed, 15 May 2013 17:22:08 GMT

Intel and SAP have worked closely together for years. But, our co-engineering has reached a new level of integration with the recent launch of our Big Data solution based on the SAP HANA^® platform and Intel^® Distribution for Apache™ Hadoop^® software. The joint solution will be demo’d at SAP Sapphire 2013, SAP’s flagship conference in Orlando, held May 14 – 16.

Stop by the Intel booth #3215 and experience our Big Data solution.

The Intel Distribution of Apache Hadoop running on SAP HANA represents more than a typical collaboration. It’s a great example of how co-engineering can result in a “more-than-the-sum-of-its parts” success that changes the game by vastly improving the speed and resilience of Big Data analytics.

HANA is SAP’s blindingly fast database platform that consolidates transactional and analytical workloads into a single, in-memory process. Combining OLAP and OLTP structures into a unified landscape eliminates traditional relational limitations that have restricted the development of real-time business applications, and in particular Big Data analytics.

Apache Hadoop is the industry’s open source standard for managing Big Data, but to ensure that Hadoop’s data-intensive workflows can provide real-time analytics on an enterprise scale requires a comprehensive computing platform with muscle and intelligence.

The Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop is specifically optimized for the advanced features of SAP HANA and the Intel® Xeon® processor E7 family. Intel’s version of Hadoop can leverage SAP HANA in-memory technologies to accelerate data analytics and also tap into extra performance and scalability that the Intel processor E7 family is optimized for. In turn, SAP HANA’s in-memory processes help eliminate the latencies found in Hadoop’s underlying file system to enable on-demand data analysis.

Through joint-engineering, SAP and Intel have delivered a breakthrough Big Data solution that can store and analyze massive volumes of structured and unstructured data in real time. The underlying platform has the performance to scale to continued exponential data growth and deliver rapid-fire insights to help boost business productivity and profits.

For more information go to: http://hadoop.intel.com/resources

Enterprise Server Business Success Stories

webadmin@intel.com — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 18:34:33 GMT

Want to see how products and technologies from Intel can help your enterprise meet its IT challenges? Take a look at what we're already doing for leading companies worldwide in these business success stories. You can find many more 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.

Big Data Analytics

Big Data Technologies for Ultra-High-Speed Data Transfer in Life Sciences

Using Aspera’s high-speed data transfer technology to achieve 10 Gbps WAN speeds on the Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 family in virtualized environments.

Hangzhou Trustway Technology Co. Ltd.: Improving Traffic Management with Big Data Analytics

Hangzhou Trustway Technology Co. Ltd. significantly improves its transportation management capability using Intel® Distribution for Apache Hadoop* software on Intel® Xeon® processors E5 series.

UFIDA Medical: Big Data Builds a Healthy City

Jinzhou City boosts healthcare initiatives with an optimized regional data center using UFIDA Medical healthcare solutions based on Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 and big data solutions.

University of Hawaii: More Responsive Library Searches

The University of Hawaii improves performance and cuts costs for its library management system by migrating to Intel® Xeon® processor E7 family.

Cloud Computing Solutions

Atea: Building a New Private Cloud Hosting Service based on Intel® Xeon® Processor E5 Family

Intel® Xeon® processor E5 family enables Atea to offer customers a choice of hosted or on-site private cloud infrastructures.

Beijing Fastweb Technology Co. Ltd.: Enhanced Content Distribution Network with Intel® Solid-State Drives

Beijing Fastweb Technology Co. Ltd. improves its content distribution network‘s node data output capacity by more than four times with Intel Solid-State Drive (Intel® SSD) 320 series.

BingoCloud: Enhancing Computing Resource Management

Research institutions improve computing resource utilization and achieve highly efficient management with BingoCloud* based on Intel® Cloud Builders.

DuPont: Deploying Intel® Trusted Execution Technology to Enable a Trusted High-Performance Cloud

DuPont R&D gets the on-demand resources it needs to support modeling, simulation, informatics, and analytics, while increasing data center security and compliance, with Intel® Trusted Execution Technology.

Fastweb Technology Co. Ltd.: Boosting DNS Reliability with Intel® Technology

Intel® Xeon® processor E5 series and Intel® Ethernet 10 Gigabit Converged Network Adapter X540 help Beijing Fastweb Technology Co. Ltd.’s CloudXNS* system provide safe DNS service.

UFIDA Medical: Big Data Builds a Healthy City

Jinzhou City boosts healthcare initiatives with an optimized regional data center using UFIDA Medical healthcare solutions based on Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 and big data solutions.

Cloud Security

Barcelona City Council: Catalan Capital Boosts Citizen Services and Staff Productivity

Barcelona moves to cloud-based application delivery and improves login times by 99 percent with a solution based on the Intel® Xeon® processor E7 family.

CompatibleOne: Making the Cloud More Transparent

CompatibleOne collaborates with Intel to develop automated cloud brokerage service using Intel® Trusted Execution Technology to boost confidence in the security of cloud services.

DuPont: Deploying Intel® Trusted Execution Technology to Enable a Trusted High-Performance Cloud

Fastweb Technology Co. Ltd.: Boosting DNS Reliability with Intel® Technology

Intel® Xeon® processor E5 series and Intel® Ethernet 10 Gigabit Converged Network Adapter X540 help Beijing Fastweb Technology Co. Ltd.’s CloudXNS* system provide safe DNS service.

Energy, Environment and Performance

Dongeun Information Technology: Improving Healthcare with Intel® Xeon® Processor

Healthcare screenings become faster and more efficient with CareWork*, a healthcare workstation based on the Intel® Xeon® processor E3 family.

Enterprise Reliability

Mobile Telesystems: Calling in the Savings

Mobile Telesystems significantly reduces total cost of ownership by migrating to an x86 architecture powered by the Intel® Xeon® processor E7 family.

University of Hawaii: More Responsive Library Searches

The University of Hawaii improves performance and cuts costs for its library management system by migrating to Intel® Xeon® processor E7 family.

High-Performance Computing

BingoCloud: Enhancing Computing Resource Management

Research institutions improve computing resource utilization and achieve highly efficient management with BingoCloud* based on Intel® Cloud Builders.

Danielson Engineering: Breaking Ground with High-Performance Computing

Danielson Engineering beats the competition with an Intel® Xeon® processor E5 family-based supercomputing platform.

Fujitsu: Making a Difference

Fujitsu and Universidad Autonoma de Madrid create ground-breaking supercomputing platform based on Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2670.

University of Coimbra: Infinite Performance

University of Coimbra evaluates performance and scalability benefits of Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2680 and Intel® True Scale Fabric.

Intelligent Systems

Auchan: Shop with your Smartphone and Skip the Queue

Leading European grocer works with Intel to delight customers with a new smartphone-based shopping experience.

Costa Coffee: Brewing an Enhanced Customer Experience

Costa Coffee delivers the next generation in self service with Intel® Core™ i7 processor and Intel® Solid-State Drive 520 series.

Remote Management

Allied Digital: Network Security, Fewer House Calls

A student health center simplifies IT with Intel® vPro™ technology and LANDesk Management Suite.

RISC Migration

Mobile Telesystems: Calling in the Savings

Mobile Telesystems significantly reduces total cost of ownership by migrating to an x86 architecture powered by the Intel® Xeon® processor E7 family.

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

How do you explain the cloud to your parents?

webadmin@intel.com — Wed, 15 May 2013 14:50:24 GMT

How important is storage to your business? My name is Ilene Aginsky and I work in the Storage Division. I’m new to this community and I think this is the perfect place to talk about how the explosion of digital data is changing the way businesses and even consumers need to manage this incredible growth.

It seems that storage should be a relatively easy concept however when data is being created at such a rapid pace it starts to get complicated very quickly. Given this complexity, I will reach out to my colleagues here at Intel and ask them to help explain the technology that surrounds the concept of storage.

For my first foray, I have asked my colleague, Gary McCulley, a Product Line Manager for the Storage Division to explain the concept of Cloud in storage. Below, in Gary’s own words, is that explanation.

How I would explain the “Cloud” to my parents

My parents recently asked me how work was going. Being a Product Marketing Engineer at Intel, I tend to give them vague, (yet accurate) feedback, like “oh, it’s going well” or “Intel as a company is doing well”, etc. In other words: “blah, blah, blah”; I tend not to get into the specifics, fearing I would be in long conversation that would span a diverse range of topics, including explaining how Al Gore really didn’t invent the Internet all the way to how the “Cloud” really has very little to do with the weather. But it got me asking myself if I could coherently tell them about important concepts like the “Cloud” and wondering if they would have a better understanding after my explanation.

Gartner Inc. recently forecasted that one-third of consumers' digital content would be stored in the “Cloud” by 2016. It's an interesting statistic that certainly would impress my parents, even though they may not initially understand it.

Aside -- My parents love me and are impressed by most anything I do or say– sort of like Ben Stiller’s parents in Meet the Fockers, who created a shrine in their son’s honor, including his 9^th place ribbon. By comparison, my mom has a framed picture of a duck that I painted when I was in 5^th grade hanging on their bathroom wall – I earned 2^nd place in my 5^th grade class of 25 students!

Upon telling my parents the “Cloud” statistic, they would likely ask the following questions:

“OK, what is digital content and what is the “Cloud”?

First, I would give them examples of digital content: pictures of their grand kids taken with a digital camera, email they send and receive songs they listen to on Pandora, videos of puppies on YouTube, and other examples. Then I would tell them why the “Cloud” is important. I would tell them the growth of multiple connected devices, most of which have cameras (my mom’s cell phone even has a camera), has led to a massive increase in digital content that users have created. And all that content has to be stored somewhere. I would tell them that people used to store content on their PCs (and still do), but with all this new digital content, people now like to store their data on social media sites, like Facebook, which offer free storage space for uploading videos and photos for social sharing.

I would explain to them that every time they access anything that isn’t stored in their computer they are engaging the “Cloud” - like when they access their Yahoo! email account, Facebook, Google, or YouTube. Basically, the “Cloud” allows anyone with an Internet connection to access information that is contained in a network of computers and servers (i.e. a data center) located around the world. This makes it easier to share pictures and videos, for example, of their kids and grand kids.

In addition to Facebook , Google, YouTube, and Apple - companies that provide free storage, I would also explain that some of them charge customers (on a monthly basis) to store their data – typically to customers that have a lot of data to store. Companies like those above and like Amazon Web Services, which have locations with server farms, (i.e. data centers), will store data for customers for a monthly service-based subscription.

Side note: while online backup services like Amazon Web Services, Google Drive, and others, are well-known cloud storage providers, their total storage allocated to consumers and "pro-sumers" is still small relative to that maintained by social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and other sites.

Anyway, at this point, my parents would be losing interest, but would still act like they are really interested. So I would try and wrap it up by saying the term “Cloud”is really just a metaphor for the cloud-like shape used to represent the Internet’s infrastructure when engineers draw it.

And then I would tell my Mom that I took a picture of my duck picture and uploaded it to Facebook, where she could enjoy it on her smart phone anytime she liked. I would then be told that the picture isn’t that great, and there was a good reason it is displayed in the bathroom...

Gary McCulley is a product line manager in the Data Center and Connected Systems Group at Intel ® Corporation. Prior to joining Intel, Gary held strategic planning and product marketing positions at Broadcom Corporation, Philips Semiconductors, and General Dynamics. He earned a B.S. in Engineering from Arizona State University, an M.S. in Engineering from San Diego State University, and an MBA from the University of Arizona.

What to Discover at HP Discover US June 11-13

webadmin@intel.com — Wed, 08 May 2013 15:40:03 GMT

HP and Intel have a long standing partnership and it feels like there will be no shortage of exciting things to come the rest of 2013 and into 2014. We are very excited to once again be the premier Sponsor of HP Discover this year. Many of you who are reading this have attended Discover, either in the US or in Europe and we look forward to seeing you again and also seeing some new faces.

What have we got in store for you this year? Well, one thing is for sure, We won’t just bore you with speeds and feeds (okay, maybe a little) but we want to invite you into the platform and technology advancements that become essential to the way we work AND the way we live and interact socially. Our innovation theater sessions will cover both the technological keys to optimizing your datacenter for the future (with sneak peeks into Intel Labs) but also the human future and balance of social power that’s being morphed by the intersection of enlightenment and technology.

Whether you want to think of it as “Return on…” a)”Investment” b)”Information” c) “Innovation “ Intel continues to work with HP to provide the building blocks that are the heart of the datacenter. No longer can you think of the datacenter as silo’d compute servers that provide awesome performance and enable cloud and virtualized environments, but you have to think of the Storage, Networking, Solid State Drives and even geekier technologies that support and augment the datacenter to help you meet your customers’ needs and positively impact your bottom line.

At Discover, look for Intel and HP to take the lead and show you how we can help your organization tackle Hyperscale computing, Big Data,
Cloud and Virtualization. Get in touch! @ITSandhya www.intel.com/xeon

Exascalar and Cost Effective HPC

webadmin@intel.com — Wed, 08 May 2013 13:00:39 GMT

I know… you’re probably thinking, “what the *?” The phrases “Cost effective” and “HPC” seem as rarely seen together as are a double bill of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Rocky Horror Picture Show. But, in fact, with rapidly expanding efficiency and performance capability of supercomputing systems, electricity costs in large scale machines may warrant deeper scrutiny of the need for newer hardware.

What got me thinking about this was a startling realization about systems

near the lower left “Corner of Inefficiency” of the familiar Exascalar plot below.

The systems near that lower left corner are almost a factor of one hundred less efficient than the most efficient systems of comparable performance. In other words they consume about one hundred times the energy for comparable work. This can be a big deal, for instance a 20kW system or a 2.0 MW system. If you think about the cost of electricity, there could be some real ROI there.

So the question is how to visualize that difference in cost. The point of what I discuss below is not to provide an accurate cost analysis for every application, but to show how this general framework can be put to use.

Costs of supercomputers, especially those at the forefront of innovation, are difficult to estimate. For the purposes here I chose to use a published cost of the Lawrence Livermore Labs Sequoia computer as the anchor point for this analysis. For comparison read about the ORNL supercomputer here. Assuming a constant $/flops one can easily scale capital cost according to performance. This scaling is shown as the horizontal lines in the Figure below.

Electricity costs also vary widely from location to location. Industrial electricity costs are actually falling in the US, but for the sake of simplicity I have assumed $0.07/kWh with an assumed facility PUE of 1.6. $0.07 is about the average industrial electricity rate in the US. This translates, conveniently, to a total energy cost of about $1/(Watt*Year). You can see system-level annualized energy costs in the Figure.

From this point it is pretty straight forward to calculate a payback time for replacing inefficient servers. It’s interesting they work out to be vertical lines. It’s interesting that they times for return on investment show up as vertical lines. It’s astounding that they are so short. In several cases, less than a year!

Again, this is not intended to be a definitive analysis of return on investment or total cost of supercomputer ownership. But I think this initial estimate is provocative enough to warrant further investigation. To me it looks like millions are on the table.

So, what are you waiting for?

Data Center Power: Zooming in Where it Matters

webadmin@intel.com — Sat, 04 May 2013 15:00:08 GMT

This post originally appeared in Information Management on December 26, 2012

Politics aside, the subject of energy is of great concern in every large data center. Why, then, is power consumption still an afterthought for most server deployments? Because IT and facilities teams typically work independently and neither team can control consumption or predict requirements when data center energy costs are buried in the overall utility bill.

Let’s face it: Energy costs are spiking, server sprawl is pushing against site capacity limits, and the Internet and smart device adoption rates are calling for aggressive increases in data center compute densities. Industry analyst firms agree that power and associated cooling requirements account for the fastest increasing components of operational costs. To protect the bottom line, and to comply with the latest EPA Energy Star standards, data centers need to change the way they monitor and manage energy consumption for power-hungry assets, like servers. New power and cooling management approaches are available that offer greater energy efficiency and reduced costs.

Traditional approaches to managing power and cooling have failed to control costs, in large part because they typically force over-budgeting to ensure priority needs are met. Ironically, even with overestimating and over provisioning cooling, data center hotspots continue to crop up, thereby impacting server availability, reducing data center cooling efficiency and driving up operational costs. These factors and their impact demand that facilities and IT professionals find a better way to achieve their common objectives.

Zooming in on the Right Measurement Points

One of the most fundamental barriers to achieving greater power efficiency and curbing runaway energy spend rates has been the inability to obtain accurate readings of actual server energy consumption levels. Various models have been developed that translate temperature and power consumption into overall data center energy requirements for servers and their associated cooling systems. However, even the best of these models lack the real-time visibility required to accurately understand and predict energy trends. Actual usage can vary significantly (up to 40 percent) from modeled predictions, and the models do not provide the immediate feedback required to pinpoint hot spots before they impact services or identify areas of waste where conservation can lead to savings.

Energy models are limited in terms of day-to-day management of power consumption. For example, we know from in-field measurements that an average of 15 percent of data center servers are “ghost” or “zombie” servers (servers that are not producing useful work, drawing energy just to stand idle). When we do the math, assuming that a server draws approximately 400 watts of power, which currently costs about $800 per year, companies are spending on average more than $24 billion per year for these “ghost” servers in their data centers.

Aggregating Server Thermal and Power Data

A second problem has been the technical challenges of aggregating data from varied and disparate systems within the data center. Facilities managers have been forced to cobble together, manually or with crude homegrown systems, vital data such as power supply of the server, inlet and outlet temperatures, asset information contained in RFID tags as well as temperature and humidity readings of the air conditioning units. This prevents the achievement of a “big picture” perspective of facilities’ server inlet temperatures and power consumption data from rack servers, blade servers, and the power-distribution units and uninterrupted power supplies related to those servers. The crippling effects of this piecemeal view are analogous to a long-distance truck driver suffering from tunnel vision.

By shifting attention from the cooling systems to the servers which account for the majority of the power consumed in the data center, managers can introduce a holistic energy optimization solution. Accurate monitoring of power consumption and thermal patterns creates a foundation for enterprise-wide decision-making with the ability to:

Monitor and analyze power data by server, rack, row or room;
Track usage for logical groups of resources that correlate to the organization or data center services;
Automate condition alerts and triggered power controls, based on consumption or thermal conditions and limits; and
Provide aggregated and fine-grained data to Web-accessible consoles and dashboards for intuitive views of energy use that are integrated with other data center and facilities management views.

Identifying temperatures at the server, versus at the room or even rack levels, can also help data center managers more accurately understand what the real ambient temperature should be for individual servers to have optimal life spans. This assessment of real temperatures has enabled data centers to increase the overall room temperature by one to two degrees, which can create significant savings in the air-conditioning expense.

Disseminating the power and cooling data, without impacting ongoing processing in the data center, is another challenge. Invasive monitoring approaches have the potential for adversely affecting the performance of existing systems. Agentless monitoring capabilities should have little impact on the overall system performance, and therefore are virtually undetectable to the end users’ experiences.

Where should all of this energy monitoring and aggregation functionality be placed within the data center? Ideally, all of this would take place transparently and non-invasively, to avoid impacting the servers and end users. Agentless approaches, without the need for any software on the managed nodes, are available. Data center managers should also look for solutions that are easily integrated, such as those based on Web Services Description Language APIs, and able to coexist with other applications on the designated host server or virtual machine.

Where Power is Going

Today, the goal is improved efficiency and reduced costs, but energy management will become even more critical in the future, as compute models continue to tax power infrastructures. Whatever the goal, the monitoring and aggregation of server energy metrics set the stage for much more comprehensive energy management and a far deeper and richer set of usage models for IT assets. Besides enabling accurate power planning and forecasting, logging and trending power data provides knowledge for data center “right-sizing” and accurate equipment scheduling to meet workload demands.

The thermal data can also be used for more efficient designs of integrated facilities systems, such as cooling and air-flow solutions. Optimized resource balancing in the data center will always be closely tied to power; the expanded insight offered by intelligent energy management approaches will contribute to cost-saving decisions for years to come.

Jeff Klaus is the director of Intel Data Center manager (DCM). Jeff leads a global team that designs, builds, sells, and supports Intel® DCM.

Reflecting on Carbon: Why Invest now in Efficiency

webadmin@intel.com — Fri, 03 May 2013 14:25:38 GMT

I’ll admit it. I read some dismay the stories about the collapsing market for European carbon dioxide emissions allowances, as covered in the New York Times.

Without going into great detail, I feel the most economically efficient way to reduce the deferred costs of carbon emissions is to simply set a price for them today. Does buying roses grown in Africa produce more or less carbon than those grown in the Holland? I’d say a carbon analysis of that supply chain borders on too complex. But if carbon impacts were fairly encumbered at each point of use with a cost, an efficient market would prefer the lower impact source to the extent that carbon futures affect the price of the commodity.

Sadly it appears we have taken a step away not only from that efficiency, but also from addressing the carbon problem.

So are the carbon credits DOA? After some digging, I think not. Here's why - carbon futures are traded on a market like any other commodity and are affected by the same supply and demand economics that affect the price of everything else. So let’s look at both.

The first data I looked at was to compare the fluctuating price of carbon with economic data in this case the changes in combined GDP of four major European economies (Germany, France, UK, and Italy). This shows an important correlation in the demand side. The amount of money available to chase EUA credits is limited.

Another correlation is with electricity generation, which is a reasonable proxy for the demand to use credits. Here I just looked at France and Germany together. Although Europe uses multiple sources for electricity, the majority source is from fossil fuels.

Again, the trend (at least of available data) shows a pretty good correlation. This is yet another way to look at the demand side of the equation. With lower economic output driving lower demand for electricity in turn diving lower demand for carbon allocations, the drop in price seems natural.

On the supply side, of course, the decision by the commission to not limit the number of allocations guaranteed an abundant supply of credits.

So do I think the carbon market idea is dead? No, I don’t. The data “behind the curtain” support the idea that the falling price of carbon allocations is just a simple matter of supply and demand.

Will demand rise and EUA prices rise in the future? Of course they will. Hence, while there may not be any short term imperative to oinvenst in low carbon and efficient technolgies, smart industries should be, I believe, investing now, in the down turn, to gain advantages from efficiency in the longer term.

How can enterprise IT keep up with the lines of business?

webadmin@intel.com — Wed, 01 May 2013 17:18:37 GMT

We have tackled this fundamental question in The New CIO Agenda, a brochure aimed at helping you advance your cloud innovation strategies. Whether your business needs to transform the supply chain or go deeper into social media, cloud services are likely to be part of the solution. If you want to run as fast as the lines of business, capture opportunities from trends like big data and consumerization, or just keep the lights on as efficiently as possible, you need to transform your IT shop into an engine for service delivery.

The brochure, The New CIO Agenda tackles this challenge head-on by talking to some of the industry thought leaders. You will find insights from Intel’s CIO and other visionaries who are driving Intel’s cloud and technology strategies along with examples of companies that are leading their own cloud journeys.

Becoming an engine for service delivery doesn’t mean you need to do it all yourself—or that you immediately outsource everything to publicly hosted services. You start by building a plan which includes understanding the required services to run the business but also by looking for the services that are missing, but valued by the lines of business.

An essential step is to start by modernizing and standardizing your internal infrastructure, if you haven’t done so already. Chances are you’re well on your way to consolidating and virtualizing your server infrastructure—a key starting point for cloud computing. The next step in terms of infrastructure is to modernize and virtualize your storage architecture, migrating traditional scale-up storage platforms onto intelligent, distributed scale-out storage platforms. You’ll also want to unify your networks on 10/100 Gigabit Ethernet, and re-examine every layer of your security architecture. With these actions, you’re building a more secure, scalable foundation for cloud services and freeing up funds that can be used for innovative services.

In parallel, start developing a cloud services roadmap that spells out what services you’ll deploy and how. As a rule of thumb, you’ll want to keep core competencies and sources of competitive advantage on secure private clouds, so you can innovate quickly in areas that are critical to the business. This approach also retains critical expertise in-house. On the flip side, commodity functions are good candidates for externally hosted SaaS solutions.

Whether you’re hosting services internally or externally, you’ll need to clearly define each service, translating business goals into specific requirements and mapping service-level agreements back to the business owners. Pay close attention to requirements around performance, monitoring, auditing, and compliance, and identify ways of measuring them.

With each new service, you build your ability to rapidly deploy additional services, expand existing services, adjust on the fly—and create strategic value. Because one thing we know as IT professionals: The lines of business will continue to surprise us.

For more about building your cloud innovation strategies, watch a video about The New CIO Agenda and download the brochure.
Download technical presentations from the April 2013 Intel Developers Forum, including my presentation for Session CLDS007.
Follow Intel CIO Kim S. Stevenson on Twitter.