Intel Communities : Document List - The Server Room

Lowering SMS Infrastructure Costs

sally.sams@intel.com — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:45:27 GMT

Video Surveillance Solution* by HP and Intel

sally.sams@intel.com — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:02:22 GMT

Intel® in Cloud Computing

webadmin@intel.com — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:52:18 GMT

Learn more about the optimization, innovation, and leading products and technologies Intel is delivering to meet the needs of large scale internet and cloud computing datacenters.

Whitepapers & Case Studies:

Latest Intel® Xeon® Processor 5500 Series Adopted for Japanese Cloud Computing Service Designed to Meet Local Needs

Changing the Game--Oracle uses Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series–based systems with Intel® Intelligent Power Node Manager to increase rack density and propel business growth

Preserving Performance While Saving Power Using Intel® Intelligent Power Node Manager and Intel® Data Center Manager

Data Center Manageability Interface (DCMI) Specification

Optimizing Hadoop* Deployments

Why the Intel® Xeon® Processor 5500 Series is the Ideal Foundation for Cloud Computing

Dynamic Power Optimization for Higher Server Density Racks – A Baidu Case Study with Intel® Dynamic Power Technology

Achieving Fast, Scalable I/O for Virtualized Servers With Intel® Virtualization Technology

IDC Whitepaper: Optimizing I /O Virtualization: Preparing the Datacenter for Next-Generation Application

Intel® Xeon® Processor Technology and Intel® Solid-State Drives

Developing an Enterprise Cloud Computing Strategy

Architecting Software as a Service for the Enterprise

Better Together: Rich Client PCs and Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing Blogs & Discussion Posts:

Billy Cox: Intel Cloud Builder

Fall IDF: Enterprise Cloud? Are you sure its not an oxymoron?

Intel® Node Manager Use Case for Server Monitoring

Why I wish it wasn't called Cloud Computing

Watch Videos on Channel Intel:

Dylan Larson-Enterprise Cloud

Jason Waxman-Cloud Services

Chip Chat Podcasts:

David Jenkins-Intel® Intelligent Power Node Manager

Raejeanne Skillern-Cloud Computing

Iddo Kadim-Virtualization and Cloud Computing

Better Together: Rich Client PCs and Cloud Computing

webadmin@intel.com — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:10:10 GMT

Cloud computing poses new questions about the optimal enterprise client computing strategy. With more and more services delivered from the cloud, which combination of client platforms and service delivery models best meets the needs of users and IT organizations?

Architecting Software as a Service for the Enterprise

webadmin@intel.com — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:08:03 GMT

As part of our cloud computing strategy, Intel IT has been opportunistically taking advantage of external offerings of software as a service (SaaS) applications. To prepare for broader SaaS adoption, we designed a SaaS architecture that will enable us to shift to a more strategic view and facilitate faster, more standardized implementations.

Developing an Enterprise Cloud Computing Strategy

webadmin@intel.com — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:45:31 GMT

Cloud computing is a significant trend with the potential to increase agility and lower costs. Today, however, security risks, immature technology, and other concerns prevent widespread enterprise adoption of external clouds. Intel IT is developing a strategy based on growing the cloud from the inside out. We take advantage of software as a service (SaaS) and niche infrastructure as a service (IaaS) implementations whenever possible, and we are building an internal cloud-computing environment. Our internal environment delivers many of the benefits of clouds and positions us to use external clouds in the future, as supplier offerings mature and barriers to enterprise adoption are overcome.

Success Story: Intel Helps Underpin Essential Engineering Operations for BMW Group

sally.sams@intel.com — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:03:24 GMT

Success Story: Improving Healthcare and Business Growth for Cogent Healthcare

sally.sams@intel.com — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:50:54 GMT

Evaluating Intel Virtualization Technology FlexMigration with Multi-generation Intel® Multi-core and Intel® Dual-core Xeon® Processors.

jim.r.blakley@intel.com — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 18:06:27 GMT

In today’s data centers, live migration is a required technology for building an agile, dynamic data center based on server virtualization. It has not been possible, however, to perform successful live migration between servers based on different generations of processors, each with different instruction sets. This limited our ability to implement large resource pools, creating islands of servers and hindering the implementation of advanced data center capabilities.

Intel Virtualization Technology FlexMigration (Intel VT FlexMigration) assist and VMware’s* Enhanced VMotion* are designed to overcome this limitation by enabling all servers to expose the same instruction set to applications, even if they are based on different processor generations from a single CPU supplier. In this case study we will showcase how these technologies allows enterprises to re-use and scale their existing resource pools by adding higher performing power efficient servers into the pool.

In this PoC, we created an enterprise reporting application workload representative of IT workloads. We then tested a variety of manual live migrations between host servers based on 3 generations of Intel® Core™ micro architecture with different instruction sets [Intel® microarchitecture, formerly codenamed Merom:SSE3, Intel® microarchitecture, formerly codenamed Penryn:SSE4.1, Intel® microarchitecture, formerly codenamed Nehalem:SSE4.2]. All migrations completed successfully without any failures in the workload.

Intel® Xeon® Processor Technology and Intel® Solid-State Drives

webadmin@intel.com — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:23:34 GMT

TV viewers have come to expect a web-like experience for TV programs—they want to watch their favourite programs on their own schedule. To meet this shift in customer expectations, Cable MSO and Telecommunications operators are rolling out Time-Shifted TV services for their subscribers using powerful video-on-demand platforms such as Espial MediaBase*. Time-Shifted TV is an especially demanding application as it requires high-performance servers with powerful processors, disk drives, and network cards to support real-time video capture and streaming.

Intel partnered with Espial to evaluate the throughput improvement possible with Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series-based platforms coupled with Intel® Solid-State Drives (SSDs) for both standard and high-definition video streaming. Espial tested the Intel® X25M-80 GB high-performance SSDs as an alternative to hard disk drives (HDDs) or DRAM typically used to store and stream the video files. The evaluation compared Intel® Xeon® processor 5400 series-based servers with HDDs to next generation Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 seriesbased servers with Intel SSDs. The evaluation was conducted during Q4 2008 at Espial labs using Espial MediaBase; an intelligent, on-demand video platform. Using eight SSD drives, the test system demonstrated that it could deliver 2,400 SD streams. This would support up to 24,000 subscribers with a maximum simultaneous play out of 10 percent. The 9 Gbps of network throughput placed less than a 20% CPU utilisation load on the test system.

In summary, next generation Intel components provide advantageous cost performance that is essential for service providers to roll out Time-Shifted TV services while containing operational and capital expenditures.

More detailed findings from the evaluation are published in this paper.

Intel® Cloud Builder Program

webadmin@intel.com — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 18:56:48 GMT

Intel® Cloud Builder program enables easier deployment of cloud solutions. Developed with leading cloud independent software vendors (ISVs), the program provides a starting point to setup, deploy and manage a cloud infrastructure. The Intel Cloud Builder program produces materials, including documented reference architectures and best known methods on how to build and operate a cloud by running the ISV software stack on a test bed hosted by Intel.

The primary goal is to simplify the effort to deploy cloud-based solutions for service providers, hosters and enterprise customers looking to use cloud architectures. The program provides tools and best practices for cloud service providers to create a cloud environment based on a defined software and hardware stack.

Intel® Cloud Builder solutions provide an easy starting point to build a cloud environment based on a basic hardware blueprint and using available cloud software management solutions to manage the resource pools. These solutions provide a defined starting point and over time will take advantage of future Intel technologies and industry software solutions to address ISV’s needs such as trusted multi-tenancy and power management.

Service providers and hosters want to innovate where they will get the greatest return. Intel eliminates time-consuming back-end work by providing tools that helps service providers and hosters start from a documented solution. Based on the test bed methodology, the program provides design specifications, APIs, and best practice information for the industry at large.

Industry leading ISVs have joined the Intel® Cloud Builder program:

“Canonical sees the Intel Cloud Builder program as an invaluable baseline for anyone who is looking to rapidly deploy a cloud solution stack. Canonical is passionate about providing the latest, most stable value-adding technologies for their end-users," said Simon Wardley, software services manager for Canonical. "The Intel Cloud Builder program will open a new world of innovation for service providers and we look forward to working with Intel to develop cloud reference solutions."

"Our participation in the Intel Cloud Builder program will provide customers access to a stable, tested starting point for deploying cloud infrastructures built on state of the art Intel Xeon hardware and cloud solutions from Citrix" said Simon Crosby, CTO, Datacenter and Cloud Division, Citrix Systems, Inc. “Citrix will further build on these reference architectures to enable our customers to deliver scalable cloud services."

“Microsoft and partners deliver a wide range of solutions for customers to design, deploy and manage highly virtualized and scalable cloud computing environments so they can streamline costs in the datacenter and accelerate business solutions,” said Mike Neil, general manager of Windows Server and Server Virtualization, Microsoft Corp. “We are working with the Intel Cloud Builder program to provide reference architectures to help our mutual customers build an optimized foundation for private and public cloud computing with Microsoft software and Intel Xeon processor-based servers.”

"Parallels works with thousands of service provider partners and believes the Intel Cloud Builder program is valuable for those partners who are deploying a cloud solution stack," said Bryan Goode, Parallels VP of Business Development. “The Intel Cloud Builder Program enables service and hosting providers to optimize the deployment of Parallels’ automation and virtualization stacks on massive numbers of Intel® Xeon servers."

"Based on our experience with open source adoption among early cloud deployments, Red Hat is perceived by many as a trusted thought leader in both public and private cloud build outs. Our customers are looking for proven configurations of the cloud stack: hardware configurations combined with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware," said Mike Evans, vice president, Corporate Development at Red Hat. "We are happy to team with Intel on the Intel Cloud Builder program to provide guidance and reference architectures to help optimize deployment on Intel(r) Xeon 5500 Series platforms for scale, multi-tenancy and lower TCO."

"Whether you are a service provider rolling out cloud services or an organization consuming them, the Intel Cloud Builder program provides the reference solutions to quickly get up and running," said Gary Tyreman, SVP Products and Alliances at Univa UD. "By publishing private, hybrid and public cloud solutions validated on Intel architecture, Univa will provide our service provider partners and customers a recipe for cloud implementation that will reduce costs and increase performance and efficiency.

“For service providers and enterprises exploring building public and private clouds leveraging the VMware platform, the Intel® Cloud Builder Program offers guidance on analyzing and evaluating ‘best of breed’ VMware vSphere and Intel based solutions, simplifying design decisions, and providing basic functionality validation” said Raghu Raghuram, GM, Server Business at VMware."

"The Intel Cloud Builder reference architecture program will help drive open source cloud platform adoption while enabling customers to take advantage of leading Intel architecture datacenter products and technologies" said Ian Pratt, founder and chairman, Xen.org. "This announcement aligns well with the Xen Cloud Platform initiative, a complete open source Infrastructure as a Service stack which can be combined with orchestration and management software from other projects - such as Eucalyptus - to deliver a complete open source 'cloud in a box.”

Check out Billy Cox Blog on Intel Cloud Builder.

Watch this space for recipes & blueprints as they become available starting in Q1 ’10. For additional details, please contact: intelcloudbuilder@intel.com

You can also check out The Intel in Cloud Computing wiki for lots of good resources on what's happening in the cloud.