Did you know that using an electricity rate of 11.4 cents per kWh provides a simple method of calculating annual electricity cost of any device?

1 watt of power consumption, with an electricity rate of 11.4 cents per kWh, cost $1 per year, assuming power usage remains constant.  Also, as a general rule of thumb, every 1W of device power consumption in a data center requires an additional 1 watt for overhead power (Source: Intel IT). So a device that consumes 1W actually consumes 2W of power at a data center level.

Here's the math:  1 Watt power * 8760 hours per year / 1000 * $0.114 electricity rate per kWh = $1 per year.  This math holds the same for any currency, Euro, Yuan, etc.  11.4 cents per kWh is the crossover point…and as electricity rates increase over 11.4 cents, 1 watt will cost more than a $1 per year. 

The datacenter overhead power, often referred to as Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) is a number which has emerged as the leading metric for data center energy efficiency.

You might say that 1W = $2 annually doesn't sound like much, but start doing the math for 1000 servers that consume 200W in a data center with a PUE of 2.0 which works out to annual electricity cost of ~$400,000 per year.  Now, for every 1 watt the server power consumption is reduced, this would translate into $2000 annual savings.  Note, this is a very rudimentary example, but it is useful to illustrate why customers are really starting to focus on power as one of their key purchase decisions.

If you need energy efficient servers, there are multiple server vendors currently have some exceptional energy efficient products based on Intel(R) Xeon(R) 5500 processors.  And looking forward, we are also actively working on how to reduce power of the processor and at the system level for the upcoming generations of products.

Here’s some good reference on electricity rates:

For United States, state by state electricity rate comparison. 

For Europe, 1st half of 2008 rate comparison by country.

Remember, power is one purchase decision, but it is not the only one.  A rack of servers that consumes less power that does less work isn't an efficient way of deploying servers either.  Ensure that the performance vector is considered.  Intel® Xeon® 5500 processor based servers provid exceptional performance and perf/watt leadership over the competition.

Quick question for you:  How does electricity rate of 11.4 cents per kWh and a data center PUE of 2.0 compare to your data center? 

The computer industry is filled with pundits, speculators, visionaries, salesman, brilliant architects and professors. Each provides invaluable insight into their experience, their intelligence, their alma mater, their ticker symbol, their ego and what’s next. Some win the “what’s next lottery”, others work for years of brilliance in relative obscurity.

Seemingly, a world that has deployed over 1 Billion devices a year for the last 3 years , is incapable of understanding the gravity of a new programming models, a new hardware architecture, a sleek new design that delivers on a vision that Gene Rodenberry thought of in the 1960’s or Da Vinci in the 15^th Century. What is old is new…..and let me tell you why? It will revolutionize the industry (not evolutionize…a term reserved for slower growing industry’s that require government assistant every decade or so…), transform your environment and provide freedoms you had only hoped to enjoy….and we invented it 40 years ago. Does any of this sound familiar?

It should. These are the paraphrased slogans of an industry in transition. Real products matters, product differentiation matters, standards matter, interoperability matters….and shareholders pay for future expectations.

The future of computing…is NOW. The future of the computer industry is NOW. The next generation of computer programming, software architectures and transformational technologies is NOW. As an industry we have finally begun to embrace interface, architectural and software programming standards to usher in a new era of interoperability and scalability. Behind us are the days of “proprietary interfaces” (What does that actually mean other than I am going to sell you some extra accessories that will be worthless in 2 years?), which do not provide a differentiated performance/cost advantage. Gone are the days of developing programming languages that lock-in customers to individual companies, whether vendors innovate or not. These rules of the past are slowly melting away, allowing the entire industry to embrace interoperability and standards at the highest level in history. Industry diversity is healthy and insures that the most innovative and technologically relevant companies will “win” most of the time. Allowing the 1 Billion and the Next Billion customers of the world to enjoy the best interface technology yet developed….each other.  It also provides us with a unique ability to move to the next phase in our dynamic industry’s growth, autonomic instrumentation.

At Intel, we are constantly working to develop the next great performance architecture, filled with new innovative “goodies”, as our Chief Virtualization Architect Rich Uhlig calls them. These “goodies” (a technical term that Rich borrowed from his nephew, I believe) come in the form of virtualization technologies (Intel VT-x, Intel VT-d and Intel VT-c), security technologies (Intel LT-SX), performance technologies (Hyper-Threading, Turbo Boost) and energy efficiency instrumentation (Node Manager and Data Center Manager). Soon they will also include differentiated services in the cloud which facilitate ease of use and growth for a host of vertical industries in need of innovation. The resulting architectures that emerge will be instrument rich, feature capable and as scalable as users are willing to pay for.

Why is this important? Instrumentation matters. As we apply business and personal rules to our growing compute environments it has become increasingly clear that the more tools we make available to users the better informed we are in making decisions. The more disclosure we provide to investors through the use of autonomic programming architectures the more informed they will be of their investing decisions.

How can you day trade $1B in 35 different stocks without clear autonomic controls in your data center, your database, your application and your client devices?

How can you move 450 Million people efficiecntly throughout a country for 2 weeks without autonomic controls on transportation: plains, trains, boats and automobiles, as they do during the Spring Festival in China?

How can you process 1 Billion text messages a day without clear business rules? What happens when these messages are also coming from machines to other machines, modifying databases, applications and clients?

As humans, we must apply guidelines, much like laws,  for our machines to take action when we are asleep, when we are tired, when we are not present, when we are just simply being human….to slow to react to a rapidly changing environment.

The innovators of the computer industry today understand this NOW. We do not need to discuss a vision of 40 years ago without a plan to act NOW. Claiming ideas without action is dishonorable at best, criminal at worst. The innovators of today must build products and services that help solve the problems of today. We do not need to look to 2050 without a plan to act NOW. The visionaries of tomorrow are…..not born. The visionaries of today…can call me in 10 years.

Autonomic controls are in place today, machine to machine computer architectures are here today, scalable compute engines are here today. Are they perfect, no. Are they effective, yes. The design architects, product engineers and systems designers of today need to address these concerns. Autonomic Instrumentation delivers control to the administrator, the user and the developer. Rules engines can be modified to maximize efficiency, minimize consumption and increase productivity. All of these will lead to increase shareholder (read: No just people who buy shares of stock) value across your enterprise, your school, our hospitals, our governments, and your home.

When executed properly, Autonomic controls should be able to deliver 20-25% performance and efficiency increases with each new generation of Moore’s law. In some cases, as in the Intel Xeon® 5500 Series these increases have been over 150% in virtualization performance, these increases will be a combination of software architecture enhancement and silicon optimization. In other cases, it will be through the dedicated hard work of increase instrumentation capability of a processor platform at the same price of the previous generation through energy efficiency and memory controls.

Autonomic controls will also allow end users to avert disasters in our data centers, our homes and in our hands. Autonomic instrumentation design frameworks, allow users to set parameters on data migrations, data backup, security, memory access, power consumption and virtual machine architectures.

For Intel and our new Xeon® 5500 Series processor family, and our recently announced

Intel® Nehalem-EX platform provide the new generation of platform instrumentation. As product developers, designers and architects we should all find a way to increase the tools available to our customers to take advantage of these instrumentation capabilities. I look forward to being able to announce more of these new features as we announce them and help to provide development frameworks for developers, engineers and architects to build new products and services, ushering in the future of autonomic computing innovation…today.

Sunsets can last a while, but in the end the sun will go down.  I talk to a lot of companies and listen to a lot of data center managers.  Customers trust their AIX-Power and Solaris-Sparc platforms.  These are solid platforms and deliver good features and reliability, but, if these managers could get the sense of security, performance, and reliability with Linux / Intel Xeon platforms, they would move tomorrow.  It is simple economics.

The reality is that customers are making this move, and being successful.  The hardware reliability on Intel platforms today is amazing.  Intel recently announced that their next generation of Xeon(Nehalem) EX based servers will support Machine Check Architecture.  This brings high end Xeon X86 servers into the RAS family previously reserved to proprietary RISC & mainframe platforms.  Intel Xeon already eclipses the performance of proprietary RISC processors both on a per processor basis and a per dollar basis.  It is reasonable to say Xeon can deliver better performance, better value, and equal or better reliability.  The only hurdle left is the software.

Linux has come a long ways.  It is no longer a university OS, run by geeky dudes in black T-shirts emblazoned with the quadratic formula.  It is mainstream and solidly supported.  Linux is the primary development and delivery platform for Oracle.  Other OS environments are ports, delaying support and innovation.  Linux is used by major financial companies.  Linux is available in solid and well supported distributions with a 20 year history of enterprise business.  Linux experts are broad community, worldwide, and growing in number.  Linux is economical vs proprietary RISC.

In an era of big budgets and conservative (don’t make any changes) philosophies, businesses will always stick to their proprietary RISC systems.  That era is over.  Sticking to your RISC systems may seem like the safe move, but failing to examine the opportunities for better performance and lower cost with Linux on Intel Xeon platforms is business negligence.  Business negligence is seldom rewarded. 

Performance, Price, Infrastructure, Ecosystem, TCO, RAS – when the decision factors are examined it becomes clear -  we are in the RISC twilight and the sun will set on Sparc-Solaris and Power-AIX.