With 2S Xeon processors delivering outstanding energy efficient performance, I get many questions from customers on “what about the Dunnington-based Servers”, “would it make sense for me to continue to use 4S servers in my IT/Enterprise”, “am I making the right choices with Dunnington” and so on.

The answer is a yes, even considering our 2S Nehalem-EP based servers expected in Q1 2009.

Customers make choices based on their business requirements – whether the new platform would be able to meet their IT needs. And in making such a decision in today’s economic context, there is temptation to use a 2S server as it is costs less. However, the choice of the server platform should not be dictated by the price alone; there are other more important considerations that you have to look into before deciding on the right choice.

One of our customers in banking had a very interesting problem – the system should be capable of delivering a user-acceptable response time while maintain headroom for growth. And the customer was keen to use virtualization running his workloads. With these key parameters (among others) in mind, we sized both 2S and 4S servers for the customer. And it turned out, that both the 2S and 4S servers were able to meet the response time, but the 4S server could deliver the “headroom for growth”. The headroom was based on the bank’s projected business growth in the next 12-24 months, their existing datacenter facility (space, power, cooling) and opportunity to further consolidate applications in a virtualization environment. The bank could have easily settled on a multiple 2S servers running in a virtual pool, but when you factor in “headroom for growth” considerations, the 4S+ Xeon 7400 servers still deliver the performance scalability and expandability that is needed today and tomorrow.

The bank finally settled on ten 4S servers and ten 8S servers. These servers had the unique capability to scale (4S to 8S to 16S) within the same OS footprint (while keep costs under control) and also deliver the performance headroom for the bank’s further needs.

In doing the above exercise for the bank, simple guidelines emerged – a) select the right architecture that scales in the future, b) look at established OS/App technologies such as virtualization to consolidate the environment, c) make decisions based on “your workload” running on the new servers and use published benchmarks as indicatives only.

Let me know what you think – share your views.

One of the common questions that I get from customers is whether their applications will be able to take advantage of so many cores in their server. And it's not just running the application without changes, but also being able to scale in performance. I would like to address this concern in three parts:

• What does many cores on a server bring to me? Applications that run on x86 servers today have been written to take advantage of more processors (or SMP) on the Servers since the 90s. These applications have been threaded over time and fined tuned to deliver optimum performance. When such applications are run on a many-core platform (such as the 4-way Intel^(r) Xeon^(r) 7400 processor-based server), these applications show instantaneous performance gain. Database applications such Oracle 10g, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 have shown significant performance gains when run on a 6-core Xeon 7400 processor-based server. As an example, check out the TPC-C performance of the 4P platform. We have seen SQL Server 2005 performance gains up to 68% compared to the previous generation processor - The highest 4P database performance on a Windows Server Platform today. We also have seen the highest DB2 database performance on Linux OS. Similarly, using Oracle OASB benchmark with Oracle 10g R2 DB and Oracle E-business suite v12, the IBM x3850M2 delivered unparalleled processing of 10,000 employee payroll batch update in 5.37 seconds (Wall Clock Duration). So Clearly, the benefits of using multi-core processors such as the 6-core Xeon 7400 processor are immense. It's performance and more performance all the way for enterprise workloads.

• Do I have to get the latest version of my application to get optimum performance? In most of the cases for enterprise workloads, the application gets performance boost as more cores are added to the system. However, the performance may not be optimum. As newer tools emerge to take advantage of Intel® Core® Architecture in a parallel environment, the ISVs may make changes to their software to give the their applications additional performance boost. Tools such as compilers and libraries from Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun and others are constantly updated to provide optimum scaling and performance on Intel Architecture based Servers.

• Does my application cost more on a 6-core Xeon 7400 processor-based server? In most of the cases, NO. You need to make an assessment of the software licensing model currently used on your servers and then decide if the price/performance is worth moving to the Xeon 7400 processor-based platform. From what we have seen in the past many years, the performance of a multi-core platform far outweighs the price of the platform. In short, YOU PAY LESS TO GET MORE. Today multi-core processing has become the norm for Enterprise Applications. ISVs are constantly evaluating their application licensing models to run in an SMP multi-core environment. ISVs such as Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, VMware have made their applications multi-core friendly, giving you more for less.

Another area that you MUST consider is Virtualization or Server Consolidation - where multi-core servers have been known to provide the optimum use of compute resources in your environment. You can read Virtualization benefits in blogs from Sudip Chahal, dave_hill, RK_Hiremane, and K_Lloyd

To summarize, enterprise applications running on the 6-core Intel Xeon 7400 processor-based servers will see performance scaling as the number of cores increase. And it WILL get better over time. I hope you have enjoyed reading this. Let me know what you think.