There’s a video going around from one of Intel’s top external customers.  Before you see this (video linked below) I wanted to position this correctly.  I caught up with Mr. X at an undisclosed coffee shop and got his approval to share publicly the messages that we would have rather had him go out with. Those messages are as follows:

Mr. X’s 4 year old servers were a burden on his organization, he spent all of his budget on just maintenance, nothing left for innovation.

He looked at his old infrastructure and determined that replacing them with more powerful-energy efficient servers from Intel was a strategic investment.

The New intel Xeon 5500 based servers provided the opportunity for him to innovate again.  He claimed that these new Intel Xeon Processor 5500 (Nehalem-EP) are the best enabler of IT business value that he's seen in years.

They boosted energy efficiency, saved him big $ and extended his facility lifespan – now he doesn’t have to go build a new data center. 

He replaced his old servers in a 9:1 ratio (getting rid of 9 old and replacing with 1 new) that enabled him to cut operational expenditures by 90% …And that savings alone is paying for the investment in these new servers in just 8 months. 

By strategically investing in IT when his competitors hunkered down and cut spending – he is now positioned to grow faster and gain share as the economic upturn arrives.

Ok, now that I’ve had a chance to convey his real messages, you can check out this video.

In March '09, former Intel executive Pat Gelsinger predicted that Nehalem-based Xeon 5500 servers would become "cash machines" for the IT industry, due to unprecedented power-efficient performance gains that can deliver a very short ROI for IT.  Pat's description of the Xeon 5500 was validated during a briefing with Intel CIO Diane Bryant in San Francisco on October 6^th, as reported in TG Daily.

She discussed the ROI achieved and the impact that a proactive serve refresh strategy has had on Intel’s bottom line, as reported in PC World.  Some of her key points:

·         Intel is expecting up to $250M savings over 8 years, saved $45M in 2008 alone.

·         Despite these results, economy forced Intel to re-evaluate capital spending in 2009.  Found that delaying server refresh would cost us $19M more than continuing.  So we continued. 

·         Getting an average of 10:1 server consolidation with Xeon 5500 in design computing environment and 20:1 virtualization server refresh ratios in Office/Enterprise. 

Did you know that Server Refresh is also the #1 driver of Intel’s Carbon Footprint reduction as well, with an initiative to reduce Carbon footprint by 5% per year.  We are projected to reduce by approximately 4K metric tons (2009) and this server refresh strategy is forecasted to be #1 project to help IT reduce Carbon.

Staying on the green IT theme, the newest ally for IT to help drive carbon-reduction and energy cost savings is the energy utilities.  A prime example of this is the Energy Trust of Oregon, who offers cash incentives to motivate Oregon businesses to make energy saving investments.  Intel gained access to a $250K incentive from them as a result of energy savings gained by replacing older servers with newer, more energy-efficient servers in our data centers. If you are replacing older servers with modern energy-efficient Xeon 5500 based servers and you haven’t had this conversation with your utility yet – please do so.  You may be eligible for utility incentives for energy savings that can lower your operating costs and reduce the impact of your business on the environment.  To estimate the energy savings associated with server refresh, go to www.intel.com/go/xeonestimator. 

You’re going to hear more about these “cash machines” in the very near future…stay tuned!

Bryce

Japan announced today that it has emerged from recession, following Germany and France’s announcements last week that their economies also grew in the second quarter. 

Moody’s Economy.com Business Confidence survey shows that confidence has been steadily increasing since March ‘09.

For the first time since September ’08, “Economic Recovery” nudges above “Economic Crisis” in Google Search Volume in early August. 

In addition to this, economic forecasts (WW GDP, US GDP, and EU GDP) point to a recovery over the next 6 months.  A couple of quotes:

• The direction of real GDP is even expected to turn from negative to positive in the current quarter. The academic arbiters of the business cycle at the National Bureau of Economic Research will eventually proclaim that the Great Recession ended sometime this summer.
         Moody’s Economy.Com – July 7, 2009
• The global economy is beginning to pull out of a recession unprecedented in the post–World War II era
         International Monetary Fund, imf.org – July 8, 2009

So, why am I bombarding this blog with various optimistic economic data? Because if we really are pulling out of the abyss, I’m worried that many companies out there are sitting on servers that will not be ready for the increased demand right around the corner.         

John Gantz, IDC Vice President in his keynote speech at the start of this year’s CIO Summit in Auckland was quoted as saying there will be an unprecedented amount of IT-driven change in the next four years.  He projected that there will be a three-fold rise in mobile users and information will grow five-fold, resulting in heightened levels of security and privacy and questions on which data to store or throw away. He also mentioned that the number of interactions between people on networks will grow eight times.

So this got me thinking… Is your company looking to differentiate and go after more market share while your competitors are hunkered down and not investing in the downturn? My guess is that there are a lot of IT managers being asked to support more social media, offer more SaaS, deploy more virtual machines, and support more real time analytics to get a leg up on the competition.  My gut tells me that it will be hard to do all of this with older servers that were put into another year of extended warranty because that felt like the right move when the proverbial economic s**t hit the fan last year. 

It’s critical to be prepared for when the recovery comes, and data points to an economic turnaround happening now – are you positioning your department to own it when it arrives?

Bryce

Last week I wrote about the server product update for the upcoming Nehalem-EX processor and the expandable platforms based on it.  Today I wanted to provide you with a short 10 minute video captured from the event.  It’s a really good summary for those of you that want to learn more about Intel’s Xeon product roadmap but with limited time.

Also, as I mentioned earlier, look for some informative blogs over the next 1-2 weeks that will offer more of an in depth view of Nehalem-EX’s 4 Socket capabilities, performance, scalability, RAS, and Virtualization. 

bryce

Sure, Intel® Xeon® 5500 Series Processors represent a quantum leap forward in terms of both performance and energy efficiency. That has been proven in a number of test results and reviews.  But for your back-end data demanding enterprise app deployments, large scale server consolidation or virtualization of business critical applications, Intel® Xeon 7400 series processors offer outstanding performance and performance per watt in 4-socket servers. So, which platform do you choose, especially when this decision is likely going to be the key determining factor for capital savings, efficiency and TCO for your datacenter infrastructure? Well, you’re read a lot about Xeon 5500 series Nehalem servers over the last few weeks.  Let me share with you some reasons to consider a Xeon 7400 series 4-socket server when you are presented with the choice between Intel’s two best of breed products for virtualization.

4 Socket and above servers (Xeon 7400) are purpose built – just like a large truck: They’re purpose built for your most data demanding enterprise applications like database and ERP, and for large scale server consolidation using virtualization. Large Trucks are also purpose built.  They’re purpose built for hauling large loads over long distances.   Now, you don’t buy a large truck to commute to work in.  You also don’t take your everyday commuter and attempt to haul large loads with it, because if you did you would be significantly undersized (you’ve all seen those cars on the road with rear tires about ready to pop under the weight of a palette of heavy goods tied on top). 

More Resources Matter for 4 Socket MP Workloads:
The apps/workloads listed above benefit from the expanded feature set associated with 4 Socket Xeon 7400 based servers: more processors (4 vs. 2), more cores (24 vs. 8), more memory (32 dimms vs. 18 dimms), more I/O capacity (7 slots vs. 4) and larger cache (16MB vs. 8MB).  These features and what they enable are why MP Server buying patterns have remained stable with IT for the last 5 years and will continue to be stable for the foreseeable future according to IDC. 

But in today’s economy there may be MP customers out there that will want to push the envelope and attempt to deploy lesser expensive 2S systems for traditional 4S solutions. Would doing so pencil out from a TCO perspective? Let’s take a look at two Virtualization usage examples and find out.

Large Scale Server Consolidation: Where almost 2x the memory matters.

In this scenario, IT Manager is dealing with numerous corporate acquisitions across the country prior to the economic downturn, with servers that now need to be consolidated to cut costs quickly.  Goal is to convert 1000 older underutilized 2S servers.  He (she) converts these to 1000 VMs and transfers them electronically to the central Data Center.   He determines that these infrastructure apps when consolidated generally run into memory constraints before they run into processor constraints, so for his candidate solutions he compares a 4 Socket Server with Xeon X7460 processors vs. a new 2 Socket server with Xeon X5570 processors.   He fully loads both systems with 4GB dimms (128GB on 4S vs. 72GB on 2S), and assigns 4GBs memory for each VM deployed (enabling 32VMs per server resulting in 31 new 4S servers vs. 18 VMs per server resulting in 56 new 2S Servers.)

Now, he only propagates the 4S Solution with 2 Xeon 7400 Processors, which allows the IT manager to still use all 128GB of memory on the 4S Servers while paying lower VMWare licensing costs.  Price these systems out on Dell, HP, IBM’s or Sun’s website, and the Xeon X7460 servers will be in the $15k-$20k range vs. the Xeon X5570 based servers will be in the $10k-$12k range (i.e. roughly 1.5x higher for 4S vs. 2S server).  Add VMWare license costs, power/cooling, LAN/SAN cabling, and system maintenance costs and you’ll see the 4S solutions offer a lower cost per VM.

Virtualizing Business Critical Workloads: Where 3x the Processor Cores matter.

In the previous example, we were looking to maximize consolidation ratios.  In this example, we’re looking to achieve predictable high performance for a business critical app.  Solutions like ERP that are put into a virtualized environment perform best when run without oversubscription, where you set the same number of virtual CPUs to equal the number of physical cores available on the platform.  This helps deliver relatively more predictable performance for all VMs and is the way that IT@Intel intends to deploy ERP in a virtualized environment as they begin to test this moving forward (read more about this in the new whitepaper).  In this example, we’ll convert ~100 non-production ERP instances (i.e. the instances used for QA, Dev, and Production break fix).  We’ll assign 2 virtual CPUs and 8GB memory for each instance.  The four-socket Xeon 7400 processor based systems (with 96GB memory) will have a total of 24 cores and will have a list price of about $25k.  This allows us to run 12 Virtual Machines without oversubscription on the MP Servers and enables 100 ERP instances to be consolidated down to about 8 MP (4 Socket) servers.  Since the Xeon 5500 based Servers just have 8-cores, the IT manager decides to avoid oversubscription and deploys 4 virtual machines – consolidating down to 25 DP (2 Socket) servers with 32GB Memory and a list price of about $8k per server.  Include the costs of the hardware, VMware ESX license costs, power/cooling, cabling, and Server maintenance – the MP (4 Socket) solution here would also offer a lower cost/vm than the Xeon 5500 based DP (2 Socket) solution due to having 3x the processor cores on 4 Socket.

When you are deploying your most data demanding enterprise applications and implementing large scale server consolidation, Xeon 7400 based servers represent a very intelligent choice. 

Let me know what you think.

bryce

We all know that IT is using virtualization on x86 servers to solve tough data center challenges (server sprawl, accelerating power and cooling costs, the need to extend life of current facilities, achieving high-availability and disaster recovery through live migration, etc.) 

But which x86 servers are they using? According to IDC’s q3’08 Server Virtualization tracker, 85% of all the x86 servers deployed in 2008 for virtualization were based on Intel® Xeon® processors. 

Ok, next question: Is there a benefit to going with scalable 4 Socket servers (Multi-processor) vs. 2 socket servers (Dual-Processor)?  It’s a religious argument really, but as IT budgets continue to tighten, scalable 4 Socket servers offer more ‘capabilities’ (i.e. processors, memory, I/O ports and reliability features) that enable higher consolidation ratios. 

So I thought I would write about 5 specific scenarios where you should see a benefit to scalable 4 Socket (MP) servers over 2 Socket newest (DP).  Tell us if you agree or disagree.

1. Higher Consolidation Ratios for Memory-Constrained Apps

Do you have a bunch of apps that you need to keep running but at the same time face tremendous pressure to address the challenges listed above?  A key advantage of scalable servers is that they can be configured with more memory than smaller 2S servers, typically 2x-4x more.  Often times, especially with multi-core processors, virtual machines will run into memory constraints before they run into processor constraints.  A 2x-4x memory capacity advantage can translate into 2x-4x the VMs.  Scalable servers also tend to use available memory more efficiently, since code and data can be stored once and shared among multiple virtual machines.  Solvay Pharmaceuticals, for example, intends to run with consolidation ratios as high as 25:1 on 4 Socket Xeon servers. 

2. Performance and Reliability for Business-Critical Workloads

Intel’s launch last September of the Xeon 7400 processor (6-cores, 16mb shared L3 cache) brings 24 processing cores and up to 256gb memory (32 dimm slots x 8gb dimms) to a 4 Socket Server environment.   This provides a lot of resources for demanding applications and unexpected workload spikes.  Tests within Intel’s IT department have shown that 4-socket servers show much less variation in throughput than comparable 2-socket servers as virtualized workloads are increased. 

3. Faster and More Cost-Effective Test and Development

Development teams can be demanding.  The faster IT can provision testing environments for the developers the better.  Scalable servers offer more headroom to deploy additional dev environments when needed, without waiting for new physical servers to be provisioned. Scalable servers can also support a broader range of applications, including enterprise applications that may require the processor, memory and I/O resources of a large, multi-processor system.  Using the same Solvay Pharmaceuticals example listed above, they were able to deploy new apps in 10 min vs. 1 week prior to deploying virtualization on Xeon based servers.

4. Larger and More Robust Flexible Resource Pools

With VMware Virtual Infrastructure, applications can be migrated without downtime among all the servers in a resource pool, which can include up to 32 physical hosts (in a VMware HA* or VMware DRS* cluster).  Using larger, scalable servers would simply expand the capacity of those resource pools due to the additional memory, processors, I/O, etc. 

5. Better Utilization of Limited Data Center Resources

Many data centers are operating at or near the limit of their power, cooling and networking capacity. By using larger, scalable servers to increase consolidation ratios, IT can reduce power and cooling requirements and share local area network (LAN) and storage area network (SAN) ports more efficiently – all of which can help defer the high cost of new data center construction. 

Let us know what you think…

There's been a number of blogs written recently about the upcoming Xeon 7400 (Dunnington) processor (I've listed a bunch of them at the bottom of this thread if you're interested). I'm happy to report that it's not upcoming anymore - today Intel formally launched this new processor at a press event in San Francisco. The event consisted of Intel VP and GM of Digital Enterprise Group Tom Kilroy's presentation to the press followed by a lively end user panel discussion with execs from Yahoo, Oracle, MySpace and Verisign and moderated by Intel VP and CIO Diane Bryant. It was really interesting to hear about the challenges these companies face today in their data centers and the benefits that Xeon platforms bring to them.

Some of the takeaways from Tom's speech were:

• This is Intel's newest high-end Xeon® server processor. It's socket compatible with the previous generation Xeon® 7300 based platforms so that means it should allow IT to easily qualify and introduce Xeon 7400 servers into their environment.

• The processor is based on Intel's 45nm high-k process technology, 6 cores per chip and 16MB shared cache memory, and has advanced virtualization capabilities like VT FlexMigration.

• It's built for virtualized environments and data demanding workloads (i.e. databases, BI, ERP and server consolidation.)

• Servers based on the processor are expected to be announced from over 50 system manufacturers around the world, including four-socket rack servers from Dell, Fujitsu, Fujitsu-Siemens, Hitachi, HP, IBM, NEC, Sun, Supermicro and Unisys; four-socket blade servers from Egenera, HP, Sun and NEC; and servers that scale up to 16-sockets from IBM, NEC and Unisys.

• It's already set new four-socket and eight-socket world records on key industry benchmarks for virtualization, database, enterprise resource planning and e-commerce. I found a link on Intel.com that summarizes these here.

Here's also a copy of the press release I found on Intel.com and an article I just found on EE times.

Previous Blog Links:

HP Announces World Record 4-Socket TPC-C Result

IBM Announces World Record 8-Socket TPC-C Result

http://communities.intel.com/openport/blogs/server/2008/08/19/dunnington-shines-at-idfnew-world-records-announced

Previous Video Links:

Announcing Demos on Demand

Turtle Entertainment-Virtualization of Gameservers

HP Announces World Record 4-Socket TPC-C Result

IBM Announces World Record 8-socket TPC-C Result

XEON 7400-series Benchmark Results

Boyd Davis Talks Dunnington Performance

IBM Announces World Record SAP-SD Result