If you hadn’t heard, Microsoft* and Intel spent a lot of effort optimizing Windows* Server 2008 R2 (and Windows 7) to improve energy efficiency by reducing system power consumption at idle and under load.  For more details, check out the presentation from the Intel Developer Forum a few weeks ago titled Microsoft and Intel: Innovations in Hardware and Software to Help Deliver New Technology Experiences.  This presentation (and other IDF presentations) can be found at intel.com/go/idfsessions (search for SPCS003 using the session ID number).  There is good information on the operating system optimizations that were done to reduce power consumption.  Slide 22 has an excellent comparison of the power consumption of Windows Server 2003 vs. Windows Server 2008 R2 running on the same Xeon® 5500 series processors. It shows that using WinSrv2008 R2 reduced system idle and peak power consumption by ~60W!!  In addition, Hyper-V* 1.1 now uses the power management features of Intel processors to reduce power consumption during periods of low utilization.  

This is a great time to show your customers the energy efficiency benefits that come with upgrading to WinSrv2008 R2 at the same time they refresh their server infrastructure with Xeon® 5500 based servers.

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

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 Intel® Xeon® 5500 Series Processor (aka Nehalem) officially stepped out from behind the curtain onto center stage today.  This processor is an engineering marvel…one that can intelligently provide phenomenal performance on demand, while also sipping power when not in use.

Any measure of energy efficiency consists of performance in conjunction with the amount power consumed, so let’s cover these “big” items first.

• Performance:  As of March 30, 2009, Intel based 2 socket Xeon® 5500 series servers set at least 30 world performance records across a wide range of benchmarks that cover virtually every application type on the market. The performance results, just by themselves, are utterly amazing, and in general they are greater than 2x the Intel® Xeon® 5400 series processors (Harpertown).
• System level power consumption:  The electricity bill is based on how much power the server consumes, so that is also an important part of the energy efficiency equation. In general, Intel® Xeon® 5500 (Nehalem) based servers consume equal or slightly less power under peak workloads vs. previous generation Intel® Xeon® 5400 based servers.  By increasing performance more than 2x over previous Intel server processors while keeping overall power consumption in check, this is a great recipe for energy efficient performance.  In addition, when servers are at idle or are not fully utilized, customers want them to consume the least amount of power possible. Because of some key new power management features built into Nehalem, system idle power is dramatically lower (up to 50% less) than previous generation Intel® Xeon® 5400 based servers.

Now let’s get into three of the “behind the curtain” details of how some of the energy efficiency improvements are achieved.

1. Power gating:  When a core is inactive, the operating system can request the core to enter a deep C state. Xeon® 5500 series processors supports C6, which is called “power gating”. This essentially puts the core into such a low power state that it consumes very close to 0W when not in use.
2. DIMM memory power management: Today’s servers often have a lot of DIMMs installed, but leaving them in their full power state all the time isn’t a very wise. The Xeon® 5500 processor can intelligently reduce DIMM power consumption when not active by using techniques such as clock gating (CKE) and putting the DIMMs in “sleep state”, called self-refresh.
3. Increased # of performance states:  P-states enable the server to proportionally match the power consumption of the server to the desired performance output. For example, if the processor CPU utilization is less, the operating system may request a lower P-state. By doing this, the power consumption of the processor is reduced to match the lower performance required. All this happens dynamically and allows the processor to scale both performance and power up and down to intelligently meet the workload demands.

In summary, while it is interesting to get into these “behind the curtain details”, what matters most is the performance and power at a system level. Servers based on Intel® Xeon® 5500 Series Processors represent a quantum leap forward in terms of both performance and energy efficiency! Call up your favorite server vendor and “test drive” one today to see for yourself.  And…once you get your hands on one, let me know what you think.

The Intel® Xeon® 7400 Processor was officially announced just a few weeks ago and there has been phenomonal interest in this product because of it's world record breaking performance leadership as well as it's great energy efficiency.

Let's first discuss one of the primary advantages of the Intel® Xeon® 7400 Processor: Up to 50% better performance/watt and up to 10% less system power vs. 7300. As stated, this is pretty straightforward: Intel has real world results that show significant performance increases while consuming less power as compared to servers based on the previous generation Intel® Xeon(R) 7300 Processors. The performance increase can largely be attributed to designing the Xeon® 7400 processor with 6 cores based on the Intel® Core™ Microarchitecture. In addition, the primary reason for the power decrease is because Xeon® 7400 uses the latest 45nm High-K process technology instead of 65nm in the previous generation. In general, processors based on the 45nm process consume less power than the processor's rated TDP (thermal design power) value. It must be noted that power consumption can vary by processor and some processors may consume even less power and others may consume up to the processor's rated TDP value. For more details on both the performance and power, I recommend taking a look at this 3rd party review by Anandtech*: http://it.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3414&p=1

Next, let's discuss the positive impact these servers can have on your data center. Whether you have an existing data center or plan to build a new one, there is always a fixed amount of power that is provided to that data center. Energy efficient performance, in it's simplest definition, is the ratio of performance in relation to the amount of power consumed. The higher the ratio, the more energy efficient your data center is. To accomplish this, two vectors need to be considered. The first is performance output and the second is power consumption (both when servers are operating at peak performance and when they are running at lower utilization levels or at idle). Servers based on the Intel® Xeon® 7400 processor can provide both higher performance as well as lower power, which offer some very compelling energy efficiency benefits. For example, when using virtualization multiple applications that currently run on independent servers can be consolidated on fewer, higher performing servers, while still providing performance headroom for future growth. By doing this, both acquisition and ongoing electricity/operational costs can be dramatically reduced. To see how much money you can potentially save by upgrading to servers based on the Intel® Xeon® 7400 processor, take a look at the ROI using the Intel® Xeon® Server Estimator at www.intel.com/go/xeonestimator

In summary, the best energy efficient performance can achieved using servers with Intel® Xeon® 7400 Processors. These servers provide both exceptional performance across a wide range of applications, with headroom to grow, while at the same time consuming less power as compared to previous generation Intel 7300 based servers.

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