The Server Room Blog

'You are not Alone' - When it comes to moving from RISC

eoin.j.mcconnell@intel.com — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:18:41 GMT

Change is hard, but it can be done and the benefits of change usually outweigh the concerns which were on our minds before we made the change.

When making the change from running your solution on a RISC architecture to running that solution on a Xeon architecture, the biggest concern usually relates to whether that solution will run at the same level as on the previous architecture. I'm not talking about performance specifically, but usually the question is around whether operating systems like Linux, Windows, and Solaris on Xeon will meet your business needs for yourmission critical solutions.

Like the underlying improvements in the microprocessor, I believe that there have also been major fundamental improvements in the operating systems that run on both today's and the soon to come next generation microprocessors (sorry, my obligatory Nehalem-EX advertisement... coming soon in 2010). A decision made many years ago to run your solution on Unix/RISC was made based on comparing all the different variables at that time to pick what was right for your business. At that time you likely decided that your solution would not run on these operating systems, these operating systems were not suitable for your mission critical workloads etc. Probably right decision at that point, but like everything else decisions get revisited based upon the here and now and what may have been the right solution in the past (and right decision) may not be the right solution for your needs now.

I wanted to share some thoughts specifically on Redhat Linux today. Lets take a little look at Redhat Enterprise Linux. Current versions of Redhat can deliver what is required for your critical solutions. RHEL is ready and here are some of the reasons cited by Redhat in recent webinars on this topic and my interpretation of their comments

Hosts real-time global mission-critical infrastructures and operations 24 X 7 - its tried and tested by other Enterprises
Enables 5x9s availability in highly secure environments - pretty important to most critical solutions
Contributes measurable reductions to TCO and enables, agile, standardized, and virtualized infrastructures - TCO benefits through standardization
Has major ISVs on-board with the majority of 3rd party Unix applications have Linux and/or Windows versions available - the ISVs that traditionally delivered applications to you based on Unix, also have versions supported on Linux/Windows
Many customer unique applications are developed with programming languages such as C, C++, JAVA, or J2EE and can be migrated to Linux and / or Windows - your applications can be moved
Hosts most major database systems standard for your infrastructure - all the major databases run and run well on Linux

One of the other things we encounter a lot is around whether the technical considerations to move from one operating system environment are too high to overcome and outweigh the benefits of moving. There are always technical considerations and things that you need to know to move from one environment to another. However you are not alone in trying to understand these technical considerations. Redhat have done a phenomenal job of documenting the challenges of moving from say Solaris to Linux and have developed a great Strategic Migration Planning Guide. This is available on request. In recent webinars Redhat outline some of the things that you need to consider for the following technical categories

- Development Environment; Kernel tuning; Security; Filesystems; Debugging, tracing, Profiling; Command Differences; Deployment methods; Software Management; Virtualization; Application considerations

In addition to the current versions of Redhat running on Intel architecture, we are also working very closely on future versions that will take advantage of the 20+ new RAS features that are planned for Nehalem-EX - more on that in a future blog

You are not alone, resources, tools and expertize exist to help you make that move and reap the business benefits while still delivering to the requirements of your business. Check out Redhat online tools for more information that dives deeper into all the areas for consideration http://www.redhat.com/migrate/solaris_to_linux/

We think Redhat Linux and Xeon are ready to run your mission critical workloads and solutions...What do you think?

Why upgrade your hardware when migrating to SAP ERP 6.0?

ennis.p.skillern@intel.com — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:10:06 GMT

Why upgrade your hardware when migrating to SAP ERP 6.0? Because it makes simple, practical, business sense that is all. SAP has identified several key reasons why customers are concerned about migration and several among them are as follows:

· Cost, Cost, Cost

o HW infrastructure cost is highlighted as one of the key barriers of migration

· Business Justification

o Is there a compelling business reason to upgrade the hardware?

· Additional risk of business disruption

o Migration of ERP environment is complex enough…how much more risk is there when upgrading your hardware?

From a cost perspective, the perception that hardware is a barrier to migration can be easily overcome. Based on research, the hardware cost as a percentage of the overall migration cost is only about 7%. That means 93% of the cost is in licensing, consulting, etc, etc. HW costs are only the “tip of the iceberg” and the real $ investment lies elsewhere in the equation.

Is there a compelling business reason to upgrade your hardware? Well…frankly, it does not make sense not to do it. One, we showed above that the hardware investment is minimal compared to SW licensing, consulting, service, etc. Two, the hardware requirements of ERP 6.0 are significantly higher than previous versions. ERP 6.0 requires up to 2.5x more CPU performance, 2.5x more memory and 1.5x more I/O! You will need the increased performance and scalability that Intel provides in our microprocessors. While the ERP performance requirements have increased 2.5x, Intel performance with SAP has increased 10X! Oh, btw…energy efficiency does matter and in your new ERP environment you will be able to consolidate servers and save on power and cooling costs. TCO will be significantly reduced and from hardware investment standpoint, you are likely going to recover the cost of the servers in a very reasonable timeframe.

From my discussions with the IT community, their major concern and number one focus area is to prevent business disruption and downtime. This costs companies real and significant money. The fact is that an ERP migration is a complex enough project managing the strategic, functional and technical portions. Adding a server infrastructure change increases fundamental risk. But, the key here is that it is done often and done successfully. Intel IT has published several whitepapers on the subject and communicated “Best Known Methods” to minimize that risk. A quick summary is inserted here:

Challenge:

• Convert Intel’s Worldwide Warehouse Management Software

• Upgrade from SAP* ERP version 4.7 to 6.0, change the DBMS, and perform a Unicode* conversion as well as a hardware upgrade

• Minimize downtime

Benefit to Intel IT:

• SAP ERP 6.0 improves Intel supportability

• Increases ease of integration to SAP NetWeaver* 7.1 Suite

• Provides access to Enhancement Packs and Enterprise Services

• Intel^® Itanium^®-based servers provide access to 128 GB of memory for database and SAP operations and significantly increased performance from true 64-bit processing

Key Results:

• Reduced downtime of upgrade by 50% by using Intel Architecture

In summary, upgrading your server infrastructure when migrating your ERP environment is a very, very complex task, but form a business perspective, it should be fairly easy to see the true benefits from combining the ERP migration and hardware upgrade at the same time.

Do I look like a big corporation to you?

emma.hitzke@intel.com — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:06:23 GMT

Just because you’re a small or medium-sized business doesn’t mean you don’t deserve benchmark data that’s relevant to your environment. In fact, the right kinds of comparisons are critical for you and your decision-making. Why? Because those performance differences can mean the difference between good and great service to your customers, or cost savings that boost your bottom-line, or maybe even help you better use your scarce resources.

That’s why Intel brings you independent and reliable benchmarks that mean something for companies like yours. For example, for our latest entry-level servers, the new Intel® Xeon® processor 3400 series, Principled Technologies* Inc. conducted a benchmark based on applications that most small and medium businesses use to run their data, web, and email exchange servers. Now you have meaningful results that you can actually use to make an informed decision about transitioning from a desktop-based server to a real server or even upgrading from an older Intel Xeon processor-based server to this new generation.

Curious what Principled Technologies found? Well, the Intel Xeon processor X3450-based server delivered 119% more performance than a desktop-based server. So, that means you can do things more than twice as fast. Plus, the energy efficiency was significant too – with an 87% increase in performance-per-watt compared to the desktop-based server and 136% more than a previous generation Intel Xeon processor.

So, whether you’re looking to transition to your first real server or it’s time to refresh your hardware, you can see what the business benefits will be – more productivity and increased energy efficiency (which can equate to utility savings and simply being a better environmental citizen). And one more thing, the benchmark also showed that the Intel Xeon processor x3450 could do all of that using only 60 percent of its capacity. That means plenty of room for future growth. Now that’s big!

Check out the benchmark results for yourself here in the PDF document. And, if you want to see more, you can visit http://www.intel.com/performance/server/

Talk to your Intel IT solution provider reseller about these results and what they can mean for your business: (http://premierlocator.intel.com)

Nehalem-EX will bring a lot to the RISC party

eoin.j.mcconnell@intel.com — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 15:17:32 GMT

I wrote a while back about how the Xeon 7400(Dunnington) processor series compared to RISC. Since then I have shared information through other blog posts and sharing content about how Xeon 7400 and Xeon 5500 will compare to both SPARC and POWER.

Xeon 7400 and Xeon 5500 are the current products shipping into the marketplace today. I.M.H.O they offer a pretty compelling alternative from both a performance and TCO perspective Vs SPARC and POWER. But I will not try and repeat all the reasons here

What I wanted to share with you was some thoughts about what the next product to succeed Xeon 7400 will bring to the RISC party. Nehalem-EX is the code-name for our next generation of product designed to serve workloads currently serviced by Xeon 7400 today (i.e. Database, ERP, BI etc). EX btw is what we all would traditionally call MP or multi processor servers

Don't stop reading now, here is why I'm EXCITED about what Nehalem-EX will bring to the RISC party.

My excitement is actually based on real customer discussions about what Nehalem-EX will do for them and why it delivers some new stuff (my code for features and benefits) which they see as a pre-requisite to make the move from RISC to Xeon. For some customers the TCO and performance of products have been enough to convince them to move. For some other customers there are still some checkboxes remaining which I believe Nehalem-EX will address

Here is a snapshot of some of the cool new stuff which is actually convincing customers (from some real deals that I have worked)

Improved bandwidth. Up to 9 times memory bandwidth of previous generations
Introduction of Quickpath Interconnects to the EX systems
Add new RAS features previously seen on Itanium products to Xeon products
Significant improvement in performance vs previous generations e.g. Database 2.5xe
More scalable platforms through 8 OEMs offering >8S. These platforms are key to manage large databases and for large scale consolidation
Mainframe class availability in scalable platforms

For more information check out the press briefing from May. See more the details in the presentation

Nehalem-EX goes into production later this year and I am pretty excited about how it will change the game. What do you think?

Coding Scalable or Parallel Applications – It Is Not As Hard You Think

wesley.e.shimanek@intel.com — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 22:54:49 GMT

The need to write scalable applications has been important for programmers in the HPC community for years. Now, with the proliferation of multi/many-core processors developing scalable software is now a top priority for many programmers.

Andrew S. Tanenbaum stated at the USENIX ’08 conference last year that developing “sequential programming is really hard” … the difficulty is “parallel programming is a step beyond that.”

He is right, but let’s illustrate why it is just a small step.

Here is the point – parallel architectures will continue proliferating and we will need to develop and refine parallel algorithms that exploit parallelism. While difficult, to develop and refine parallel algorithms, the actual programming of these new algorithms, does not need to be hard. However, if the developer is required to know the intimate details of the hardware then the development and refinement parallel algorithms can be very difficult, and very time consuming.

One approach provided by Intel software developer tools is to abstract away the details of the hardware. This allows the developer to focus on their algorithms /applications, and rely on Intel software developer tools to provide the best optimizations for current and future platform While you may give up some performance by being abstracted away, what you lose in performance will be rewarded by your ability to quickly iterate through more iteration of your parallelization ideas in less time. You may find yourself designing and developing better approaches to parallelism because you were able to test more hypotheses.

An additional by-product of being abstracted away from having to know the intricacies of the hardware is that your software will be highly adaptable to future platforms. You will see tremendous improvements on multi-core solutions and will be in a great position scale your application performance forward as newer architectures are made available.

To learn more Intel Software Tools and the benefits of optimizing your software on multi core based solutions first visit http://software.intel.com/en-us/intel-sdp-home/

Consolidating multiple Unix environments to Industry Standard Xeon

eoin.j.mcconnell@intel.com — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:01:50 GMT

Running multiple Unix environments across a range of locations adds increased complexity and cost to the IT environment. I came across an interesting case study and wanted to highlight some of the key findings

YPF SAis the largest company in Argentina operating in the Oil and Gas industry. The company has 29 gas plants around Argentina running different Unix environments such as HP-UX, AIX and Solaris.

YPF SA consolidated their SAP ERP and Oracle DB environment from multiple Unix environments to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with integrated virtualization running on Intel Xeon based platforms from IBM System X

Some of the key findings to highlight

Key requirement from Unix Administration Team that "migrating from old RISC/Unix and proprietary servers to open and flexible platforms would pose no risk to the reliability, availability and performance of the systems"
Positive impact on cost and performance; Lowered costs, simplified management and increased compatibility
Reduction in costs especially when compared to license costs of RISC based platforms
Increased performance and availability drove decision to scale with RHEL and Xeon
Ability to leverage Redhat integrated virtualization. Free up internal hardware and technical resources for other projects

I guess the combination of Redhat and Intel deliver the business results that customers are seeking. What do you think?

Solaris and Xeon 5500 - a perfect combination?

eoin.j.mcconnell@intel.com — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 18:07:20 GMT

Are you a developer writing applications to run on the Solaris operating system?. Are you looking for ways to optimize your Solaris solution on industry standard architecture based on Intel microprocessor? If you answer yes to either of these questions then please read on.

Intel and SUN have been working closely together to optimize the Solaris operating system on the Intel Xeon 5500 processor. Most of you probably know the Xeon 5500 better by its product codename Nehalem. The Xeon 5500 is the the product that fits into 2 socket platforms.

SUN have just published a very compelling quick reference guidethat will assist both Developers and System Administrators looking to optimize Solaris solutions on Xeon based processors. The guide talks about the work that Intel and SUN are doing together, technical descriptions of specific features and capabilities that can be implemented in the Solaris OS to optimize the capabilities of the Xeon.

I have just finished reading this and it is a very compelling paper covering topics such as

- How Solaris takes advantage of Intel Turbo Boost Technology to use available power headroom to deliver higher performance based on workload demand

- How Solaris can take advantage of new Intel Quickpath Interconnect (better known as QPI) and other innovations in the OS to reduce memory latency

- How Solaris performance counters help to better manage workloads

- How Solaris takes advantage of many of the power efficiency capabilities in the processor. Things like Power Aware Dispatched in Solaris enable the processor to stay longer in idle states. In non tech talk this saves power.

Solaris has been a tried and tested operating system for along time for companies running their most business critical workloads. This paper talks about the combination of Solaris and Xeon to deliver improved reliability and availability for these critical workloads. Detail information on predictive self healing, fault management, leveraging Intel Machine Check Architecture and more all included in this paper.

Probably my favourite section is around the developer tools optimizations and the different tools available for developers that want to run and optimize their applications on Solaris and Xeon.

Ok, I'll stop waxing lyrical now. This is a very compelling paper and it does certainly construe that Solaris and Xeon 5500 could be the perfect combination for your Solaris solution. What do you think?

NEHALEM-EX… Monster Chips and Big Boxes

matthew.j.kmiecik@intel.com — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 22:45:18 GMT

A MONSTER CHIP IS COMING. The next generation of MP processor is targeted for production later this year, and by all accounts it is going to be a monster. Nehalem-EX is part of the Nehalem family of processors, but compared to its siblings it has the highest cores/threads count, largest shared cache, highest CPU-to-CPU bandwidth, highest I/O bandwidth, highest memory capacity, highest memory bandwidth, greatest scalability, and highest level of Reliability/Availability/Serviceability. It’s expected to bring a gargantuan, unprecedented leap in capabilities and performance--the biggest leap in all of Xeon product history.

IT’S TARGETED AT “BIG BOXES”. Big box servers are multiprocessor systems using the most capable processors and platform components. These systems are targeted at applications and usages that require the largest memory footprints, the highest amounts of single-box processing power (for workloads that don’t decompose well into lots of independent threads) and/or advanced levels of RAS. Such systems are typically the best choice for large databases, ERP apps, Business Intelligence apps, large-scale server consolidation and business-critical virtualization, mission critical applications and large scale high performance computing.

IT USES THE SAME PROCESSING TECHNOLOGY AS THE SUCCESSFUL XEON 5500, BUT MORE OF IT. Just like with Xeon 5500, the Nehalem micro-architecture brings improved single-threaded performance via IPC (Instructions per Clock) enhancements and Intel’s Hi-k 45nm manufacturing process. Greater multi-threaded performance comes via Hyper-Threading and more cores. But while the Xeon 5500 has up to 4 cores/16threads per socket, the Nehalem-EX monster doubles that to 8 cores/16 threads.

HAS A BEEFIER MEMORY AND INTERCHIP COMMUNICATION SUBSYSTEMS. Monster thread processing capabilities require monster size feeding to bring out the best performance. Nehalem-EX’s raw processing potential is made viable by a heavy duty memory subsystem and inter-chip communication system.

Nehalem-EX has 24MB of shared level 3 cache--that’s 50% more than the current Xeon 7400 and 200% more than Xeon 5500. The memory channel bandwidth was increased to 9-times that of Xeon 7400. And it’s all attached to up to 16 DIMM slots per socket (that’s 64DIMMs slots for 4 sockets)—double the current generation of Xeon 7400.

In a multi-socket system, processors need to communicate with each other in order to most efficiently coordinate their shared workload. They also need lots of I/O bandwidth. Nehalem-EX has four QuickPath Interconnects on every socket--double that of Xeon 5500. The four QPI links enable Nehalem-EX processors to be directly connected to each other in a 4 socket system. This offers significant performance advantage over a so-called ring architecture wherein some processor-to-processor communication must go through an intermediary processor. The extra QPIs also mean that there’s plenty of CPU to I/O bandwidth.

EXPECTED TO BRING THE GREATEST LEAP FORWARD IN XEON PERFORMANCE EVER. On key server performance benchmarks (e.g. SPEC_int_rate, SPEC_floating point_rate, TPC-C, etc) Xeon 5500 using Nehalem technology brought gains of over 100-200% greater than prior generation. Generational gains of this magnitude come along just about once a decade. Nehalem-EX’s generation-to-generation performance gains are expected to be substantially higher than those of Xeon 5500. We’ve already seen measured memory bandwidth of 9X vs. prior generation. That’s an early indication of the level by which new performance records will be set when this monster chip comes to market.

Related Topics:

NHM-EX Press Fact Sheet

NHM-EX May 26^th Press Briefing Video – condensed version

IBM 8Socket Demo Video

NHM-EX--A New Standard

The Nehalem-EX Press Briefing Video – For the Busy IT Decision Maker

bryce.olson@intel.com — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 21:17:46 GMT

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

SPARC better than Intel - No it is not and I have data to prove it

eoin.j.mcconnell@intel.com — Fri, 08 May 2009 18:33:45 GMT

I was thinking about what to write in my next blog and what I could share beyond what I have written previously about Intel Vs RISC in terms of TCO, performance and the customers that are choosing to move.

Luckily I didn't have to think too long on a Friday morning as a a topic came to mind instantly. There are numerous articles flying around this morning that picked up on the Oracle comments yesterday about how SPARC based systems compare to Intel. Thanks for providing me with an appropriate topic.

So in case you missed it, there was a question and answer session with Larry Ellison. When asked about SPARC, this was the reply "SPARC is much more energy efficient than Intel while delivering the same performance on a per socket basis. This is not a green issue, its an economic issue. Today, database centers are paying as much for electricity to run their computers as they pay to buy computers. SPARC machines are much less expensive to run than Intel machines"

1) SPARC more energy efficient than Intel? Seriously, in what parallel universe does that exists?

SUN continues to use watts per thread as measure of energy efficiency. The recognized industry standard benchmark for measuring energy efficiency is SPECpowerand I don't see any SPARC based results in the 91 results published. The absence of a result certainly says something very clear to me - no story.

These UltraSPARCT2+ systems get loaded with a lot of memory to deliver the their results, so when you look at overall system power (what people care about) they are not as energy efficient as Intel based systems.

SPECpower is effectively based of SPECJbb-2005 so another way of loking at this is to look at the SPECJbb-2005 results for a 4 socket UltraSPARcT2+ system and a Xeon 7400 system. The 4s UltraSPARCT2+ delivers 693k BOPs while Xeon 7400 is 532kBOPs. So you conclude that SPARC is better than Xeon?. That would be the wrong conclusion

UltraSPARCT2+ system would consume 1525 watts Vs Xeon 7400 at 816 watts. If you look at BOPs per watt (another way of looking at energy efficiency and performance) then you would see that Xeon 7400 is 43% more energy efficient. Doing a similar comparison with Xeon 5400 (I haven't even talked about our latest Xeon 5500, Nehalem) would be up to 77% more efficient than UltraSPARCT2+.

And lastly before I forget to mention the 4s UltraSPARCT2+ had 128GB memory and costs over $150,000for the system, while Xeon 7400 based system had 64GB memory and costs around $32,000.

2) SPARC deliver same performance on a per socket basis?

2S Xeon 5500 has performance leadership over 2S UltaSPARCT2+ across a wide range of benchmarks. Up to 70% more performance and up to 60% lower system cost. 4S Xeon 7400 has price/performance leadership over 4S UltraSPARCT2+, UltraSPARCT2+ results achieved with system loaded with lots of memory that drives the cost up to 3-4Xthat of Xeon 7400 system

3) SPARC machine are less expensive to run?. I can't for the life of me work this one out!.

Hardware systems based on Intel have leading price/performance (read cheaper), lower energy needs (so electrivity bill lower) and any software product with a license per core strcuture is less expensive on Xeon system than an 8 core UltraSPARcT2+ (which also has higher multipler per core)

That's all for now folks. I just wanted to share some data on why I know that SPARC machines are much MORE expensive to run than Intel machines

3 items to consider for your next energy efficient server

dave.r.hill@intel.com — Wed, 06 May 2009 22:10:49 GMT

If your company needs new servers, this is a great time to be in the market. Intel based Xeon® 5500 (Nehalem) servers that were introduced only a month ago have been arriving at customer sites all over the world and they provide some very compelling performance and energy efficiency benefits. Here are 3 key items to consider before buying your next server. The actual order of importance of these items may vary depending upon your business needs.

1. Performance. This is still a primary reason why new servers are purchased. The best way to measure performance is to actually run your applications on the server you are considering. If that is not possible or feasible, the next best choice is to compare server performance using a suite of benchmarks. Some of the more common benchmarks that IT departments use to compare server performance are:

a. Virtualization performance using Vmware VMmark: http://www.vmware.com/products/vmmark/results.html

b. Energy efficiency using SPECpower_ssj2008: http://www.spec.org/power_ssj2008/

c. Integer performance using SPECing_rate_base2006: http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/cpu2006.html#SPECint_rate

d. Floating point performance using SPECfp_rate_base2006: http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/cpu2006.html#SPECfp_rate

e. Web server performance using SPECweb2005: http://www.spec.org/web2005/results/

f. Java performance using SPECjbb2005: http://www.spec.org/jbb2005/results/jbb2005.html

After looking these benchmark results, one thing you’ll notice is the Xeon® 5500 processors provide phenomenal performance…often up to 2x the previous generation!

2. Server Hardware Choices

a. Processor. The processor is one of the most important choices in the server. Performance, features, power envelope and price all need to be considered. From a power perspective, there are three power envelopes available for Xeon® 5500 server processors (95W, 80W and 60W). In addition, there are 130W Xeon® 5500 processors, but these are primarily being used for workstations. If you are in constrained power environment, it may be worthwhile to consider buying a lower power processor to reduce energy consumption. Depending upon the processor SKU you are interested in, it is possible to get the exact same performance/frequency with a processor that just consumes less power. (i.e. Xeon L5520 2.26GHz 60W instead of the Xeon E5520 2.26GHz 80W). The L in front of the processor number refers to low voltage processors that consume less power.

b. Power supply. Choosing a power supply with a high efficiency rating is one of the easiest choices you can make to reduce power consumption. Choose a power supply that is at least 80%+ or higher efficiency. Some of the newer power supplies are 90%+ or higher. The higher the percentage, the better.

c. Memory. Every DIMM installed in the server consumes power. In general, the fewer the DIMMs used, the less power that server will consume. For a given memory capacity, such as 24GB, choose six 4GB DIMMs instead of twelve 2GB DIMMs. The price of 2GB and 4GB DIMMs are almost at price per bit parity, but the power consumption of the memory will be much less with fewer DIMMs installed.

d. Add in boards. Compare power consumption of add in boards such as 10GbE adapters, fibre channel adapters and other I/O cards. Also, do you really need a fibre channel card these days. FCOE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) using a 10GbE adaptor is definitely a cost effective and power efficient way to get access to your storage array.

3. To virtualize or not to virtualize? Virtualization is no longer just a buzz word. Virtualization is being used by many companies across multiple diverse industries today. Fundamentally, it is an excellent way to consolidate many applications onto a single server, thereby increasing the utilization, value and energy efficiency of every server purchased. Definetely a top item to consider.

What about your business? What items do you consider before purchasing servers to maximize energy efficient performance?

Per Core Performance, the MHz really doesn't tell you much now

james.vogeltanz@intel.com — Tue, 05 May 2009 18:35:36 GMT

Ah, the good old days.... It was normal to have a discussion with a friend or coworker member about something like, "We just bought a 1.2 GHz Pentium III server, it runs circles around that 500 MHz system we bought a few years back." Everyone nods in approval, all rightly assuming that of course bigger is better and frequency directly relates to performance. Of course now things are more complex with multi-core, multi-threads, differing architectures (Power, SPARC, Xeon, Opteron). Is a dual-core at Power6 4.7 GHz faster than a Xeon at 3 GHz? Is a 1.4 GHz processor with 8 threads/core better than a 2.8 GHz quad-core with 2 threads per core? Tough to know off the top of your head these days. One thing is clear, the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series is in the lead of performance per processor (regardless of the frequency of processors available today).

In comparing the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series (Nehalem) architecture vs. what's available from IBM, Sun, and AMD today, you see a wide variety of cpu offerings with dramatically differing specs. However, when you take a look at all these systems with a common number of cores, you can see the differences in per core performance on the industry standard benchmark SPECint_rate_base2006

Processor	# of cpus	Total Cores	Total Threads	Frequency	SPECint_rate_base2006 Performance
Intel Xeon X5570	2	8	16	2.93 GHz	240
AMD Opteron 2393SE	2	8	8	3.1 GHz	122
IBM Power6	4	8	16	4.7 GHz	206
Sun UltraSPARC T2	1	8	64	1.4 GHz	73

What a contrast! Chip designers today have multiple choices to make to eek out the most performance in today's server systems. What we see today is that the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series balances all of these quite well. Whereas others have much higher frequencies, it doesn't necessarily translate into more performance, while others have gone with a larger number of threads, but have low performance per thread. Even processors that have similar specs have performance that is quite different. Of course this is only one benchmark, however if you look at others you will find similar differences.

What this means for most IT buyers is it's more difficult to understand how all the whiz-bang features the marketers throw at you and how they translate into value for you. My advice, really understand what kind of workloads are improtant to you and focus on the performance from industry standard workloads that best represent those. Remember that bigger numbers on the spec sheet aren't always better when it comes to server performance. Check your figures!

SPECint_rate_base2006 performance data reference:

Intel® Xeon® processor X5570 based platform details

Fujitsu PRIMERGY* TX300 S5 server platform with two Intel Xeon processors X5570 2.93GHz, 8MB L3 cache, 6.4GT/s QPI, 48 GB memory (6x8 GB PC3-10600R, 2 rank, CL9-9-9, ECC), SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP2 x86_64 Kernel 2.6.16.60-0.21-smp, Intel C++ Compiler for Linux32 and Linux64 version 11.0 build 20010131. SPECint_rate_base2006 score 240, http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2009q1/cpu2006-20090313-06653.html

AMD Opteron 2393SE based platform details

Supermicro A+ Server 1021M-UR+B, AMD Opteron 2393 SE 3.1 GHz, 6MB L3 cache, 32 GB memory (8x4 GB DDR2-800, CL5, Reg, Dual-rank), SuSE Enterprise Server 10 (x86_64) SP1, Kernel 2.6.16.46-0.12-smp, PGI Server Complete Version 7.2, PathScale Compiler Suite Version 3.2, SPECint_rate_base2006 score 122, http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2009q2/cpu2006-20090406-06931.html

IBM Power6 based platform details

IBM system p570 (4.7 GHz, 8 core), 32MB L3 cache, 64 GB memory (32x2 GB)DDR2 667 MHz, IBM AIX5L V5.3, XL C/C++ Enterprise Edition Version 9.0 for AIX, SPECint_rate_base2006 score 206, http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2007q2/cpu2006-20070518-01103.html

Sun UltraSPARC T2 plus based platform details

Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120, Sun UltraSPARC T2 1.417 GHz, 4MB L2 cache, 64 GB memory (16x4 GB), Solaris 10 8/07 (build s10s_u4wos_12b), Sun Studio 12 (patch build 2007/08/30), SPECint_rate_base2006 score 73.0, http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2007q4/cpu2006-20071009-02247.html

The time is right now to move from risc

eoin.j.mcconnell@intel.com — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 20:16:31 GMT

I'll be up front, I really don't know what Brittany Spears, Miley Cyrus or Susan Boyle would say about moving from RISC to the Xeon 5500 processor!. What I can share is the feedback that I'm getting direct from customers. I'm currently out on the road and have got some real feedback direct from customers on why they are looking at migrating their solutions from RISC processors to Xeon processors.

Over the past couple of days I have had the opportunity to meet directly with individual customers and hosted a roundtable with several customers to discuss their plans to replace their RISC based infrastructure. The conversation has been very open and frank and has not been about 'should I move' but more focused on 'how do I make the move'. As could be expected the down economy is placing big taxes on the ability of IT organizations to support their business units need for organic growth in a flat to down IT spending environment. A big priority for most of the customers that I spoke with is how to reduce their overall TCO while still meeting the increased demands being placed on IT by their business Partners. Most of the customers are already engaged in active projects to assess moving from RISC or are building their plans to make this migration.

During the roundtable I had opportunity to share the latest Xeon 5500 processor performance comparisons Vs the main SPARC and POWER based solutions out there. There was great rejoicing and joy (ok I'm taking poetic license here) in the roundtable when we share some of the results that we highlighted when we launched the Xeon 5500 processor just over 3 weeks ago. So I want to spread the joy and let you read for yourself the performance and price performance benefits.

We compared the Xeon 5570 processor vs the top UltraSPARCT2+ in a 2 socket configuration. We took best published results on spec.org and sap (so no funny games at play). The results comparing best UltraSPARCT2+ vs best Xeon 5500 with 1 taken as baseline for SPARC redults were amazing

- 20% better on SAP-SD

- 62% better java performance for Specjbb2005

- 69%better for integer performance SPECIntrate-2006

- 75% better for floating point performance SPECfprate-2006

But the best bit was the cost competitiveness of the Xeon 5500 solutions. Comparing both solutions with 32GB memory, the Xeon 5500 based solutions are offered at approx $11,000 whereas the UltraSPARCT2+ is at $36,000.

Compared the Xeon 5570 processor vs the top POWER6 in a 2 socket configuration gave even more staggering results. At the roundtable today customers were amazed. They keep hearing that POWER 6 has leading performance and more GHz so better performance. Right?. Wrong is the answer and I noticed many customers scribbling down the comparisons. Again taking 1 as baseline for POWER results

- 150% better on SAP-SD

- 190% better java performance for Specjbb2005

- 126%better for integer performance SPECIntrate-2006

- 90%better for floating point performance SPECfprate-2006

But the best bit was the cost competitiveness of the Xeon 5500 solutions. Comparing both solutions with 32GB memory, the Xeon 5500 based solutions are 92% less expensive than equivalent POWER 6 offerings.

I only shared the specific comparisons vs RISC and have not gone into the architectural advancements of the Xeon 5500 processor and how it addresses real business needs that have been flagged to us. There have been lots of other blogs out in cyberspace over the last few weeks on improvements in IO, low latency etc. so you don't need my 2 cents.

I think now is the time to make the move from RISC, what do you think?

Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus and Susan Boyle would recommend the Xeon 5500 servers for Economic Stimulus

shannon.poulin@intel.com — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 16:57:30 GMT

OK, so we launched the Xeon 5500 processor based servers and workstations a couple of weeks ago. While I don’t have direct quotes of support from Brit, Miley, Susan or any country presidents who have signed economic stimulus into law I am pretty confident that if they were ever actually considering purchasing a server or workstation they would come to the conclusion that the new Xeon 5500 platforms would be their best choice.

I had the privilege of being at one of the thirty seven different worldwide Xeon 5500 launch events. I was on Wall Street and attended the NASDAQ launch event on March 31^st. Based on which data source estimate you look at Financial Services as a whole represents about 20% of the worldwide market for servers. It was also evident when meeting with customers in the NYC area that they are passionate about performance and power consumption. Most of them had received pre-production seed systems and had already done extensive testing prior to this launch event. I have been in Intel’s Server Platform Group for over a decade now and I have never seen so much enthusiasm for a product launch.

I won’t rehash the performance benchmarks and performance per watt data. There are many benchmarks, blogs and press articles doing that. What I took away from the conversations was a feeling of optimism from the end users I spoke to. Some people felt that these new products would be what it takes for them to deliver solutions that would give them a performance advantage over their competition. In few markets does that pay off more, and translate almost directly to the bottom line, than in Financial Services. Others felt that these systems would help them continue to add to their existing datacenters without having the need to build a new one. This was due to the performance per watt improvements and the end users ability to replace many old servers and workstations with a few new ones.

Lastly, I think human nature being what it is we are seeing that IT professionals want to work on cool new projects. These Xeon 5500 servers and workstations represent a shiny new toy that IT professionals can use to have a material impact on the bottom lines of their companies. To some degree the same applies to virtualization in that it is disruptive and provides a new cost effective way to deliver legacy solutions and also enables flexibility for future growth. The IT folks that I have met who familiarize themselves with virtualization, new hardware and advanced management techniques (power, systems, virtualization) generally are viewed internal to their companies as leaders with visionary capabilities.

As we all work through this economic morass I am hopeful that with new technology introductions, and a relentless focus on efficiency, we will all emerge with a greater level of capability and a higher degree of flexibility. I also believe IT will emerge as a key asset of differentiation for companies from Wall Street to Main Street and this will place an even greater burden on delivering solutions to meet those unique needs.

What do you think?

Shannon

shannon.poulin@intel.com

Nehalem: The new standard for energy efficient performance

dave.r.hill@intel.com — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 23:18:40 GMT

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.

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.
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.
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.