The Server Room Blog

Nehalem - The Cash Machine that Keeps on Giving…For IT

bryce.olson@intel.com — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 01:17:36 GMT

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

@ IDF 2009: Cold Redundancy – A New Power Supply Technology for Reducing System Energy Usage

andrew.watts@intel.com — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 17:55:43 GMT

If you would like to learn about a new power supply technology for reducing server energy usage there is an upcoming IDF session that may interest you. The title of the session is “Cold Redundancy – A New Power Supply Technology for Reducing System Energy Usage”. As you can probably guess from the title, we are calling this new technology “Cold Redundancy”. There has been a lot of research done to figure out ways of reducing the input power of a server when it is in an idle state. After all, an idle server is just a very expensive space heater sitting there doing nothing other than consuming energy and producing lots of heat. This is important because some utilization studies have shown that servers can sit idle for a considerable percentage of the time. So anything that reduces the input power of an idle system will have a very significant effect on the overall yearly energy usage - and ultimately save on operating costs.

This presentation will describe, and demonstrate, the cold redundancy technology we have been working on here at Intel® to reduce system idle power.

One great thing about this new technology is that everything can be kept inside the power supply. No changes to the system software will be needed so the only additional requirement to implement this would be using a power supply that has cold redundancy technology inside it. This will make it easy to integrate into systems in the future because it could become a “plug ‘n play” power supply upgrade option.

Since cold redundancy is a power supply technology, I’ll cover some basic concepts to get things started.

There are two different types of power supplies called redundant and non-redundant which are used in computers.

A non-redundant supply has only a single module which provides all the power needed to keep the system operating. This means there is no backup so if the power supply fails, the system shuts down until the supply is replaced. Desktop computers typically have a non-redundant supply in order to keep the costs low.

Most servers on the other hand, have a redundant type of power supply. That means there are extra (redundant) power supplies in the power subsystem so if one supply fails the server will continue working normally. This is for applications where getting maximum system uptime and reliability are worth the additional cost of putting in the redundant supplies. In a case like this though, the redundant supplies are not really needed until one of the supplies actually fails. The drawback with having the redundant supplies turned on until needed is that the supplies still use a lot of power which increases the system operating costs.

Cold redundancy reduces system idle input power by putting these redundant supplies into an almost off (standby) condition or “cold redundancy” mode, as we call it here at Intel®. Because of how cold redundancy works, the more redundant supplies there are in a power subsystem the more effective it is and the more energy that can be saved. The general idea of powering down redundant supplies is not new, but the problem has always been how to turn the supplies back on fast enough so that system operation is not affected in case of a failure. We have come up with a solution to this problem by developing cold redundancy technology. Cold redundancy has the ability to put the redundant supplies into a standby state to save energy at system idle while still being able to turn them back on fast enough in case of a failure to keep the system operating normally. It really is the best of both worlds, saving energy while maintaining the same system uptime and reliability as conventional redundancy where all the power supplies are running all the time.

If you are interested in learning more, the session number is ETMS001 and will be presented at the fall Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco on September 22^nd at 10:15 AM in room 2006 of the Moscone Center. This session will be a combination of lecture and live demonstrations. We decided that having a couple of demos during the lecture would help make the concept more understandable and the presentation more interesting as well. One thing to keep in mind about this session is that we will not be discussing theoretical possibilities or projects planned years in the future but real products that will be available soon. The live demonstrations use a production ready cold redundancy enabled power subsystem that is being integrated into a product Intel® plans to release in the 4^th quarter of this year. It doesn’t get much more real than that.

The demonstrations will show how the control logic works and what power and energy savings are actually possible. This will be done by measuring the AC input power to a four module power subsystem and running the same output load profile with and without cold redundancy enabled. By comparing the two input power graphs the advantages of implementing this new technology can be immediately seen and quantified. I think you will find this to be a very interesting and informative session but then I’m probably biased just a little bit. J

Hope to see you there,

Andy

Presenters:

Viktor Vogman – Power Architect

Andrew Watts – Test Automation

Use Cases for Intel Intelligent Power Node Manager

todd.christ@intel.com — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 20:31:09 GMT

Intel Intelligent Power Node Manager is a new technology that is available with the Xeon 5500 Series Platforms released earlier this year. Many of you have asked me questions via Twitter (@Toadster) about "How can I use Node Manager?" - so I wanted to present some simple use cases to simplify the explanation of Node Manager and how you can best use the technology in your own enterprise.

First of all, let's explain the growth problem at hand. As servers shrink in size, the density of each server 'footprint' is growing from a power perspective... a few years ago, a single 42U rack could hold about 21 servers (estimating 2U servers) - and usually hosting one or two apps/servers per physical server, depending on if you had single or dual-socket servers. In modern datacenters, that same 42U rack can hold 42 servers (1U each) with 2P per server - so you have an immediate density increase of 2X the # of servers, and 2-4X the number of sockets - which can equate to 16X the number processor threads per rack... one good thing is that Intel has been developing newer technologies to keep the TDP of each CPU roughly the same over the same time period between processor updates... where you used to have 2 or 4 cores, you now have 8 to 16 cores at the same thermal envelope!

Knowing how much power your platform uses is a key factor in populating racks and rows in your datacenter. Prior to Node Manager technology, most Datacenter Managers would base rack population on 'nameplate' power - or the (W) rating on your power supply. That's the 'max' power utilized by the platform, and what the PSU is rated for (worst case). See the image below...

As you can see - using Intel Intelligent Power Node Manager technology, you can view your system's power utilization in real-time using Intel Datacenter Manager and the administrator can implement the power caps to ensure your server rack stays within your required power limits. By utilizing the 'actual' power limits instead of nameplate power, you can increase your rack density thereby increasing your ROI, and decrease your TCO! Lets face it - everyone loves saving money!

Many of us are familiar with this next scenario... it's summertime, and the power company is announcing that the power grid is under strain. Personal homes start having their A/C cut-off to save the power grid from brown-outs... now your enterprise can help reduce those risks as well!

Over the next few weeks, I hope to post more blogs/videos:

1. Single Node Power Monitoring & Management
2. Group/Rack Power Monitoring & Management
3. Thermal Monitoring & Management

Please provide some feedback, and post your questions and ideas for upcoming blogs!

Am I making the right choice with 4S+ Xeon 7400 servers?

adesh.gupta@intel.com — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 23:49:55 GMT

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.

Skate to where the puck is going to be: Energy Efficient Performance

dave.r.hill@intel.com — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:23:41 GMT

Only a few years ago, customers seldom considered server energy efficiency when buying servers. Today, server energy efficiency is often one of the key purchase criteria. And for some customers, energy efficient performance is the #1 criteria. Going forward in time, it is expected that the majority of people will use energy efficient performance (sometimes referred to as performance/watt) when evaluating servers.

From a customer point of view, the request is simple: "I want both high performance and reduced power consumption…at the same time." From a product design viewpoint, the "opportunity" to reduce power while still improving performance comes with some unique tradeoffs that are often complex. How much performance is needed? How much can/should power consumption be reduced? If power consumption is reduced, what impact will that have on performance? Etc, etc.

Processor design cycles are quite long and are started many years before a product actually comes to market. Because of the long design cycle, there is comprehensive process at the beginning to determine product features based on expected market needs. At the time the Nehalem architecture was being developed, customers were just starting to evaluate servers based energy efficient performance, but the Nehalem processor design team decided to make energy efficiency a fundamental "feature" of the processor. The good news is the team correctly predicted the market requirements with the upcoming Intel® Xeon® 5500 Processors (aka. Nehalem). Servers based on Nehalem processors are expected to provide customers with exactly what they have been requesting…"knock your socks off" performance along with reduced power consumption.

As Wayne Gretzky once famously said: “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.” With Nehalem, Intel is definitely skating to where the puck will be.

Data Center Crisis - Part 3 - Getting Dense

ken.r.lloyd@intel.com — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 18:37:38 GMT

This is part three - the implication being that it is a sequel to part one and part two. It is. That said, each of the sections have their own messages and may or may not help your data center. The first part talked about the benefits of bringing in the latest hardware. Intel has been delivering performance increases at a pace beyond "Moore's Law". Getting rid of old, slow, inefficient servers can give you 2-12 times the capacity instantly. The second "episode" talked about getting everything you can from each server. Use virtualization and consolidation to make sure your servers are full and busy. The most efficient bus is a full bus ( this is a metaphor, I am talking about the big yellow things carrying students, not the circuitry in the box )

My focus in part three is on density. My operating premise is that the data center manager wants to get everything out of the current data center and avoid, or at least defer, construction of a new data center. If your in the data center construction business, this is not for you.

To get the most out of our data center we want to pack every server we can power into the space. You can do this by executing three actions. 1) Use every watt, 2) Build the right servers, and 3) Optimize HVAC. In many cases twice the servers can be crammed into the existing rack space even without adding power. If you are able to redirect your hvac power savings to your racks, your results could be even better.

So, we potentially got 5x capacity from new quad core servers, 5x capacity from boosting utilization with consolidation, and 2x capacity with higher density. My math says 5x * 5x * 2x = 50x the capacity ( in the same space and power!) video