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?

"Live From Super Computing 2009"

william.h.lea@intel.com — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:12:27 GMT

This week I'm in Portland, Oregon, where I call home. Its interesting for me since this is my first Super Computing conference, and soo far, I'm really impressed, not only by the intense knowledge and the plethera of scientific discovery all around, but also by the fact this conference is so well attended. There -s a huge trade show floor, filled to capacity where you can see everything from genome research to oil and gas exploration, to bio-computing. . It's very cool to see NASA, Oak Ridge Labratory, and many top universities all showing off the lastest in High Performance Computing, some very cool stuff indeed. From the point of view of higher learning and how super computers are changing the world, this is the place to be. Here are a few shots of the Intel booth in case you get a chance to come by and see us.

I'll be capturing some cool videos from the conference and you should keep a look out for these on Channel Intel at YouTube. Thanks for stopping by The Server Room.

Why Did Intel IT Build Two SuperComputers?

christopher.p.peters@intel.com — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:09:27 GMT

In order to deliver to the continued promise of Moore’s Law, Intel’s Information Technology team needs to enable Intel’s Silicon designers with the tools, capabilities and streamlined processes to bring higher performing processors to market every year. The latest generation of 45nm products (ie the Intel microarchitecture, codenamed Nehalem) was an especially challenging project for us.

With Intel design computing demand growing an average of 45% year over year coupled with the rich technology capabilities in the 45nm based Nehalem micro-architecture, the computational requirements of silicon tape-out (the last stage of design before manufacturing) represented an approximate 13x increase in increase in demand from prior 65nm processors. Staring at this demand (1.2 million hours of compute demand per day) plus a need to bring products to market faster and more efficiently, our IT team realized we needed to do something different - our standard grid computing solution that was sufficient for earlier stage design work was insufficient for tape-out.

Solution: Intel IT built a High Performance Computing (HPC) solution that currently rank in the Top 500 list of supercomputers (#261, #308, Nov 09) and feature a new parallel storage environment to support our 45nm Silicon tape-out process. The details of this effort are captured in this whitepaper.

In summary, the Intel IT HPC solution employs two of the world’s fastest supercomputers to create the fastest microprocessors helping Intel achieve the following results.

· Completed 45nm tape-out in 10day, less than HALF the time of prior products

· Delivered an estimated incremental value of $44M to Intel

I can’t wait for what tomorrow will bring as Intel IT is already upgrading and evolving this HPC solution to support our future generations of micro-processor designs. Tune in tomorrow at SuperComputing 2009 in Portland where Shesha Krishnapura from Intel IT will present more details on our HPC environment or join us December 8th, 2009 from 10-12am PST for a live chat with Intel IT experts in the Server Room

Chris (twitter)

Why Are You Still Running Your CAD Application As 32 Bit Application?

wesley.e.shimanek@intel.com — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 19:33:48 GMT

Ok it may be that your IT department or enterprise applications are limiting your opportunity to adopt 64 bit version of your favorite CAD application, but your inability to adopt a 64 bit CAD application can be very limiting to your productivity.

Here as an example from a recent discussion with some end users who are involved in a workstation pilot with Intel. When they moved to a 64 bit version of their favorite CAD application the time to open a 2.5GB file dropped from 20 minutes to less than 1.

Question - How many files does your engineering team open a day? What is the cost of the 20 minutes?

Customers operating in a 32 bit world are forced to work with smaller models. You knew that. And of course smaller file sizes will open faster.

But….

Rather than working with the chassis, engine and transmission in a single view, you will need to work each one independently. The results is you may miss a design interference, a misalignment or another obvious design issue, because you only had a partial view of the entire design. More rework and more delays.

Yes but... many of the enterprise applications you use are 32 bit and you need to have a 32 bit workstation environment in order to access these tools. That may have been true once, but with technology like Intel® Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O and Parallels™ Workstation Extreme software you now have the opportunity for an uncompromised workstation experience. You get all the benefits of a 64 bit CAD application and you can still work within a 32 bit environment when you need to. You can even pass the data between workstation environments.

Do not be too slow to adopt a 64 bit version of your favorite CAD application, just opening files faster and working with a complete design can make eth cost of a new workstation irrelevant.

To learn more about Intel® Xeon® based workstations visit www.intel.com\go\workstation

Analysis Driven Design on a Digital Workbenches Powered by the Intel® Xeon® Processor 5500 Series

wesley.e.shimanek@intel.com — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:43:18 GMT

Are you ready to innovate faster or explore more design options in less time than ever before?

The digital workbench powered by two Intel Xeon 5500 processors gives you the opportunity to create, test and modify your idea right at your workstation. Have no doubt, workstations powered by two processors, with eight total cores, sixteen computational threads, and memory capacities up to 192GB are proving extremely capable at analysis-driven design.

Today’s digital workbench is nothing at all like last year’s workstation, which may have struggled to design and simulate. This new breed of a workstation presents you with the capability to rapidly play “what if?”

What is driving the interest in the digital workbench?

Organizations of all shapes and sizes are looking for opportunities to reduce design cycle times and associated costs without negatively impacting product performance. One potential method of achieving this is by enabling designers to consider the validity of a greater number of design concepts earlier in the design cycle. This may not only shorten design cycles, but it may also enable you to ultimately deliver a more favorable product configuration.

The product development rules are changing.

Manufacturers are recognizing that by reordering product design activities, they may be able to achieve a more efficient product development process. By empowering engineers with easy-to-use and powerful 3D conceptual design tools, together with early access to CAE applications, engineers may be able develop the most advantageous designs before committing them to labor-intensive detailed design processes.

Isn’t this old news?

Many manufacturers agree the greatest opportunity to impact product development cost is by bringing simulation forward. That is old news. Manufacturers know that when product analysis or simulation results trail the detailed design process then product changes become extremely expensive and negatively impact new product release schedules. Worse yet, they also realize that changes made downstream in a design cycle are “last minute” and almost always imply compromises on original design goals. This, of course, cuts into the product performance and profits of the new or updated product.

Using simulation and getting results before the detailed design process begins helps ensure that the CAD models meet performance requirements, mitigating last-minute and expensive design changes.

OK, the product development rules may be changing, but I still need an expert.

No doubt, the expert is still needed. However, advancements at companies like ALTAIR, ANSYS, SIMULIA, MSC, SpaceClaim and others are all making it easier to bring simulation and analysis further upstream in the design process.

As one example, let’s look at the ANSYS Workbench platform. This solution provides an easy-to-use framework that guides the user through even complex multi-physics analyses with drag-and-drop simplicity. It supports bi-directional CAD connectivity and enables the idea of simulation-driven product development.

ANSYS is an example of what ISVs are doing to create tools that learn from the experts and export them to others who need access to their knowledge. Yes, the expert is still very much needed, but leveraging the expert’s knowledge and driving it upstream in the design process is needed even more.

The new model

Using the combined hardware and software technologies delivered through a digital workbench, engineers can now create a single digital model that gives them the ability to design, visualize and simulate their products faster than ever.

This hardware and software suite enables users to create a digital prototype and can help engineers to reduce their reliance on costly physical prototypes and get more innovative designs to market faster.

The digital workbench helps users bring together design data from all phases of the product development process into a single digital model that can be rapidly changed, tested and validated.

What can you do to test the promise of the digital workbench?

Today’s workstation can provide you with a magnificent digital canvas to create tomorrow today. You need to decide if you want to explore reordering your product design activities and potentially achieve a more efficient product development process.

Today’s workstation gives engineers a new tool that can be likened to a digital workbench. This tool, powered by two Intel Xeon 5500 series processors, hosts a suite of software applications that engineers can employ to create and test their ideas. The pliers, hammer and nails found on a workbench in a garage or basement have now been replaced with digital tools that promise to accelerate innovations via a process known as digital prototyping. Its enablers include application tools like detailed CAD, CAE and PIM. Together they represent the new digital workbench—a powerful innovation tool you can use to bring your ideas forward faster than ever before.

Are you ready to use a digital workbench?

Visit www.intel.com/go/workstation to see which workstation is right for you.

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.

What is a digital workbench?

wesley.e.shimanek@intel.com — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 14:07:25 GMT

The digital workbench is like the workbench at home where you have pliers, nails and hammers that we use to build or fix things—the workbench holds all the best, most useful tools to complete a project and makes them available at your fingertips.

The digital workbench replaces analog tools with digital tools and software suites from ISVs (e.g. Altair, ANSYS, Autodesk, Dassault CATIA, Dassault SIMULIA, ESI, MSC, PTC, Siemens PLM and others). These ISV’s are all laser focused on enabling designers to move analysis further up the design chain. Couple this with recent performance gains available on workstations based on the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series from suppliers like Boxx, Dell, HP and Lenovo and you have the opportunity to now view your workstations as a digital workbench. The result is a new environment that enables users to rapidly test and refine their ideas potentially at the speed of thought.

The digital workbench, powered by two intelligent Intel® Xeon® 5500 processors based on the Nehalem microarchitecture, can help you transform complex and visually intensive data into actionable information at near-supercomputer speeds.

The Changing Face of the Digital Workstation

wesley.e.shimanek@intel.com — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:52:04 GMT

“Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.” Albert Einstein

Today’s workstation can provide you with a magnificent digital canvas to create tomorrow today.

With workstations powered by two Intel® Xeon® 5500 series processors, engineers have the opportunity to create, shape, test and modify products before they become real. Engineers can now design, visualize and simulate products from the conceptual design phase through the entire manufacturing process. This is done virtually before any investments are made in a prototype.

“Experiment fearlessly.” “Innovation is bloody random.” Tom Peters

Peters, a world renowned author and management consultant, recognized that innovation is more art than science.

Consider this example: Taking innovation to an entirely new level, Boeing, in the late 1990s, employed a process known as algorithmic design to see what designs might be viable to meet a specified hypersonic aircraft design criteria. The algorithmic design process enabled computers to create and test new ideas against the specified design criteria without human intervention. As a result, more models were evaluated in less time, and a vehicle that was counterintuitive to what many engineers may have thought possible was evaluated. Innovation just accelerated.

Intel technology has seen dramatic changes since Boeing first tested the idea of algorithmic design in the last decade. Workstation performance has gone up Dual-processor workstations have yielded to workstations with two processors, eight cores and 16 computational threads. Science or simulation that was never tractable on a workstation before is now standard, and it is getting faster.

“I confess that in 1901 I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years.” Wilbur Wright

You think all you need is an entry-level workstation with a single Intel® Xeon® processor. After all , you only do CAD—right?

However, as you begin to adopt modern workflows and realize the dramatic impact that simulation-based engineering or digital prototyping can have on your product development cost and schedules, you realize that the cost of the second processor and additional memory necessary to support digital prototyping was far less expensive than the cost of multiple physical prototypes and the associated time to produce them. Instead of investigating hundreds of digital prototypes, you only have time to look at a single physical prototype and ask: What if I …?

Those “what ifs” could have been played out on a dual-processor Intel Xeon processor 5500 series-based digital workbench faster, and your time and cost of physical prototypes could have been significantly reduced.

The digital workbench, powered by two Intel® Xeon® 5500 series processors, can have an enormous impact on your organization’s ability to design, visualize and simulate products, from the conceptual design phase through the entire manufacturing process, and it is all done virtually before a prototype is ever invested in. These digital workbenches exceed the computational power of the Cray C90 series, which in the 1990s was revered as the fastest ever.

Without question we all recognize that simulation and modeling have become indispensable tools in design. But visualization remains the principal conduit to transforming data into knowledge and actionable information. The digital workbench can provide you with both the compute capacity and the visualization capability you need to innovate faster.

If all you are doing is CAD on your workstation, then an entry workstation may be best your solution. However, as others around you adopt modern workflows that incorporate simulation-based engineering and digital prototyping, you may want to step up to a more comprehensive digital workbench solution that provides an entire suite of tools to help you play more “what ifs” locally and faster than ever before.

One more point on this: If you are stuck on the entry workstation, then you may want to consider a mobile workstation. While the immediate cost will be higher than an entry-level workstation, the real cost may be lower. With mobile workstations you can design with your customers and not just for your customers. You may be able to reduce the number of design reviews by innovating with your customer right there as spontaneous ideas happen. The real cost of a tethered entry-level workstation may be indeed be much higher than you think.

Join the revolution and innovate faster with the digital workbench powered by two Intel(r) Xeon(r) 5500 processors

Somebody Blew The Whistle on The ‘Nehalem’ Effect

bryce.olson@intel.com — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:24:19 GMT

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.

How does a Real Server improve your life?

keith.e.lauritzen@intel.com — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:22:18 GMT

I’d like to introduce myself as a product line manager at Intel who has spent almost a decade ensuring we are creating the best servers to solve small business challenges. Part of my role is to influence future generation products and I’d like to learn more about your challenges, needs and desires so I can ensure we address them in our next generation products.

Here is a story I have heard in the past: “Ah geez, What Now? A customer just called to tell me they tried to enter an online order for my product and my web site is nowhere to be found. I am lucky they called, but so much for spending a Saturday at my kid’s baseball tournament! Now I need to drive an hour to my downtown office to restart and possibly fumble with my server. You would think that the desktop system that I am using as a server would just work so I can spend my free time with my family and my work time growing my business.”

I can’t count the number of times I have heard a similar story from customers and colleagues that are trying to grow a small business, manage their own computers and have a personal life. The answer to their problem is simple, buy a real server based on Intel®Xeon® Processors that is designed to keep your business running 24/7. Our latest Xeon processors and chipsets are not only validated to run 24/7, but include features such as support for error correcting code memory and RAID for server operating systems that ensure dependability and differentiate a real server from desktop system used as a server. However, a small business should not care about all this technical jargon. I believe they only care that their server runs 24/7 without failure, enabling them to focus on business growth and life.

What are your small business challenges? I’m all ears.

Keith

Nehalem-EX at Oracle Open World...who now does not know what Nehalem-EX is??? ;-)

michihiro.koyama@intel.com — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 06:36:16 GMT

Just wrapped up Oracle Open World…sitting at SFO, waiting for a flight back home.

The event from a Nehalem-EX perspective was a success. Hit important points and accomplished what we had to deliver.

Hit #1: Michael Dell, in his key note, delivered Nehalem-EX message beautifully. 2.5x performance improvements coming from 9x memory bandwidth…compared to currently sold technology. Thank you, Michael.

Hit #2: Dell placed Nehalem-EX demo at its Exhibit at Moscone West. I missed seeing it in person but the Dell friends came to me reporting that the demo attracted a lot of attention from the audience. Thank you again, Dell.

Hit #3: My Nehalem-EX demo at Intel booth was also a success. The pre-production system ran throughout the event with 64 logical processors fully active with 1TB of Samsung DDR3 memory, running SPECjbb, stressing all the CPUs, cores, and threads. Occasionally, I injected double-bit error to show off the MCA-Recovery function. Windows 2008 R2 reported nicely that the system encountered a critical error but the system still running at full speed. If not with MCA-Recovery function, I would have had blue screen each time I ran that error injection script and would have had to wait for few minutes to have the server come back up online.

Also, I really liked the demographics of the audience this time. Compared to the other events I went to this year, I had more conversations with the folks who actually purchase equipments, those who test new equipments at IT shops, and those from Oracle starting to realize that hardware choice does matter when selling Oracle software. Many people specifically asked when Intel starts shipping Nehalem-EX and which specific OEM models would use Nehalem-EX. I hope my responses to those folks were legitimate. ;-) I also hope Oracle sales folks now have true confidence that the Oracle software stack runs best on Intel, specifically, Nehalem-EX.

Oracle Open World is said to be the largest IT event. I believe that. You don’t get to have lunch at the middle Mission St tarmac very often. You don’t get to see four digit hotel bills very often for just couple night stay. Despite the fall storm hitting the peninsula dumping loads of water and gust knocking trees down on Tuesday, Intel booth continuously had heavy flow of traffic. I admire the Intel team putting together our presence and admire the whole industry supporting the event. I also personally learned a lot from the event, meeting people, exchanging knowledge. Three day booth duty is a tough one but worth it.

Oh, and to wrap the whole trip up…

Hit #4: cleared the wait list and getting home earlier with an earlier flight…

AND…I wish today was Friday…

Reporting live from the Intel booth at Oracle OpenWorld

jason.t.beane@intel.com — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 22:23:43 GMT

At Intel, we not only pack a lot of performance in a small form factor, we also pack a lot of great demos and theater presentations into our booth at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco (South Moscone, booth #1621). We have 5 demos from 5 of our customers—Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, and Sun—and 3 other demos showcasing Wind River, Intel’s SOA Expressway product, and last, but certainly not least, Intel’s amazing and upcoming Nehalem-EX processor, which you heard Michael Dell praise in his keynote this morning.

Over the course of the three days of our booth at OOW (Monday through Wednesday this week), we will have over 35 brief presentations that will help you plan your requirements for your next generation data center. They are short and sweet, and you can ask all the questions you want. If you simply attend a presentation and get a few more stamps form our demo stations, you can enter to win one of two netbooks that will be given away at the end of each day.

Outside of our booth, you may find us presenting in various partners’ booths and we hope to see you in a session we are having later today (see info below). We had an amazing session yesterday from resident Intel genius, Steve Shaw. The huge room was filled to capacity. At this other session today we will be giving away a netbook. Here are the logistics for today’s session:

ID#: S309892

Title: Ten Ways to Improve J2EE Application Performance on Multicore Systems

Track: Oracle Develop: Enterprise Java and Oracle WebLogic

Date: 13-OCT-09

Time: 17:30 - 18:30

Venue: Hilton Hotel

Room: Yosemite B

We hope to see you around somewhere at Oracle OpenWorld, but if for some reason we miss you entirely, please visit www.intel.com/server for more info on Intel’s fantastic products. Also, please visit Channel Intel on youtube for some videos from the event.

What a tool! (For finding a first server that is….)

lynne.mccandless@intel.com — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 17:25:48 GMT

When it comes to your car or fixing something around the house, you know there’s a tool for every job right? Well, it’s no different when you’re considering transitioning from a desktop-based server to a real server. That’s why we created the Server Transition tool for all small businesses. It’s easy to use (a few clicks), and gives you what you need to make a sound business decision.

Now you have a comprehensive tool to understand your server options and how your current system measures up. All you do is select the year you purchased your current system and the tool makes an initial guess at the configuration you have right now. You can make adjustments so it better matches your actual set-up and then, PRESTO! You’ll see how your system stacks up to a real server based on the processor, memory, storage, business applications and form factor. This way, you’re making an apples to apples comparison with quantifiable data. Well, I guess since it’s a desktop versus a server it’s more of an apples to apple pie comparison and maybe even apple pie a la mode….

You can even take the comparison one step further by answering a few usage questions to find a more customized configuration for your business needs. It’s really that simple – a few clicks and you have a recommended server configuration that will deliver greater dependability, productivity and performance to meet your needs today and tomorrow. Now, if only there were tools like that to help my sister find the right guy to date. Maybe that would be more of a tool avoidance tool, if you know what I mean.

Don’t wait, check it out now.

The One Million IOPS game

bhaskar.d.gowda@intel.com — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 03:47:12 GMT

Few months back I saw an press release on Reuters from Fusion IO and HP claiming to hit 1 Million IOPS with a combination of Five 320GB ioDrives Duos and Six 160GB IO drives in an HP Proliant DL785 G5 which is a 4 Socket server with each socket having 4 cores, that makes a total of 16 cores in the server. I went saying wow that is amazing, a million IOPS is something any DBA running a high performance Database would like to get hands on. But when I did a quick search on the Internet for on how affordable the solution would be, I was horrified to see the cost which was clsoe enough to buy me couple of Mercedes E class sedan, all though the performance was stellar the cost and 2KB chunk size made me say which application does a 2KB read/write anyways, the default windows allocation is 4KB.

As time went by I got busy with other work till our Nand Storage Group told us that they are coming up with a product concept based on PCIe to show a real 1 Million IOPS with 4KB block sizes which application in real world uses. This triggered the thought on what takes to achieve a 1 Million IOPS using generically available off-the shelf components. I hit my lab desk to figure out what it takes.

Basically getting a Million IOPS depends on Three things:

1. Blazing fast Storage drives.
2. Server hardware with enough PCIe slots and good processors.
3. Host Bus Adapters capable of handling the significant number of IOPS

Setup:

Intel Solid State Drives was my choice, there has been a lot discussed and written about the performance of Intel SSD's and that was easy choice make. I selected Intel X25-M 160GB MLC drives made using 34nm process. These drives are rated for 35K Random 4KB read IOPS and seemed like a perfect fit for my testing.

Then I started searching for the right Dual Socket server, this Intel® Server Systems SR2625URLX with 5 PCIe 2.0 x8 provided enough slots to connect HBA's. The server was configured with Two Intel Xeon W5580 running at 3.2Ghz and 12GB of memory.

Search for the HBA was ended when LSI showed their 9210-8i series (Code named as Falcon) which has been rated to perform 300K IOPS. These are entry level HBA's which can be configured to hook up up to Eight drives to eight Internal ports.

Finally I had to house the SSD's some where in a nice looking container, and a container was necessary to provide power connectivity to the drives. I zeored in on Super Micro 2U SuperChassis 216 SAS/SATA HD BAY, this came with Dual power supply and without any board inside it, but it provided me an option to simply plug in the drives to the panel and not worry about getting them powered. The other interesting thing about this Chassis is that, it comes with Six individual connectors on the back plane so all each connector handles only Four drives, this is very different from active back planes which routes the signal across all the drives connected to them, this allowed me to just connect 4 drives per port on the HBA. I also had to get a 4 slot disk enclosure ( Just some unnamed brand from local shop) in total I had capability to connect 28 drives.

With all the hardware in place, I went ahead and installed Windows 2008 enterprise server edition and Iometer (Open source tool to test IO performance). 2 HBA's were populated fully utilizing all 8 ports on them while other 3 HBA's were just populated with 4 ports only. The drives were left without a partition on them. Iometer was configured with two manager processes with 19 worker threads 11 on one Manager and 8 on the other. The 4KB Random reads were selected with Sector alignment set to 4KB. The IOmeter was set to fetch last update on the result screen.

Result:

Once the test started with 24 drives, and felt I was short of few thousands to reach 1M IOPS so I had to find the 4 bay enclosure to connect another 4 more SSD's taking the total number of SSD's to 28. There was a Million sustained IOPS from the server with an average of 0.88 ms latency and 80-85% of CPU utilization. Please see below pics for more pictorial representation of the setup.

Conclusion:

Recently we demonstrated this setup at Intel Developer Forum 2009 at San Francisco, this grabbed attention of many visitors due to the fact that this is something an IT organization can achieve realistically without spending a lot of initial investment, the good thing about this setup is that the availability of parts and equipments in open market. As Intel we wanted to get this thought started that High Performance storage without robbing a ton of money from your IT department's budget. Once a storage admin gets the idea on what is possible the industry will take more innovative approach to expand and tryout new setups using of the shelf components.

Next Steps:

I would be spending sometime to get this setup running with a RAID config and possibly use a real world application to drive the storage. This needs a lot of CPU resources and I have in mind one upcoming Platfrom from Intel which will let me do this. . I come up with followup experiments.

-Bhaskar Gowda.

Live From IDF -- Paul Ottelini on Servers

william.h.lea@intel.com — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:37:00 GMT

Take a look at this video segment from Paul Ottelini's keynote today at IDF. Very interesting on where the technology is headed and what the consumer wishes technology could do for them. Very cool stuff......