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?

Green Storage

curt.e.bruns@intel.com — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:52:02 GMT

It’s not just about energy-sipping systems—it’s also about your storage footprint

Most of us are familiar with the concept of green IT: increasing energy efficiency across the enterprise to trim costs and optimize resources. While you hear a lot about servers helping to reduce energy usage, not as much is said about storage. Intel and the storage industry are working together to provide green storage solutions, too.

For the storage community, every system has to be cost-effective as well as performance-driven, which means energy efficiency is a key consideration. It starts at the processor level, where the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series is extending the boundaries of energy efficient performance.

Many storage system providers have picked up on the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series since it was introduced last March. For example, the HP StorageWorks XP10000* Disk Array and 3000 Enterprise* Virtual Array are based on the new processors. Schooner Information Technology appliances leverage quad-core Intel Xeon 5500 processors and half a terabyte of Intel® X25-E flash memory. The bottom line for the Schooner appliances is an 80 percent decrease in power and cooling requirements versus ordinary servers.

But green storage isn’t just about power consumption at the processor or system level. An equally important green strategy is to reduce the overall storage footprint, and a number of technologies are available to help IT organizations implement this strategy.

Virtualization is driving huge data center energy savings by greatly reducing the number of physical machines in the data center. As Bob Fine, director of product marketing at Compellent, pointed out at the 2009 Storage Networking World conference last spring, many large enterprises realize that they’re approaching a cap. “They can only get a certain amount of power in their data centers and see virtualization as a way to reduce their power requirements,” says Fine. “Instead of building new data centers, they can stay in the ones they have, saving millions of dollars in the process.”

Many IT managers tell Intel that storage can be a big gating factor when it comes to scaling virtual environments. The Intel Xeon processor 5500 series uses Intel® HT Technology within each processor core, doubling the number of threads that can be processed at the same time. This option permits more efficient workloads and enables storage servers to virtualize more applications. Intel HT Technology is also more energy efficient than traditional threaded processing.

Compellent and Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), both users of the Intel Xeon processors, recommend reducing the storage footprint in other ways as well. “Limit the amount of content you need to store by using technologies like data deduplication,” advises Asim Zaheer, vice president of product and competitive marketing at HDS. “Also, don’t have wasted capacity or wasted systems—that’s where tiered storage and virtualization come into play.”

Compellent’s Fine sees tiered storage as especially important when using expensive disk resources like solid-state drives (SSD). By limiting SSD to the top tier, a company could save on drive costs and increase storage efficiency. “Only the active data would sit on SSD, and all the inactive data would go onto a tier-three SATA drive,” says Fine. “Since SSD drives are about 10 times the cost of Fibre Channel, it’s very important to gain those kinds of efficiencies.”

Isilon Systems, another user of Intel processors, has a pay-as-you-grow model for its clustered storage products that makes it easier to avoid over-provisioning and wasting power. If a customer needs to add more performance, Isilon can provide nodes with Intel processors and memory, but no storage. If the customer requires capacity only, Isilon sells nodes with just disks. In addition, Isilon uses ColdWatt power supplies, which it says are about 30 percent more efficient than traditional power supplies.

As Intel works with the storage industry to deliver more energy-efficient and high-performance storage solutions, we’d like to know what IT organizations are doing to implement green storage technologies in the data center. If you work in IT and have fresh perspectives to make your organization more efficient, you’re invited to share your ideas here.

"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.

Your server workloads may be cheating you on power... get it back!

todd.christ@intel.com — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:12:17 GMT

Prior to the Intel Xeon X5500 Server Platforms*, measuring server power was done via expensive equipment and could only be performed in a discrete fashion. Unless you had tons of monitoring equipment to mash-up your power data - it was a tedious process. Now, using Intel DCM and Node Manager - you can pull multiple servers worth of power info to make some important power decisions in your datacenter.

First of all, you need to baseline your workload. If you're confident that you can replicate workload patterns then you've got a starting point. Otherwise, it's usually a good idea to start monitoring and looking for some cyclical patterns and/or common data points (time, power, thermals, etc) to keep track of.

In this scenario (like in my last blog) we're using a SQL workload which can be modified to run the CPU at high levels for a relatively set amount of time. The base workload runs for 7 min 30 seconds, as shown in the Intel DCM screencap below.

In this test case: Idle power for the 4 servers is 782W, and under load - the power increases to 1174W - which is a delta of 392W. This power increase occurs when work is given to the server and the P/T states react to the workload and increase power/voltage to the system to increase performance. Exactly what we've been used to seeing even since EIST was introduced several years ago.

Now, what I'll show you is something that may be very interesting in scale... I will power cap the servers by 20W each, and set the Intel DCM Power Policy to only allow 1095W for the 4 servers in the rack.

What is awesome here is that we can still finish the workload in the same 7 minutes 30 seconds. So essentially, we have saved 80W of power for each set of 4 servers and still get the same amount of work completed! In a large datacenter this can be HUGE in energy savings.

Let's do some quick math: 20W power savings per serer x 10,000 servers = 20kW power savings and you still get the work done. I hope I just helped some of you server admins get some new ideas on your next "I need a raise" talk with your manager

*your mileage may vary, so test your own workloads and report out!

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.

Intel Node Manager Use Case for Server Monitoring

todd.christ@intel.com — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 22:00:02 GMT

With the Intel Xeon 5500 series (Nehalem) based processors, the X5500 chipset and instrumented power supplies, you can start with the most basic use case for Intel Node Manager - monitoring the power usage of your servers.

As you can see in the Intel Datacenter Manager (DCM) screen below - there are multiple servers configured into logical units: HF2-EIL is the lab that these servers are located in. Rack 1 and Rack 2 are the physical location of these servers, and each Rack contains 2 servers each.

When you highlight one server (as above in DCM)- you can see the power characteristics over a certain time period. The time period shown gives you the idle power, max power, and thermal measurement. The 'hump' in the graph is a SQL workload which creates 'work' for the server and the process runs for about 5 1/2 minutes with no power capping.

Here's a graph of the 2nd server in that rack, performing a similar workload. As you can see, the 2nd server power usage is different than the first.

The Intel Datacenter Manager SDK console can monitor multiple systems as well. The next graph, is both of those servers in the rack, which accounts for both servers power usage during the same timeframe.

Finally, here is the final graph, showing the accumulation of all 4 servers, in both Rack #1 and Rack #2. This shows the maximum power utilized during the workload, the minimum power (idle) and the inlet thermal temperature in the lab. Something that hasn't been able to be done before without expensive equipment in the datacenter.

My next power based blog will show how power-capping can give you more effience use of your workload power while using Xeon 5500 series platforms.

Windows* Server 2008 R2: Great improvements in energy efficiency

dave.r.hill@intel.com — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 23:13:55 GMT

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

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

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

Sun Solaris Is Getting Ready For Nehalem-EX - Is Your Data Center?

greg.okeefe@intel.com — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 23:45:59 GMT

Sun has recently published a whitepaper that discusses how the Solaris OS will take advantage of the next generation Intel Xeon processor (codename Nehalem-EX) for expandable servers (4 sockets & greater). Sun with over 20 years of experience in larger socket, core & threading capabilities is working to have the Solaris OS be ready to take advantage of the features & new capabilities of “Nehalem-EX”. The three areas of collaboration for Solaris & Nehalem-EX are around scalable performance; advanced reliability and energy efficiency between the specific features in Solaris and the next generation Intel Xeon processor. Read this recently published whitepaper

Intel Node Manager Ecosystem Video IDF 2009

todd.christ@intel.com — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 21:56:09 GMT

The ecosystem is growing...

Sean Maloney's keynote presentation at IDF 2009 highlighted Intel Node Manager. This is the video from his keynote which shows customers from Baidu, BMW, Oracle, and Telefonica, who have been working with Intel on Intel Intelligent Power Node Manager.

Check out the final slide showcasing the OEM/ODM/Console providers and customers using Intel Intelligent Power Node Manager.

Subject: Nehalem-EX, a game changer, unleashed!!!

michihiro.koyama@intel.com — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 16:04:20 GMT

See this video from IDF 2009, San Francisco.

Sean Maloney demonstrates new features coming with the next generation Intel Xeon processor for 4S+ server configurations, Nehalem-EX. Sean focuses on the unique scalability and RAS capabilities newly introduced into the platform.

Paul Ottelini on Monday said it is the democratization of data. With the capabilities, Intel Xeon processor based servers are ever more relevant to any type of workload a data center would support. The economics of standards based Intel architecture platforms will in effect provides another choice for data center operators to run the most demanding and mission critical workloads where expensive and legacy proprietary architectures like RISC are no longer the sole choice. This choice proposition is very powerful as the cost reduction is the foremost concern that needs to be tackled by data center operators and IT managers.

Nehalem architecture brought the performance and efficiency. Nehalem-EX will bring, on top of that, the RAS capabilities and increased variation of OEM system designs. In addition, ISVs will be ready to have hardware features reflected into the software products. It is a game changer, turn of the industry, where Intel is providing data centers with opportunities to standardize ALL the workload, including the most mission critical, to Intel Xeon processor based infrastructure.

Testing ENERGY STAR Intelligently

jennifer.sanati@intel.com — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 00:40:25 GMT

ENERGY STAR compliance is becoming an increasingly important factor for servers and workstations.

Accurate interpretation of the ENERGY STAR specification can be quite challenging with the ever-expanding scope of rules and regulations that govern platform and component-level design considerations.

Intel recently developed a semi-automated test tool to greatly simplify ENERGY STAR testing of servers and workstations. This tool has the following capabilities:

1. Ability to identify the relevant ENERGY STAR criteria per configuration

2. Automated assignment of ENERGY STAR test conditions and system testing

3. Preparation of system test data for analysis and ENERGY STAR submission

Feel free to stop by my booth at IDF in the Eco-Technology Community for a hands-on demonstration and to learn more.

Jennifer

Packing even more performance per rack with the new Xeon L5530

edward.g.groden@intel.com — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 15:28:10 GMT

Last month, Intel added another high-performing, low power to the Xeon 5500 SKU lineup with the Intel Xeon L5530 processor (2.40 GHz, 60W TDP). As with the L5506 (2.13 GHz) and L5520 (2.26 GHz) SKUs that were launched in March, the L5530 deliver the same performance as its 80W counterpart (E5530), but at 25% lower CPU power.

With space being a valuable asset in power-constrained data centers (IDC estimates datacenter construction costs at an average of $1,000/sq ft and $40,000/rack), the Xeon L5530 delivers even more performance in the same 60W CPU power envelope to help get the most out of each rack. Here’s the tale of the tape:

66% more performance than previous generation Xeon L5420 SKU
45% more performance than the Xeon L5506 SKU

(performance numbers based on SPEC_int_rate2006*, see http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/ for more details)

Want to find out more about the Xeon L5530 and the rest of the 5500 lineup, check out: http://www.intel.com/p/en_US/products/server/processor/xeon5000

@ 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

Selecting the Right Xeon Processor Just Got Easier

christopher.p.peters@intel.com — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 04:33:51 GMT

Since we started the Ask An Expert discussion thread in the Server Room a couple years ago, I found that the community often asked for guidance between selection of server system type and processor number as IT professionals sought to make the best purchase for them.

As I responded to these threads, I realized there were a lot of the same questions occurring over and over again. I then thought that having a selection tool to allow the community to guide themselves through a few questions to help narrow the options might be a valuable.

Sometimes the world (ok Intel) moves too slowly for me. My brainchild on this was something I wanted to have done about a year ago with the first 45nm quad-core processors (Xeon 5400). However, our server and corporate marketing teams got a little distracted by the Xeon 5500 (Nehalem) processor launch.

However, after much delay I’m proud to introduce this simple, interactive Xeon Server processor selector tool that can help you choose which server system type and processor would be ideal for your application and business goals. With Three Easy Steps, you can narrow your choices.

Step 1: Identify the business environment, application type and primary purchase criteria
Step 2: Compare and Choose the processor family (7000, 5000, 3000)
Step 3: Compare and Choose the specific processor within that family

In this 3^rd step you can look at price, performance, power and feature set across multiple CPUs to help you narrow. Take a short cut and look at the most popular CPUs or expand your options and look at the whole range of offerings.

We also have a Workstation Selection Tool (this tool was what triggered the idea to create a server one)

Other IT and business value assessment tools from Intel include:

Chris

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Strategies for Managing Power Consumption in the Data Center

enrique.g.castro-leon@intel.com — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 05:04:54 GMT

In spite of significant gains in server energy efficiency, power consumption in data centers is still trending up. At the very least, we can make sure that the energy expended yields maximum benefit to the business. A first step in managing power in the servers in a data center is having a fairly accurate monitoring capability for power consumption. The second step is to have a number of levers that allow using the monitoring data to carry out an effective power management policy.

While we may not be able to stem the overall growth of power consumption in the data center, there are a number of measures we can take immediately:

· Implement a peak shaving capability. The data center power infrastructure needs to be sized to meet the demands of peak power. Reducing peaks effectively increase the utilization of the existing power infrastructure.

· Be smart about shifting power consumption peaks. All the watts are not created equal. The incremental cost of generating an extra watt of power during peak consumption hours is much higher than the same watt generated in the wee hours of the morning. For most consumer and the smaller commercial accounts flat rate pricing still prevails. Real time pricing (RTP) and negotiated SLAs will become more common to put the appropriate economic incentives in place. The incentive of real time pricing is a lower energy bill overall, although the outcome is not guaranteed. In pilot programs residential consumers have complained that RTP result in higher electricity costs. With negotiated SLAs the customer can designate a workload to be subject to lower reliability; for instance, instead of 3 9’s, or outages amounting to about 10 hours per year, the low reliability workload can be designated as only 90 percent reliable, and can be out on the average of two hours per day.

· Match the electric power infrastructure in the data center to server workloads to minimize over-provisioning. This approach assumes the existence of an accurate power consumption monitoring capability.

· Upgrading the electrical power infrastructure to accommodate additional servers is not an option in most data centers today. Landing additional servers at a facility that's working at the limit of thermal capacity leads to the formation of hot spots, this assuming that electrical capacity limits are not reached first with no room left in certain branch circuits. Hence measures that work under the existing power infrastructure are to be preferred over alternatives that require additional infrastructure.

For the purposes data center strategic planning it may make economic sense to grow large data centers in a modular fashion. If the organization manages a number of data centers, consider making effective use of the existing data centers, and when new construction is justified, redistribute the workloads to the new data center to maximize the use of the new electrical supply infrastructure.

Intel has built into its server processor lineup a number of technology ingredients that allow data center operators optimize the utilization of the available power system infrastructure in the data center.

Newer servers of the Nehalem generation are much more energy efficient, if only because of the side effect of increased performance per watt. These servers also have a more aggressive implementation of power proportional computing. Typical idle consumption figures are in the order of 50 percent of peak power consumption.

Beyond passive mechanisms that do not require explicit operator intervention, the Intel® Intelligent Power Node Manager (Node Manager) technology allows adjusting the power draw of a server and trade off power consumption against performance. This capability is also known as power capping. The control range is a function of server loading. For the Intel SR5520UR baseboard on the 2U chassis, the server will draw about 300 watts at full load and its power consumption can be rolled down to about 200 watts. The control range tapers down gradually until it reaches zero at idle.

For power monitoring, selected models of the current Nehalem generation come with PMBus specification compliant power supplies allowing real-time power consumption readouts.

The Node Manager power monitoring and capping capability apply to a single server. To make this capability really useful it is necessary to exercise these capabilities collectively to groups of servers, to add the notion of events and a capability to build a historical record of power consumption for the servers in a group. The additional capabilities have been implemented in software through the Data Center Manager Software Development Kit developed by the Intel Solutions and Software Group. An additional Software Development Kit, Cache River allows programming access to components in servers and server building blocks produced by the Intel Enterprise Products Server Division (EPSD), including the baseboard management controller (BMC) and the management engine (ME), the subsystems that host or interact with the Node Management firmware. EPSD products are incorporated in many OEM and system integrator offerings.

Data Center Manager implements abstractions that apply to collections of servers:

· A hierarchical notion of logical server groups

· Power management policies bound to specific server groups

· Event management and a publish/subscribe facility for acting upon and managing power and thermal events.

· A database for logging a historical record for power consumption on the collection of managed nodes.

The abstractions implemented by DCM on top of Node Manager allow the implementation of power management use cases that involve up to thousands of servers.

If this topic is of interest to you, please join us at the Intel Development Forum in San Francisco at the Moscone Center on September 22-24. I will be facilitating course PDCS003, "Cloud Power Management with the Intel(r) Xeon(r) 5500 Series Platform." You will be the opportunity to talk with some of our fellow travelers in the process of developing power management solutions using Intel technology ingredients and get a feel of their early experience. Also please make a note to visit booths #515, #710 and #712 to see demonstrations of early end-to-end solutions these folks have put together.