The Server Room Blog

Consolidating multiple Unix environments to Industry Standard Xeon

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

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

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

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

Some of the key findings to highlight

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

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

Solaris and Xeon 5500 - a perfect combination?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- How Solaris performance counters help to better manage workloads

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

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

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

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

Look Who’s Moving!! – From RISC to Intel architecture

eoin.j.mcconnell@intel.com — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 17:08:39 GMT

I was thinking about a catchy title when I suddenly recalled the ‘Look Who’s Talking’ movie series from a while back. After all catchy titles are key for blogs!.

Previously I shared some thoughts on overall TCO savings that could be achieved, performance benefits that can be realized and how to migrate from RISC to Intel architectures. We all agree that making a change for the sake of change is never a good thing and justifying a change in the current economic environment can be a challenging path. So let’s look at who is changing and the benefits they are realizing from making a change. (I do apologize for over-use of word change, this is not a political commercial)

BMW Group wanted to simplify management of their environment and reduce TCO of their proprietary RISC server infrastructure. BMW moved their SAP environment and achieved 2.75-3xperformance gains and greater energy efficiency and drove down cost.
Telefonica a major Telecom Service Provider in Europe migrated their mobile online billing system and achieved a 428%performance gain.
Florida Hospital moved their disaster recovery system and got higher availability, reduced recovery time and lower system maintenance costs

Changing architecture does not mean that you have to change the operating system and solution stack. In some cases IT organizations are choosing to retain their Solaris environment.

BT Vision wanted to triple their Data Center capacity without increasing their power consumption or consuming more space in their DataCenter. Deployed Solaris on Xeon and achieved 10xfaster performance in Solaris Applications, 25-50%increased availability and 80%savings on their underlying equipment

Hopefully these examples help in some way to show that you will not be the first trailblazer trying out something new and unproven. IT Organizations have moved and are reaping the benefits of the change.

Finally being March 17^th and Irish, I would like to wish you all a Happy St Paddy’s day!

Virtualization and Legacy Replacement - where there's risc there is risk

ken.r.lloyd@intel.com — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 20:50:59 GMT

I recently spoke with a large financial customer that has several hundred sparc boxes ( mostly inherited from an acquisiton). These systems are a challenge in that they are aging - some running out of available maintenance, slow, old, and the expertise in the company just doesn't extend to this architecture.

They were also very proud of there virtualized Xeon architecture where they could move vm's quickly to maximize efficiency and optimize resources. I think it is time to bring these two together.

So given 500 solaris servers:

about half of these are running enterprise applications - like Oracle(tm) - that run just great under windows or linux. Move these today.

Of the other half, most of these are - performance wise - tiny servers. You could put dozens of them - maybe all of them - in VMs on just a few large xeon servers. ( Don't forget about the phenominal virtualization perofrmance on the Xeon 7400 that Intel announced last week at IDF )

So how do I move these custom solaris sparc based physical servers into my super efficient Xeon based virtual machines?

Three ways:

1) recompile the apps for solaris 10 - which runs great in a vm on your virtualized pool

2) Use transitive quicktransit and move the binaries to Solaris 10 or Linux vms in the pool

3) Move to the windows or linux version of the software, or replace it with software that does the same business function.

Presto - 500 physical legacy servers - collapsed into a more efficient, more manageable, more modern pool of resources. What will you do with all the free space?

Sun and Intel Announce Threading Building Blocks now Supported on Solaris, Sun Studio

william.h.lea@intel.com — Thu, 08 May 2008 17:06:24 GMT

As part of the Sun Microsystems and Intel alliance, the two companies have collaborated to bring open source Threading Building Blocks (TBB) support to the Solaris Operating System (OS) and Sun Studio software toolchain. Check out the SUN Blog for additional information. Click the video below for a short interview with Deepanker Bairagi, Principal Engineer for the Sun Studio.

Software parallelism can unleash the processing power that the newer multi-core architectures provide, including the Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® processors. For developers, multithreading offers a software parallelism model, but many existing solutions require a lot of low-level coding. Threading Building Blocks offers a rich approach to expressing parallelism in a C++ program by offering higher-level, task-based parallelism that abstracts platform details and threading mechanism for performance and scalability.

The Solaris OS is able to take advantage of multicore architectures, including the Intel Architecture, with features such as a lightweight processes (LWPs), load-balancing across cores, and processor affinities. Sun Studio software offers a complete integrated toolchain for Solaris and Linux platforms, including parallelizing compilers, performance and thread analysis tools, memory and code debuggers, NetBeans-based Integrated Development Environment, and more.

Combined with Threading Building Blocks, developers for the Solaris platform now have a fully loaded toolbox that simplifies the development of optimized multithreaded applications for multi-core Intel processors. Click here to learn more about Threading Building Blocks and optimizing performance for multi-core processors.

Would like to hear from the community on how you see this impacting the next generation of software development for Solaris running on Intel Architecture.