The Server Room Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why upgrade your hardware when migrating to SAP ERP 6.0?

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

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

· Cost, Cost, Cost

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

· Business Justification

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

· Additional risk of business disruption

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

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

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

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

Challenge:

• Convert Intel’s Worldwide Warehouse Management Software

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

• Minimize downtime

Benefit to Intel IT:

• SAP ERP 6.0 improves Intel supportability

• Increases ease of integration to SAP NetWeaver* 7.1 Suite

• Provides access to Enhancement Packs and Enterprise Services

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

Key Results:

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

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

Better together: engineering collaboration at the heart of breakthrough capability

andrew.i.fields@intel.com — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:00:37 GMT

As I’m new to The Server Room, I offer this brief introduction: I am a marketing manager in Intel’s Software and Services Group – looking after Intel’s collaborative marketing efforts with virtualization solution providers.

A couple weeks ago, Ken Lloyd blogged about the incredible changes in compute capability and performance brought by the Nehalem microarchitecture – and gave credit to the advances in software, too. I’d like to take the conversation a step further: did you know that the launch of VMware™ vSphere 4.0 in April 2009 represented a milestone of collaborative development? The combination of VMware vSphere and Intel Xeon processor 5500 based systems delivers astonishing performance in part because it is the result of a full cycle of collaboration.

Intel has a well established rhythm of technology innovation – and a lot of really smart architects who know a thing or two about cpu design – but we get innovative ideas from the outside, too. Over the years of the VMware alliance, Intel has received (and acted on) many requests for small changes in cpu circuitry…changes that would make virtualizing the cpu easier, more efficient, or add capability. A whole raft of hardware optimizations for virtualization were included in the Nehalem architecture. As Intel started to deliver early silicon for Xeon 5500 based platforms, Intel software engineers worked closely with VMware engineers – optimizing vSphere code to take advantage of the new hardware features to improve performance, increase efficiency, and add new functionality. The results? Check out this video from the launch of VMware™ vSphere 4.0 to see for yourself what “better together” really means. And the cycle continues – what can you imagine in the next round of collaborative innovation??

IDF Thoughts: SR-IOV and Random Tidbits

benjamin.r.hacker@intel.com — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 20:34:04 GMT

I’m a bit late in relaying my thoughts from Intel’s Developer Forum (IDF), but there was definitely some excitement around virtualization and high performance networking that I wanted to get the word out about!

In the past I’ve shared some details about SR-IOV and the advantages you can gain by being able to present virtual LAN hardware to each Virtual Machine (VM), effectively avoiding the Hypervisor when presenting virtual devices to each VM. The advantage of being able to do this is clear: The less interaction in the networking stack there is from the hypervisor, the less processing overhead is required for the system process the data.

That’s all good because if you have a dual 10 Gigabit adapter, you can segregate those two physical pipes into perhaps 16 virtual pipes that get exposed to 16 VMs. By segregating these LAN pipes at the hardware level with SR-IOV instead of using Hypervisor switching, the performance gains in both CPU utilization as well as maximum total throughput can be very large. There were several demos at IDF with various configurations, but reductions in CPU utilization of 40% were possible coupled with dramatic improvement in throughput!

But there is unfortunately one minor complication that I didn’t mention in my last post on the topic of SR-IOV. There is the little fact that when VMs move between physical boxes (a usage that is highly desired and commonplace these days) you run into some problems with this SR-IOV capability. When the hypervisor owned the network hardware abstraction, the performance was worse, but the functionality was better because you could seamlessly migrate from one box to another and the virtualization application would handle the details. But with SR-IOV, a new layer needs to be added so that the direct hardware connection between the VM and the LAN hardware can be moved to a new box.

The really exciting part of IDF demos that I saw was the demonstration not just of the SR-IOV functionality on multiple hardware and virtualization configurations, but that these demonstrations also showed updated software from two virtualization vendors allowing mobility of the VMs while supporting SR-IOV!

There was a demo on Dell systems showing this fully functional SR-IOV implementation with Citrix’s Virtualization suite. There were two separate demonstrations on Dell systems, with VMWare displaying their new Network Plug-In Architecture (NPIA) solution that allows for the migration of SR-IOV connected VMs seamlessly between servers.

For those hungry for more detail, I’ve included the three SR-IOV demonstration videos here:

The first is the Citrix demonstration on Dell and Intel hardware of SR-IOV with VM mobility:

These next two are two videos are demos on Dell and Intel hardware with VMWare and their NPIA software implementation.

Each virtualization demo shows the massive performance benefits under various workloads when moving from Hypervisor based LAN segregation to SR-IOV implementation. But most importantly, each demonstration proves out the capability to migrate VMs between physical hardware. The only system hardware requirement is that the server itself supports VT-d. If the networking hardware in the newly migrated-to box supports SR-IOV you get better performance, and if not, the solution falls back on the legacy Hypervisor virtualization. Backwards compatibility is maintained!

I didn’t get firm details on when this full support for SR-IOV and migration will be available in Citrix and VMWare’s releases, but the demos looked pretty clean, and hopefully these suites will be available soon with this new functionality. The LAN and Server hardware ecosystems are ready today, and it looks like the software vendors are just around the corner. Virtualization momentum continues!

While virtualization was the big takeaway for me from IDF, there were also several other interesting demos for us networking hounds. I’ve linked a couple videos of them below for anyone still thirsting for more of the latest networking technology and performance details!

The first video is a demonstration of Intel’s 82599 10 Gigabit Ethernet-based adapter card with Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) support. Storage and Ethernet together at last!

The second video is a demonstration of Intel’s NetEffect 10 Gigabit Ethernet card publishing 1 million messages per second in a simulated NYSE floor trading scenario. Oh yeah, only 35uS of latency. That is fast.

So although I am two weeks after IDF, I hope some of you got a little taste of the networking excitement that took place. Industry wide, hardware and software vendors alike are delivering ultra high performance low latency applications for the financial services industry, as well as mainstream performance increases for virtualization. The performance and technology beat moves forward. Exciting times!

Ben Hacker

Scalable Virtualization Infrastructure: How Are You Driving ROI?

radhakrishna.hiremane.shridhar@intel.com — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 18:23:04 GMT

In the management practices of most datacenters I see IT driving more efficiency from their infrastructure by switching to virtualization. As they do so and develop confidence over the years, the types of applications that are getting deployed with virtualization are also changing. Even the scalable enterprise apps are being considered as good candidates for virtualization.

IT managers now have the building blocks to consider deploying scalable enterprise apps using virtualization with increasing SMPness in VMM’s like 8-way vCPU capability in VMware vSphere, Intel Xeon virtualization hardware assists, NICs with virtualization hardware assists, and scalable system architectures based on Intel Xeon from IBM such as 3850, 3950 and BladeCenter servers. VMware HA and DR solution and chipset architecture with reliability and availability features further provide the confidence for business critical needs of enterprise apps. Capabilities such as VMware VMotion and FlexMigration help increase efficiency of the infrastructure with such environment.

Economic condition at the same time is also putting more pressure on the IT to deliver more value within a constrained budget. Refreshing old hardware and adopting virtualization are simple strategies to achieve such goals.

I’ll be talking about virtualization with the new VMware vSphere on IBM Intel processors on August 12, 1 PM EST. I’ll be joined by Bob Zuber, Program Director, High Performance, IBM. The webinar is designed to help IT managers better understand scalable virtualization infrastructure, enterprise application virtualization, reduced TCO, and efficiency benefits along with a special financing opportunity.

Register for the session on “Virtualize with the new VMware vSphere on IBM Intel processors and take advantage of special financing”.

In the meantime, I’ll be answering related questions leading up to the webcast, and during the webcast. I’d also like to hear how you’re delivering more value in the data center within a constrained budget.

Nehalem-EX will bring a lot to the RISC party

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creating New Usages with vSphere SDK

jim.r.blakley@intel.com — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 23:19:53 GMT

So, its not clear from this posting whether VMware's "Code Central" was announced or escaped but this looks to be a very valuable repository for sharing vSphere scripts.

I'm a recent convert to the wonders of creating new capabilities through the vSphere SDK. Our team has been using it to prototype some interesting new usages for power aware virtualization that we hope eventually will find their way into the VMWare Distributed Power Management (DPM) tool.

The most interesting usage is what we call "platooning" where different server resource pools are kept in different power states from fully powered on through power capped to standby and full off. Servers are moved from one platoon to the next (and workloads are migrated onto them) based on a set of policies for required application capacity headroom and power on latency as load increases. Our belief is that, by carefully designing these policies, we'll be able to save significant power across the data center without impacting peak throughput or response time of any of the applications.

Unfortunately, we don't have the data to demonstrate this savings yet. That's where the SDK comes in. We're able to prototype the usage, collect the data, validate the feasibilty and, if it never shows up in DPM, still be able to implement it in production.

We're just coming up to speed on the SDK, having completed our first "Hello World" integration with it but we think its going to be a very valuable tool for experimenting and going to production with many new usages. I'm hoping Code Central provides a good source of examples to help bootstrap our development.

Consolidating multiple Unix environments to Industry Standard Xeon

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

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

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

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

Some of the key findings to highlight

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

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

Solaris and Xeon 5500 - a perfect combination?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- How Solaris performance counters help to better manage workloads

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

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

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

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

Nehalem-EX Brings New Economics to Scalable Systems

michael.j.demshki@intel.com — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 16:10:42 GMT

The debate on how to best increase system capacity to accommodate growing applications has raged on for years; “scale up” with more CPU, memory, and I/O, or “scale out” with loosely connected systems. Scaling out by adding networked systems to increase capacity has been a good economical solution for many IT managers because it allows them to grow by using less expensive, industry standard building blocks. However, there are some notable exceptions to this line of thought. One is that the class of applications that require shared memory and large database support are much better suited to run on a single, expandable system that scales up. These are typically transaction processing, business intelligence and ERP solutions. Until now, IT managers running applications that require scale-up systems larger than 4 or 8 CPUs have had limited platform choices and most were proprietary and expensive RISC-based servers.

The other problem with the scale out approach is the people, facilities, software and overhead costs and complexity of managing very large numbers of servers, which can grow to a point where the costs outweigh the performance and system cost benefits. The industry solution to achieving better ROI has been to consolidate multiple scale-out servers onto single industry standard scale-up servers with virtualization solutions. This is a good solution, but is limited by the number of application loads the IT manager feels comfortable placing on a single server, given the need to maintain peak performance and availability for each application.

Well, it looks like the scale-up, scale-out debate is about to take another turn. In the server product update Intel gave on May 26th, they talked about new levels of system scalability and choice supported by the upcoming Nehalem-EX processor. This processor will support systems that scale up to 8 sockets natively (shared memory, without any additional silicon), and up to 16 sockets and higher with node controllers from system manufactures that allow single systems to share memory beyond 8 sockets. So far there are over 15 different designs from 8 OEMs that offer 8 socket or higher scalability. But of course, for the class of application where scaling is important, socket count doesn’t tell the whole story of what’s needed for scalable performance. Thread support, key for transaction processing and virtualization, scales at the rate of 16 threads per socket with 8 cores and Hyper Threading (2 threads per core). That would be 128 threads for an 8-socket system, and 256 threads for 16 sockets. And in order to keep those threads fed with data close to the CPU, each processor supports up to 24 MB of shared cache (1.5X current generation Xeon), and an impressive 16 memory slots per socket or 128 DIMMs on an 8-socket system. In addition, the Scalable Memory Interconnect gives these systems 9 times the memory bandwidth of today’s top Xeon processor. Finally, four QuickPath interconnect links per socket allow for high-bandwidth sharing of data across the system.

So the net of it is that the industry is going to see a broad selection of highly scalable, next-generation servers that significantly extend the economic advantage of industry standard scale-up solutions for business-critical, large database, and high-end virtualization/consolidation deployments. I would expect these systems to give IT managers a very cost-effective alternative to the much more expensive and proprietary RISC-based servers they use today.

What are your thoughts? Mike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The time is right now to move from risc

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

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

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

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

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

- 20% better on SAP-SD

- 62% better java performance for Specjbb2005

- 69%better for integer performance SPECIntrate-2006

- 75% better for floating point performance SPECfprate-2006

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

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

- 150% better on SAP-SD

- 190% better java performance for Specjbb2005

- 126%better for integer performance SPECIntrate-2006

- 90%better for floating point performance SPECfprate-2006

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

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

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

Virtualization “Doing More with Less”

mark.a.wright@intel.com — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 18:05:09 GMT

Two weeks ago, I flew to Mexico City to present on virtualization technologies to both government agencies and private industry. In both cases their issues were the same. They are trying to do more with less. In these times of global economic uncertainty, businesses are being challenged to reduce spending, while still improving infrastructure to keep up with business demand. This is true, especially in the US, where in one case the construction of a 300 million dollar data center was put on hold and instead IT was task to reduce their server footprint in an at-capacity data center. The new focuses . . . find ways to reduce overall power and cooling costs. Almost every company is looking at virtualization as one key component of the equation to finding solutions to these data center problems.

The combination of a managed virtualization solution coupled with an efficient Intel processor based server is one highly effective means to solve the “do more with less” mandate. Let’s start by talking about the new Xeon 5500 processor that was just unveiled last Monday. You have a need to reduce power and consolidate servers? A Xeon 5500 based server can effectively replace eight to nine older single-core servers. 9x performance improvements have been seen using things like Turbo Boost. The processor idle power drops to only 10 watts, enabling a 50% reduction in system idle power compared to our previous generation chip. Everything I’m seeing on this is that you can recoup your capital investment in around 8 to 9 months from reduced maintenance, power use, software licensing, and cooling costs. Your energy savings alone can be as high as a 90% reduction! That’s big!

Check out more details on the launch of the new Xeon 5500 processor with Intel’s press release.

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20090330corp_sm.htm?iid=pr1_releasepri_20090330smr#story

Second, let’s talk about Intel’s power management embedded in the chipset. This component is the key to rapidly recouping power costs and maximizing your server consolidation efforts. For a good introduction to Intel’s power management system for server power capping in the data center, take a look at Jackson He’s blog “Datacenter Dynamic Power Management – Intelligent Power Management on Intel Xeon® 5500”.

http://communities.intel.com/community/openportit/server/blog/2009/03/31/datacenter-dynamic-power-management-intelligent-power-management-on-intel-xeon-5500

Lastly, virtualization management software drives ROI but the challenge in the management of large virtual infrastructures is that there are no clear boundaries in terms of network, storage and datacenter management teams. This needs to be defined as well as an emphasis on a holistic management approach or a “Service Management” approach. We have to get beyond just monitoring the uptime or resource usage levels of virtual machines (VM) and physical hosts. Along with Intel’s announcement of our latest Xeon 5500, there have also been a number of new product announcements in the past two months. From VMworld Europe 2009, we heard about vSphere 4.0 and Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V and at ManageFusion Symantec touting improved virtualization functionality and management with CMS/SMS 7.0 integrating Intel’s vPro functionality.

Are the current products providing a holistic management approach with virtualization?

Is it the right strategy to integrate power management with virtualization management?

I’ve got my opinion on this, what’s yours?

Mark

Can all apps be virtualized? -- Turning up the contrast.

jim.r.blakley@intel.com — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 23:43:54 GMT

So, building off Bob's post from September (http://communities.intel.com/openport/thread/1905), I contend that, at least from a performance perspective, with the new capabilities in the next generation of virtualized infrastructure coming this year, the answer is yes!

As we look at the availability of ESX 4.0 from VMWare and servers based on the Intel Nehalem-based Xeon servers with new VT features for CPU, chipset and IO later this year, we're not seeing any of the mainstream applications that can't be virtualized. In the past, some of the mainstream apps that (allegedly) couldn't be virtualized that we've consistently heard are SAP and other complex business processing apps, middle sized databases and large enterprise email systems like Microsoft Exchange. While it's a little early to declare victory, we're thinking the next generation of technology will be more than good enough to run these workloads in most environments. We're currently running testing on the lastest generation infrastructure software and not seeing any reason why most of these apps won't be capable of being virtualized over the next couple of years.

Anyone think differently? Why?

Note, other issues remain:

Even if I don't run the applications on the same physical server as other applications, is the virtual infrastructure secure and reliable enough to support these important applications?
And, if I try to consolidate the app with other apps, can I be guaranteed that the app won't interfere or be interfered with by other apps. Interference could be either unintentional resource contention or intential security attacks.
Do I have the tools and support infrastructure to do such a critical application in a virtual infrastructure.

I'm making no claims on whether these particular challenges have been solved but I would be interested in whether they are real issues for you.

What do you think?

Jim Blakley

<Note: This is a duplicate to the blog I posted at VMWorld Europe last week. I'll pull over the responses as replies to this>

Virtualization 2.0: Solutions with Intel technologies for emerging usage models

radhakrishna.hiremane.shridhar@intel.com — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 20:16:05 GMT

Virtualization usage models continue to evolve and so does Intel technologies that support it.

Consolidation is the foundation usage model of virtualization. This we term the basic virtualization 1.0 usage model. Workload consolidation with virtualization within a physical server helps IT realize cost savings and also cost avoidance. Intel VT technologies, power efficient performance of Xeon 5400 and Xeon 7400, and reliability capabilities are essentially the building blocks for consolidation.

Emerging usage models or virtualization 2.0 go beyond more than cost savings and cost avoidance. They target data center efficiency and business continuity. Virtualization 2.0 hence is a step after 1.0. Once workloads are consolidated the key challenge for IT is to utilize the consolidated resources in the data center in the most efficient manner and making sure that one consolidated workload does not impact the others running on the same platform. Essentially, how can IT move the workload from one system to another is a resource pool (that now spans more than a single physical server) for efficient use of their data center resources to manage application SLAs and manage datacenter power and performance resources; and how can IT ensure business continues to run with better reliability and availability. VM mobility is a corner stone of virtualization 2.0 usage models such as load balancing and virtualization high availability. Intel technologies have also evolved to meet the requirements of these usage models. Some of the important ones are Intel VT FlexMigration and virtualization technologies for I/O (that I have blogged about in the past). Intel VT FlexMigration for instance provides investment protection to IT by allowing resource pooling of multiple generations of Intel Xeon based servers. This way IT does not have to break a resource pool to get the benefit of new energy efficient hardware when they refresh. This allows IT to constantly also refresh without impacting their datacenter architecture, as new processors typically deliver better energy efficient performance than previous generation and newer capabilities to meet the customer demands in this digital age.

It is also note worthy that customers buy solutions and not just hardware or software. So it is important that these solutions be efficiently enabled with the ecosystem for customers to take advantage of the benefits. In this video clip, learn from Steve (VMware CTO) and Doug (VP, Intel, Software Solutions Group), how Intel and VMware, are working together to deliver solutions that meet IT demands.

More online resources to usage models with virtualization and Intel technologies that enable these usage models efficiently:

Part1 virtualization usage models

Part2 virtualization usage models

Part3 Intel role in evolving usage models