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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is driving the interest in the digital workbench?

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

The product development rules are changing.

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

Isn’t this old news?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The new model

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you ready to use a digital workbench?

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

Workgroup Group Based Simulation – Accelerating Your Innovation

wesley.e.shimanek@intel.com — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:38:51 GMT

Interactive Modeling and Simulation – Come on you are kidding!!

Recent advancements in mathematical modeling, computational algorithms, and the speed of computers based on technologies like the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series have brought the field of computer simulation to the threshold of a new era. While not quite interactive, simulation and analysis can now occur at a pace that impacts decisions further upstream in the design process.

Simulation and analysis tools are also no longer the domain of the expert. Organizations can now potentially achieve a more efficient product development process by considering a reordering of product design activities and empowering engineers with easy-to-use and powerful 3D conceptual design tools and early access to CAE applications.

Why consider reordering your product development process?

This is not new news. Manufacturers know that when product analysis or simulation results trail the detailed design process that product changes are become significantly expensive and will most likely negatively impact new product release schedules. Worse yet, they also realize that changes made downstream in any design cycle are often “last minute” and almost always imply compromises on original design goals. This, of course, cuts into the product performance and profits of the new or updated product.

By reordering product design activities, manufactures may be able to achieve a more efficient product development process and reduce overall product development cost, time and risk.

No experts needed.

Don’t be fooled. While ISV’s from ANSYS, ALTAIR, MSC, PTC, Siemens PLM, SIMLUIA, SolidWorks and others have made tremendous strides in making their simulation products easier to use, you probably still need an expert. However, their collective advancements in tools, wrappers, and easy-to-use frameworks that guide the engineers through complex multi-physics analyses with drag-and-drop simplicity make it easier to move analysis further upstream.

That means your expert can now focus on the really hard problems.

Workgroup Computing – Bringing “Real” HPC Computing To Your Department

Using analysis and simulation to get results before the detailed design process begins will help ensure the CAD models meet performance requirements and will almost always mitigate last-minute and expensive design changes.

Large scale compute intensive jobs used to require investments and/or access to a divisionally shared, large scale cluster housed in a controlled Data Center environment …supporting hundreds of users.

While this may have been true a few years ago, the advancements in mathematical modeling, computational algorithms, and the speed of computers based on technologies like the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series now makes it possible to quickly and efficiently solve large scale problems closer to the engineers responsible for dealing with them, on compute clusters supporting small workgroups or departments of engineers vs. large scale clusters shared by hundreds of engineers.

As an example let’s look at the Cray CX1™ deskside personal supercomputer. Like others in this new usage category, it presents an organization with a solution that is the "right size" in performance, functionality, and cost for individuals and departmental workgroups who want to harness HPC without the complexity of traditional clusters. Equipped with powerful Intel Xeon 5500 series processors the Cray CX1 delivers the power of a high performance cluster with the ease-of-use and seamless integration of a workstation.

OK, You Can Give Me The Performance, But The Support Can Be A Nightmare

Intel® Cluster Ready makes HPC simpler. It boosts productivity and solves new problems. The Intel® Cluster Ready program makes it simpler to experience the power of high-performance computing.

Intel Cluster Ready presents HPC users a certification program that is designed to establish a common specification among original equipment manufacturers, independent software vendors (ISVs) and others for designing, programming and deploying high performance clusters built with Intel components.

For users, this certification means that these certified HPC systems will run a wide range of Intel Cluster Ready ISV applications right of the box. Tested, validated and simple.

By selecting a certified Intel Cluster Ready system for your registered Intel Cluster Ready applications you can be confident that hardware and software components will work together, right out of the box. Software tools such as Intel® Cluster Checker help ensure that those components continue to work together, delivering a high level of quality and a low total cost of ownership over the course of the cluster’s lifetime.

To learn more about Intel HPC Technology visit www.intel.com/go/HPC

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!

Germany, France, or the UK: Who Wins for Server ROI?

edward.g.groden@intel.com — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 19:41:28 GMT

Most of the time, server ROI is measured on the data center scale, replacing tens, hundreds, or even thousands of servers with fewer higher-performing and more energy efficient servers.

But...have you ever wondered how much power you could save if you replaced every 4 year old server in an entire country with Xeon 5500 Nehalem-based systems? What about how much CO2 that could be removed for those same 4-year old servers – and number of cars it effectively removes from the road?

Well, wonder no more! Check out this short paper for an eye-opening comparison of the UK, Germany, and France, and how big of an ROI they can realize if the entire country refreshed ALL of their 4-year-old servers. It looks at power savings, land reclamation, and monetary savings in slightly different terms, like how much space can be saved in comparison to the floor area of Notre Dame Cathedral? You’ll need to read on to find out more… J

Additionally, all calculations were done using the Xeon ROI tool, so check it out and come up with some more interesting comparisons based on your city, state, or country data. Be sure to post them here!

Migrating, there has never been a better time than now!

julie.a.baker@intel.com — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:47:36 GMT

Why migrate? Why now?

There has never been a better time to migrate your proprietary RISC servers running UNIX(R) to Intel(R) Xeon(R) processor-powered Dell™ PowerEdge™ servers running Red Hat(R) Enterprise Linux(R) Why? Four compelling reasons. First, cost, cost, and cost again. This industry-standard platform can reduce your capital expenditures as well as your operational costs for a lower total cost of ownership (TCO). Second, choice and flexibility. Because you’re not locked into proprietary technologies, you have substantial choices that keep you nimble and agile no matter how your business needs evolve. Third, simplicity. The Red Hat-Dell-Intel platform just works. And acquiring all the products and services you need from one source–Dell–reduces the complexities of both technology procurement and support. Finally, performance. In these challenging economic times, migrating from RISC and UNIX to a Red Hat-Dell-Intel solution is an easy and fast way to accomplish more with less, bringing true value to your business.

Power Your Enterprise

Because Red Hat Enterprise Linux is optimized for the Intel Xeon processor on which Dell PowerEdge servers are based, you can support your business’s most demanding challenges. For starters, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 takes advantage of the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series to deliver more than twice the performance compared toprevious generation Intel processors.1 Because Red Hat Enterprise Linux incorporates Intel’s energy efficiency enhancements, such as integrated power gates and automated low power states to support low-latency changes among power states, you can lower power consumption during off-peak times. This has the additional benefit of reducing datacenter cooling requirements. You achieve previously unattainable scalability with support for up to 255 central processing units (CPUs) and one terabyte of memory. And Red Hat Enterprise Linux supports Intel Hyper-Treading Technology to enable advanced parallel computing.

Learn More

To learn more about migrating from a proprietary RISC /UNIX platform to a Red Hat, Dell, Intel solution navigate to http://www.redhat.com/intelligence/, then click on White Papers.

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??

What is a digital workbench?

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

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

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

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

The Changing Face of the Digital Workstation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the winner of the Intel Xeon Workstation Sweepstakes is...

greg.wagnon@intel.com — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:38:33 GMT

Congratulations to Ron as the winner of the Intel Xeon Workstation Sweepstakes. He has been a member of The Server Room for over a year and was able to complete the quiz on the first attempt.

Good job!

"I was excited to hear that I won the Intel Xeon workstation sweepstakes. With its incredible performance, the system offers me the flexibility to use it in so many ways that I'm not sure how to best utilize it at the moment. It's a welcome problem to have and I look forward exploring the possibilities. Thanks to Intel and the Server Room team for providing a great resource to everyone!"

Thank you all for entering and look for more sweepstakes offerings in the near future.

- Your 'The Server Room' Admin's

Somebody Blew The Whistle on The ‘Nehalem’ Effect

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

There’s a video going around from one of Intel’s top external customers. Before you see this (video linked below) I wanted to position this correctly. I caught up with Mr. X at an undisclosed coffee shop and got his approval to share publicly the messages that we would have rather had him go out with. Those messages are as follows:

Mr. X’s 4 year old servers were a burden on his organization, he spent all of his budget on just maintenance, nothing left for innovation.

He looked at his old infrastructure and determined that replacing them with more powerful-energy efficient servers from Intel was a strategic investment.

The New intel Xeon 5500 based servers provided the opportunity for him to innovate again. He claimed that these new Intel Xeon Processor 5500 (Nehalem-EP) are the best enabler of IT business value that he's seen in years.

They boosted energy efficiency, saved him big $ and extended his facility lifespan – now he doesn’t have to go build a new data center.

He replaced his old servers in a 9:1 ratio (getting rid of 9 old and replacing with 1 new) that enabled him to cut operational expenditures by 90% …And that savings alone is paying for the investment in these new servers in just 8 months.

By strategically investing in IT when his competitors hunkered down and cut spending – he is now positioned to grow faster and gain share as the economic upturn arrives.

Ok, now that I’ve had a chance to convey his real messages, you can check out this video.