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.

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)

1. Improved bandwidth. Up to 9 times memory bandwidth of previous generations
2. Introduction of Quickpath Interconnects to the EX systems
3. Add new RAS features previously seen on Itanium products to Xeon products
4. Significant improvement in performance vs previous generations e.g. Database 2.5xe
5. More scalable platforms through 8 OEMs offering >8S. These platforms are key to manage large databases and for large scale consolidation
6. 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?

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?

A MONSTER CHIP IS COMING. The next generation of MP processor is targeted for production later this year, and by all accounts it is going to be a monster. Nehalem-EX is part of the Nehalem family of processors, but compared to its siblings it has the highest cores/threads count, largest shared cache, highest CPU-to-CPU bandwidth, highest I/O bandwidth, highest memory capacity, highest memory bandwidth, greatest scalability, and highest level of Reliability/Availability/Serviceability. It’s expected to bring a gargantuan, unprecedented leap in capabilities and performance--the biggest leap in all of Xeon product history.

IT’S TARGETED AT “BIG BOXES”. Big box servers are multiprocessor systems using the most capable processors and platform components. These systems are targeted at applications and usages that require the largest memory footprints, the highest amounts of single-box processing power (for workloads that don’t decompose well into lots of independent threads) and/or advanced levels of RAS. Such systems are typically the best choice for large databases, ERP apps, Business Intelligence apps, large-scale server consolidation and business-critical virtualization, mission critical applications and large scale high performance computing.

IT USES THE SAME PROCESSING TECHNOLOGY AS THE SUCCESSFUL XEON 5500, BUT MORE OF IT. Just like with Xeon 5500, the Nehalem micro-architecture brings improved single-threaded performance via IPC (Instructions per Clock) enhancements and Intel’s Hi-k 45nm manufacturing process. Greater multi-threaded performance comes via Hyper-Threading and more cores. But while the Xeon 5500 has up to 4 cores/16threads per socket, the Nehalem-EX monster doubles that to 8 cores/16 threads.

HAS A BEEFIER MEMORY AND INTERCHIP COMMUNICATION SUBSYSTEMS. Monster thread processing capabilities require monster size feeding to bring out the best performance. Nehalem-EX’s raw processing potential is made viable by a heavy duty memory subsystem and inter-chip communication system.

Nehalem-EX has 24MB of shared level 3 cache--that’s 50% more than the current Xeon 7400 and 200% more than Xeon 5500. The memory channel bandwidth was increased to 9-times that of Xeon 7400. And it’s all attached to up to 16 DIMM slots per socket (that’s 64DIMMs slots for 4 sockets)—double the current generation of Xeon 7400.

In a multi-socket system, processors need to communicate with each other in order to most efficiently coordinate their shared workload. They also need lots of I/O bandwidth. Nehalem-EX has four QuickPath Interconnects on every socket--double that of Xeon 5500. The four QPI links enable Nehalem-EX processors to be directly connected to each other in a 4 socket system. This offers significant performance advantage over a so-called ring architecture wherein some processor-to-processor communication must go through an intermediary processor. The extra QPIs also mean that there’s plenty of CPU to I/O bandwidth.

EXPECTED TO BRING THE GREATEST LEAP FORWARD IN XEON PERFORMANCE EVER. On key server performance benchmarks (e.g. SPEC_int_rate, SPEC_floating point_rate, TPC-C, etc) Xeon 5500 using Nehalem technology brought gains of over 100-200% greater than prior generation. Generational gains of this magnitude come along just about once a decade. Nehalem-EX’s generation-to-generation performance gains are expected to be substantially higher than those of Xeon 5500. We’ve already seen measured memory bandwidth of 9X vs. prior generation. That’s an early indication of the level by which new performance records will be set when this monster chip comes to market.

Related Topics:

NHM-EX Press Fact Sheet

NHM-EX May 26^th Press Briefing Video – condensed version

IBM 8Socket Demo Video

NHM-EX--A New Standard

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

Ah, the good old days.... It was normal to have a discussion with a friend or coworker member about something like, "We just bought a 1.2 GHz Pentium III server, it runs circles around that 500 MHz system we bought a few years back."  Everyone nods in approval, all rightly assuming that of course bigger is better and frequency directly relates to performance.  Of course now things are more complex with multi-core, multi-threads, differing architectures (Power, SPARC, Xeon, Opteron).  Is a dual-core at Power6 4.7 GHz faster than a Xeon at 3 GHz? Is a 1.4 GHz processor with 8 threads/core better than a 2.8 GHz quad-core with 2 threads per core?  Tough to know off the top of your head these days.  One thing is clear, the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series is in the lead of performance per processor (regardless of the frequency of processors available today). 

In comparing the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series (Nehalem) architecture vs. what's available from IBM, Sun, and AMD today, you see a wide variety of cpu offerings with dramatically differing specs.  However, when you take a look at all these systems with a common number of cores, you can see the differences in per core performance on the industry standard benchmark SPECint_rate_base2006

What a contrast!  Chip designers today have multiple choices to make to eek out the most performance in today's server systems.  What we see today is that the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series balances all of these quite well.  Whereas others have much higher frequencies, it doesn't necessarily translate into more performance, while others have gone with a larger number of threads, but have low performance per thread.  Even processors that have similar specs have performance that is quite different.  Of course this is only one benchmark, however if you look at others you will find similar differences.   

What this means for most IT buyers is it's more difficult to understand how all the whiz-bang features the marketers throw at you and how they translate into value for you.  My advice, really understand what kind of workloads are improtant to you and focus on the performance from industry standard workloads that best represent those.  Remember that bigger numbers on the spec sheet aren't always better when it comes to server performance.  Check your figures!

SPECint_rate_base2006 performance data reference:

Intel® Xeon® processor X5570 based platform details

Fujitsu PRIMERGY* TX300 S5 server platform with two Intel Xeon processors X5570 2.93GHz, 8MB L3 cache, 6.4GT/s QPI, 48 GB memory (6x8 GB PC3-10600R, 2 rank, CL9-9-9, ECC), SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP2 x86_64 Kernel 2.6.16.60-0.21-smp, Intel C++ Compiler for Linux32 and Linux64 version 11.0 build 20010131. SPECint_rate_base2006 score 240, http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2009q1/cpu2006-20090313-06653.html

AMD Opteron 2393SE based platform details

Supermicro A+ Server 1021M-UR+B, AMD Opteron 2393 SE 3.1 GHz, 6MB L3 cache, 32 GB memory (8x4 GB DDR2-800, CL5, Reg, Dual-rank), SuSE Enterprise Server 10 (x86_64) SP1, Kernel 2.6.16.46-0.12-smp, PGI Server Complete Version 7.2, PathScale Compiler Suite Version 3.2, SPECint_rate_base2006 score 122, http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2009q2/cpu2006-20090406-06931.html

IBM Power6 based platform details

IBM system p570 (4.7 GHz, 8 core), 32MB L3 cache, 64 GB memory (32x2 GB)DDR2 667 MHz, IBM AIX5L V5.3, XL C/C++ Enterprise Edition Version 9.0 for AIX, SPECint_rate_base2006 score 206, http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2007q2/cpu2006-20070518-01103.html

Sun UltraSPARC T2 plus based platform details

Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120, Sun UltraSPARC T2 1.417 GHz, 4MB L2 cache, 64 GB memory (16x4 GB), Solaris 10 8/07 (build s10s_u4wos_12b), Sun Studio 12 (patch build 2007/08/30), SPECint_rate_base2006 score 73.0, http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2007q4/cpu2006-20071009-02247.html

OK, so we launched the Xeon 5500 processor based servers and workstations a couple of weeks ago. While I don’t have direct quotes of support from Brit, Miley, Susan or any country presidents who have signed economic stimulus into law I am pretty confident that if they were ever actually considering purchasing a server or workstation they would come to the conclusion that the new Xeon 5500 platforms would be their best choice.

I had the privilege of being at one of the thirty seven different worldwide Xeon 5500 launch events. I was on Wall Street and attended the NASDAQ launch event on March 31^st. Based on which data source estimate you look at Financial Services as a whole represents about 20% of the worldwide market for servers. It was also evident when meeting with customers in the NYC area that they are passionate about performance and power consumption. Most of them had received pre-production seed systems and had already done extensive testing prior to this launch event. I have been in Intel’s Server Platform Group for over a decade now and I have never seen so much enthusiasm for a product launch.

I won’t rehash the performance benchmarks and performance per watt data. There are many benchmarks, blogs and press articles doing that. What I took away from the conversations was a feeling of optimism from the end users I spoke to. Some people felt that these new products would be what it takes for them to deliver solutions that would give them a performance advantage over their competition. In few markets does that pay off more, and translate almost directly to the bottom line, than in Financial Services. Others felt that these systems would help them continue to add to their existing datacenters without having the need to build a new one. This was due to the performance per watt improvements and the end users ability to replace many old servers and workstations with a few new ones.

Lastly, I think human nature being what it is we are seeing that IT professionals want to work on cool new projects. These Xeon 5500 servers and workstations represent a shiny new toy that IT professionals can use to have a material impact on the bottom lines of their companies. To some degree the same applies to virtualization in that it is disruptive and provides a new cost effective way to deliver legacy solutions and also enables flexibility for future growth. The IT folks that I have met who familiarize themselves with virtualization, new hardware and advanced management techniques (power, systems, virtualization) generally are viewed internal to their companies as leaders with visionary capabilities.

As we all work through this economic morass I am hopeful that with new technology introductions, and a relentless focus on efficiency, we will all emerge with a greater level of capability and a higher degree of flexibility. I also believe IT will emerge as a key asset of differentiation for companies from Wall Street to Main Street and this will place an even greater burden on delivering solutions to meet those unique needs.

What do you think?

Shannon

shannon.poulin@intel.com

Why Invest in IT … for Large Enterprises

In my blog titled top 10 reasons to buy in a recession  , I discussed generic reasons to invest.  For large enterprises with a large install base of servers (multiple data centers, row and rows or rooms and rooms of servers), you have the economies of scale on your side.  Most likely, about 40% of your existing servers use single-core processor technology and another estimated 40% based of dual-core processor (source IDC).  Running existing infrastructure on these slower servers is just plan inefficient compared to the new servers available on the new Intel Microarchitecture (Nehalem) – intel's 3^rd generation of quad-core processors for 2 socket servers.

Based on Intel estimates, replacing nine single-core based servers with one new xeon 5500 can yield up to 90% lower operating costs, delivering a payback on investment in  as short at 8 months (learn more here) … or … by upgrading single-core, dual-core or even the latest quad-core processors can yield performance enhancements that can boost productivity or open up new business opportunities. 

Even though this is day of introduction, there are four large companies today that have already identified the benefits of using these new processors.  See their results below

ð       Play saw roaming mobile transaction times reduce from 102 minutes to 44 minutes from last years quad-core processors and expects to be able to reduce the cost of running its data centre with these energy efficient servers.

ð       Capgemini tested a virtualization environment and sees ability to help their development team be more productive while strengthening customer offerings … as exhibited by a reduction in response time from 12.46 sec to 5.56 seconds compared to last years quad-core processors

ð       The Technical University of Munich saw processing speeds increase by 66% and experience 4x memory bandwidth for applications leading them and their customers to consider new projects and compute models for their research and business.

ð       Business & Decision saw the ability for 20:1 virtualization ratios with utilization levels at approximately 55%, providing the ability to improve customer service levels, productivity, reduce implementation costs by 50% and anticipates a ROI of < 1year. 

The bottom line is that these customers are moving forward with technology investment as a core strategy to boost their business and cut costs – helping them to emerge stronger and more competitive in their industry as economic conditions improve.

What could the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series based server do in your business?

Chris