I had never heard of a cloud forest before I went on vacation this past June to Costa Rica where I spent time at the Villa Blanca Resort.  Even when we arrived at Villa Blanca, I have to admit I was a little confused.  I had expected to see a forest in the clouds, however, I saw a beautiful hill side scattered with a few trees.

However, when we went on our walking tour the next morning, our tour guide walked up to one of the larger trees and says “Welcome to the Cloud Forest.  This tree is a perfect example of a cloud forest”.   As I looked more closely at the tree, I was amazed at what I saw - this single tree was host to thousands of species of both plants and animals.

Nature is extremely efficient in it’s use of a cloud forest.  Likewise, Cloud Computing is an extremely efficient use of computing resources.  It is for this reason that Intel IT has developed an enterprise cloud computing strategy focused on building an internal cloud to boost efficiency and flexibility inside of our IT infrastructure.  This internal cloud strategy is closely linked to our current use and accelerated plans for virtualization. In addition Intel IT uses the external cloud services selectively for certain applications.

Additionally, we are exploring using rich mobile clients with cloud computing models moving forward to better meet the needs of an ever changing user base, consumerization trends and the need to maintain highly efficient, secure information and application delivery to employees.

To find more discussion, blogs and content relating to cloud computing – in the enterprise or corporate client solution areas – take advantage of these resources.

And .. if you ever have the chance to visit Costa Rica .. visit the cloud forest. It was worth the trip.

Chris Peters, Intel IT

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My grandfather was born in the early 1900’s.  By all accounts he was a hardworking man with a strong degree of curiosity.  He passed away in his late 80’s and before he died I remember talking to him about my pursuit of an Electrical Engineering degree.  He nodded politely, asked a few questions and when I helped to fix the electrical outlet in his garage I got the sense that he thought I was heading down the path to be an electrician.  I believe that thought pleased him.  Several years ago I was explaining to my five year old daughter in layman’s terms what I did for a living and what my company made.  I said things like “We make tiny engines that run computers” or “I work with computers that run websites like Webkinz® and Disney®”.  She seemed impressed.  Months later when she was asked by a parent of her friend what her dad did for a living I was a combination of proud and surprised to hear that she replied “They make chips…”  (proud moment) “…and salsa!” (um OK.  I still have work to do).

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Now the other day she walked up to me and said something like “Dad, I am having trouble getting the Slingbox to work on mom’s iPod Touch.  It is connected to the Internet but the remote does not seem to be changing the channel.  Can you help me?”  Clearly she has made some progress up the technology curve, but it also struck me how far she has come.  Kids these days are surrounded by technology.  In our house alone there are at least the following electronic devices; Oven, Microwave, AppleTV, refrigerator, smoke detector (3), carbon monoxide detector, programmable thermostat, furnace, radio, garage door opener (2), wireless speakers, televisions (3), set top boxes (3), ceiling fans with remotes (3), netbook, Slingbox, Clear wireless router, remote outlet, sprinkler control box, iPod Touch, desktop computer, Wii, iPod shuffle (2), alarm clocks (3), oven timer, electronic light dimmer, cordless phones (4), AV receiver, DVD players (3), VCR, iPod docking station, security system, motion sensor, camcorder, camera (2), USB hub, music keyboard, AV switch, computer keyboard, battery chargers (4), Wii remotes (4), Wii Fit Pad, Wii drums, copier/fax/scanner, computer monitor, AC, Power supplies (4), RFID credit cards (2), washer, dryer, noise canceling headphones, answering machine, internet modem, cell phones (2), handheld GPS, auto GPS and electronic battleship.

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I am sure I have forgotten several things and I did not count cars or anything at my children’s school.  I am also sure each of the electronic devices in our house has either a processor, microcontroller, ASIC or multiple of each.  Admittedly, the silicon content in our house is probably above average given where I work and the personalities my wife and I have.  But when I think back to my grandfather he had none of these silicon laden items.  I am sure he didn’t care since it is hard to miss something you never knew.  Of the hundreds of pieces of silicon in our house about a dozen or so are smart enough to connect to each other or to “the cloud” in some way.  I put “the cloud” in quotes because it is not only the most over-hyped word of it’s time it is also the best way to articulate what I suspect my children and many others think of the services that they get when all of this stuff gets connected.

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I can safely say two things are fact. First, my grandchildren will have in their house many more pieces of silicon than I do. Second, they will have more pieces of silicon that can connect to each other and communicate with “the cloud”.  There are many billions of devices connected to the Internet today and that number will grow.  At Intel we are building silicon, and increasingly software assets, that facilitate the processing and movement of data both on those devices and between them. Servers are increasingly becoming an important part of that over-hyped cloud word. My cable company has a cloud delivering me my on demand video content, A social media site allows me to upload pictures into their cloud to share with my friends, someone just used a cloud architecture to develop a perpetual motion machine.  OK, one of those things was false.

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My grandfather thought a cloud was something in the sky.  My children think it streams video to their handheld device.  What will our great-grandchildren think?

Open Cloud – Where it Makes Most Sense

Openness and standardization have been an eternity topic for computer industry. Since the early 80’s when the PC revolution led by Intel processors, open hardware standards have revolutionized the computer industry with standardized hardware components and building blocks. HW stadnards, USB, PCI-E, SATA, SAS, etc. are common to servers and PCs alike. At the same time many software standard emerged DLL, CORBA, Web Services, etc. to ensure software interoperability. Open standards have become the gene pool of today’s computing infrastructure.

How will open standards and open source solutions play in the cloud computing era? As we look at the most popular cloud service providers today, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. None of them have open standards, at most they have open interfaces for others to interact with, but the cloud solution stack is mostly proprietary. If past history is a mirror of the future, we can foresee that as cloud services become more popular, open standards will play more and more important roles. A natural question to ask is how much open standards can play in the context of cloud computing? That is a question interesting to many of us. Let me try to share my opinion on this.

As indicated in the chart below, the level of open standards decrease as we go higher up to the cloud services stack. At the very bottom, the hardware building blocks, we need strong interoperability and inter-changeable (disposable?) components. They should be general independent of cloud middleware and application services. At the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform services (Platform as a service – PaaS) layers, cloud operators are more likely to use open standard and generic building blocks to build their infrastructure services, even though they have to be optimized and work well with the cloud environment (cloud middleware or cloud OS) of their choice. While in the upper layers of cloud solution stack, where and application services (SaaS) are defined, there are a greater needs for cloud operators to offer differentiated services. That is where they will put their “secrete source” for competitiveness. It will be much more difficult to drive open standard building blocks/ components, other than focusing on interoperable interfaces, such as web services standards.

Based on the analysis above, it is safe to assume that open standard and open source opportunities are most promising at HW building blocks, IaaS, and PaaS layers. That should be where the industry is more likely to build consensus. While for the upper layers, especially SaaS, we should focus on interface standards, not as much on standard building blocks and open source solutions.

Intel has been a leader for HW standard building block for the last 30 years and has changed the industry. It is natural to assume that Intel should focus IaaS and PaaS building blocksas well as how these open standards could be applied at open datacenters (ODC) as“adjacent” growth opportunities to embrace the booming cloud computing. Some conventional wisdom says that Intel is not relevant to cloud, as cloud computing be definition abstracts HW. I would say just the opposite – Intel will continue to play a critical role to define and promote open standards and open source solutions for IaaS and PaaS, so that the cloud can actually mushroom. There is a strong correlation between how fast cloud computing can proliferate and how well Intel plays its role to lead the open cloud solutions at IaaS and PaaS layers. What do you think?

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Definition of taxonomy:

•      ODC– (Open Data Center) Currently stands for a set of interoperable technologies optimized for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS datacenters.  At the most basic levels, these optimizations will also apply to traditional enterprise as well in areas such as power management but higher level management will be tailored for IaaS and SaaS high density datacenters.

•      SaaS – Software as a Service:  is a model of software deployment whereby a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand.  Examples include Google apps, Salesforce.com, etc.

•      PaaS – Platform as a Service:  It facilitates deployment of applications without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware and software layers, providing all of the facilities required to support the complete life cycle of building and delivering web applications and services entirely available from the Internet—with no software downloads or installation for developers, IT managers or end-users

•      IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service:  Rather than purchasing servers, software, data center space or network equipment, clients instead buy those resources as a fully outsourced service. The service is typically billed on a utility computing basis and amount of resources consumed (and therefore the cost) will typically reflect the level of activity.

Cloud.

I haven’t seen as hyped a term in the data center arena since…um…virtualization.  Everyone is talking cloud, promising cloud, and believing cloud.  But what exactly is this thing called cloud? Is it outsourcing services to a provider, the next generation of virtualization, or something completely different?  There are a lot of definitions, and everyone has opinions…strongly held opinions that led me to my Rolling Stones inspired title to this post (yep, those lyrics...you can sing along now).  Chip Chat decided to get to the bottom of the cloud story, so we were excited to spend some time recently with Intel’s queen of the cloud, Raejeanne Skillern.  Check out my conversation with her here.

Yesterday – Intel officially launched the Intel® Xeon® 5500 processor (formerly codenamed “Nehalem”) for servers and workstations. One of the most exciting uses of this new platform will be as a key building block in cloud computing infrastructure. Whether you’ve bought into the hype of cloud computing or are a jaded IT realist – you can’t afford to pass up this list of 10 reasons the Intel Xeon 5500 processor is perfect for the cloud.

1. Efficiency. To get the greatest efficiency – the leaders of large-scale Internet providers place their datacenters next to hydroelectric power or other low-cost energy sources. Each watt saved flows straight to the bottom line. Similarly – cloud computing companies intensely scrutinize their server purchases – weighing some variation of this question: how much performance (and by extension, revenue) can I squeeze out of the equipment – versus the cost of procurement and operations. This is the essence of “efficiency”. And now – with Intel’s new Xeon 5500 processor – there’s great news for anyone building efficient cloud infrastructure. The Xeon 5500 can deliver up to 2.25X the computing performance at a similar system power envelope compared to Intel’s previous generation Xeon 5400 series¹. (By the way – the Xeon 5400 is no efficiency slouch – as it’s been leading the industry-standard SpecPower results for two socket systems since the benchmark was created.²) Need more evidence of Xeon 5500 efficiency? Look no further than the amazing results announced by IBM – a score of 1860, which is a 64% leap over the previous high score for a two socket system.³ Results like this clearly demonstrate that the Xeon 5500 has the extremely efficient performance that cloud operators are seeking.
2. Virtualization performance. If a cloud service provider has leveraged a virtualization layer in its architecture - the performance of virtual machines and the ratio of VMs to servers are key concerns. Enter the Xeon 5500 which boasts a stellar jump in virtualization performance, up to 2 times the previous generation Xeon 5400 series⁴ allowing virtualized clouds to squeeze even more capability out of their infrastructure.
3. Adaptable. Cloud computing environments tend to be highly dynamic as usage ebbs and flows during the day, some applications scale rapidly while some shut down, and so on. To meet such shifting demand – it’s critical to have adaptable cloud building blocks. And here Intel’s Xeon 5500 shines: this processor has unique new intelligence to increase performance when needed (Intel Turbo Boost) and to reduce power consumption when demand falls (Intel Intelligent Power Management Technology).
4. Designed for higher operating temperatures. Across the datacenter industry – there’s growing interest in the notion of running datacenters at warmer temperatures to conserve energy. For cloud computing mega-datacenters, this concept has been in practice for several years. But it’s not just the datacenter staff that needs to handle warmer climates - the equipment must tolerate the conditions as well. Intel’s Xeon 5500 has been designed to run at higher temperatures providing one more piece of the puzzle to enable more efficient cloud infrastructure environments⁵.
5. 50% lower idle power. Cloud computing providers – like airlines and phone companies – need to run at the highest utilization possible to maintain a healthy P&L. Yet there are times when usage – and thus server utilization – drops and at these times, cloud service providers desire processors with low power consumption. The Xeon 5500 processor now boasts an idle power that’s up to 50% lower than the prior generation systems, reducing energy costs⁶.
6. Advanced power management. Intel has incorporated special platform level power technologies into the Xeon 5500 platform – which open new avenues to managing server energy consumption beyond what’s already built into the processor. Intel Intelligent Power Node Manager is a power control policy engine that dynamically adjusts platform power to achieve the optimum performance-power ratio for each server. By setting user-defined platform energy policies – Node Manager can enable datacenter operators to increase server rack density while staying within a given power threshold. While results vary based on the type of application and server – Intel demonstrated up to 20% improvement in rack density by using Node Manager in a recent proof-of-concept with Baidu, a leading search engine⁷.
7. High Performance Memory Architecture. Cloud computing and other highly scalable Internet services are often relying on workloads where it makes more sense to keep large volumes of memory in DRAM, close to the CPU, rather than on slower, more distant hard drives. “Memcached” – a distributed caching system used by many leading Internet companies – is but one example. The Intel Xeon 5500 offers several exciting memory architecture benefits over the previous generation: (1) Up to 3.5X the memory bandwidth⁸ by leveraging an integrated memory controller and Intel Quick Path Interconnect (QPI), (2) supports a larger memory footprint (144GB versus 128GB), and (3) DIMMs and QPI links automatically move to lower power states when not active. In these new caching and distributed workloads, where large memory architectures are crucial, the Intel Xeon 5500 offers real advantages.
8. Perfect when paired with SSDs. Few technologies get datacenter gurus more excited than solid state drives – which can offer impressive performance gains over their rotating hard drive cousins at far lower energy consumption. But with SSDs that can read 1000 times more data into the CPU versus a HDD – you want a ravenous processing beast to handle the traffic. And – you’re catching on to the blog theme – the Xeon 5500 can provide up to 72% better performance using SSDs than even the previous generation Xeon systems⁹. Intel Xeon 5500 is truly a perfect engine to complement SSDs.
9. Ideal for optimized server boards. For cloud infrastructure – where every watt is a pernicious tax – you need more than just an extremely efficient processor such as the Xeon 5500. You also need an optimized server platform that has been stripped of every unneeded feature, configured with world-class energy efficient components, and designed for reduced airflow that minimizes the use of fans. One such product is an Intel server motherboard – codenamed “Willowbrook” which has an impressively low idle power below 70W, considering it’s a dual Xeon 5500 performance rocket¹⁰.
10. A competitive lever for cloud operators. Lastly, for a service provider scaling out its infrastructure – systems based on Intel Xeon 5500 processors could offer a competitive advantage versus service providers whose servers are 2 to 3 years old. Because of the performance leaps in Intel server processors in the past few generations – Intel Xeon 5500 based servers can handle the same performance load as up to three times the number of 3-year old dual core servers¹¹. The benefit is clear: providing the same performance level but with far fewer servers means a leg-up on those service providers with more antiquated, less efficient infrastructure.

If you have made it through this lengthy top 10 list – you should have a better sense for the advantages of Intel’s latest processor for cloud computing environments. Of course, the best way to really see the benefits is to get an Intel Xeon 5500 based system from your preferred vendor and test with your own code.

^{1 - 11}For Footnotes, Performance Background, and Legal information, please refer to the attached document.

Virtualization 1.0 is yesterday’s news; the days of virtualization being used only as a tactical tool to drive consolidation and higher system utilization are quickly ending. For the most part, companies have figured out how to get improved utilization, and are using server virtualization in a wide range of usage models across development, testing and some rather interesting production/mission-critical scenarios.   Its use is gradually maturing from simple partitioning and encapsulation to leveraging the mobility of virtual machines to improve management and operations of IT environments. This is allowing the change in deployment models for virtualization from typical scale-up approach (SMP with large Memory servers) to a scale-out model.

Virtualization 2.0 includes a host of new use cases (shouldn’t be surprising to anyone) that include:

·         Load-balancing for SLA Mgt

·         Power-optimization

·         High availability (no downtimes)

·         Disaster recovery and business continuity

·         Hosted clients

·         SOA & Utility computing.

I see three key foundational tenets as the underpinnings for these usages.  First are the “abstraction” and the “convergence” of compute servers, storage and networks. It has been happening, but virtualization 2.0++ is driving (and will continue to drive) a seismic rethink in how Data centers are architected, and the data center would be a “Fungible” pool of infrastructural resources, for a wide variety of services that IT provides to run the businesses.   I will get deep into the implications of this to IT operations, etc, in a follow on blog, but will leave you with this thought.  The new control point in the data center, both architecturally and operationally, would be the integration of compute, storage and network virtualization architectures.  Key industry players like IBM, HP, Cisco, EMC, VMWare and Microsoft are introducing integrated solution architectures targeted at positioning themselves as the first vendor of choice for this emerging direction.  This foundational tenet, coupled with the merits of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), is providing an infrastructure for ‘Cloud Computing’.

The Second core tenet is the mobility of Virtual machines - The migrate-ability of the ‘encapsulated’ Virtual machines on this abstracted infrastructure for the best performance, operational cost and SLA management.  They are no longer tied to a server or a set of servers. In some cases they are not tied to a datacenter; hybrid models are emerging where these VMs would execute in the ‘enterprise’ data center, or on external clouds – the optimal place for the best TCO, and SLA management  (Yes, yes, there are security, compliance, accounting, performance concerns… I agree)

The third core aspect is Manageability.  The abstraction and the mobility, coupled with IT’s job of ensuring security, reliability and compliance brings a totally new set of requirements for Manageability.   

If done right, the benefits of Virtualization 2.0 (and 2.0++) to IT shops would be in the form of reduced administrative costs, improve productivity even as demand goes, reduce energy and cooling costs, etc,   however, there are quite a few challenges with the adoption of Virtualization 2.0.  Let us briefly look at these.

Challenges with Virtualization 2.0

1.      There is a significant challenge in the management of large scale virtual infrastructures. There are no clear boundaries and responsibilities in terms network, storage and datacenter management teams.  The emphasis on monitoring and management in Virtualization 2.0 is shifting from virtual machine (VM) management to service management; i.e., knowing how a business service is performing and which components of the Data Center (network, server, VM, applications) are working properly and which are not. Hence, it's no longer sufficient to just monitor the uptime or resource usage levels of virtual machines and physical servers and conclude that the entire IT infrastructure is working right.   More granular monitoring and management of resources would be needed to provide precise QoS and SLA management.

2.      VM Mobility – The Mobility of Virtual machines puts requirements on the underlying server CPU architectures, and has challenges with networks and storage.  Such mobility occurs via either a cold migration - which simply copies the virtual machine and restarts a copy somewhere else. Or a live migration, which moves a live running virtual machine, while maintaining state.  There are clear cases where cold migration is sufficient, but the flexibility and agility that is inherent with the virtualization 2.0 use-models requires the ‘live migration’ of VMs. 

·         VM Mobility and the ‘Compatible CPU Architecture’ requirements: Successful migration relies on compatibility between the processors of the host servers within a cluster. For live migration to take place, the source and destination servers must be in the same cluster and must have processors that expose the same instruction set., In the past, it has not been possible to mix servers based on different processor generations, each of which support different instruction sets, within the same cluster without sacrificing the ability to live migrate VMs across hosts supporting different instruction sets. As a result, IT organizations have needed to create separate clusters for different server generations. This has limited our ability to provide an agile data center environment because it creates islands of compute capacity, resulting in data center fragmentation.  Intel’s VT FlexMigration assist, together with VMWare’s Enhanced VMotion, provide a solution. These products are designed to allow IT to maximize flexibility by creating a single pool of compute and memory resources using multiple generations of Intel processor-based servers within the same cluster.  This can reduce the number of pools, increase the efficiency and utilization of servers.

·         VM Mobility & networks: Today, when Virtual machines move on the virtual infrastructure, its network properties and policies are not retained.  Connection state, ACL, Port Security properties, ACL Redirect, Qos Marking, etc are lost as these VMs move across hosts.   Technologies like the VMWare distributed switch, and Cisco’s Nexus 1000v are specifically targeted to address the ‘Network and Security’ aspects of VM Mobility.

3. Licensing in Virtual environments:  Licensing rules for applications, development tools, data management tools and operating systems often make a completely virtual environment more costly than the organization expects.   Most all ISVs are looking at ‘virtualization’ friendly licensing models, but they are far from being there.  Example:  With Oracle database servers, if you have a 16core server as your host, it doesn’t matter if you database VM uses 4 vCPUs, you would still need the license for 16 cores.  If you would “Live Migrate” the VM, you would need the license on each of the host… This gets prohibitively expensive and impractical.

4. 10G Networks and Converged Fabrics: The Compute power on the servers has increased dramatically, and with the advent of 8 core processors, the bottleneck clearly moves out of the server, and on to the network and storage bandwidths and throughput.  Virtualization 2.0 will require the consolidation of network traffic and will also increase the need for more bandwidth to the server, both of which will be possible as enterprises make the move to converge and consolidate data, storage, and inter process traffic on 10GbE networks.  10GbE and the converged networks need new switches, access cards, and also a rethink of how applications view the network I/O.  

5. Security and Isolation guarantees – The hosting of multiple ‘services’ on an abstracted virtualized infrastructure has very specific needs on Security and isolation, multi-tenancy isolation, compliance and audit requirements..  In addition to providing these on a server (for a given service), the infrastructure has to guarantee these across the infrastructure – doesn’t matter on which server (and where) the service and data reside/execute, they need to be secure and isolated. 

In conclusion, Virtualization 2.0 would have a dramatic impact on the architecture of the data center, and also IT architectures and operations.  IT shops will use virtualization for administrative cost reduction, better resource allocation, and more flexibility in a mobile world.   Coupled with Service Oriented Architectures,, the promise of true service-oriented/utility computing might be closer than it has ever been with Virtualization.

Would love to hear your thoughts and views on this..

Here's a cool new site I came across where you can contribute to defining what Server Virtualization is all about: Virtualization Conversation

You can also listen in to some Webcasts coming this month with Iddo Kadim, Director of Virtualization Technologies at Intel and Bob Zuber of IBM:

Register Here

Check it out, there's also a cool new widget that let's you draw your ideas on a whiteboard: Share Your Definition

These new widgets are really getting cool