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.

At Intel, we not only pack a lot of performance in a small form factor, we also pack a lot of great demos and theater presentations into our booth at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco (South Moscone, booth #1621).  We have 5 demos from 5 of our customers—Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, and Sun—and 3 other demos showcasing Wind River, Intel’s SOA Expressway product, and last, but certainly not least, Intel’s amazing and upcoming Nehalem-EX processor, which you heard Michael Dell praise in his keynote this morning.

Over the course of the three days of our booth at OOW (Monday through Wednesday this week), we will have over 35 brief presentations that will help you plan your requirements for your next generation data center.  They are short and sweet, and you can ask all the questions you want.  If you simply attend a presentation and get a few more stamps form our demo stations, you can enter to win one of two netbooks that will be given away at the end of each day.

Outside of our booth, you may find us presenting in various partners’ booths and we hope to see you in a session we are having later today (see info below).  We had an amazing session yesterday from resident Intel genius, Steve Shaw.  The huge room was filled to capacity.  At this other session today we will be giving away a netbook.  Here are the logistics for today’s session:

ID#: S309892

Title: Ten Ways to Improve J2EE Application Performance on Multicore Systems

Track: Oracle Develop: Enterprise Java and Oracle WebLogic

Date: 13-OCT-09

Time: 17:30 - 18:30

Venue: Hilton Hotel

Room: Yosemite B

We hope to see you around somewhere at Oracle OpenWorld, but if for some reason we miss you entirely, please visit www.intel.com/server for more info on Intel’s fantastic products.  Also, please visit Channel Intel on youtube for some videos from the event.

Sun has recently published a whitepaper that discusses how the Solaris OS will take advantage of the next generation Intel Xeon processor (codename Nehalem-EX) for expandable servers (4 sockets & greater).  Sun with over 20 years of experience in larger socket, core & threading capabilities is working to have the Solaris OS be ready to take advantage of the features & new capabilities of “Nehalem-EX”.  The three areas of collaboration for Solaris & Nehalem-EX are around  scalable performance; advanced reliability and energy efficiency between the specific features in Solaris and the next generation Intel Xeon processor.  Read this recently published whitepaper

…on my way to a customer meeting, and the thought dawns on me about why the car I’m getting into is a relatively new, clean 2008 compact car and not a 1966 Chevy Impala, which probably has enough steel to dramatically distort the earth’s local magnetic field.  Well the reasons are fairly simple:

• Newer cars are more reliable and require less maintenance - cars in the shop don’t make the rental car agency money, and don’t make customers happy if they break down
• Newer cars are typically more fuel efficient - that ’66 Impala’s gas mileage might be quoted in gallons per mile J
• Newer cars typically fall under a manufacturer warranty

As with rental cars, servers aren’t much different.  It’s all about keeping your business running smoothly, minimizing your operating costs, and keeping your customers happy.  While I’m guessing not many of today’s data centers have the server equivalent of a ’66 Impala in them, there are probably a bunch ready to be removed from the rental car fleet.

Think about it on your next business trip, and check out the benefits of refreshing servers that are only 3 or 4 years old with the Xeon® ROI estimator tool (link:  www.intel.com/go/xeonestimator).

I am an IDF veteran...I've attended too many IDFs to remember and I have developed a couple of truisms about the event.

#1 Geeks will be on hand.  As one of them it's kind of like spending a week with my people.  People who get more excited about, say, the latest I/O bus compared to Milan's latest fashions.

#2 The Geeks on hand will not be disappointed.  If there is one thing that Intel can be counted on in doing this week it's showcasing some pretty cool technology across all of the market segments we operate in.  We'll also bring some very big name industry leaders on-stage to talk about what they're doing to create our collective future.

In the past couple of weeks I've been travelling across the world working on a few last minute items for the event, and I happened to be in Munich for the Intel/T-Systems Data Center 2020 Test Lab opening event.  This was a big announcement by T-Systems (the enterprise arm of Deutche Telecom and sister organization to T-Mobile) and Intel.  The Data Center 2020 Test Lab was developed by the two companies with the express purpose of developing data center best practices for tomorrow's datacenter requirements.  The initial focus of the lab will center on data center efficiency best practices and specifically cooling efficiency.  And this is a fantastic thing that the industry and our customers will all benefit from...but this is not what was most exciting to me about the test lab...

I visited the test lab the day before the opening to get a preview and was given a tour by Herr Meier from T-Systems.  As we walked towards the lab I noticed a glint in his eye that told me he was very proud of what he was about to share with me...and soon I realized why.  If you could imagine the most ideal data center configuration for the Data Center 2020 project you'd be close to what Herr Meier showed me.  The data center itself is small, but the features of the facility highlight the degree of data collection that can be measured and analyzed.  Features included: depressurized air at 10K feet altitude, raising and lowering ceiling height, smoke system to track air circulation, cold aisle containment cabinets, water cooled rack for cross comparison, and floor tiles that allowed for acute control of airflow. And enough sensors to measure every micro adjustment in efficiency gains across a multitude of testing variables.  If this sounds nearly as cool to you as it was to me, I'd encourage you to attend the joint T-Systems Intel session at IDF this week in the Eco-Technology track and see the T-Systems demo in the Eco-Tech community.  And to learn more (in English too soon) visit www.datacenter2020.de

See you all at IDF!

Last month, Intel added another high-performing, low power to the Xeon 5500 SKU lineup with the Intel Xeon L5530 processor (2.40 GHz, 60W TDP).  As with the L5506 (2.13 GHz) and L5520 (2.26 GHz) SKUs that were launched in March, the L5530 deliver the same performance as its 80W counterpart (E5530), but at 25% lower CPU power.

With space being a valuable asset in power-constrained data centers (IDC estimates datacenter construction costs at an average of $1,000/sq ft and $40,000/rack), the Xeon L5530 delivers even more performance in the same 60W CPU power envelope to help get the most out of each rack. Here’s the tale of the tape:

• 66% more performance than previous generation Xeon L5420 SKU
• 45% more performance than the Xeon L5506 SKU

(performance numbers based on SPEC_int_rate2006*, see http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/ for more details)

Want to find out more about the Xeon L5530 and the rest of the 5500 lineup, check out:  http://www.intel.com/p/en_US/products/server/processor/xeon5000

Given the increasing costs to power and cool data centers, IT and Facility managers of enterprise and cloud data centers want to maximize capacity utilization and reduce total cost of operations. However this has been challenging given the lack of fine grained instrumentation and visibility into server and rack level power consumption resulting in over-provisioning of racks and costly expansions despite unused capacity.

With Intel® Xeon® 5500 series, we introduced Intel® Intelligent Power Node Manager that provides server level power monitoring and policy based power capping. Since power and cooling constraints exist at rack, row, room and PDU level, we also released Intel® Data Center Manager to enable ISVs to realize Node Manager benefits at data center level with reduced investment.

Intel® DCM software development kit (SDK) provides power and thermal monitoring and management for servers, racks and groups of servers in data centers using Intel® Xeon instrumentation. Management Console Vendors (ISVs) and System Integrators (SIs) can integrate Intel® DCM into their console or command-line applications and provide high value power management features to IT organizations.

IT organizations facing power and cooling challenges can benefit from:

• Increased rack density within space, power and cooling constraints through power control
• Reduced capital costs by right-sizing power and cooling infrastructure based on actual power
• Reduced operations costs by eliminating worst-case head-room during provisioning

Intel® DCM features include:

• Built-in policy based heuristics engine maintains group power and dynamically responds to changing loads
• Designed as an SDK to integrate into existing management software products
• Scales to thousands of nodes support in large data centers
• Manages across system vendors through use of standard IPMI and DCMI Power Management support
• Supports integration with Smart PDU meters for servers without Node Manager to provide a unified view

If you are at IDF in San Francisco Sep 22-24, 2009, stop by following sessions to learn more about Intel® DCM and see proof-of-concepts and meet with end users who benefited from this.

• PDCS003 - Cloud Power Management with Intel® Micro-architecture (Nehalem) Processor-based Platforms
• ECTS0004 - Improving Data Center Efficiency with Intel® Xeon® Processor Based Instrumentation

There are also several demos in the showcase area that showcase the technologies from multiple partners.

I will be at IDF co-presenting PDCS003 - stop by after the class with your questions and thoughts about Intel® DCM.
See you at IDF.

--Susmita

Have you ever had one of those MacGuyver moments? You know – you have a problem to solve and a collection of items at your disposal, and if you use can figure out how to use those items, you can save the day.

Earlier this year Intel, HP, IBM, Lawrence Berkeley Labs, Emerson Network Power & Wunderlich-Malec collaborated on a California Energy Commissions sponsored MacGuyver-ish project call Advanced Cooling Environment (ACE) to solve an issue that many data centers face – overcooling their data centers beyond the needs of the servers and other IT equipment running inside of the facility.  You see, IT equipment is designed to run within a temperature envelope. If the air coming into the server is warmer than the envelope, you run the risk of overheating. If the air coming into the server is colder than the envelope, you are spending too much money on cooling the air, which does nothing other than needlessly increase the cost of operating the data center and reduces the energy efficiency as well.

The team surveyed the items at its disposal and determined that they could link data from the front panel temperature sensors (server instrumentation) on the servers to the control systems of the computer room air handlers (CRAHs – essentially air conditioners) via standard data center management communication protocol.   The CRAHs could then dynamically adjust the speed of the fans and the temperature of the air to the requirements of the servers. The results: servers received the appropriate temperature air, power costs for cooling went down and the energy efficiency of the data center went up.  Problem solved….and they didn’t even use a paper clip or shoestring.  The real beauty of the project is that all of the items used are commercially available today for you to instrument your data center and improve the energy efficiency of your operation.

To learn more about ACE at the upcoming Intel Developer Conference in San Francisco, check out the “ECOS003 Advanced Cooling Environment (ACE) Technology: Controlling Data Center Cooling with Servers” or stop by the ACE demo in the Eco-Tech Zone of the Tech Showcase.