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?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
oHW infrastructure cost is highlighted as one of the key barriers of migration
·Business Justification
oIs there a compelling business reason to upgrade the hardware?
·Additional risk of business disruption
oMigration 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:
•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.
Every day, Intel® technology and platforms help companies solve business problems and challenges. Here are a few of the growing number of stories and reasons for choosing Intel processors and technology.
Winning: Humana – Healthcare product and services company
Humana continues to refresh its infrastructure with more powerful, energy-efficient technologies. For Humana, technology is vital for providing information and a full array of health benefit services to members. To replace an outdated facility, the company worked with Intel to design a state-of-the-art data center with a compact, energy-efficient infrastructure that could deliver flexibility and scalability.
·The Intel processor–based virtualized environment helps IT deploy new services quickly and ensure high availability.
·Humana added 25 percent more servers in 56 percent of the previous space while decreasing data center power consumption by 16 percent.
Winning: Emerson Electronics
Emerson reshapes its IT infrastructure for future growth, consolidating approximately 135 data centers down to four using Intel® technology–based servers
·3,600 physical servers are eliminated by virtualizing on Intel processor–based blade servers, for 18:1 consolidation worldwide
·Power-saving processors help make Emerson’s new global production data center in St. Louis 31 percent more energy efficient than traditional data centers
Winning: Türkiye Finans Katılım Bank
Leading Turkish Financial Institution Drives Better Growth and Services with Intel®Technology. Türkiye Finans Katılım Bank makes use of the online Intel Xeon processor-based Server Refresh Savings Estimator
Intel® Xeon® processor-based Server Refresh Savings Estimator¹ sets expectations clearly, predicting 80 per cent reduction in power/cooling requirements, and a 30 per cent increase in system performance already realized. With only 20 per cent of capacity currently utilised, bank has significant headroom for business expansion
Winning: Oracle IT
Oracle uses Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series–based systems with Intel® Intelligent Power Node Manager to increase rack density and propel business growth. Refreshing its existing dual socket, quad-core servers on a three- to five-year schedule to increase processing capability and energy efficiency, but had no significant power management in use in the data centers.
More processing capability can fit within the data center power envelope because Oracle can actively manage power consumption for individual servers and applications.
·Energy savings of 35 percent are projected with Intel Intelligent Power Node Manager, for reduced operating expenses
·50 percent more servers per rack saves data center space and enables more growth while keeping costs low
Winning: DataPipe®
DataPipe® retains a competitive edge by designing a new facility and refreshing existing data centers with cutting-edge technology that can deliver outstanding processing performance for a broad range of customer applications. Low-voltage Intel® Xeon® processors help DataPipe create a dense, energy-efficient infrastructure for managed IT services.
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.
These are dog years for servers.Pretty much every year Intel introduces a new Xeon processor.Those who have heard the story recognize this as the Tic Tock model.On Tic years the manufacturing process is updated, on Tock years the chip architecture is updated.Every year customers get a boost in performance, and often a cut in power.Typically this boost is in the 50% neighborhood, enough to make it worth the upgrade, and still achievable by engineering teams on a two year cycle.Except, we are in dog years.
The Nehalem – Xeon 5500 – processor broke all prior boundaries on single generation performance gain.Delivering two to three times the compute capacity of the Xeon 5400 (Harpertown) generation.This is a big change, probably a once in a lifetime change – unless that quantum thing happens in my lifetime.Roughly a 10X performance boost in less than 5 years.
During this same five years we have seen virtualization technology go from a lab project – something for test and dev – to mainstream data center process.In 2005 it would have been heresy to suggest virtualizing the corporate ERP.At that point virtualization overhead on the server could be as high as 25% and the entire server was needed to do “real work”.Fast forward to today.Virtualization technology in both the hypervisor and processor have reduced overhead to only a few percent, AND servers are 10X faster.Not only can you virtualize the ERP, you are irresponsibly wasting resources if you do not.Unless your ERP demands have grown 10X in 5 years, your ERP alone won’t even make a new Xeon 5500 system sweat.
If this advancement wasn’t enough, the announcements last month from Intel about the coming Xeon 7500 (4+ socket) processor were amazing.All the benefits of the Xeon 5500, but on steroids.The new biggest leap ever.With up to eight cores and four memory channels per socket, this is a monster.Your ERP system will be barely a blip in perfmon.It isn’t unreasonable that an entire data center for a SMB business could be virtualized onto one of these beasts.And, how big is a Xeon 7500 server?My guess is about the size of a breadbox…
Three short years ago, this would have taken 32 Xeon 5100 (Woodcrest) servers, accounting for 64U of rack space... this pic is from the upcoming Xeon MP (Beckton) platform with Nehalem-EX processors that many of you have seen at IDF 2009. This server only takes 3U of rack space... less than 5% of the space of what it could replace.
Sometimes you see a screenshot and it just makes your jaw drop...
Just to give a comparison of CPU density... here's a diagram showing the comparison of 3 year old technology compared to the upcoming Nehalem-EX. If each of those 32 old servers burns 400W of power - that's 12.8 kilowatts - compared to one server, burning less than 1kW.
What's even more amazing, is that some design wins are based on a 1U server with the same cpu footprint - that's AWESOME!
What are your thoughts on these upcoming multi-core technology improvements?
With the Intel Xeon 5500 series (Nehalem) based processors, the X5500 chipset and instrumented power supplies, you can start with the most basic use case for Intel Node Manager - monitoring the power usage of your servers.
As you can see in the Intel Datacenter Manager (DCM) screen below - there are multiple servers configured into logical units: HF2-EIL is the lab that these servers are located in. Rack 1 and Rack 2 are the physical location of these servers, and each Rack contains 2 servers each.
When you highlight one server (as above in DCM)- you can see the power characteristics over a certain time period. The time period shown gives you the idle power, max power, and thermal measurement. The 'hump' in the graph is a SQL workload which creates 'work' for the server and the process runs for about 5 1/2 minutes with no power capping.
Here's a graph of the 2nd server in that rack, performing a similar workload. As you can see, the 2nd server power usage is different than the first.
The Intel Datacenter Manager SDK console can monitor multiple systems as well. The next graph, is both of those servers in the rack, which accounts for both servers power usage during the same timeframe.
Finally, here is the final graph, showing the accumulation of all 4 servers, in both Rack #1 and Rack #2. This shows the maximum power utilized during the workload, the minimum power (idle) and the inlet thermal temperature in the lab. Something that hasn't been able to be done before without expensive equipment in the datacenter.
My next power based blog will show how power-capping can give you more effience use of your workload power while using Xeon 5500 series platforms.
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.
Nehalem-EX has been in the news quite a bit over the past several months.
First, in May, Intel described how Nehalem-EX will be at the heart of the next generation of intelligent and expandable high-end Intel server platforms, delivering a number of new technical advancements (Intel Nehalem Architecture, Quick Path Interconnects, 16 threads, 24MB cache, new RAS features like MCA-Recovery, 16 DIMM slots per socket, 128 threads on 8 Socket systems) and boost enterprise computing performance (the greatest gain in generational performance ever seen at Intel.)
Next at IDF in September Intel described how Nehalem-EX would deliver a bigger generational performance improvement than that delivered by the Intel Xeon 5500 processor (including a 3X Nehalem-EX gain in database performance); a large shift in Xeon scalability with over 15 >8S systems anticipated and expandability for the most data demanding enterprise applications, the addition of about 20 RAS capabilities traditionally found in the Intel® Itanium processor family – along with a demonstration of MCA-Recovery. IBM announced their upcoming BladeCenter products that will support 4S Nehalem-EX blades and Super-Micro announced a 1U box, specifically targeted at HPC.Staying on the HPC theme, Mark Seager from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was also quoted with stating that “Nehalem-EX allows us to invest in science, not the computer science of porting and adapting software to new architectures, but real science.Nehalem EX is an innovative SMP on a chip solution that provides us access to a “super node” … The result is an astonishing new level of performance.”
And Oracle Open World on October 13th, the drumbeat for Nehalem-EX continued.Michael Dell in his Oracle Open World Keynote today discussed how Nehalem-EX will provide a true leap in performance, with up to 9x the memory bandwidth and 3x the database performance vs. prior generation.And he mentioned that Dell’s unique implementation of the memory architecture will allow the most cost effective scaling, with 4S systems up to 1TB of DRAM (64 Dimms x 16GB Memory sticks) enabling customers to run their entire database in system memory.He also mentioned that standard based systems are driving new efficiencies with applications like Oracle, where Dell’s data shows Oracle apps run better on x86 vs. proprietary architectures, up to 200% better. Check out this short video from the keynote and watch what Michael Dell had to say.
Keep your eyes on the Server Room for more Nehalem-EX news as it comes between now and launch.And visit the Intel booth at South Moscone Booth #1621 to learn more.
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 aroundscalable performance; advanced reliability and energy efficiency between the specific features in Solaris and the next generation Intel Xeon processor.Read this recently published whitepaper
In March '09, former Intel executive Pat Gelsinger predicted that Nehalem-based Xeon 5500 servers would become "cash machines" for the IT industry, due to unprecedented power-efficient performance gains that can deliver a very short ROI for IT. Pat's description of the Xeon 5500 was validated during a briefing with Intel CIO Diane Bryant in San Francisco on October 6th, as reported in TG Daily.
She discussed the ROI achieved and the impact that a proactive serve refresh strategy has had on Intel’s bottom line, as reported in PC World.Some of her key points:
·Intel is expecting up to $250M savings over 8 years, saved $45M in 2008 alone.
·Despite these results, economy forced Intel to re-evaluate capital spending in 2009. Found that delaying server refresh would cost us $19M more than continuing. So we continued.
·Getting an average of 10:1 server consolidation with Xeon 5500 in design computing environment and 20:1 virtualization server refresh ratios in Office/Enterprise.
Did you know that Server Refresh is also the #1 driver of Intel’s Carbon Footprint reduction as well, with an initiative to reduce Carbon footprint by 5% per year.We are projected to reduce by approximately 4K metric tons (2009) and this server refresh strategy is forecasted to be #1 project to help IT reduce Carbon.
Staying on the green IT theme, the newest ally for IT to help drive carbon-reduction and energy cost savings is the energy utilities.A prime example of this is the Energy Trust of Oregon, who offers cash incentives to motivate Oregon businesses to make energy saving investments.Intel gained access to a $250K incentive from them as a result of energy savings gained by replacing older servers with newer, more energy-efficient servers in our data centers. If you are replacing older servers with modern energy-efficient Xeon 5500 based servers and you haven’t had this conversation with your utility yet – please do so.You may be eligible for utility incentives for energy savings that can lower your operating costs and reduce the impact of your business on the environment.To estimate the energy savings associated with server refresh, go to www.intel.com/go/xeonestimator.
You’re going to hear more about these “cash machines” in the very near future…stay tuned!
I’m a bit late in relaying my thoughts from Intel’s Developer Forum (IDF), but there was definitely some excitement around virtualization and high performance networking that I wanted to get the word out about!
In the past I’ve shared some details about SR-IOV and the advantages you can gain by being able to present virtual LAN hardware to each Virtual Machine (VM), effectively avoiding the Hypervisor when presenting virtual devices to each VM. The advantage of being able to do this is clear: The less interaction in the networking stack there is from the hypervisor, the less processing overhead is required for the system process the data.
That’s all good because if you have a dual 10 Gigabit adapter, you can segregate those two physical pipes into perhaps 16 virtual pipes that get exposed to 16 VMs. By segregating these LAN pipes at the hardware level with SR-IOV instead of using Hypervisor switching, the performance gains in both CPU utilization as well as maximum total throughput can be very large. There were several demos at IDF with various configurations, but reductions in CPU utilization of 40% were possible coupled with dramatic improvement in throughput!
But there is unfortunately one minor complication that I didn’t mention in my last post on the topic of SR-IOV. There is the little fact that when VMs move between physical boxes (a usage that is highly desired and commonplace these days) you run into some problems with this SR-IOV capability. When the hypervisor owned the network hardware abstraction, the performance was worse, but the functionality was better because you could seamlessly migrate from one box to another and the virtualization application would handle the details. But with SR-IOV, a new layer needs to be added so that the direct hardware connection between the VM and the LAN hardware can be moved to a new box.
The really exciting part of IDF demos that I saw was the demonstration not just of the SR-IOV functionality on multiple hardware and virtualization configurations, but that these demonstrations also showed updated software from two virtualization vendors allowing mobility of the VMs while supporting SR-IOV!
There was a demo on Dell systems showing this fully functional SR-IOV implementation with Citrix’s Virtualization suite. There were two separate demonstrations on Dell systems, with VMWare displaying their new Network Plug-In Architecture (NPIA) solution that allows for the migration of SR-IOV connected VMs seamlessly between servers.
For those hungry for more detail, I’ve included the three SR-IOV demonstration videos here:
The first is the Citrix demonstration on Dell and Intel hardware of SR-IOV with VM mobility:
These next two are two videos are demos on Dell and Intel hardware with VMWare and their NPIA software implementation.
Each virtualization demo shows the massive performance benefits under various workloads when moving from Hypervisor based LAN segregation to SR-IOV implementation. But most importantly, each demonstration proves out the capability to migrate VMs between physical hardware. The only system hardware requirement is that the server itself supports VT-d. If the networking hardware in the newly migrated-to box supports SR-IOV you get better performance, and if not, the solution falls back on the legacy Hypervisor virtualization. Backwards compatibility is maintained!
I didn’t get firm details on when this full support for SR-IOV and migration will be available in Citrix and VMWare’s releases, but the demos looked pretty clean, and hopefully these suites will be available soon with this new functionality. The LAN and Server hardware ecosystems are ready today, and it looks like the software vendors are just around the corner. Virtualization momentum continues!
While virtualization was the big takeaway for me from IDF, there were also several other interesting demos for us networking hounds. I’ve linked a couple videos of them below for anyone still thirsting for more of the latest networking technology and performance details!
The first video is a demonstration of Intel’s 82599 10 Gigabit Ethernet-based adapter card with Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) support. Storage and Ethernet together at last!
The second video is a demonstration of Intel’s NetEffect 10 Gigabit Ethernet card publishing 1 million messages per second in a simulated NYSE floor trading scenario. Oh yeah, only 35uS of latency. That isfast.
So although I am two weeks after IDF, I hope some of you got a little taste of the networking excitement that took place. Industry wide, hardware and software vendors alike are delivering ultra high performance low latency applications for the financial services industry, as well as mainstream performance increases for virtualization. The performance and technology beat moves forward. Exciting times!
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.
I wanted to follow-up on the pre-IDF blog I wrote and what I and Sean conveyed regarding comprehensive IO optimization for enterprise cloud (based on virtualization infrastructure). A blog I owed to those who could not attend the IDF session.
In the last blog we identified 4 important vectors that drive I/O evolution.
1)Balanced system that maps to the increases in CPU performance
2)Scalability
3)Unified fabric
4)Security
In my view I state it an evolution as I feel that is the natural state things will head towards in the (near) future.
In a cloud environment you would anticipate automation and policies determine the consolidation possible on a system. If SSDs get broader adoption and virtualization performance increases due to hardware assists, I/O and fabric could become the bottleneck for the degree of consolidation and efficiency as it cannot map to the increased data rates from the storage and CPU performance.
Ways to address this is either to reduce or eliminate the overheads in the I/O stack caused by software emulation of devices in the VMM. VMDq is an example of a technology that can reduce the overhead or offload some of the VMM tasks through hardware assists in the NIC. Direct assignment with PCI-SIG SR-IOV support is a way to eliminate the overheads by by-passing the VMM. With SR-IOV, a single device can be divided into many logical devices known as Virtual Functions (like a pair or independent transmit receive queue). Each virtual function can be directly assigned to a VM using Intel VT-d thereby bypassing the VMM. This can work with Live VM Migration too. At IDF we showcased 4 demos of prototype SR-IOV software solutions running on Intel Xeon 5500 based hardware with prominent VMM vendors like VMware, Citrix and Redhat that have different hypervisor technology. The networking demos showcased working live migration with SR-IOV and VT-d based direct assignment. Direct assigned VMs could be even moved to an emulated mode and brought back to direct assigned mode. Intel has not only been working with software providers but also with other hardware vendors like LSI to demonstrate this capability. These technologies are as important to storage as networking particularly as SSDs gather steam. You can learn more from these blogs below on the demos.
If those multi 1GbE cables (that make your fabric look like pasta) be replaced by 10GbE and if SR-IOV and VT-d be used for performance, then it answers both the I/O performance and scalability requirements for a flexible datacenter.
Beyond those VT-d provides greater protection by allowing I/O devices to access only the memory regions allocated to them, and SR-IOV allows VMs to access only their portion of the device and restricts access to other Virtual Functions (owned by other VMs) on the I/O device or the entire device itself. Better security through better isolation.
Last but not the least of the requirements is the unified fabric. When IT can use a single I/O device for storage or for LAN traffic, the rigidity associated with provisioning of servers with some number of HBAs and some number of NICs is reduced. The I/O capacity becomes fungible and flexible. FCoE and iSCSI are key technologies in this direction. Adding capability to monitor QoS and shape the traffic makes it a good match for flexible datacenter.
Many of the technologies I discussed above (VT-d, SRIOV, FCoE, iSCSI) are here today… software such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux is already delivering the solution. In my view just a matter of time that ecosystem builds further and hardware is well tuned.
With these in perspective how do you see your datacenter shaping up?
Sean Maloney's keynote presentation at IDF 2009 highlighted Intel Node Manager. This is the video from his keynote which shows customers from Baidu, BMW, Oracle, and Telefonica, who have been working with Intel on Intel Intelligent Power Node Manager.
Check out the final slide showcasing the OEM/ODM/Console providers and customers using Intel Intelligent Power Node Manager.
