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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The ecosystem is growing...

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.

In my previous post Fall IDF: Is Italian Pasta the Actual Inspiration for Server Virtualization? I talked about the evolution of Server I/O virtualization. I mentioned a few demos and invited you to check them out. But I didn’t give any details about the demos…

Well, it's the 3rd and last day of IDF today and the demos have running now for 2 days. You have one moreday to check them out! So let me describe them quickly.

Dell has been a great partner for these demos. We’re showing 2 demos together in booths 709 and 711 in the Virtualization Community, using Dell’s R710 servers, based on the Xeon 5500 platform, and using Intel 82599 (Niantic) with Virtual Machine Direct Connect (VMDc). The 1^st demo is with VMware and their Network Plug-In Architecture (NPA) technology.

When you visit the demo, check out the great CPU utilization as well VMotion* among heterogeneous server configurations!

The 2^nd demo is delivered with Citrix, showing scalable direct assignment by using XenServer with VT-d and SR-IOV support. The overall performance is really great and live relocation of virtual machines is working nicely.

Another demo (booth 707) is delivered by Red Hat, featuring RHEL 5.4 with KVM (shipping SW with VT-d and SR-IOV support!), Neterion with their 10GbE NIC, all running on an Intel Xeon 5500 server. Look out for the performance value shown for scalable direct assignment!

And finally, a storage (not LAN) demo! Using the same combination of VMM and server, in booth 517, LSI is showing the value of scalable direct assignment for a RAID controller. The performance boost is fantastic!

Check out these demos at the IDF Showcase... I’d love to hear your impressions!

First there was the Multi-Billion Dollar Automobile “Cash for Clunkers” program that I wrote about back in early August. Then in late August we started reading more about the planned $300M state-run rebate programs for consumer purchases of new ENERGY STAR® qualified home appliances. Appliance categories eligible for rebates include: central air conditioners, heat pumps (air source and geothermal), boilers, furnaces (oil and gas), room air conditioners, clothes washers, dishwashers, freezers, refrigerators, and water heaters.

The government wants to make cars and homes more energy efficient, while helping to support the nation’s economic recovery.  But what about making Data Centers more efficient?

A couple of years ago the US Environmental Protection Agency reported that the energy consumption associated with data centers had doubled between 2000 and 2006, reaching some 60 billion kWh in 2006, roughly 1.5% of the entire US energy use. The EPA says this is expected to double again by 2010.  The same authors of that report previously calculated that US servers currently use the same level of electricity as all color TVs in the country combined. 

So this got me thinking…which industries have done the most to increase output per energy unit and which products also offer the most attractive paybacks when you invest in them.  The findings were interesting to say the least.  Let’s first look at the sectors creating more energy-efficient products over the last 30 years*.

• Autos – 1978 (14.3 MPG), 2008 (20 MPG): Energy Efficiency gains = 40%
• Airlines – 1978 (22.8 Revenue passenger MPG), 2008 (50.4): Energy Efficiency gains = 121%
• Agriculture – 1978 (0.63 units of output per unit of energy use), 2008 (1.46): Energy Efficiency gains = 132%
• Steel Mfg – 1978 (63 lbs of steel per MBtu), 2008 (167 lbs): Energy Efficiency gains = 167%
• Lighting – 1978 (Incandescent light bulb – 13 lumens per watt), 2008 (Compact Fluorescent Bulb – 57 lumens per watt): Energy Efficiency gains = 339%
• Computer Systems – 1978 (1,400 instructions per second per watt), 2008 (40,000,000 instructions per second per watt): Energy Efficiency gains = 2,857,000%

*Source:  “A Smarter Shade of Green,” ACEEE Report for the Technology CEO Council, 2008.

Next let’s look at some big ticket energy efficient products that offer the most attractive paybacks on their investments. (Note: Buying a hybrid automobile wouldn’t make this list below in terms of rapid payback, hence not included.)

• Central Air Conditioning: 4.7 year payback per Energy Star Savings Calculator (I used Los Angeles as Location)
• Freezer: 4.3 year payback per Energy Star Savings Calculator
• Refrigerator: 2.8 year payback per Energy Star Savings Calculator
• Commercial Ice Machine: 2.1 year payback per Energy Star Savings Calculator
• New Intel Xeon 5500 based Server: 9 months payback per the Xeon ROI estimator at www.intel.com/go/xeonestimator. (I modeled refreshing from older 2005 Single-Core servers, getting 10:1 server consolidation ratio.)

IT industry far exceeds others at increasing output per energy unit… and Intel servers also offer a faster payback on investment than other energy efficient products (including Energy Star Products).  Yet there is not government stimulus package to help encourage these purchases in energy efficiency. Simply, this is the most energy efficient investment that the government won’t help you make.

I would be curious to hear what you think.

bryce

In that case, iSCSI or FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) could be used for the SAN connection, still using the same high-speed ports. Standards like Data Center Bridging (DCB) could add a lossless character to the 10GbE link to make it friendlier to FCoE.

Few new solutions though come without new challenges. The common way for VMs to share I/O devices in a today’s environment in through mediation of the hypervisor, using emulation or para-virtualization. That reduces the effective I/O bandwidth. It also becomes a fairly significant overhead to the server in its own right, reducing the available server capacity for application processing, and it adds latency. With the growing trend in IT to treat virtualization as a default deployment mode for any application, these issues become quite limiting.

We at Intel have thought that the best way to overcome these issues is by using “direct assignment”. Using the Intel® VT-d technology (launched in the Xeon 5500 platform), a VM can be assigned a dedicated I/O device. This nearly eliminates the overheard related to the hypervisor mediation I mentioned above. A side benefit is that it increases the VM to VM isolation and security. But assigning an individual I/O device to one VM is not very scalable…

This is where the PCI-SIG’s SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization) standard comes into play. This standard allows a single I/O device to present itself as multiple virtual devices. With SR-IOV, each virtual device can be assigned to a VM, adding scalability to the direct assignment model, effectively allowing the physical I/O to be shared yet with greater security and reliability.

Another challenge with the direct assignment model is related to live migration. Hypervisors have typically assumed the SW mediated IOV model. As a result, hypervisors need to be modified to adapt their live migration solutions to direct assignment.

These technologies span many different components of the server platform. Intel® VT-d is necessary, so Xeon 5500 must be used (or later platforms). SR-IOV capable I/O devices – NICs or Storage controllers, are required. BIOS must be modified, as well as hypervisor software. This is pretty heavy lifting.

So you can only imagine how excited I am to be able to showcase 4 different SR-IOV demos at IDF next week! The demos involve 2 server vendors, 3 VMM vendors – 3 different vendors implementing 3 different hypervisor architectures, and 3 different IHVs representing 2 different I/O technologies. We show the performance improvements, as well as VM live-migration. It works!

Come and see it (Booths 517, 707, 709, and 711 in the IDF showcase)!

Since we started the Ask An Expert discussion thread in the Server Room a couple years ago, I found that the community often asked for guidance between selection of server system type and processor number as IT professionals sought to make the best purchase for them.

As I responded to these threads, I realized there were a lot of the same questions occurring over and over again.  I then thought that having a selection tool to allow the community to guide themselves through a few questions to help narrow the options might be a valuable.

Sometimes the world (ok Intel) moves too slowly for me.  My brainchild on this was something I wanted to have done about a year ago with the first 45nm quad-core processors (Xeon 5400).  However, our server and corporate marketing teams got a little distracted by the Xeon 5500 (Nehalem) processor launch.

However, after much delay I’m proud to introduce this simple, interactive Xeon Server processor selector tool that can help you choose which server system type and processor would be ideal for your application and business goals.  With Three Easy Steps, you can narrow your choices.          

• Step 1: Identify the business environment, application type and primary purchase criteria
• Step 2: Compare and Choose the processor family (7000, 5000, 3000)
• Step 3: Compare and Choose the specific processor within that family

In this 3^rd step you can look at price, performance, power and feature set across multiple CPUs to help you narrow.  Take a short cut and look at the most popular CPUs or expand your options and look at the whole range of offerings.

We also have a Workstation Selection Tool (this tool was what  triggered the idea to create a server one)

Other IT and business value assessment tools from Intel include:

• Intel Xeon Server Refresh Savings Estimator
• Intel RISC Migration TCO Calculator
• PC (Client) Refresh ROI Calculator

Chris

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Intel Intelligent Power Node Manager is a new technology that is available with the Xeon 5500 Series Platforms released earlier this year.  Many of you have asked me questions via Twitter (@Toadster) about "How can I use Node Manager?" - so I wanted to present some simple use cases to simplify the explanation of Node Manager and how you can best use the technology in your own enterprise.

First of all, let's explain the growth problem at hand.  As servers shrink in size, the density of each server 'footprint' is growing from a power perspective... a few years ago, a single 42U rack could hold about 21 servers (estimating 2U servers) - and usually hosting one or two apps/servers per physical server, depending on if you had single or dual-socket servers.  In modern datacenters, that same 42U rack can hold 42 servers (1U each) with 2P per server - so you have an immediate density increase of 2X the # of servers, and 2-4X the number of sockets - which can equate to 16X the number  processor threads per rack...  one good thing is that Intel has been developing newer technologies to keep the TDP of each CPU roughly the same over the same time period between processor updates... where you used to have 2 or 4 cores, you now have 8 to 16 cores at the same thermal envelope!

Knowing how much power your platform uses is a key factor in populating racks and rows in your datacenter.  Prior to Node Manager technology, most Datacenter Managers would base rack population on 'nameplate' power - or the (W) rating on your power supply.  That's the 'max' power utilized by the platform, and what the PSU is rated for (worst case).  See the image below...

As you can see - using Intel Intelligent Power Node Manager technology, you can view your system's power utilization in real-time using Intel Datacenter Manager and the administrator can implement the power caps to ensure your server rack stays within your required power limits.  By utilizing the 'actual' power limits instead of nameplate power, you can increase your rack density thereby increasing your ROI, and decrease your TCO!  Lets face it - everyone loves saving money!

Many of us are familiar with this next scenario... it's summertime, and the power company is announcing that the power grid is under strain.  Personal homes start having their A/C cut-off to save the power grid from brown-outs...  now your enterprise can help reduce those risks as well!

Over the next few weeks, I hope to post more blogs/videos:

1. Single Node Power Monitoring & Management
2. Group/Rack Power Monitoring & Management
3. Thermal Monitoring & Management

Please provide some feedback, and post your questions and ideas for upcoming blogs!

Japan announced today that it has emerged from recession, following Germany and France’s announcements last week that their economies also grew in the second quarter. 

Moody’s Economy.com Business Confidence survey shows that confidence has been steadily increasing since March ‘09.

For the first time since September ’08, “Economic Recovery” nudges above “Economic Crisis” in Google Search Volume in early August. 

In addition to this, economic forecasts (WW GDP, US GDP, and EU GDP) point to a recovery over the next 6 months.  A couple of quotes:

• The direction of real GDP is even expected to turn from negative to positive in the current quarter. The academic arbiters of the business cycle at the National Bureau of Economic Research will eventually proclaim that the Great Recession ended sometime this summer.
         Moody’s Economy.Com – July 7, 2009
• The global economy is beginning to pull out of a recession unprecedented in the post–World War II era
         International Monetary Fund, imf.org – July 8, 2009

So, why am I bombarding this blog with various optimistic economic data? Because if we really are pulling out of the abyss, I’m worried that many companies out there are sitting on servers that will not be ready for the increased demand right around the corner.         

John Gantz, IDC Vice President in his keynote speech at the start of this year’s CIO Summit in Auckland was quoted as saying there will be an unprecedented amount of IT-driven change in the next four years.  He projected that there will be a three-fold rise in mobile users and information will grow five-fold, resulting in heightened levels of security and privacy and questions on which data to store or throw away. He also mentioned that the number of interactions between people on networks will grow eight times.

So this got me thinking… Is your company looking to differentiate and go after more market share while your competitors are hunkered down and not investing in the downturn? My guess is that there are a lot of IT managers being asked to support more social media, offer more SaaS, deploy more virtual machines, and support more real time analytics to get a leg up on the competition.  My gut tells me that it will be hard to do all of this with older servers that were put into another year of extended warranty because that felt like the right move when the proverbial economic s**t hit the fan last year. 

It’s critical to be prepared for when the recovery comes, and data points to an economic turnaround happening now – are you positioning your department to own it when it arrives?

Bryce