For readers of my February Blog, I talked about being so excited that i felt like a kid on Christmas morning when it came to our upcoming Nehalem launch and shared a story about some customers I talked with.  Well I can now give you your presents and a little background on the experience I had back in February.

• The two customers i interviewed were Thomson-Reuters (James Powell - CTO) and Intel IT (Elwood Coslett, Director Engineering Computing).  You can view our discussion at http://www.intel.com/business/xeon/seminar.htm
• You can learn more about the Xeon 5500 capabilities at www.intel.com/business/xeon
• You can gain insights and connect with industry insiders on the next generation of server technology at the new Server Solutions Insider community

Time to play with our new technology toys.

Chris

Given the recent intense focus in the industry around data center power management and the furious pace of the adoption of virtualization, it is remarkable that the subject of power management in virtualized environments has received relatively little attention.

It is fair to say that power management technology has not caught with virtualization.

Here are a few thoughts on this particular subject, which I intend to elaborate in subsequent transmittals.

For historical reasons the power management technology available today had its inception in the physical world where watts consumed in a server can be traced to the watts that came through the power utility feeds.  Unfortunately, the semantics of power in virtual  machines have yet to be comprehensively defined to industry consensus.

For instance, assume that the operating system running  in a virtual image decides to transition the system to the ACPI S3 state, sleep to memory.  What we have now is the state of the virtual image preserved in the image's memory with the virtual CPU turned off.

Assuming that the system is not paravirtualized, the operating system can't tell if it's running in a physical or virtual instance. The effect of transitioning to S3 will be purely local to the virtual machine.  If the intent of the system operator was to transition the machine to S3 to save power, it does not work this way.   The virtual machine still draws resources from the host machine and requires hypervisor attention. Transitioning the host itself to S3 may not be practical as there might be other virtual machines still running, not ready to go to sleep.

Consolidation is another technology for reducing data center power consumption by driving up the server utilization rates.  Consolidation for power management is a blunt tool, where applications that used to run in a physical server are now virtualized and squished into a single physical host.  The applications are sometimes strange bedfellows.  Profiling might have been done to make sure they could coexist, as a priori, static exercise with the virtual machine instances treated as black boxes. There is no attempt to look at the workload profiles inside each virtualized instance and in real time.  Power savings come from an almost wishful side effect of repackaging applications formerly running in a dedicated server into virtualized instances.

A capability to map power to virtual machines, in both directions, from physical to virtual and virtual to physical would be useful from an operational perspective.  The challenge is twofold, first from a monitoring perspective because there is no commonly agreed method yet to prorate host power consumption to the virtual instances running within, and second from a control perspective.  It would be useful to schedule or assign power consumption to virtual machines, allowing end users tomake a tradeoff between power and performance.  Fine grained power monitoring would allow prorating power costs to application instances, introducing useful pricing checks and balances encouraging energy consumption instead of the more common method today of hiding energy costs in the facility costs.

Following my earlier blog, I promised to share answers to some of the more common questions I get from customers on 45nm and mostly about the newest product we have on 6-core 45nm: the Xeon processor 7400 series.

1. What does 45nm really mean? A nanometer represents a distance that is one billionth of a meter in length. 45nm represents the width of a single transistor and is used to describe the manufacturing technology Intel uses to create our latest generation of processors. Because of the small 45nm transistor size, Intel is able fit 2 million transistors on the period at the end of this sentence.

2. Are all 45nm transistors the same? No. Materials used in silicon manufacturing process can vary from manufacturer to manufacturer. Intel switched over to a high-k dielectric material (Halfnium) that helps dramatically reduce leakage current – improving the performance/watt characteristic of our processors.

3. What OEM products feature 6-core 45nm products? Servers based on the processor are expected to be announced from over 50 system manufacturers around the world, including four-socket rack servers from Dell, Fujitsu, Fujitsu-Siemens, Hitachi, HP, IBM, NEC, Sun, Supermicro and Unisys. There are four-socket blade servers from Egenera, HP, Sun and NEC and there are server designs that scale up to 16-sockets from IBM, NEC and Unisys.

4. How does 6-core affect my software licensing? Just like with other multi-core processors, licensing will depend on the software vendor. With quad-core most ISVs elected to license by socket or processor meaning that the performance enhancements came “for free” as the number of cores are increased. Recently VMware updated their definition of a “processor” to include up to 6-cores per processor (learn more) meaning that with VMware ESX 3.5 update 2 and Intel Xeon processor 7400 series, IT can deploy a higher density of virtual machines per server without an incremental increase in licensing costs. Everyone does it differently – so do your homework.

Other common questions circle around IT usage trends and how this technology can really be applied. Here is an interesting (and somewhat long) video where Intel VP and CIO Diane Bryant discusses with executives from Yahoo, Oracle, MySpace and Verisign about the challenges they face and how technology is helping them. If you choose to listen you will find answers to questions (paraphrased) like?

• What are some of the top challenges IT faces today? How can technology help?

• Is 6 core performance too much? Does IT have the ability inside their environment to take advantage of this additional compute capacity?

• Is the software ecosystem is ready for multi-core? Can today's applications take advantage of it?

• How are customers using Virtualization today and how do they see it changing over time?

• When virtualizing ... how does IT view MP servers (4 socket) vs DP (2 socket)?

• When deploying next generation technology, how important is the power capacity of the IT environment when selecting technology?

• Are Intel Xeon servers powerful and reliable enough to consider moving away from RISC or other proprietary architectures?

If I missed your burning question, just ask … I’d be happy to share. Chris

About 3 months ago I delivered a 2-part viedo series on the benefits of 45nm process technology (part 1, part 2). As time has progressed, the intel roadmap has continued to evolve and deliver increased benefits. On Sept 8th 2008, we introduced four new 2-socket processors in our Xeon 5400 product line and this past Monday (Sept 15th), we introduced a whole new series of products for our 4-socket product line, the Xeon 7400 series (codename: Dunnington). All of these new products feature 45nm process technology and the enhanced Intel Core Microarchitecture.

Here are some highlights of the benefits available for IT solutions

 Better Performance: Xeon 7400 features up to 6-cores and 16MB cache per processor. It is staggering to think about what an individual server is now capable of doing.

o Over 1 million transactions per minute (8 socket TPC-C* result)
o Over 600,000 transactions per minute (4 socket TPC-C* result)
o Over 500,000 business operation per second (4 socket Java SPECjbb*2005 result)
o Learn more about performance results of the Xeon 7400 products here

 Energy Efficient: The performance of 45nm processors (including the 6core) is being delivered in the same power/thermal envelopes as previous quad-core processors making the performance per watt ratio particularly appealing and beneficial to managing data center space and minimizing cooling challenges while growing performance capability. Many customers are refreshing older servers and seeing dramatic reductions in total cost of operations and space requirements. Evaluate your potential benefits with the Xeon estimator

 Investment Protection – All 45nm intel xeon processors (xeon 7400 and xeon 5400) are platform compatible with their 65nm quad-core predecessors (xeon 7300 and xeon 5300 respectively) so adoption, certification and integration into existing IT environments requires less effort.

 Flexible Virtualization: All 45nm Intel Xeon processors contain a technology called Intel VT FlexMigration that allows newer 45nm processors to be live migration compatible with previous 65nm intel xeon processors. So with current virtualization software support, IT customers can migrate virtual machines across multiple generations of intel processors, all in one big pool of computing.

 Better Business and Science: Many of the world’s top companies are using Intel’s 45nm products coupled with their software solutions to enhance their IT infrastructure. Last week Cern opened the Large Hadron Collider focused on recreating the big bang . Read more about how 45nm intel technology is playing an integral role in gaining insights into the formation of the universe or check out how your peers are benefiting from new technology at www.intel.com/references

 Eco-Friendly: If your company or boss has a green thumb, you may be interested in knowing that the new Xeon 5400 products are now built with materials which are both lead and halogen free (halogen is a material known to contribute to global warming)

Finally, I came across this video where Nathan Brookwood (analyst from Insight 64) discusses the new Xeon 7400 product (Dunnington) and his outlook on technology roadmaps moving forward.

In the next few weeks, I will be compiling and answering the top 6 questions around 45nm … so ask away.

Chris

Hank Lea and myself (Jason Davidson) will be covering the Eco-Technology debates at the Marriot Hotel in San Francisco on Monday, August 18th. We will also be hosting a blog talk radio show around this event at 5:15 PM.

In my tenure at Intel, I have had the pleasure of walking into major companies, educational institutes, non-profits, and government agencies to talk technology with many great people. “How green is this solution” is a topic on many minds lately – no matter which topic of discussion. Being an engineer by trade and scientist by education, I will typically dive into the details of around each component’s power consumption and the discussion ends with some simple math multiplying a number of units by their thermal numbers. However, there is so much more to the overall impact, and as I walk in and out of these locations, I am always amazed at the number of larger issues with much larger impacts that are unresolved or overlooked. For more information on these items, here is a blog.

The Eco-Technology Great Debates provide a unique and entertaining forum to expand your understanding of today’s most pressing data center and IT issues. Come hear industry leaders take up both sides of some of the hot topics facing

the industry.

Attendees will learn about the pros and cons of high-density computing versus low-density computing and ready-to-use container data centers versus traditional brick and mortar data centers. There will also be a panel discussion on energy efficiency metrics, which will take a look at everything from chips to cooling systems and how they play a role in energy efficiency.

The energy consumption of servers and data centers has doubled in the past five years and is expected to almost double again in the next five, costing about USD 7.4 billion annually.¹ There is no single right answer on what to do about this critical situation. Take an active step in solving this challenge by attending *The Eco-Technology Great Debates* and IDF at a special money-saving price. Register for IDF now and enter promo code *CLOECOT* (admission to the Eco-Technology Great Debate and a 2-day pass to IDF) or enter promo code *CLTECOT*(admission to the Eco-Technology Great Debate and a full conference pass to IDF). The debate takes place at the San Francisco Marriott Hotel (located across the street from IDF).

¹ [EPA Reports Significant Energy Efficiency Opportunities for U.S.

Servers and Data Centers (August 2007).|http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/0de87f2b4bcbe56e852572a000651fde/4be8c9799fbceb028525732c0053e1d5!OpenDocument]

<!-- /Item 3 ><! /Eco-Technology -->

After coming back from IDF a couple weeks ago, I've had some time to go through the mountains of online material, presentations mostly and a few interesting videos. This video is from Pat Gelsinger's keynote address and features Mendel Rosenblum from VMware. Pat and Mendel discuss new technologies in virtualization and demonstrate "Flex Migration", just hit the play button below to view...

This is very interesting for those IT shops with multiple legacy platforms and new generation servers coming online. We will have more discussion on this topic in the future, and so in the meantime, let us know if you have questions on how this could benefit your datacenter.

Many utility companies in North America are encouraging energy efficiency in datacenters in a big way. Some are offering incentives to non-residential customers for making energy efficient choices including servers, storage, and other datacenter equipments. Most of these utility companies require customers to make thier rebate/incentive application prior to starting the project and obtain thier approval. I compiled a short informative article regarding various rebates/incentives offered by the utility companies and it was recently published in the datacenterjournal. Read through......

http://datacenterjournal.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1475&Itemid=41

RK Hiremane