Most of the time, server ROI is measured on the data center scale, replacing tens, hundreds, or even thousands of servers with fewer higher-performing and more energy efficient servers.

But...have you ever wondered how much power you could save if you replaced every 4 year old server in an entire country with Xeon 5500 Nehalem-based systems?  What about how much CO2 that could be removed for those same 4-year old servers – and number of cars it effectively removes from the road?

Well, wonder no more!  Check out this short paper for an eye-opening comparison of the UK, Germany, and France, and how big of an ROI they can realize if the entire country refreshed ALL of their 4-year-old servers.  It looks at power savings, land reclamation, and monetary savings in slightly different terms, like how much space can be saved in comparison to the floor area of Notre Dame Cathedral?  You’ll need to read on to find out more… J

Additionally, all calculations were done using the Xeon ROI tool, so check it out and come up with some more interesting comparisons based on your city, state, or country data.  Be sure to post them here!

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 To replace an outdated facility, the company worked with Intel to design a state-of-the-art data center with a compact, energy-efficient infrastructure that could deliver flexibility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.

Read about it here

The results:

·          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

Read about it here

The results:

·          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

Read about it here.

The results:

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.

Read about it here

The results:

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.

Read about it here

The results:

                 New Intel Xeon Processors Provide a Foundation for Cloud Computing. With the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, DataPipe is creating

                a robust virtualized server environment, Stratosphere™, for hosting customer applications.     

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.

If you hadn’t heard, Microsoft* and Intel spent a lot of effort optimizing Windows* Server 2008 R2 (and Windows 7) to improve energy efficiency by reducing system power consumption at idle and under load.  For more details, check out the presentation from the Intel Developer Forum a few weeks ago titled Microsoft and Intel: Innovations in Hardware and Software to Help Deliver New Technology Experiences.  This presentation (and other IDF presentations) can be found at intel.com/go/idfsessions (search for SPCS003 using the session ID number).  There is good information on the operating system optimizations that were done to reduce power consumption.  Slide 22 has an excellent comparison of the power consumption of Windows Server 2003 vs. Windows Server 2008 R2 running on the same Xeon® 5500 series processors. It shows that using WinSrv2008 R2 reduced system idle and peak power consumption by ~60W!!  In addition, Hyper-V* 1.1 now uses the power management features of Intel processors to reduce power consumption during periods of low utilization.  

This is a great time to show your customers the energy efficiency benefits that come with upgrading to WinSrv2008 R2 at the same time they refresh their server infrastructure with Xeon® 5500 based servers.

*Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others

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 6^th, 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!

Bryce

About Hugh Mercer: I am a sales development manager in Intel’s Enterprise Solution Sales group. One of my responsibilities is working with Intel’s Server Platforms Group to indentify, develop and highlight success stories around Intel’s server platforms and technologies.

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: Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule (RWTH)

Leading German university turns to Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series for high-performance computing

Read about it here

The results:

·          Implemented small server farm. Intel Xeon processor series performed more powerfully than RISC architectures.

·          2010 scale out. In 2010, the university plans to implement some 400 more systems with over 20,000 cores powered by the upcoming Intel Xeon processors code-named Nehalem EX

Winning: Alvotech

Alyotech turns to Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series to deliver insightful design improvements

Read about it here

The results:

·          Alyotech benchmarked the new processor, developed on 45nm Hi-k next generation Intel® Core™ Microarchitecture, and increased performance by 65 percent over the previous generations, dual-core servers

Winning: Atos Origin

Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series helps Atos Origin lower total cost of ownership of its data centre environment.

Read about it here.

The results:

• Atos Origin compared the performance of      the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series with four cores to that of the previous-generation      with just two cores. It found, on average, 2.4x greater      transaction throughput running a web server, 1.75x running a database server and 1.25x running an email      server.

Winning: Business and Decision Group

Business and Decision Group powers forward with huge virtualization project underpinned by the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series.

Read about it here

The results:

• Early results showed that      with the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series they could gain virtualization rates      of 20:1 and with a processor load slightly below 55 percent.
• Power consumption was reduced by approximately 30 percent compared to the previous generation of processors.

Winning: Onkosh.com

Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series boots performance of unique Arabic search engine Onkosh.com

Read about it here

The results:

·          Onkosh.com already witnessed an increase of around 20% in performance. This performance increase was possible due to the new micro-architecture with Intel Turbo Boost

·          Onkosh.com is now able to grow about 300% in terms of the ability to crawl and parse new Arabic content automatically discovered on the World Wide Web.

Winning: BMW

Migration to Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series lowers total cost of ownership and increases flexibility

Read about it here

The results:

·          BMW Group is deploying Dell PowerEdge* servers powered by the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series, which will replace a RISC-based infrastructure that has much higher costs, lower performance and less flexibility

·          This allowed BMW Group to increase the workload to more than 80 percent and to significantly decrease the total cost of ownership (TCO).

Winning: Société d'Exploitation des Transports de l'Agglomération Orléanaise (SETAO)

SETAO turns to Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series to strengthen and build on its service offerings.

Read about it here

The results:

·          Thanks to the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series and VMware hypervisor, SETAO is now able to provide mainframe-class quality of service and ensure easy deployment of new virtual machines and applications while reducing total cost of ownership.” Olivier Parcollet, Chief Technology Officer, SET

·          SETAO estimated that it could save approximately 40 percent on energy costs due to the higher server consolidation ratio and greater CPU energy consumption management.

ENERGY STAR compliance is becoming an increasingly important factor for servers and workstations.

Accurate interpretation of the ENERGY STAR specification can be quite challenging with the ever-expanding scope of rules and regulations that govern platform and component-level design considerations.

Intel recently developed a semi-automated test tool to greatly simplify ENERGY STAR testing of servers and workstations. This tool has the following capabilities:

1. Ability to identify the relevant ENERGY STAR criteria per configuration

2. Automated assignment of ENERGY STAR test conditions and system testing

3. Preparation of system test data for analysis and ENERGY STAR submission

Feel free to stop by my booth at IDF in the Eco-Technology Community for a hands-on demonstration and to learn more.

Jennifer

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