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!

I have a confession to make… Last year was my first IDF. Ever! I had no idea then, that this year I would end up being responsible for a whole track, and sponsoring the Virtualization Community zone. I was lucky that Jake took ownership of the community zone. He assembled a great line-up of demos, from a variety of companies. It should be great, go see!

But this blog is about the Enterprise Cloud track. I set out to make it to represent a theme, rather than a collection of loosely related sessions. In my view, this required a mix of depths – an overview session to explain the concepts alongside deep technical sessions. I also thought it would be a great opportunity to gather some industry leaders beyond Intel to talk about Enterprise Cloud vision and the opportunities it presented for the developers community.

“What is this guy talking about” you must be asking yourself. “What is Enterprise Cloud? Not more hype?!” Well, I think of Enterprise Cloud as a very real vision of the place where actual IT needs meet the aspirations of the Cloud Computing hype.

The Cloud hype is based on some pretty impressive efficiencies that several companies are being told to have achieved. These companies did so by designing custom application to run in their data centers. In some of these cases the data centers and the hardware in them were even custom architected and designed to run these applications. IT wants to gain similar efficiencies. But IT can’t throw away all the legacy applications…

In comes Enterprise Cloud, where IT evolves to gain the efficiencies, without losing the legacy investments…

In the Enterprise Cloud track we’ll cover some of the key technologies that are required for this to happen.

We’ll start with an overview (session ECTS001) on Tuesday at 10:15, where Dylan and I will do an overview of key technology areas: virtualization and performance, Data Center efficiency, evolution of I/O, and security, and why they are critical for the evolution of IT. What will follow are several in-depth sessions that will cover those very topics:

·         ECTS002 – will focus on Intel® Trusted Execution Technology and explain how application can protected in the Enterprise Cloud environment. Check this out in Jim's blog

·         ECTS003 – will cover enhancement for encryption processing in upcoming CPUs. Leslie gives a really great overview in her blog

·         ECTS004 – will talk about technologies to improve Data Center efficiency. David covers one of those technologies here and check out his other blogs as well.

·         ECTS005 – is an in-depth review of Intel’s technologies for virtualization, and will be presented by Intel Fellow Rich Uhlig.

·         ECTS006 – will discuss evolution of I/O, which is necessary to enable IT to gain the desired efficiencies. RK gives an excellent preview in his blog here

·         We also have a Q&A session on Tuesday evening (ECTQ001) to allow an open unscripted conversation with all the track presenters who will be around on Tuesday.

·         Finally, we have a VERY exciting panel (ECTP001, on Tuesday at 5pm). Jake Smith from Intel will lead a discussion with some true industry thought leaders from Cisco, Citrix, Microsoft, Sun, and VMware. The Theme of the panel is “Enterprise Cloud – technologies, usages, and opportunities for the developers community”. This should be an exhilarating hour!

Along with a couple of labs this should a great track. See you at IDF… it all starts tomorrow!!!

We seem to have an insatiable appetite for all kinds of computing equipment.  I remember my parents carrying a cell phone the size a football.  I thought they were way cool. Today, my 7 year old cousin has a blackberry, not sure how I feel about that.  I suspect that she is more tech savvy than I am.  

Needless to say, the use and proliferation of electronic products has grown substantially over the past two decades, changing the way and the speed in which we communicate and how we get information and entertainment.  According to the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), Americans own approximately 24 electronic products per household.  So I did a quick inventory at my own place and came up with 12. True, I fell short, but I am a household of one and not a techie.  With all this electronic stuff out there, ever wonder what happens to it? Does it end-up in a landfill?   Can you donate or recycle? The answer is not as straight forward as my might think. 

Relative to a few years ago, it is easier to recycle.  Some OEMs offer free recycling.  In the EU the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive provides direction regarding recycling options.  19 US states have also passed laws that mandate recycling.  But we have a long way to go, as only 15-17% of the equipment that we do not want is recycled.  So I pose the question, how do we work as an industry to increase recycling? Can we design compute equipment to help with recycling? What are HP and DELL doing?  What can we learn from them?  If you are curious, come to the LCA panel discussion at IDF and hear first hand from the experts and no, my 7 year old cousin will not be there. 

I and Sean Varley will be jointly presenting a session on ‘I/O innovations optimized for enterprise cloud’ at Intel Developer Forum (IDF). We are focusing on the I/O challenges in virtualization based enterprise cloud infrastructure and how current innovations, collaborations and technologies solve some of the challenges efficiently.

I have written in the past we have a view that evolution of virtualization has different phases to it. IT begins with basic consolidation, what we call virtualization 1.0, and then wants to extract more efficiency through flexible resource utilization and automation that we term as virtualization 2.0. The next phase to flexible resource management is deployment and management of scalable applications on a dynamic infrastructure, which we can relate to as enterprise cloud or virtualization 3.0.

In our view, the requirements of virtualization 2.0 makes virtualization 1.0 better and similarly the requirements of virtualization 3.0 makes 2.0 phase better. This means some of the challenges and solutions we discuss for enterprise cloud will make the IT datacenter today much efficient.

So what are the I/O challenges for enterprise cloud built on virtualization? There are many.

Enterprise cloud model would mean being able to deploy the workload on available infrastructure (given that security and compliance needs are met) in a more flexible manner. This could lead to large scale consolidation given the new server capacity and performance. More VMs on a single server means more pressure on the I/O. So we need a balanced platform solution that maps the I/O capability to the CPU performance increases.

Flexible resource utilization should mean that the even the I/O hardware resources are flexible. However typical I/O architecture in a server is very rigid today. IT typically configures a virtualized server with a bunch of HBAs for storage I/O and eight or ten ports of Ethernet device for network traffic. Add to it separate cabling associated with each. Well, that means we cannot reallocate resources as needed in a flexible manner. So I/O hardware resource limits the extent of true flexibility. How to get around the challenge of rigidness in I/O architecture? And how do we reduce the complexity of the fabric and the power consumption? We perhaps need a unified converged high-speed I/O fabric.

Is it sufficient to have a converged fabric or do we need more? Ofcourse we need more, what about the QoS and SLA of the I/O traffic? How about the scalability of the I/O fabric and security features to isolate the traffic between two VMs?

All these are important as well in a multitenant enterprise environment.

In our session we explain how Intel in its products and through standards work has been targeting solutions for these challenges and delivering those to market with the ecosystem. To learn more make sure you attend the IDF session ECTS006. And for those who cannot attend, look for a blog from me and Sean post-IDF where we will succinctly define how we solve the challenges with Intel technology solutions.

RK Hiremane & Sean Varley

It has been a couple of years since I’ve had the opportunity and pleasure of attending an IDF, but I remember the experience well.  While I had been in the technology industry for many years and was familiar with major tradeshows like Comdex, Interop, CeBit, etc, I recall being amazed that a single company could be the catalyst for such a huge event.  But as I experienced it, it made more sense: after all, Intel sells a very broad line of products to a huge array of customers.  And our products are among the most technologically advanced and complex in the world—yet they are only critical components to solutions that require a wide range of complementary parts—system boards, test tools, compilers, software, BIOS and integrators—to name just a few.  And IDF is the critical venue to galvanize this huge and surprisingly efficient cadre of fellow travelers that will help build upon and deliver our technologies to the world.  It is where we educate, communicate and differentiate, and it is a great showcase for Intel.

This year, I’m excited to be able to participate.  As I wrote a few weeks ago, I’m looking forward to being able to use this showcase to help establish Intel’s focus on server security. We’ve got a couple of key new features—Intel® Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) and Advanced Encryption Standard new instructions (AES-NI) for encryption processing—that promise to make secure processing for servers more complete and efficient.  You can get a glimpse of what Leslie Xu and Michael Kounavis will cover for AESNI. I’ll be working with Mahesh Natu and some friends in the fellow traveler community to help introduce TXT for servers. Like many others, we’ll be using this opportunity to: conduct training for developers (session ECTS002); show the technology in action in a really cool Server Zone demo (Booth #517), and generally help build awareness for TXT and security in general.  I’m really looking forward to the demo.  It is one thing to offer a cool feature, but it is a whole new level of anticipation when one can so clearly visualize how this technology can be deployed to make users’ environments better.

I know that we’re eager to share our enthusiasm and engage the developers and customers that will make our technologies a success.  I’m also keen to get to see other great things coming out of Intel and our fellow travelers. What are you eager to see and hear about at IDF?

Cryptography, encryption, identity theft, rootkit, malware - none of this sounds familiar? You're not alone. These are words that identifies with managing, communicating, and protecting information and data in business environment and in our personal life.  Rootkit and malware are nasty software that get below the hypervisor and OS to infect your computer system. Cryptography is the science of secret codes, transforming data from ordinary readable form into unintelligible gibberish in order to provide confidentiality, integrity and authentication for data protection, end to end protection, and access control. The challenge is that historically, cryptography has been complex and computation costly.

Why is cryptography hot in the marketplace today, especially in the enterprise? For starters, over 90 million consumers have been notified of potential security breaches regarding personal information since 2005 per privacyrights website. The rate is accelerating and the attacks are more complex and harder to detect. There is a shift from attacks that infects millions of computers to one which targets a few banks/government agencies with sensitive financial and personally identifiable information. In the highly virtualized environment of computing today, several virtual machines share the same hardware resources. The hardware resources needs more secure protection as there are more eggs in one basket. Encryption provides the defense in depth that even if the systems are compromised, information is lost, it is still possible to make the information unusable through symmetric, asymmetric, and hash crypto schemes. Encryption also provides data protection increasingly important due to HIPPA (health), SOX (US companies), and PCI (payment card industry) regulation compliance

Asymmetric cryptography involving a public and private key, symmetric cryptography with just one key, and hashes are all cryptography types. Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is a type of symmetric cryptography that has been adopted by the US government as well as other governments in the world.  Three main enterprise AES usage models include secure transactions with SSL/HTTPS/FTP/SSH/Ipsec, software full disk encryption (FDE), and application level encryption in databases, mail servers etc.

As for AES-NI, it comprises 7 instructions for accelerating different sub-steps of the AES algorithm. 4 instructions to perform the first round and last round of the 10/12/14 rounds of transformation that encrypts 128b of data from plaintext to ciphertext and vice versa. 1 instruction for mix column operation and 1 instruction for generating the next round key. The 7th instruction, CLMUL, does the packed carry-less multiply in hardware. The benefit are reduction of software side-channel attacks and reduction of performance overhead.

To find out more, please attend my class "Securing the Enterprise with AES-NI" class with Michael Kounavis and come see the "Westmere-EP Encrypting the Internet" demo at Fall IDF in San Francisco.

ENERGY STAR® for computers version 5 went into effect July 2009, superseding version 4 from 2007.  Version 5 has higher efficiency limits, introduces an energy total calculation for personal computers, while also expanding the scope of products to include thin client systems.  The EPA released ENERGY STAR for computer servers in May 2009. The EPA also has plans for energy efficiency programs to cover enterprise storage systems and networks, along with updates to its existing programs in a year or two.

Japan, Europe, Australia, Canada and other countries have included the ENERGY STAR programs as part of their energy efficiency programs.  Japan has begun to enhance its TopRunner program for updates in a year or so.  Europe’s Energy Commission has an Energy Related Products (ErP), formerly Energy Using Produdct (EuP), program that complements their ENERGY STAR program with mandatory power requirements.  The ErP program has an upcoming implementing measure which sets a maximum Off-power (i.e. Lot #6) at 1W for personal computers effective January 2010.  Lot #6 lowers off-power limits to 0.5W in January 2013.   The European EC is reviewing additional "Lot"s to cover other system power characteristics and investigating programs to cover other systems such as servers. Korea just established its e-Standby program this year, 2009.  Australia and New Zealand have been developing its Minimum Energy Performance Standards (MEPS) as mandatory levels for personal computers. Other countries are following suit with their own energy efficiency programs.

In short, with the geo-political focus on energy efficiency and green-house-gases, many countries have or will begin instituting a number of power targets for computer systems. With multiple energy efficiency programs springing up, each has its own specific methods and targets.  The various criteria drive a common question of whether a product complies and to which specification.  At this fall’s Intel Developers Forum in San Francisco, I will host a panel discussion ECOP002: World Wide Information Communications Technology (ICT) Energy Efficiency Regulations: What Are They and Where Are They Headed? The panel includes Andrew Fanara from the US EPA, Rick Goss from the IT Industry Council, and Jan Viegand a lead  European Commission consultanat.  The panel will provide an overview, plans, and discussion on some of the major energy efficiency programs for computer systems.

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.