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

o   HW infrastructure cost is highlighted as one of the key barriers of migration

·         Business Justification

o   Is there a compelling business reason to upgrade the hardware?

·         Additional risk of business disruption

o   Migration 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:

Challenge:

•         Convert Intel’s Worldwide Warehouse Management Software

•         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.

“Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.” Albert Einstein

Today’s workstation can provide you with a magnificent digital canvas to create tomorrow today.

With workstations powered by two Intel® Xeon® 5500 series processors, engineers have the opportunity to create, shape, test and modify products before they become real. Engineers can now design, visualize and simulate products from the conceptual design phase through the entire manufacturing process. This is done virtually before any investments are made in a prototype.

“Experiment fearlessly.” “Innovation is bloody random.” Tom Peters

Peters, a world renowned author and management consultant, recognized that innovation is more art than science.

Consider this example: Taking innovation to an entirely new level, Boeing, in the late 1990s, employed a process known as algorithmic design to see what designs might be viable to meet a specified hypersonic aircraft design criteria. The algorithmic design process enabled computers to create and test new ideas against the specified design criteria without human intervention. As a result, more models were evaluated in less time, and a vehicle that was counterintuitive to what many engineers may have thought possible was evaluated. Innovation just accelerated.

Intel technology has seen dramatic changes since Boeing first tested the idea of algorithmic design in the last decade. Workstation performance has gone up Dual-processor workstations have yielded to workstations with two processors, eight cores and 16 computational threads. Science or simulation that was never tractable on a workstation before is now standard, and it is getting faster.

“I confess that in 1901 I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years.” Wilbur Wright

You think all you need is an entry-level workstation with a single Intel® Xeon® processor.                       After all , you only do CAD—right?

However, as you begin to adopt modern workflows and realize the dramatic impact that simulation-based engineering or digital prototyping can have on your product development cost and schedules, you realize that the cost of the second processor and additional memory necessary to support digital prototyping was far less expensive than the cost of multiple physical prototypes and the associated time to produce them. Instead of investigating hundreds of digital prototypes, you only have time to look at a single physical prototype and ask: What if I …?

Those “what ifs” could have been played out on a dual-processor Intel Xeon processor 5500 series-based digital workbench faster, and your time and cost of physical prototypes could have been significantly reduced.

I’d like to introduce myself as a product line manager at Intel who has spent almost a decade ensuring we are creating the best servers to solve small business challenges. Part of my role is to influence future generation products and I’d like to learn more about your challenges, needs and desires so I can ensure we address them in our next generation products.

Here is a story I have heard in the past: “Ah geez, What Now? A customer just called to tell me they tried to enter an online order for my product and my web site is nowhere to be found.  I am lucky they called, but so much for spending a Saturday at my kid’s baseball tournament! Now I need to drive an hour to my downtown office to restart and possibly fumble with my server.  You would think that the desktop system that I am using as a server would just work so I can spend my free time with my family and my work time growing my business.”  

I can’t count the number of times I have heard a similar story from customers and colleagues that are trying to grow a small business, manage their own computers and have a personal life.  The answer to their problem is simple, buy a real server based on Intel®Xeon® Processors that is designed to keep your business running 24/7.   Our latest Xeon processors and chipsets are not only validated to run 24/7, but include features such as support for error correcting code memory and RAID for server operating systems that ensure dependability and differentiate a real server from desktop system used as a server.  However, a small business should not care about all this technical jargon.   I believe they only care that their server runs 24/7 without failure, enabling them to focus on business growth and life.

What are your small business challenges?  I’m all ears.

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.

Few months back I saw an press release on Reuters from Fusion IO and HP claiming to hit 1 Million IOPS with a combination of Five 320GB ioDrives Duos and Six 160GB IO drives in an HP Proliant DL785 G5 which is a 4 Socket server with each socket having 4 cores, that makes a total of 16 cores in the server. I went saying wow that is amazing, a million IOPS is something any DBA running a high performance Database would like to get hands on. But when I did a quick search on the Internet for on how affordable the solution would be, I was horrified to see the cost which was clsoe enough to buy me couple of Mercedes E class sedan, all though the performance was stellar the cost and 2KB chunk size made me say which application does a 2KB read/write anyways, the default windows allocation is 4KB.

As time went by I got busy with other work till our Nand Storage Group  told us that they are coming up with a product concept based on PCIe to show a real 1 Million IOPS with 4KB block sizes which application in real world uses. This triggered the thought on what takes to achieve a 1 Million IOPS using generically available off-the shelf components.  I hit my lab desk to figure out what it takes.

Basically getting a Million IOPS depends on Three things:

1. Blazing fast Storage drives.
2. Server hardware with enough PCIe slots and good  processors.
3. Host Bus Adapters capable of handling the significant number of IOPS


Setup:

  Intel Solid State Drives was my choice, there has been a lot discussed and written about the performance of Intel SSD's and that was easy choice make. I selected Intel X25-M 160GB MLC drives made using 34nm process. These drives are rated for 35K Random 4KB read IOPS and seemed like a perfect fit for my testing.

Then I started searching for the right Dual Socket server, this Intel® Server Systems SR2625URLX with 5 PCIe 2.0 x8 provided enough slots to connect HBA's. The server was configured with Two Intel Xeon W5580 running at 3.2Ghz and 12GB of memory.

Search for the HBA was ended when LSI showed their 9210-8i series (Code named as Falcon) which has  been rated to perform 300K IOPS. These are entry level HBA's which can be configured to hook up up to Eight drives to eight Internal ports.

Finally I had to house the SSD's some where in a nice looking container, and a container was necessary to provide power connectivity to the drives. I zeored in on Super Micro 2U SuperChassis 216 SAS/SATA HD BAY, this came with Dual power supply and without any board inside it, but it provided me an option to simply plug in the drives to the panel and not worry about getting them powered. The other interesting thing about this Chassis is that, it comes with Six individual   connectors on the back plane so all each connector handles only Four drives, this is very different from active back planes which routes the signal across all the drives connected to them, this allowed me to just connect 4 drives per port on the HBA.  I also had to get a 4 slot disk enclosure ( Just some unnamed brand from local shop) in total I had capability to connect 28 drives.

With all the hardware in place, I went ahead and installed Windows 2008 enterprise server edition and Iometer (Open source tool to test IO performance). 2 HBA's were populated fully utilizing all 8 ports on them while other 3 HBA's were just populated with 4 ports only.  The drives were left without a partition on them. Iometer was configured with two manager processes with 19 worker threads 11 on one Manager and 8 on the other. The 4KB Random reads were selected with Sector alignment set to 4KB. The IOmeter was set to fetch last update on the result screen.

Result:

Once the test started with 24 drives, and felt I was short of few thousands to reach 1M IOPS so I had to find the 4 bay enclosure to connect another 4 more SSD's taking the total number of SSD's to 28. There was a Million sustained IOPS from the server with an average of 0.88 ms latency and 80-85% of CPU utilization.  Please see below pics for more pictorial representation of the setup.

Conclusion:

Recently we demonstrated this setup at Intel Developer Forum 2009 at San Francisco, this grabbed attention of many visitors due to the fact that this is something an IT  organization can achieve realistically without spending a lot of initial investment, the good thing about this setup is that the availability of parts and equipments in open market. As Intel we wanted to get this thought started that High Performance storage without robbing a ton of money from your IT department's budget. Once a storage admin gets the idea on what is possible the industry will take more innovative approach to expand and tryout new setups using of the shelf components.

Next Steps:

I would be spending sometime to get this setup running with a RAID config and possibly use a real world application to drive the storage. This needs a lot of CPU resources and I have in mind one upcoming Platfrom from Intel which will let me do this. . I come up with followup experiments.

-Bhaskar Gowda.

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

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

Follow me on twitter

I'm always looking for good ways to describe to end-users what Intel Intelligent Power Node Manager can relate to everyday activities.  Over the weekend, I was helping a buddy of mine move to a new home, and of course we rented a truck.  While we were driving, we noticed a cool gauge on the dash and a pretty simple sticker describing what it does:

Keep it in the Green - what a simple concept!  Most everyone can relate to the gas pedal in your vehicle directly with gas mileage. If you have a lead-foot, you burn more gas.  But people who want to conserve, and keep it green - use cruise control.

Well, Intel servers can also be managed to optimize the energy consumed by the platform.  Power Optimzed servers using X5500 Series Processors (Nehalem) and the X5500 chipset in conjunction with Node Manager is like cruise-control - you set your "speed" and the servers keep that maximum speed.  It's all managed via P/T states using Intel Datacenter Manager.

Of course, at times the RED ZONE is needed - work needs to get DONE - so you throttle up, kick in the Turbo Boost and release that power cap!  But there are also times when all that energy isn't needed - so you lift your foot off the gas pedal, and set your speed for the work that needs to be done. Intel Xeon based servers can transition to higher/lower power states using technologies like EIST, DBS, and Node Manager.

Keep your eyes on the lookout for more data on Intel and server power management at the Intel Developer Forum 2009

Cloud Power Management with Intel® Microarchitecture (Nehalem) Processor-based Platforms

Check Twitter for more details @IDF and @IntelNews and search #IDF09

* disclaimer: giving credit where credit is due U-Haul owns that sticker and tagline!