Change is hard, but it can be done and the benefits of change usually outweigh the concerns which were on our minds before we made the change.

When making the change from running your solution on a RISC architecture to running that solution on a Xeon architecture, the biggest concern usually relates to whether that solution will run at the same level as on the previous architecture. I'm not talking about performance specifically, but usually the question is around whether operating systems like Linux, Windows, and Solaris on Xeon will meet your business needs for yourmission critical solutions.

Like the underlying improvements in the microprocessor, I believe that there have also been major fundamental improvements in the operating systems that run on both today's and the soon to come next generation microprocessors (sorry, my obligatory Nehalem-EX advertisement... coming soon in 2010). A decision made many years ago to run your solution on Unix/RISC was made based on comparing all the different variables at that time to pick what was right for your business. At that time you likely decided that your solution would not run on these operating systems, these operating systems were not suitable for your mission critical workloads etc. Probably right decision at that point, but like everything else decisions get revisited based upon the here and now and what may have been the right solution in the past (and right decision) may not be the right solution for your needs now.

I wanted to share some thoughts specifically on Redhat Linux today. Lets take a little look at Redhat Enterprise Linux. Current versions of Redhat can deliver what is required for your critical solutions. RHEL is ready and here are some of the reasons cited by Redhat in recent webinars on this topic and my interpretation of their comments

• Hosts real-time global mission-critical infrastructures and operations 24 X 7 - its tried and tested by other Enterprises
• Enables 5x9s availability in highly secure environments - pretty important to most critical solutions
• Contributes measurable reductions to TCO and enables, agile, standardized, and virtualized infrastructures - TCO benefits through standardization
• Has major ISVs on-board with the majority of 3rd party Unix applications have Linux and/or Windows versions available - the ISVs that traditionally delivered applications to you based on Unix, also have versions supported on Linux/Windows
• Many customer unique applications are developed with programming languages such as C, C++, JAVA, or J2EE and can be migrated to Linux and / or Windows - your applications can be moved
• Hosts most major database systems standard for your infrastructure - all the major databases run and run well on Linux

One of the other things we encounter a lot is around whether the technical considerations to move from one operating system environment are too high to overcome and outweigh the benefits of moving. There are always technical considerations and things that you need to know to move from one environment to another. However you are not alone in trying to understand these technical considerations. Redhat have done a phenomenal job of documenting the challenges of moving from say Solaris to Linux and have developed a great Strategic Migration Planning Guide. This is available on request. In recent webinars Redhat outline some of the things that you need to consider for the following technical categories

- Development Environment; Kernel tuning; Security; Filesystems; Debugging, tracing, Profiling; Command Differences; Deployment methods; Software Management; Virtualization; Application considerations 

In addition to the current versions of Redhat running on Intel architecture, we are also working very closely on future versions that will take advantage of the 20+ new RAS features that are planned for Nehalem-EX - more on that in a future blog

You are not alone, resources, tools and expertize exist to help you make that move and reap the business benefits while still delivering to the requirements of your business. Check out Redhat online tools for more information that dives deeper into all the areas for consideration http://www.redhat.com/migrate/solaris_to_linux/

We think Redhat Linux and Xeon are ready to run your mission critical workloads and solutions...What do you think?

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!

There’s a video going around from one of Intel’s top external customers.  Before you see this (video linked below) I wanted to position this correctly.  I caught up with Mr. X at an undisclosed coffee shop and got his approval to share publicly the messages that we would have rather had him go out with. Those messages are as follows:

Mr. X’s 4 year old servers were a burden on his organization, he spent all of his budget on just maintenance, nothing left for innovation.

He looked at his old infrastructure and determined that replacing them with more powerful-energy efficient servers from Intel was a strategic investment.

The New intel Xeon 5500 based servers provided the opportunity for him to innovate again.  He claimed that these new Intel Xeon Processor 5500 (Nehalem-EP) are the best enabler of IT business value that he's seen in years.

They boosted energy efficiency, saved him big $ and extended his facility lifespan – now he doesn’t have to go build a new data center. 

He replaced his old servers in a 9:1 ratio (getting rid of 9 old and replacing with 1 new) that enabled him to cut operational expenditures by 90% …And that savings alone is paying for the investment in these new servers in just 8 months. 

By strategically investing in IT when his competitors hunkered down and cut spending – he is now positioned to grow faster and gain share as the economic upturn arrives.

Ok, now that I’ve had a chance to convey his real messages, you can check out this video.

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.

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.

New Server Security Technologies Are Coming & Why We Need Them

The other day I had the opportunity to talk with Jeff Casazza and James Green from Intel’s Server Platform Group.  The topic? server security.  Our conversation was focused on the introduction of some new security technologies that are on their way and why we need them.  During our discussion, I found myself thinking back to my days in the US Navy, where security was a core topic of everything we did. The introduction of submarines transformed naval tactics and the stealth fighter changed aviation tactics.

So, why does IT put so much emphasis on information security?  … because the cost of a data breech is extremely high.  Imagine if a data breech of your IT systems resulted in losing employee social security numbers or customer information – the cost to recover that data (if possible) and the legal costs (penalties from regulatory agencies) is very, very high.   Jeff and James mentioned that business models are also exposed if these types of information escapes happen – a company’s brand, business and employee relationships could be at risk given the nature of trust and integrity that circle throughout our business.

Security always ranks high in importance, especially when we feel at risk.  As I have transitioned into my new role inside Intel IT, I have found a significant focus on security solutions especially as new threats (for profit attacks), new usages (client / server virtualization, cloud computing) and new collaboration tools (social media) challenge our existing paradigms of information security. 

During my discussion, I learned about two technology standards that Intel is implementing for servers that reduce security risks and address the changing nature of information security attacks happening today and expected tomorrow. 

Stealth Fighters Attacking Your Data: The nature of security attacks have changed.  Previous generation hackers used to target broad wide spread attacks on corporations or the worldwide web trying to disrupt business, gain notoriety with the ability to affect tens of thousands of people.  The newer generation attackers are seeking a smaller target .. a single laptop or a single server.  These new for-profit attacks are aimed at both industrial (business) or government entities and only need a single penetration into your infrastructure to get enough information to create a serious issue for your business.  

Encryption: A solution to defend against the stealth fighter point attack on your data is increased encryption of data.  Data encryption is not new.  Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption for communication over the internet, harddisk encryption and enterprise application encryption are all standard methods IT shops use to protect information.  Unfortunately, encryption is not free, and I’m not talking about purchase cost .. but rather compute cost.  Encryption is a compute intensive process that consumes processing cycles. Intel is planning on introducing new instructions for Advance Encryption Standards (AES-NI) that are intended to dramatically improve the efficiency of encryption in a future version of it’s processor micro architectures. 

Submarines Seeking Your Data From Under Your Hypervisor: Much of the anti-virus and security protection that resides on servers and client machines resides and is run through either the Operating System, Hypervisor or Application layer.   New malware software and root kits are targeting systems at startup before the hypervisor and/or OS boot up undermining the protection you have at the higher levels of the application stack. 

A new server technology from Intel, called Intel® Trusted Execution Technology (Intel TXT) works to ensure your system can boot up to the secure, protected environment you have deployed through your software stack.  In doing this, TXT ensures that your anti-virus software “perimeter” is secure and has not been compromised by a root kit “submarine”.  TXT has been available in Client Intel® vPro™ processor technology-based platforms since 2007.

Tune into the upcoming Intel Developers Forum (www.intel.com/idf) to learn more about plans for securing your server’s data and many other technology innovations from Intel.

Chris

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

I have been working in servers for almost 10 years with intel and in the last 4 years, much of my job had me focused on how IT uses server technology to create business value.  It was an awesome experience where I learned new things every day from OEMs, Intel's customers, sales force and with social media ... many extended.

During my role as an end user product marketing manager, I found that Intel IT was an extremely valuable source of learning for me to understand the end customer of the products that Intel makes and enables.   I also found that end user IT organizations valued hearing how Intel IT was approaching business challenges and deploying technology solutions to create value.  So when I was given the opportunity to move into Intel IT and be part of that team and learn from the inside out, my decision was easy.

I'm excited about seeing all aspects of technology (client, server, storage, network, facility, pc companions ... ), how IT aligns to business goals, makes investment trade-offs, implements new projects without disrupting business processes, and a host of other topics.  My learning curve is steep and fast (just the way I like it).  So as I transition and learn about Intel IT from the inside out, I will continue to share my experiences and learnings as i go

If you'd like to follow along real time on my Journey to the Center of IT, follow me on twitter (@Chris_P_Intel) as I will share the things I find, learn and explore.  Let me know if there is something you want to know.

In the mean time, check out the various resources available from IT@Intel including technical / business whitepapers, tools, videos and blogs.  Many of these are already on my required reading list.

Chris