Your first server, that is. There’s nothing like a real server to help your business become more competitive. While some small businesses can get away with using a desktop as a server, there’s really no substitute for the real thing. With the ability to more efficiently handle more users, accommodate the latest applications, and deliver greater reliability, having a real server will make all the difference.

     Aren’t you ready for the real thing? A server built on an Intel® Xeon® processor has a lot to offer your business, so be prepared for dramatic performance and productivity improvement. If you want to be able to handle the demands of more customers, more data and more staff, an Intel Xeon processor based server is the way to go. 

Can you afford downtime? Of course not! Maximize business uptime with technology that’s ready to work all day, every day.  And protect your critical digital assets with error correcting memory and support for RAID storage.

     And just to build the IT excitement for your first server, check out this animation to see what a real server can do for your business:

     So, if you’re flirting with transitioning to a real server, I would just advise that you make sure that your first really is the best.  Talk to your IT solutions provider [ http://premierlocator.intel.com/] about implementing an Intel Xeon processor-based server. And remember, once you go Xeon, you’ll never go back!

Running multiple Unix environments across a range of locations adds increased complexity and cost to the IT environment. I came across an interesting case study and wanted to highlight some of the key findings

YPF SAis the largest company in Argentina operating in the Oil and Gas industry. The company has 29 gas plants around Argentina running different Unix environments such as HP-UX, AIX and Solaris.

YPF SA consolidated their SAP ERP and Oracle DB environment from multiple Unix environments to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with integrated virtualization running on Intel Xeon based platforms from IBM System X

Some of the key findings to highlight

• Key requirement from Unix Administration Team that "migrating from old RISC/Unix and proprietary servers to open and flexible platforms would pose no risk to the reliability, availability and performance of the systems"
• Positive impact on cost and performance; Lowered costs, simplified management and increased compatibility
• Reduction in costs especially when compared to license costs of RISC based platforms
• Increased performance and availability drove decision to scale with RHEL and Xeon
• Ability to leverage Redhat integrated virtualization. Free up internal hardware and technical resources for other projects

I guess the combination of Redhat and Intel deliver the business results that customers are seeking. What do you think?

Today, I watched a video from Gartner where they shared insighs from their recent CIO survey and offered recommendations for 2H.  In the survey, about 1/2 the CIOs saw a drop in budget this year (no surprise there) and they reported the average budget was about 7% down.  However, Gartner also noted that moving forward, these CIO budgets appear stable.

Recommendations from Gartner to CIOs

1. Be Decisive - CIO Must Make Tough Decisions in the downturn (don't have time or resources for lengthy analysis)
2. Be Resourceful - Change the way you work .. to be more efficient (more with less mentality)
3. Prioritize - Do First Things First and Faster (accelerate the things that are important)
4. Focus on Greater Results (ROI, Benefits, payback, savings, productivity)

In my opinion, server refresh is ripe to capitalize on these Gartner reccomendations (boosting efficiency, must act to get benefits, and the benefits are big with estimated 8 month ROI when using then new Xeon 5500).  The good news is that with the server refresh estimator (www.intel.com/go/xeonestimator), you don't have to reinvent the wheel.  This tool helps you estimate the benefits of server refresh and helps you communicate those benefits to a variety of stakeholders in your organization including business heads, finance, facility managers, sr management and others. Getting everyone behind refresh is critical since server refresh affects everyone, and positively.

For Intel, proceeding with server refresh in 2H is worth $19M in savings http://communities.intel.com/docs/DOC-3271

Waiting on Server Refresh Means Wasting Valuable Resources.

Chris (http://twitter.com/chris_p_intel)

The debate on how to best increase system capacity to accommodate growing applications has raged on for years; “scale up” with more CPU, memory, and I/O, or “scale out” with loosely connected systems.    Scaling out by adding networked systems to increase capacity has been a good economical solution for many IT managers because it allows them to grow by using less expensive, industry standard building blocks.  However, there are some notable exceptions to this line of thought.  One is that the class of applications that require shared memory and large database support are much better suited to run on a single, expandable system that scales up.  These are typically transaction processing, business intelligence and ERP solutions.   Until now, IT managers running applications that require scale-up systems larger than 4 or 8 CPUs have had limited platform choices and most were proprietary and expensive RISC-based servers.

The other problem with the scale out approach is the people, facilities, software and overhead costs and complexity of managing very large numbers of servers, which can grow to a point where the costs outweigh the performance and system cost benefits.  The industry solution to achieving better ROI has been to consolidate multiple scale-out servers onto single industry standard scale-up servers with virtualization solutions.  This is a good solution, but is limited by the number of application loads the IT manager feels comfortable placing on a single server, given the need to maintain peak performance and availability for each application.

Well, it looks like the scale-up, scale-out debate is about to take another turn.  In the server product update Intel gave on May 26th, they talked about new levels of system scalability and choice supported by the upcoming Nehalem-EX processor.  This processor will support systems that scale up to 8 sockets natively (shared memory, without any additional silicon), and up to 16 sockets and higher with node controllers from system manufactures that allow single systems to share memory beyond 8 sockets.   So far there are over 15 different designs from 8 OEMs that offer 8 socket or higher scalability.  But of course, for the class of application where scaling is important, socket count doesn’t tell the whole story of what’s needed for scalable performance.  Thread support, key for transaction processing and virtualization, scales at the rate of 16 threads per socket with 8 cores and Hyper Threading (2 threads per core).  That would be 128 threads for an 8-socket system, and 256 threads for 16 sockets.   And in order to keep those threads fed with data close to the CPU, each processor supports up to 24 MB of shared cache (1.5X current generation Xeon), and an impressive 16 memory slots per socket or 128 DIMMs on an 8-socket system.  In addition, the Scalable Memory Interconnect gives these systems 9 times the memory bandwidth of today’s top Xeon processor.  Finally, four QuickPath interconnect links per socket allow for high-bandwidth sharing of data across the system.

So the net of it is that the industry is going to see a broad selection of highly scalable, next-generation servers that significantly extend the economic advantage of industry standard scale-up solutions for business-critical, large database, and high-end virtualization/consolidation deployments.     I would expect these systems to give IT managers a very cost-effective alternative to the much more expensive and proprietary RISC-based servers they use today.

What are your thoughts?  Mike

Related Topics:

• NHM-EX Press Fact Sheet
• NHM-EX May 26th Press Briefing Video – condensed version
• IBM 8Socket Demo Video
• NHM-EX--A New Standard

Fast Food. Fast Servers. Fast Savings.

A recent customer who worked for the US Department of Defense expressed an interest in using the Intel Xeon Server Refresh Savings Estimator off-line (no internet connection) due to security concerns of using their own internal business data over the internet.

For those of you who may have similar concerns, here is a procedure that will give you access to the ROI estimator on the safety of your own laptop or desktop computer.

http://communities.intel.com/docs/DOC-3204

I was thinking about what to write in my next blog and what I could share beyond what I have written previously about Intel Vs RISC in terms of TCO, performance and the customers that are choosing to move.

Luckily I didn't have to think too long on a Friday morning as a a topic came to mind instantly. There are numerous articles flying around this morning that picked up on the Oracle comments yesterday about how SPARC based systems compare to Intel. Thanks for providing me with an appropriate topic.

So in case you missed it, there was a question and answer session with Larry Ellison. When asked about SPARC, this was the reply "SPARC is much more energy efficient than Intel while delivering the same performance on a per socket basis. This is not a green issue, its an economic issue. Today, database centers are paying as much for electricity to run their computers as they pay to buy computers. SPARC machines are much less expensive to run than Intel machines"

1) SPARC more energy efficient than Intel?  Seriously, in what parallel universe does that exists?

SUN continues to use watts per thread as measure of energy efficiency. The recognized industry standard benchmark for measuring energy efficiency is SPECpowerand I don't see any SPARC based results in the 91 results published. The absence of a result certainly says something very clear to me - no story.

These UltraSPARCT2+ systems get loaded with a lot of memory to deliver the their results, so when you look at overall system power (what people care about) they are not as energy efficient as Intel based systems.

SPECpower is effectively based of SPECJbb-2005 so another way of loking at this is to look at the SPECJbb-2005 results for a 4 socket UltraSPARcT2+ system and a Xeon 7400 system. The 4s UltraSPARCT2+ delivers 693k BOPs while Xeon 7400 is 532kBOPs. So you conclude that SPARC is better than Xeon?. That would be the wrong conclusion

UltraSPARCT2+ system would consume 1525 watts Vs Xeon 7400 at 816 watts. If you look at BOPs per watt (another way of looking at energy efficiency and performance) then you would see that Xeon 7400 is 43% more energy efficient. Doing a similar comparison with Xeon 5400 (I haven't even talked about our latest Xeon 5500, Nehalem) would be up to 77% more efficient than UltraSPARCT2+.

And lastly before I forget to mention the 4s UltraSPARCT2+ had 128GB memory and costs over $150,000for the system, while Xeon 7400 based system had 64GB memory and costs around $32,000.

2) SPARC deliver same performance on a per socket basis?

2S Xeon 5500 has performance leadership over 2S UltaSPARCT2+ across a wide range of benchmarks. Up to 70% more performance and up to 60% lower system cost. 4S Xeon 7400 has price/performance leadership over 4S UltraSPARCT2+, UltraSPARCT2+ results achieved with system loaded with lots of memory that drives the cost up to 3-4Xthat of Xeon 7400 system

3) SPARC machine are less expensive to run?. I can't for the life of me work this one out!.

Hardware systems based on Intel have leading price/performance (read cheaper), lower energy needs (so electrivity bill lower) and any software product with a license per core strcuture is less expensive on Xeon system than an 8 core UltraSPARcT2+ (which also has higher multipler per core)

That's all for now folks. I just wanted to share some data on why I know that SPARC machines are much MORE expensive to run than Intel machines

OK, so we launched the Xeon 5500 processor based servers and workstations a couple of weeks ago. While I don’t have direct quotes of support from Brit, Miley, Susan or any country presidents who have signed economic stimulus into law I am pretty confident that if they were ever actually considering purchasing a server or workstation they would come to the conclusion that the new Xeon 5500 platforms would be their best choice.

I had the privilege of being at one of the thirty seven different worldwide Xeon 5500 launch events. I was on Wall Street and attended the NASDAQ launch event on March 31^st. Based on which data source estimate you look at Financial Services as a whole represents about 20% of the worldwide market for servers. It was also evident when meeting with customers in the NYC area that they are passionate about performance and power consumption. Most of them had received pre-production seed systems and had already done extensive testing prior to this launch event. I have been in Intel’s Server Platform Group for over a decade now and I have never seen so much enthusiasm for a product launch.

I won’t rehash the performance benchmarks and performance per watt data. There are many benchmarks, blogs and press articles doing that. What I took away from the conversations was a feeling of optimism from the end users I spoke to. Some people felt that these new products would be what it takes for them to deliver solutions that would give them a performance advantage over their competition. In few markets does that pay off more, and translate almost directly to the bottom line, than in Financial Services. Others felt that these systems would help them continue to add to their existing datacenters without having the need to build a new one. This was due to the performance per watt improvements and the end users ability to replace many old servers and workstations with a few new ones.

Lastly, I think human nature being what it is we are seeing that IT professionals want to work on cool new projects. These Xeon 5500 servers and workstations represent a shiny new toy that IT professionals can use to have a material impact on the bottom lines of their companies. To some degree the same applies to virtualization in that it is disruptive and provides a new cost effective way to deliver legacy solutions and also enables flexibility for future growth. The IT folks that I have met who familiarize themselves with virtualization, new hardware and advanced management techniques (power, systems, virtualization) generally are viewed internal to their companies as leaders with visionary capabilities.

As we all work through this economic morass I am hopeful that with new technology introductions, and a relentless focus on efficiency, we will all emerge with a greater level of capability and a higher degree of flexibility. I also believe IT will emerge as a key asset of differentiation for companies from Wall Street to Main Street and this will place an even greater burden on delivering solutions to meet those unique needs.

What do you think?

Shannon

shannon.poulin@intel.com