In order to deliver to the continued promise of Moore’s Law, Intel’s Information Technology team needs to enable Intel’s Silicon designers with the tools, capabilities and streamlined processes to bring higher performing processors to market every year.  The latest generation of 45nm products (ie the Intel microarchitecture, codenamed Nehalem) was an especially challenging project for us. 

With Intel design computing demand growing an average of 45% year over year coupled with the rich technology capabilities in the 45nm based Nehalem micro-architecture, the computational requirements of silicon tape-out (the last stage of design before manufacturing) represented an approximate 13x increase in increase in demand from prior 65nm processors. Staring at this demand (1.2 million hours of compute demand per day) plus a need to bring products to market faster and more efficiently, our IT team realized we needed to do something different - our standard grid computing solution that was sufficient for earlier stage design work was insufficient for tape-out. 

Solution: Intel IT built a High Performance Computing (HPC) solution that currently rank in the Top 500 list of supercomputers (#261, #308, Nov 09) and feature a new parallel storage environment to support our 45nm Silicon tape-out process.  The details of this effort are captured in this whitepaper. 

In summary, the Intel IT HPC solution employs two of the world’s fastest supercomputers to create the fastest microprocessors helping Intel achieve the following results.

·         Completed 45nm tape-out in 10day, less than HALF the time of prior products

·         Delivered an estimated incremental value of $44M to Intel

I can’t wait for what tomorrow will bring as Intel IT is already upgrading and evolving this HPC solution to support our future generations of micro-processor designs. Tune in tomorrow at SuperComputing 2009 in Portland where Shesha Krishnapura from Intel IT will present more details on our HPC environment or join us December 8th, 2009 from 10-12am PST for a live chat with Intel IT experts in the Server Room

Chris (twitter)

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

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

Sure, Intel® Xeon® 5500 Series Processors represent a quantum leap forward in terms of both performance and energy efficiency. That has been proven in a number of test results and reviews.  But for your back-end data demanding enterprise app deployments, large scale server consolidation or virtualization of business critical applications, Intel® Xeon 7400 series processors offer outstanding performance and performance per watt in 4-socket servers. So, which platform do you choose, especially when this decision is likely going to be the key determining factor for capital savings, efficiency and TCO for your datacenter infrastructure? Well, you’re read a lot about Xeon 5500 series Nehalem servers over the last few weeks.  Let me share with you some reasons to consider a Xeon 7400 series 4-socket server when you are presented with the choice between Intel’s two best of breed products for virtualization.

4 Socket and above servers (Xeon 7400) are purpose built – just like a large truck: They’re purpose built for your most data demanding enterprise applications like database and ERP, and for large scale server consolidation using virtualization. Large Trucks are also purpose built.  They’re purpose built for hauling large loads over long distances.   Now, you don’t buy a large truck to commute to work in.  You also don’t take your everyday commuter and attempt to haul large loads with it, because if you did you would be significantly undersized (you’ve all seen those cars on the road with rear tires about ready to pop under the weight of a palette of heavy goods tied on top). 

More Resources Matter for 4 Socket MP Workloads:
The apps/workloads listed above benefit from the expanded feature set associated with 4 Socket Xeon 7400 based servers: more processors (4 vs. 2), more cores (24 vs. 8), more memory (32 dimms vs. 18 dimms), more I/O capacity (7 slots vs. 4) and larger cache (16MB vs. 8MB).  These features and what they enable are why MP Server buying patterns have remained stable with IT for the last 5 years and will continue to be stable for the foreseeable future according to IDC. 

But in today’s economy there may be MP customers out there that will want to push the envelope and attempt to deploy lesser expensive 2S systems for traditional 4S solutions. Would doing so pencil out from a TCO perspective? Let’s take a look at two Virtualization usage examples and find out.

Large Scale Server Consolidation: Where almost 2x the memory matters.

In this scenario, IT Manager is dealing with numerous corporate acquisitions across the country prior to the economic downturn, with servers that now need to be consolidated to cut costs quickly.  Goal is to convert 1000 older underutilized 2S servers.  He (she) converts these to 1000 VMs and transfers them electronically to the central Data Center.   He determines that these infrastructure apps when consolidated generally run into memory constraints before they run into processor constraints, so for his candidate solutions he compares a 4 Socket Server with Xeon X7460 processors vs. a new 2 Socket server with Xeon X5570 processors.   He fully loads both systems with 4GB dimms (128GB on 4S vs. 72GB on 2S), and assigns 4GBs memory for each VM deployed (enabling 32VMs per server resulting in 31 new 4S servers vs. 18 VMs per server resulting in 56 new 2S Servers.)

Now, he only propagates the 4S Solution with 2 Xeon 7400 Processors, which allows the IT manager to still use all 128GB of memory on the 4S Servers while paying lower VMWare licensing costs.  Price these systems out on Dell, HP, IBM’s or Sun’s website, and the Xeon X7460 servers will be in the $15k-$20k range vs. the Xeon X5570 based servers will be in the $10k-$12k range (i.e. roughly 1.5x higher for 4S vs. 2S server).  Add VMWare license costs, power/cooling, LAN/SAN cabling, and system maintenance costs and you’ll see the 4S solutions offer a lower cost per VM.

Virtualizing Business Critical Workloads: Where 3x the Processor Cores matter.

In the previous example, we were looking to maximize consolidation ratios.  In this example, we’re looking to achieve predictable high performance for a business critical app.  Solutions like ERP that are put into a virtualized environment perform best when run without oversubscription, where you set the same number of virtual CPUs to equal the number of physical cores available on the platform.  This helps deliver relatively more predictable performance for all VMs and is the way that IT@Intel intends to deploy ERP in a virtualized environment as they begin to test this moving forward (read more about this in the new whitepaper).  In this example, we’ll convert ~100 non-production ERP instances (i.e. the instances used for QA, Dev, and Production break fix).  We’ll assign 2 virtual CPUs and 8GB memory for each instance.  The four-socket Xeon 7400 processor based systems (with 96GB memory) will have a total of 24 cores and will have a list price of about $25k.  This allows us to run 12 Virtual Machines without oversubscription on the MP Servers and enables 100 ERP instances to be consolidated down to about 8 MP (4 Socket) servers.  Since the Xeon 5500 based Servers just have 8-cores, the IT manager decides to avoid oversubscription and deploys 4 virtual machines – consolidating down to 25 DP (2 Socket) servers with 32GB Memory and a list price of about $8k per server.  Include the costs of the hardware, VMware ESX license costs, power/cooling, cabling, and Server maintenance – the MP (4 Socket) solution here would also offer a lower cost/vm than the Xeon 5500 based DP (2 Socket) solution due to having 3x the processor cores on 4 Socket.

When you are deploying your most data demanding enterprise applications and implementing large scale server consolidation, Xeon 7400 based servers represent a very intelligent choice. 

Let me know what you think.

bryce

In Lesson 3 , our final video in this series on virtualization, I interviewed Intel Technology Specialist Radhakrishna (RK) Hiremane Shridhar, who discusses the platform and hardware assist technology that has been designed specifically into the current and future generations of Intel processor based servers to support both consolidation and emerging flexible live VM migration use models.I invite you to view lesson 3 (~ 6min) and comment on the usefulness of this information to your business planning.

I hope you were able to gains some key insights in this series. 

• For the lighthearted fun loving side … watch this fun video featuring the Orange Guy

• But when it comes down to serious business decisions, use these technical resources.
• • Implementing virtualization ; Understanding Intel VT FlexMigration

Learn more about Intel Virtualization Technology at www.intel.com/go/virtualization.

Can your Server Do Yoga? Namasté

Chris Peters, Intel

The use models and benefits of Server Virtualization are as diverse as the number of poses in the art of Yoga.  Virtualization is boosting server utilization while creating more flexible use models that feature live application migration from server to server. 

Over the past year, I found myself constantly talking with IT professionals about how they are using virtualization and how it was transforming their business.  And despite a more challenging economic environment for business and IT on the horizon, several industry analysts continue to predict investment growth in server virtualization during 2009.  It is easy to understand why. 

The many customers I have talked with and the many of the case studies I’ve read articulate that virtualization is lowering TCO through CapEx avoidance (data center construction, staff hiring) and OpEx reductions (power/cooling, management and maintenance savings).  In addition, virtualization is improving time to service, simplifying management of server infrastructure, boosting server utilization, and accelerating ROI of new hardware investment.  Beyond these “foundational” usages, I also found a set of new flexible use models that IT was considering that are based on moving applications dynamically from server to server … real time. 

For Lesson 1 of a 3 part series on virtualization, I interviewed Sudip Chahal from Intel IT where he explained to me the variety of terms, buzz words and use models of virtualization that are delivering the benefits above.  

I invite you to view this short video (~5 min) and comment about how you are using or intending to use virtualization in your business.

Namasté

Chris