Just wrapped up Oracle Open World…sitting at SFO, waiting for a flight back home. 

The event from a Nehalem-EX perspective was a success. Hit important points and accomplished what we had to deliver. 

Hit #1:  Michael Dell, in his key note, delivered Nehalem-EX message beautifully.  2.5x performance improvements coming from 9x memory bandwidth…compared to currently sold technology.  Thank you, Michael. 

Hit #2:  Dell placed Nehalem-EX demo at its Exhibit at Moscone West.  I missed seeing it in person but the Dell friends came to me reporting that the demo attracted a lot of attention from the audience.  Thank you again, Dell. 

Hit #3:  My Nehalem-EX demo at Intel booth was also a success.  The pre-production system ran throughout the event with 64 logical processors fully active with 1TB of Samsung DDR3 memory, running SPECjbb, stressing all the CPUs, cores, and threads.  Occasionally, I injected double-bit error to show off the MCA-Recovery function.  Windows 2008 R2 reported nicely that the system encountered a critical error but the system still running at full speed.  If not with MCA-Recovery function, I would have had blue screen each time I ran that error injection script and would have had to wait for few minutes to have the server come back up online. 

Also, I really liked the demographics of the audience this time.  Compared to the other events I went to this year, I had more conversations with the folks who actually purchase equipments, those who test new equipments at IT shops, and those from Oracle starting to realize that hardware choice does matter when selling Oracle software.  Many people specifically asked when Intel starts shipping Nehalem-EX and which specific OEM models would use Nehalem-EX.  I hope my responses to those folks were legitimate.  ;-)  I also hope Oracle sales folks now have true confidence that the Oracle software stack runs best on Intel, specifically, Nehalem-EX. 

Oracle Open World is said to be the largest IT event.  I believe that.  You don’t get to have lunch at the middle Mission St tarmac very often.  You don’t get to see four digit hotel bills very often for just couple night stay. Despite the fall storm hitting the peninsula dumping loads of water and gust knocking trees down on Tuesday, Intel booth continuously had heavy flow of traffic.  I admire the Intel team putting together our presence and admire the whole industry supporting the event. I also personally learned a lot from the event, meeting people, exchanging knowledge.  Three day booth duty is a tough one but worth it. 

Oh, and to wrap the whole trip up…

Hit #4:  cleared the wait list and getting home earlier with an earlier flight… 

AND…I wish today was Friday… 

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.

If you hadn’t heard, Microsoft* and Intel spent a lot of effort optimizing Windows* Server 2008 R2 (and Windows 7) to improve energy efficiency by reducing system power consumption at idle and under load.  For more details, check out the presentation from the Intel Developer Forum a few weeks ago titled Microsoft and Intel: Innovations in Hardware and Software to Help Deliver New Technology Experiences.  This presentation (and other IDF presentations) can be found at intel.com/go/idfsessions (search for SPCS003 using the session ID number).  There is good information on the operating system optimizations that were done to reduce power consumption.  Slide 22 has an excellent comparison of the power consumption of Windows Server 2003 vs. Windows Server 2008 R2 running on the same Xeon® 5500 series processors. It shows that using WinSrv2008 R2 reduced system idle and peak power consumption by ~60W!!  In addition, Hyper-V* 1.1 now uses the power management features of Intel processors to reduce power consumption during periods of low utilization.  

This is a great time to show your customers the energy efficiency benefits that come with upgrading to WinSrv2008 R2 at the same time they refresh their server infrastructure with Xeon® 5500 based servers.

*Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others

Sun has recently published a whitepaper that discusses how the Solaris OS will take advantage of the next generation Intel Xeon processor (codename Nehalem-EX) for expandable servers (4 sockets & greater).  Sun with over 20 years of experience in larger socket, core & threading capabilities is working to have the Solaris OS be ready to take advantage of the features & new capabilities of “Nehalem-EX”.  The three areas of collaboration for Solaris & Nehalem-EX are around  scalable performance; advanced reliability and energy efficiency between the specific features in Solaris and the next generation Intel Xeon processor.  Read this recently published whitepaper

In March '09, former Intel executive Pat Gelsinger predicted that Nehalem-based Xeon 5500 servers would become "cash machines" for the IT industry, due to unprecedented power-efficient performance gains that can deliver a very short ROI for IT.  Pat's description of the Xeon 5500 was validated during a briefing with Intel CIO Diane Bryant in San Francisco on October 6^th, as reported in TG Daily.

She discussed the ROI achieved and the impact that a proactive serve refresh strategy has had on Intel’s bottom line, as reported in PC World.  Some of her key points:

·         Intel is expecting up to $250M savings over 8 years, saved $45M in 2008 alone.

·         Despite these results, economy forced Intel to re-evaluate capital spending in 2009.  Found that delaying server refresh would cost us $19M more than continuing.  So we continued. 

·         Getting an average of 10:1 server consolidation with Xeon 5500 in design computing environment and 20:1 virtualization server refresh ratios in Office/Enterprise. 

Did you know that Server Refresh is also the #1 driver of Intel’s Carbon Footprint reduction as well, with an initiative to reduce Carbon footprint by 5% per year.  We are projected to reduce by approximately 4K metric tons (2009) and this server refresh strategy is forecasted to be #1 project to help IT reduce Carbon.

Staying on the green IT theme, the newest ally for IT to help drive carbon-reduction and energy cost savings is the energy utilities.  A prime example of this is the Energy Trust of Oregon, who offers cash incentives to motivate Oregon businesses to make energy saving investments.  Intel gained access to a $250K incentive from them as a result of energy savings gained by replacing older servers with newer, more energy-efficient servers in our data centers. If you are replacing older servers with modern energy-efficient Xeon 5500 based servers and you haven’t had this conversation with your utility yet – please do so.  You may be eligible for utility incentives for energy savings that can lower your operating costs and reduce the impact of your business on the environment.  To estimate the energy savings associated with server refresh, go to www.intel.com/go/xeonestimator. 

You’re going to hear more about these “cash machines” in the very near future…stay tuned!

Bryce

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

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