Three short years ago, this would have taken 32 Xeon 5100 (Woodcrest) servers, accounting for 64U of rack space... this pic is from the upcoming Xeon MP (Beckton) platform with Nehalem-EX processors that many of you have seen at IDF 2009. This server only takes 3U of rack space... less than 5% of the space of what it could replace.
Sometimes you see a screenshot and it just makes your jaw drop...
Just to give a comparison of CPU density... here's a diagram showing the comparison of 3 year old technology compared to the upcoming Nehalem-EX. If each of those 32 old servers burns 400W of power - that's 12.8 kilowatts - compared to one server, burning less than 1kW.
What's even more amazing, is that some design wins are based on a 1U server with the same cpu footprint - that's AWESOME!
What are your thoughts on these upcoming multi-core technology improvements?
Recently in our test lab, we experienced a cooling failure... and I wasn't even sitting in the lab to realize it. In fact, I wasn't in the same state!
With the recent launch of the Xeon 5500 Series servers - I have been testing some use-cases against four of our servers in our lab when I noticed that the temperature was rising pretty drastically in there. How did I see this? Using Intel® Intelligent Power Node Manager embeddd in our Xeon Serversand using our Intel Data Center Manager (DCM) SDK software interface - the data is presented in a visual format.
In the graph above, the dark colored line is the "front panel inlet" temperature, and in a matter of minutes, the temperature in the lab rose from 71F to 87F - 16 degrees! What I didn't have setup is the scenario is a power policy that activates on a thermal trip. Here is how you would setup this policy in Data Center Manager under the Policies section for this rack:
In the event that a thermal event occurred that would cause the room to heat up to 78F (as shown above) - Intel DCM would send the IPMI commands to the platform which in turn would tell the Node Manager firmware to throttle-back the Xeon CPUs to their lowest P-state possible. This would reduce energy consumed across the systems in the policy group as well as reduce the thermal output of each server. This would in turn generate less heat across the servers thereby reducing the load placed on an already overheated lab or datacenter.
This gives the server managers more time to gracefully shutdown systems, and/or move the workloads to cooler sections of the datacenter. If you have ever experienced a cooling failure in the datacenter, it's a usually a frenzy to shutdown machines to minimize heat and/or power utilization overall. This thermal policy can give you more time before you reach a critical temperature where you start losing components, servers and ultimately - loss of data and productivity.
Using standard the standard IPMI interface, the Data Center Manager SDK and Node Manager on the Xeon 5500 series platform enable power monitoring, power management, and front panel inlet monitoring. This gives a server/datacenter manager the capcity to measure power usage per server, where you'd have to previously have more expensive power measurement tools. External power meters cost anywhere from a cheap $15 to spendy $1000 - but now the technology is embedded into the firmware on the machine.
You can learn more about the Xeon 5500 Series Processors on the Intel Xeon website.
Everyone is talking “green-energy” and “power-efficiency” these days. Reducing carbon footprint, renewable energy, CFLs, solar power, biking instead of driving, etc… the list goes on forever. Many people are excited to do something to change power consumption, but as a server administrator - are the proper tools in place?
Many of you have probably experienced the power/efficiency example at home. When the summer gets hot - many of us run to the thermostat and set it accordingly. When it's REALLY hot outside, we tend to twist the dial cooler - knowing all along, that our electric bill will most likely be higher at the end of the billing cycle. So, what do we do?
Some of us just live with the higher bills, some of us turn off the A/C and struggle in the heat - but I'd hope that most of us set the thermostat to a 'livable' temperature - it may not be the coolest, but it's enough to do the job and keep the electricity bills at a more moderate level - in a sense, it's a happy medium. In today's modern age, thermostats are programmable - taking a lot of the guesswork out of our hands and automating many of the old day-to-day temperature functions that our parents had to follow... Intel server platforms are evolving in this realm as well!
As a server admin, do you have the tools and technologies to reduce power consumption? There are several avenues addressing this issue, and I suggest reading the post from Lori Wigle on http://communities.intel.com/openport/community/openportit/server/blog/2007/11/14/data-center-efficiency. The datacenter is different from the desktop… server admins aren’t likely to enable sleep states to save energy – but rather, increase utilization on fewer servers to maximize your performance output in relation to your server footprint.
When was the last time you looked at your server’s power footprint? Do you even know how much power you’re using? Some of you may have some power meters and can monitor a server (or a few servers) at a time… but how many of you can monitor a rack or servers or a datacenter?
What if this capability was built into your current generation Xeon server platform? The good news is that modern processors DO have power management capabilities. Based on the ACPI specs:
P0 Performance State
While a device or processor is in this state, it uses its maximum performance capability and may consume maximum power. Thereby the processor uses it's maximum power allocation.
P1 Performance State
In this performance power state, the performance capability of a device or processor is limited below its maximum and consumes less than maximum power.
Pn Performance State
In this performance state, the performance capability of a device or processor is at its minimum level and consumes minimal power while remaining in an active state. State n is a maximum number and is processor or device dependent. Processors and devices may define support for an arbitrary number of performance states not to exceed 16.
Each Pn State is a "notch" in the processor's performance powerband (as seen below)
As these performance notches are set, the processor will lower it's power envelope and reduce the power needed in order to save energy. Just as a note, EIST must be enabled in the BIOS for this performance enhancement to work on your platform.
If you attended Intel’s IDF (Intel Developer Forum) you may have run into a few demos in regards to Datacenter Power Management, my booth showcased 4 current generation Intel Servers based on Bensley/Starlake Xeon DP boards and Xeon 54xx Series (codename Harpertown) Processors.
Here’s a quick video showcasing the demo – and just a note - we’ll be redoing this in a higher-quality format soon – so stay tuned!
Hopefully if you’ve watched the video – you’ve got some questions! The good news is that we have a new website from the Intel Software Network that is focused on Intel® Dynamic Power Datacenter Manager. The site lists the features, system requirements, downloads, and FAQ to get you started!
I’m looking forward to your feedback and questions!
