Prior to the Intel Xeon X5500 Server Platforms*, measuring server power was done via expensive equipment and could only be performed in a discrete fashion. Unless you had tons of monitoring equipment to mash-up your power data - it was a tedious process. Now, using Intel DCM and Node Manager - you can pull multiple servers worth of power info to make some important power decisions in your datacenter.
First of all, you need to baseline your workload. If you're confident that you can replicate workload patterns then you've got a starting point. Otherwise, it's usually a good idea to start monitoring and looking for some cyclical patterns and/or common data points (time, power, thermals, etc) to keep track of.
In this scenario (like in my last blog) we're using a SQL workload which can be modified to run the CPU at high levels for a relatively set amount of time. The base workload runs for 7 min 30 seconds, as shown in the Intel DCM screencap below.
In this test case: Idle power for the 4 servers is 782W, and under load - the power increases to 1174W - which is a delta of 392W. This power increase occurs when work is given to the server and the P/T states react to the workload and increase power/voltage to the system to increase performance. Exactly what we've been used to seeing even since EIST was introduced several years ago.
Now, what I'll show you is something that may be very interesting in scale... I will power cap the servers by 20W each, and set the Intel DCM Power Policy to only allow 1095W for the 4 servers in the rack.
What is awesome here is that we can still finish the workload in the same 7 minutes 30 seconds. So essentially, we have saved 80W of power for each set of 4 servers and still get the same amount of work completed! In a large datacenter this can be HUGE in energy savings.
Let's do some quick math: 20W power savings per serer x 10,000 servers = 20kW power savings and you still get the work done. I hope I just helped some of you server admins get some new ideas on your next "I need a raise" talk with your manager
*your mileage may vary, so test your own workloads and report out!
Why upgrade your hardware when migrating to SAP ERP 6.0?Because it makes simple, practical, business sense that is all.SAP has identified several key reasons why customers are concerned about migration and several among them are as follows:
·Cost, Cost, Cost
oHW infrastructure cost is highlighted as one of the key barriers of migration
·Business Justification
oIs there a compelling business reason to upgrade the hardware?
·Additional risk of business disruption
oMigration of ERP environment is complex enough…how much more risk is there when upgrading your hardware?
From a cost perspective, the perception that hardware is a barrier to migration can be easily overcome.Based on research, the hardware cost as a percentage of the overall migration cost is only about 7%.That means 93% of the cost is in licensing, consulting, etc, etc.HW costs are only the “tip of the iceberg” and the real $ investment lies elsewhere in the equation.
Is there a compelling business reason to upgrade your hardware? Well…frankly, it does not make sense not to do it.One, we showed above that the hardware investment is minimal compared to SW licensing, consulting, service, etc.Two, the hardware requirements of ERP 6.0 are significantly higher than previous versions. ERP 6.0 requires up to 2.5x more CPU performance, 2.5x more memory and 1.5x more I/O!You will need the increased performance and scalability that Intel provides in our microprocessors.While the ERP performance requirements have increased 2.5x, Intel performance with SAP has increased 10X!Oh, btw…energy efficiency does matter and in your new ERP environment you will be able to consolidate servers and save on power and cooling costs.TCO will be significantly reduced and from hardware investment standpoint, you are likely going to recover the cost of the servers in a very reasonable timeframe.
From my discussions with the IT community, their major concern and number one focus area is to prevent business disruption and downtime.This costs companies real and significant money.The fact is that an ERP migration is a complex enough project managing the strategic, functional and technical portions.Adding a server infrastructure change increases fundamental risk.But, the key here is that it is done often and done successfully.Intel IT has published several whitepapers on the subject and communicated “Best Known Methods” to minimize that risk.A quick summary is inserted here:
•Upgrade from SAP* ERP version 4.7 to 6.0, change the DBMS, and perform a Unicode* conversion as well as a hardware upgrade
•Minimize downtime
Benefit to Intel IT:
•SAP ERP 6.0 improves Intel supportability
•Increases ease of integration to SAP NetWeaver* 7.1 Suite
•Provides access to Enhancement Packs and Enterprise Services
•Intel® Itanium®-based servers provide access to 128 GB of memory for database and SAP operations and significantly increased performance from true 64-bit processing
Key Results:
•Reduced downtime of upgrade by 50% by using Intel Architecture
In summary,upgrading your server infrastructure when migrating your ERP environment is a very, very complex task, but form a business perspective, it should be fairly easy to see the true benefits from combining the ERP migration and hardware upgrade at the same time.
As I’m new to The Server Room, I offer this brief introduction:I am a marketing manager in Intel’s Software and Services Group – looking after Intel’s collaborative marketing efforts with virtualization solution providers.
A couple weeks ago, Ken Lloyd blogged about the incredible changes in compute capability and performance brought by the Nehalem microarchitecture – and gave credit to the advances in software, too.I’d like to take the conversation a step further:did you know that the launch of VMware™ vSphere 4.0 in April 2009 represented a milestone of collaborative development?The combination of VMware vSphere and Intel Xeon processor 5500 based systems delivers astonishing performance in part because it is the result of a full cycle of collaboration.
Intel has a well established rhythm of technology innovation – and a lot of really smart architects who know a thing or two about cpu design – but we get innovative ideas from the outside, too.Over the years of the VMware alliance, Intel has received (and acted on) many requests for small changes in cpu circuitry…changes that would make virtualizing the cpu easier, more efficient, or add capability. A whole raft of hardware optimizations for virtualization were included in the Nehalem architecture. As Intel started to deliver early silicon for Xeon 5500 based platforms, Intel software engineers worked closely with VMware engineers – optimizing vSphere code to take advantage of the new hardware features to improve performance, increase efficiency, and add new functionality.The results?Check out this video from the launch of VMware™ vSphere 4.0 to see for yourself what “better together” really means.And the cycle continues – what can you imagine in the next round of collaborative innovation??
Congratulations to Ron as the winner of the Intel Xeon Workstation Sweepstakes. He has been a member of The Server Room for over a year and was able to complete the quiz on the first attempt.
Good job!
"I was excited to hear that I won the Intel Xeon workstation sweepstakes.With its incredible performance, the system offers me the flexibility to use it in so many ways that I'm not sure how to best utilize it at the moment. It's a welcome problem to have and I look forward exploring the possibilities. Thanks to Intel and the Server Room team for providing a great resource to everyone!"
Thank you all for entering and look for more sweepstakes offerings in the near future.
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.
Just because you’re a small or medium-sized business doesn’t mean you don’t deserve benchmark data that’s relevant to your environment. In fact, the right kinds of comparisons are critical for you and your decision-making. Why? Because those performance differences can mean the difference between good and great service to your customers, or cost savings that boost your bottom-line, or maybe even help you better use your scarce resources.
That’s why Intel brings you independent and reliable benchmarks that mean something for companies like yours. For example, for our latest entry-level servers, the new Intel® Xeon® processor 3400 series, Principled Technologies* Inc. conducted a benchmark based on applications that most small and medium businesses use to run their data, web, and email exchange servers. Now you have meaningful results that you can actually use to make an informed decision about transitioning from a desktop-based server to a real server or even upgrading from an older Intel Xeon processor-based server to this new generation.
Curious what Principled Technologies found? Well, the Intel Xeon processor X3450-based server delivered 119% more performance than a desktop-based server. So, that means you can do things more than twice as fast. Plus, the energy efficiency was significant too – with an 87% increase in performance-per-wattcompared to the desktop-based server and 136% more than a previous generation Intel Xeon processor.
So, whether you’re looking to transition to your first real server or it’s time to refresh your hardware, you can see what the business benefits will be – more productivity and increased energy efficiency (which can equate to utility savings and simply being a better environmental citizen). And one more thing, the benchmark also showed that the Intel Xeon processor x3450 could do all of that using only 60 percent of its capacity. That means plenty of room for future growth. Now that’s big!
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.
Nehalem-EX has been in the news quite a bit over the past several months.
First, in May, Intel described how Nehalem-EX will be at the heart of the next generation of intelligent and expandable high-end Intel server platforms, delivering a number of new technical advancements (Intel Nehalem Architecture, Quick Path Interconnects, 16 threads, 24MB cache, new RAS features like MCA-Recovery, 16 DIMM slots per socket, 128 threads on 8 Socket systems) and boost enterprise computing performance (the greatest gain in generational performance ever seen at Intel.)
Next at IDF in September Intel described how Nehalem-EX would deliver a bigger generational performance improvement than that delivered by the Intel Xeon 5500 processor (including a 3X Nehalem-EX gain in database performance); a large shift in Xeon scalability with over 15 >8S systems anticipated and expandability for the most data demanding enterprise applications, the addition of about 20 RAS capabilities traditionally found in the Intel® Itanium processor family – along with a demonstration of MCA-Recovery. IBM announced their upcoming BladeCenter products that will support 4S Nehalem-EX blades and Super-Micro announced a 1U box, specifically targeted at HPC.Staying on the HPC theme, Mark Seager from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was also quoted with stating that “Nehalem-EX allows us to invest in science, not the computer science of porting and adapting software to new architectures, but real science.Nehalem EX is an innovative SMP on a chip solution that provides us access to a “super node” … The result is an astonishing new level of performance.”
And Oracle Open World on October 13th, the drumbeat for Nehalem-EX continued.Michael Dell in his Oracle Open World Keynote today discussed how Nehalem-EX will provide a true leap in performance, with up to 9x the memory bandwidth and 3x the database performance vs. prior generation.And he mentioned that Dell’s unique implementation of the memory architecture will allow the most cost effective scaling, with 4S systems up to 1TB of DRAM (64 Dimms x 16GB Memory sticks) enabling customers to run their entire database in system memory.He also mentioned that standard based systems are driving new efficiencies with applications like Oracle, where Dell’s data shows Oracle apps run better on x86 vs. proprietary architectures, up to 200% better. Check out this short video from the keynote and watch what Michael Dell had to say.
Keep your eyes on the Server Room for more Nehalem-EX news as it comes between now and launch.And visit the Intel booth at South Moscone Booth #1621 to learn more.
Software scalability has been a big issue recently.While modern servers are incredibly fast, many software solutions simply are not able to take advantage of it.There are many reasons for this.Some are easy to address and some require changes to the software.Intel performance engineer and Oracle WebLogic performance engineer will jointly give a talk at Oracle OpenWorld on this topic.
Here is the session information:
ID#: S309892
Title: Ten Ways to Improve J2EE Application Performance on Multi-Core Systems
Track: Oracle Develop: Enterprise Java and Oracle WebLogic
Date: 13-OCT-09
Time: 17:30 - 18:30
Venue: Hilton Hotel, Room: Yosemite B
Here is the abstract:
The current economic environment and the new focus on being green demand greater efficiency from every IT shop, big and small alike. In this session, you will learn how to improve Java application scalability by using Oracle WebLogic Server on the latest multi-core systems. It examines various software and hardware features for getting the best performance out of your applications. In particular, it explores the pros and cons of 32-bit versus 64-bit environments and how having multiple Java virtual machine instances can reduce heap pressure and improve cache locality. It also discusses operating system and hardware features such as large pages and solid-state drives and their impacts on J2EE application performance.
As a bonus, we will be giving away a Netbook at the end of the talk.
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 aroundscalable 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 6th, 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!
I’m a bit late in relaying my thoughts from Intel’s Developer Forum (IDF), but there was definitely some excitement around virtualization and high performance networking that I wanted to get the word out about!
In the past I’ve shared some details about SR-IOV and the advantages you can gain by being able to present virtual LAN hardware to each Virtual Machine (VM), effectively avoiding the Hypervisor when presenting virtual devices to each VM. The advantage of being able to do this is clear: The less interaction in the networking stack there is from the hypervisor, the less processing overhead is required for the system process the data.
That’s all good because if you have a dual 10 Gigabit adapter, you can segregate those two physical pipes into perhaps 16 virtual pipes that get exposed to 16 VMs. By segregating these LAN pipes at the hardware level with SR-IOV instead of using Hypervisor switching, the performance gains in both CPU utilization as well as maximum total throughput can be very large. There were several demos at IDF with various configurations, but reductions in CPU utilization of 40% were possible coupled with dramatic improvement in throughput!
But there is unfortunately one minor complication that I didn’t mention in my last post on the topic of SR-IOV. There is the little fact that when VMs move between physical boxes (a usage that is highly desired and commonplace these days) you run into some problems with this SR-IOV capability. When the hypervisor owned the network hardware abstraction, the performance was worse, but the functionality was better because you could seamlessly migrate from one box to another and the virtualization application would handle the details. But with SR-IOV, a new layer needs to be added so that the direct hardware connection between the VM and the LAN hardware can be moved to a new box.
The really exciting part of IDF demos that I saw was the demonstration not just of the SR-IOV functionality on multiple hardware and virtualization configurations, but that these demonstrations also showed updated software from two virtualization vendors allowing mobility of the VMs while supporting SR-IOV!
There was a demo on Dell systems showing this fully functional SR-IOV implementation with Citrix’s Virtualization suite. There were two separate demonstrations on Dell systems, with VMWare displaying their new Network Plug-In Architecture (NPIA) solution that allows for the migration of SR-IOV connected VMs seamlessly between servers.
For those hungry for more detail, I’ve included the three SR-IOV demonstration videos here:
The first is the Citrix demonstration on Dell and Intel hardware of SR-IOV with VM mobility:
These next two are two videos are demos on Dell and Intel hardware with VMWare and their NPIA software implementation.
Each virtualization demo shows the massive performance benefits under various workloads when moving from Hypervisor based LAN segregation to SR-IOV implementation. But most importantly, each demonstration proves out the capability to migrate VMs between physical hardware. The only system hardware requirement is that the server itself supports VT-d. If the networking hardware in the newly migrated-to box supports SR-IOV you get better performance, and if not, the solution falls back on the legacy Hypervisor virtualization. Backwards compatibility is maintained!
I didn’t get firm details on when this full support for SR-IOV and migration will be available in Citrix and VMWare’s releases, but the demos looked pretty clean, and hopefully these suites will be available soon with this new functionality. The LAN and Server hardware ecosystems are ready today, and it looks like the software vendors are just around the corner. Virtualization momentum continues!
While virtualization was the big takeaway for me from IDF, there were also several other interesting demos for us networking hounds. I’ve linked a couple videos of them below for anyone still thirsting for more of the latest networking technology and performance details!
The first video is a demonstration of Intel’s 82599 10 Gigabit Ethernet-based adapter card with Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) support. Storage and Ethernet together at last!
The second video is a demonstration of Intel’s NetEffect 10 Gigabit Ethernet card publishing 1 million messages per second in a simulated NYSE floor trading scenario. Oh yeah, only 35uS of latency. That isfast.
So although I am two weeks after IDF, I hope some of you got a little taste of the networking excitement that took place. Industry wide, hardware and software vendors alike are delivering ultra high performance low latency applications for the financial services industry, as well as mainstream performance increases for virtualization. The performance and technology beat moves forward. Exciting times!
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.
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 3rd 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:
Are you hearing this clamor? Nope, this is not London Calling! But your employees calling for more performance, your customers calling for faster response time, your boss for more savings. Have you been waiting to upgrade until your existing servers clash, I mean, crash? This economy has led to a lot of indecision, but when it comes to upgrading your servers, the benefits are pretty big not matter the size of your company. Good news, the new Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series-based servers will deliver just that and more.
• Save money. By spending money now, you can save in the long run. The latest Intel Xeon processor-based servers deliver more performance than previous generations. Small businesses can consolidate three older servers to one new server and still have room to grow (1). And make sure to take advantage of government and manufacturer server incentives. All of that adds up to a return on your refresh investment in about a year. This tool can help your calculate your ROI: www.intel.com/go/xeonestimator
• Be more competitive. You want to be ready when things rebound and rely on competitive IT equipment. The additional performance and improved reliability offered by updated servers means a more productive staff and faster response times for your customers.
• Avoid hidden costs. The other thing to consider with older servers is the expenses that you don’t expect, like maintenance and downtime. You know - one day is fine, next day is black. To get your boss off your back and your business running smoothly, newer equipment now is a great idea.
So, if fast ROI, savings, increased performance, improved productivity, new warranty sound like music to your ears, talk to your IT solutions provider (http://premierlocator.intel.com) about going with an Intel Xeon processor-based server.
And for more info, check out this new brochure: Almost as good as the lyrics from The Clash
[1]Source: Intel Xeon Server Refresh Savings Estimator, Jul 09
