Every day, Intel® technology and platforms help companies solve business problems and challenges. Here are a few of the growing number of stories and reasons for choosing Intel processors and technology.

Winning: Humana – Healthcare product and services company

Humana continues to refresh its infrastructure with more powerful, energy-efficient technologies. For Humana, technology is vital for providing information and a full array of health benefit services to members. To replace an outdated facility, the company worked with Intel to design a state-of-the-art data center with a compact, energy-efficient infrastructure that could deliver flexibility and scalability.

Read about it here

The results:

·          The Intel processor–based virtualized environment helps IT deploy new services quickly and ensure high availability.

·          Humana added 25 percent more servers in 56 percent of the previous space while decreasing data center power consumption by 16 percent.

Winning: Emerson Electronics

Emerson reshapes its IT infrastructure for future growth, consolidating approximately 135 data centers down to four using Intel® technology–based servers

Read about it here

The results:

·          3,600 physical servers are eliminated by virtualizing on Intel processor–based blade servers, for 18:1 consolidation worldwide

·          Power-saving processors help make Emerson’s new global production data center in St. Louis 31 percent more energy efficient than traditional data centers

Winning: Türkiye Finans Katılım Bank

Leading Turkish Financial Institution Drives Better Growth and Services with Intel®Technology. Türkiye Finans Katılım Bank makes use of the online Intel Xeon processor-based Server Refresh Savings Estimator

Read about it here.

The results:

Intel® Xeon® processor-based Server Refresh Savings Estimator¹ sets expectations clearly, predicting 80 per cent reduction in power/cooling requirements, and a 30 per cent increase in system performance already realized. With only 20 per cent of capacity currently utilised, bank has significant headroom for business expansion

Winning: Oracle IT

Oracle uses Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series–based systems with Intel® Intelligent Power Node Manager to increase rack density and propel business growth. Refreshing its existing dual socket, quad-core servers on a three- to five-year schedule to increase processing capability and energy efficiency, but had no significant power management in use in the data centers.

Read about it here

The results:

More processing capability can fit within the data center power envelope because Oracle can actively manage power consumption for individual servers and applications.

·          Energy savings of 35 percent are projected with Intel Intelligent Power Node Manager, for reduced operating expenses

·          50 percent more servers per rack saves data center space and enables more growth while keeping costs low

Winning: DataPipe®

DataPipe® retains a competitive edge by designing a new facility and refreshing existing data centers with cutting-edge technology that can deliver outstanding processing performance for a broad range of customer applications. Low-voltage Intel® Xeon® processors help DataPipe create a dense, energy-efficient infrastructure for managed IT services.

Read about it here

The results:

                 New Intel Xeon Processors Provide a Foundation for Cloud Computing. With the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, DataPipe is creating

                a robust virtualized server environment, Stratosphere™, for hosting customer applications.     

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-watt compared 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!

Check out the benchmark results for yourself here in the PDF document.  And, if you want to see more, you can visit http://www.intel.com/performance/server/

Talk to your Intel IT solution provider reseller about these results and what they can mean for your business: (http://premierlocator.intel.com)

About Hugh Mercer: I am a sales development manager in Intel’s Enterprise Solution Sales group. One of my responsibilities is working with Intel’s Server Platforms Group to indentify, develop and highlight success stories around Intel’s server platforms and technologies.

Every day, Intel® technology and platforms help companies solve business problems and challenges. Here are a few of the growing number of stories and reasons for choosing Intel processors and technology.

Winning: Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule (RWTH)

Leading German university turns to Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series for high-performance computing

Read about it here

The results:

·          Implemented small server farm. Intel Xeon processor series performed more powerfully than RISC architectures.

·          2010 scale out. In 2010, the university plans to implement some 400 more systems with over 20,000 cores powered by the upcoming Intel Xeon processors code-named Nehalem EX

Winning: Alvotech

Alyotech turns to Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series to deliver insightful design improvements

Read about it here

The results:

·          Alyotech benchmarked the new processor, developed on 45nm Hi-k next generation Intel® Core™ Microarchitecture, and increased performance by 65 percent over the previous generations, dual-core servers

Winning: Atos Origin

Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series helps Atos Origin lower total cost of ownership of its data centre environment.

Read about it here.

The results:

• Atos Origin compared the performance of      the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series with four cores to that of the previous-generation      with just two cores. It found, on average, 2.4x greater      transaction throughput running a web server, 1.75x running a database server and 1.25x running an email      server.

Winning: Business and Decision Group

Business and Decision Group powers forward with huge virtualization project underpinned by the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series.

Read about it here

The results:

• Early results showed that      with the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series they could gain virtualization rates      of 20:1 and with a processor load slightly below 55 percent.
• Power consumption was reduced by approximately 30 percent compared to the previous generation of processors.

Winning: Onkosh.com

Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series boots performance of unique Arabic search engine Onkosh.com

Read about it here

The results:

·          Onkosh.com already witnessed an increase of around 20% in performance. This performance increase was possible due to the new micro-architecture with Intel Turbo Boost

·          Onkosh.com is now able to grow about 300% in terms of the ability to crawl and parse new Arabic content automatically discovered on the World Wide Web.

Winning: BMW

Migration to Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series lowers total cost of ownership and increases flexibility

Read about it here

The results:

·          BMW Group is deploying Dell PowerEdge* servers powered by the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series, which will replace a RISC-based infrastructure that has much higher costs, lower performance and less flexibility

·          This allowed BMW Group to increase the workload to more than 80 percent and to significantly decrease the total cost of ownership (TCO).

Winning: Société d'Exploitation des Transports de l'Agglomération Orléanaise (SETAO)

SETAO turns to Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series to strengthen and build on its service offerings.

Read about it here

The results:

·          Thanks to the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series and VMware hypervisor, SETAO is now able to provide mainframe-class quality of service and ensure easy deployment of new virtual machines and applications while reducing total cost of ownership.” Olivier Parcollet, Chief Technology Officer, SET

·          SETAO estimated that it could save approximately 40 percent on energy costs due to the higher server consolidation ratio and greater CPU energy consumption management.

I wrote a few weeks ago about the end of the mini generation.  This time I thought I would dig out some data to support my case.  My personal anecdotal evidence is what I am hearing from my customers.  They are looking at replacing hundreds of legacy Unix servers with new high performance Xeon boxes.  I am not talking about a one-for-one replacement, but using virtualization to replace 5 to 25 of these older unix boxes with each Xeon 5500 server.  The economic incentives here are pretty staggering.

Why now?

I see multiple reasons

1)  Ecosystem maturity.  Enterprise class tools for virtualization, Linux, high availability from VMware, KVM, Xen, RedHat, Suse and others

2)  Performance.  The performance of 200-2005 vintage sparc and ultra-sparc boxes is easily replaced by Xeon – saving power, space, and potentially licensing.

3)  Applications readiness.  Applications like Oracle are now “made for linux” and do great on X-86 platforms

4)  Staff.  You have the expertise in Linux on Xeon, this is a growing area, capitalize on it.

5)  Economics.  There is real savings to be had in licensing, power, space, staff, sanity( sanity savings is subjective).

I hopped out to tpc.org to look at some benchmarks.  Benchmarks are notoriously awful as measures of actual performance, but they do work – mostly – as a comparison of relative performance.

There isn’t a lot of Sparc data, and much of it is old, but if you are looking at replacing some aging 4+ year old Unix hardware, that may be just what you need.  (with respects to Bryce’s cash for clunkers blog).

For TPC-C the most recent Sparc result I found was from 2003. Running Oracle Database 10g EE on Sun Solaris 8 on 64 single cores of Fujitsu SPARC64 - 1.3 GHz processors, they delivered 595702 tpmC at $12.43/tpmC (tpc.org)

So if “this old machine" is setting in your landscape, gulping power and support costs, you could replace it today by running Oracle Database 11g SE1 on Oracle Linux 2 quad core Intel Xeon Processors X5570 2.93GHz  delivering 631766 tpmC at $1.08/tpmC (tpc.org)

The ROI on this must be about 10 minutes! Ok maybe that is a bit quick, but this is a data base! Export, Import, ta-da!  What are you going to do with all that extra rack space and power?

Replace a 64 socket platform with a 2 socket platform.  Amazing.  this could be 1U, or even a blade.  You could put it under your desk.  There have got to be some examples of older sparc and power boxes sitting in the landscape. Let me know what you have.

-Ken

Of course changing a light bulb is easier. But did you know that the power savings benefits of changing a single server are about equal to changing three light bulbs and the economics of replacing either is similar.

ð        Energy Star estimatesthat replacing a light bulb with a single compact fluorescent can save $30 over its lifetime and pay for itself in 6 months.

ð        Intel estimatesare that replacing 9 racks of older servers with just one rack of new servers can save up to $765,000 over four years and pay for itself in as few as 8 months. 

While many of us no longer question changing older incandescent light bulbs with more energy efficient compact fluorescent light bulbs because of economic and eco-friendly reasons, many businesses retain older servers in their environment because they still work. About 3 months ago when talking to IDC, they shared an estimate that they expect there to be about 32 million servers supporting businesses around the world in 2009 and about 40% of them are more than 4 years old (making them single core processor technology). That is a lot of old single-core technology.

These single core servers take up a lot of space, resources and power/cooling infrastructure.  Newer servers consume less power (about 150W on average based on test results with industry standard benchmark SPECpower found at www.spec.org), deliver more performance (up to 9x), come with a new warranty, and support technologies to enable consolidation that can reduce OS, application and other costs that vary per server.  The combination of these savings balanced with the costs and effort to replace them, migrate applications and validate the new environment can deliver a rapid payback and dramatic savings.  You can estimate the savings yourself using this server refresh savings estimator.

And since power per server is lower, you don’t need to replace the rack infrastructure (unless you want to) … similar to how you don’t need a new light fixture for compact fluorescent light bulbs.

While it will take more work to change your server (than a light bulb), the additional work is sure worth the effort as many customers have learned (www.intel.com/references). Learn more about server technology in the new Server Learning Center located here.

QUESTION OF THE DAY:

How many engineers does it take to change a light bulb? … a server?

chris

In my blog titled “why buy for the little guy”, I shared that I was in the market for a new home desktop to replace my existing one.  Well, today I spent my 2009 tax refund check on a new computer – an iMac. 

So why the secrecy?  ... The iMac is a surprise for my wife’s birthday.  My wife has wanted a Mac since we left college and I’ve always been a PC guy (grew up with one, always used them at work, etc.) and when I started working at Intel almost 10 years ago, I could not justify a Mac given my corporate loyalties and who was paying the bills.  When Apple adopted Intel architecture a couple years ago, my options were now opened (really my old excuses were not longer valid).  

I’m very excited to install the new iMac as the challenges of my old technology and the limitations and headaches they were giving me will be gone - and I think I’ll finally get some good-guy points with my wife.

Chris

The current economic environment is unprecedented in our lifetime and is having multiple impacts on Enterprise decision making. IT spending is under severe scrutiny with IT budget reductions forecasted throughout most Enterprises in ’09. Even with reduced budgets, IT needs to continue to improve business productivity and competitiveness. So what can you do to manage all these conflicting conditions?

Maybe this type of environment represents an opportunity to make some changes with respect to your IT Policy. Could this be a good time to simplify and standardize your IT environment by looking at a broader range of choices that are now available. These choices may not have existed in the past due to some of your decision criteria not being meet for your hardware or software needs. Hardware and software evolve at a rapid pace, and the capabilities to meet your needs are significantly different today than what was available 5-7 years ago when you made previous decisions.

Equipment nearing the end of depreciation cycles or lease contracts offer another opportunity to look at the cost and performance of your existing architectures Vs other architectures that are available today. In my previous blog I shared some thoughts on performance and pricing of RISC systems Vs x86 based platforms. There are significant savings that can be made be choosing x86 hardware without trading off on your performance needs. Selecting x86 hardware could enable you to execute your IT refresh and replacement strategy in a reduced Capex budget environment. Sometimes it seems that offsetting a purchase may be a prudent thing to do, but at some point you will have to replace these systems to meet business productivity requirements. In the meantime you will have to spend incremental budget paying extra $’s for maintenance and support for systems that you had planned to replace and you may also not meet the demands placed on you to support your business needs. I also read recently that under the proposed US Stimulus package there may be some provisions for accelerating depreciation on new equipment purchases. This could be another factor to consider in terms of which option will cost you most in the long-run.

One other thought I had was the ability to re-allocate $’s within your overall TCO to spend on other aspects of your solution needs. If you could save money on the hardware cost would it free up $’s for you to spend on the overall solution?. For example could you afford to pay the software license costs and support more users for your ERP environment.

Consolidating older generation RISC based platforms to current x86 based platforms could be another way to offset some of the associated costs associated with maintaining and supporting your RISC environment.  I read a paper recently published by Dell where they talked about the performance difference between V440 SPARC Servers and todays R900 systems. They talked about the R900m being 14 times as fast as V440. This led me to conclude that I could consolidate a distributed workload from a number of older V440s and run that workload on one system. This sounds like a pretty good deal to me as I can save some space in my datacenter, save some energy costs, probably get some savings on software license and support costs.

Another factor to consider is the whole issue of payback. In the current environment everyone is being asked to justify the payback on their investment to be 12 months or less. What if I said that you could get a 9 month payback on your investment in a new hardware platform purely on the basis of savings from power & cooling savings and lower OS maintenance costs. Would these types of savings be enough to justify your investment and consolidating multiple legacy RISC servers to a current x86 platform?. Well that type of payback is attainable, and there are other savings like software license costs, administrator and operator costs that are not really included in the calculations.

Ok, so the counterside to my argument is that it is hard to move a workload from RISC to x86. The savings I get from moving will not be offset by the money I spend to move. It is a fair argument, but there are Customers who have done the transition and saved some significant money by doing so. Avis in Europe are one example that comes to mind where they talk about reduce their TCO by 50% moving from RISC to x86 platform

One of the other comments I often hear relates to it being technically hard to move my solution if it is running on UNIX/RISC to x86 offering. I agree you are moving move one architecture to another and there are some challenges to do so, but there are resources out there to help you. Principled Technologies wrote two reports recently that discussed how you could move your Oracle database to Solaris or Linux running on Xeon. Don’t worry, these were not marketing papers, they actually did this migration in a real lab environment and documented the technical ‘how to’.

Ok, so these are some of my thoughts, let me know what you think?.

Part four of three

Hopefully if you are watching this, you have already seen the first three installments I did on surviving data center crisis. A quick recap, the premise ( aka crisis ) is, You are running out of capacity.

According to Green Tech World, TMC 2007 "81% of IT mgrs will exceed capacity for power or space in the next 5 years".

In the first three video segments I spoke to three complementary approaches, that taken together could give you as much as 50X the data center capacity in your existing power and space .

Summarizing:

Data Center Crisis - How to Survive... Refresh with todays advanced high performing servers

Data Center Crisis - Part 2 - Using Virtualization... Virtualize and Consolidate

Data Center Crisis - Part 3 - Getting Dense- Use every Watt

Today I want to address two follow-up questions:

One, Where to go next when I used up all this new capacity?
Two, Who can help me get there?

The answers, it turns out, are related.

Moving outside the box is the 4^th strategy, and like the other strategies, it can be used anytime, in complement with the other three strategies.

Step to outside the boxness:

Moving outside the box allows it manager to move work that can be efficiently run elsewhere ( things like email ) outside the data center, and focus on the highest business value or least movable work inside.

As to who can help you get here. The system integrator/IT Outsourcer community offers support in all four strategies I have outlined.

My recommendation is to examine your situation, and your growth projection, and create a plan using all four strategies that will preclude the major capital expense of data center construction. Avoiding that 10 to 50 million dollar capital hit should be a very compelling proposal.