My grandfather was born in the early 1900’s.  By all accounts he was a hardworking man with a strong degree of curiosity.  He passed away in his late 80’s and before he died I remember talking to him about my pursuit of an Electrical Engineering degree.  He nodded politely, asked a few questions and when I helped to fix the electrical outlet in his garage I got the sense that he thought I was heading down the path to be an electrician.  I believe that thought pleased him.  Several years ago I was explaining to my five year old daughter in layman’s terms what I did for a living and what my company made.  I said things like “We make tiny engines that run computers” or “I work with computers that run websites like Webkinz® and Disney®”.  She seemed impressed.  Months later when she was asked by a parent of her friend what her dad did for a living I was a combination of proud and surprised to hear that she replied “They make chips…”  (proud moment) “…and salsa!” (um OK.  I still have work to do).

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Now the other day she walked up to me and said something like “Dad, I am having trouble getting the Slingbox to work on mom’s iPod Touch.  It is connected to the Internet but the remote does not seem to be changing the channel.  Can you help me?”  Clearly she has made some progress up the technology curve, but it also struck me how far she has come.  Kids these days are surrounded by technology.  In our house alone there are at least the following electronic devices; Oven, Microwave, AppleTV, refrigerator, smoke detector (3), carbon monoxide detector, programmable thermostat, furnace, radio, garage door opener (2), wireless speakers, televisions (3), set top boxes (3), ceiling fans with remotes (3), netbook, Slingbox, Clear wireless router, remote outlet, sprinkler control box, iPod Touch, desktop computer, Wii, iPod shuffle (2), alarm clocks (3), oven timer, electronic light dimmer, cordless phones (4), AV receiver, DVD players (3), VCR, iPod docking station, security system, motion sensor, camcorder, camera (2), USB hub, music keyboard, AV switch, computer keyboard, battery chargers (4), Wii remotes (4), Wii Fit Pad, Wii drums, copier/fax/scanner, computer monitor, AC, Power supplies (4), RFID credit cards (2), washer, dryer, noise canceling headphones, answering machine, internet modem, cell phones (2), handheld GPS, auto GPS and electronic battleship.

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I am sure I have forgotten several things and I did not count cars or anything at my children’s school.  I am also sure each of the electronic devices in our house has either a processor, microcontroller, ASIC or multiple of each.  Admittedly, the silicon content in our house is probably above average given where I work and the personalities my wife and I have.  But when I think back to my grandfather he had none of these silicon laden items.  I am sure he didn’t care since it is hard to miss something you never knew.  Of the hundreds of pieces of silicon in our house about a dozen or so are smart enough to connect to each other or to “the cloud” in some way.  I put “the cloud” in quotes because it is not only the most over-hyped word of it’s time it is also the best way to articulate what I suspect my children and many others think of the services that they get when all of this stuff gets connected.

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I can safely say two things are fact. First, my grandchildren will have in their house many more pieces of silicon than I do. Second, they will have more pieces of silicon that can connect to each other and communicate with “the cloud”.  There are many billions of devices connected to the Internet today and that number will grow.  At Intel we are building silicon, and increasingly software assets, that facilitate the processing and movement of data both on those devices and between them. Servers are increasingly becoming an important part of that over-hyped cloud word. My cable company has a cloud delivering me my on demand video content, A social media site allows me to upload pictures into their cloud to share with my friends, someone just used a cloud architecture to develop a perpetual motion machine.  OK, one of those things was false.

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My grandfather thought a cloud was something in the sky.  My children think it streams video to their handheld device.  What will our great-grandchildren think?

I haven’t been to see the new Terminator movie yet, but I certainly remember the Arnold movies of my youth, and the similar theme of machine vs. man in the geek lovin’ Matrix series.  Really, we all have a fear in a remote corner of our minds that someday the machines we all love will be smarter than us and somehow realize that we’re disposable.  Or useful as human batteries.  Which is why I love to work on the future of datacenter technology…after all, we’ll be the first to know the Top 500 list will mean something much more sinister.

Of course…I’m kidding.  The future of datacenters will bring great things to our planet from speeding the discovery in science, to making us much more efficient and lowering our collective carbon footprint.  And of course it’s datacenters that bring us Facebook, and who could really live without that?

The next transformation of the datacenter is almost within our grasp with the evolution of the enterprise cloud.  I wanted to shift focus from the nearer term technology innovation covered in our most recent podcasts to this broader technology movement, and to do so I recently chatted with three very smart people.  First, I talked with Dylan Larson about Intel’s view of the enterprise cloud and what technology trends he sees as critical to the creation of the architectural framework for the cloud.  I then spoke to Jim Greene about the future of security in the datacenter.  Finally, I visited with David Jenkins about our vision of instrumentation and why this technology is so important to the datacenter of the future. None of them mentioned anything about Christian Bale or Neo…but they did say a lot about where we’re going to create the next stage in datacenter computing. Take a listen at our Chip Chat Channel…

...and if you like what you hear subscribe to Chip Chat on Intel's RSS feed or on iTunes.

Are you a developer writing applications to run on the Solaris operating system?. Are you looking for ways to optimize your Solaris solution on industry standard architecture based on Intel microprocessor? If you answer yes to either of these questions then please read on.

Intel and SUN have been working closely together to optimize the Solaris operating system on the Intel Xeon 5500 processor. Most of you probably know the Xeon 5500 better by its product codename Nehalem. The Xeon 5500 is the the product that fits into 2 socket platforms.

SUN have just published a very compelling quick reference guidethat will assist both Developers and System Administrators looking to optimize Solaris solutions on Xeon based processors. The guide talks about the work that Intel and SUN are doing together, technical descriptions of specific features and capabilities that can be implemented in the Solaris OS to optimize the capabilities of the Xeon.

I have just finished reading this and it is a very compelling paper covering topics such as

- How Solaris takes advantage of Intel Turbo Boost Technology to use available power headroom to deliver higher performance based on workload demand

- How Solaris can take advantage of new Intel Quickpath Interconnect (better known as QPI) and other innovations in the OS to reduce memory latency

- How Solaris performance counters help to better manage workloads

- How Solaris takes advantage of many of the power efficiency capabilities in the processor. Things like Power Aware Dispatched in Solaris enable the processor to stay longer in idle states. In non tech talk this saves power.

Solaris has been a tried and tested operating system for along time for companies running their most business critical workloads. This paper talks about the combination of Solaris and Xeon to deliver improved reliability and availability for these critical workloads. Detail information on predictive self healing, fault management, leveraging Intel Machine Check Architecture and more all included in this paper.

Probably my favourite section is around the developer tools optimizations and the different tools available for developers that want to run and optimize their applications on Solaris and Xeon.

Ok, I'll stop waxing lyrical now. This is a very compelling paper and it does certainly construe that Solaris and Xeon 5500 could be the perfect combination for your Solaris solution. What do you think?

As companies face the economic downturn, they are being asked to trim their IT budgets -- essentially, do more with less. Meanwhile, IT folks are also being asked to make sure their companies remain competitive with the best server performance running best of breed IT solutions that operate in extremely efficient data centers as well as ensuring every IT dollar spent is showing an RIO within 12 months or less. That raises the question: “Can migrating applications from a RISC architecture to an Intel architecture save a company money and allow them to remain competitive?” In many cases the answer is “YES!”

I have been an Intel Enterprise Technical Specialist supporting many of the large financial customers in the NYC area. My customers have a mix of all sorts of platforms, from commodity X86 servers to large RISC servers and from Midrange to Mainframe systems. Customers perform tests to measure Performance, Performance per Watt and Performance per Dollar. The outcomes will determine the architecture that is best suited for their applications. Customers have also relied on industry benchmarks such as CPU2006, SPECint, SPECfp, SPECpower_ssj2008, and SPECjbb2005 whose results can be found at www.spec.org.

I have seen many custom and commercial applications that used to run on other architectures which have been ported and are now running on commodity Intel architectures. Why? The Intel Xeon 5500 Series microprocessor (codename Nehalem) is delivering increased performance, power efficiency, and overall lower cost needed to meet the IT requirements for their need. For example, in the financial sector several applications exist, such as Market Data Feed Handlers, High-Frequency Automated Trading, Risk Analytics, Monte Carlo (compute farms) which require high performance servers to gain a competitive advantage and increase revenues for the firm.

As an example, one of my customers migrated several of their company’s in-house developed applications that were running on legacy RISC servers. Migrating applications to Intel servers was a straight forward process since many of them were written in Java and were fairly easy to port. Other applications that were written in C/C++ could be migrated using Intel software tools, (i.e. Intel C/C++ compiler, Thread Checker, Thread Profile and Vtune) to make the job were extremely helpful in migrating their applications to the Intel architecture. For example, using Intel servers for their Risk Analytic application provided increased compute performance over their legacy RISC servers which helped complete their Risk Analytic runs much faster with fewer servers leading to an overall lower TCO.

Using Intel Xeon 7400 & 5500 Series has not only provided increased overall performance but has decreased the number of servers through server consolidation in the data center which also requires less energy.  This has helped prevent the data center from reaching the capacity of power and cooling. For some of my customers, using Intel Xeon 7400 & 5500 servers has extended the lifespan of their data center, saving millions of dollars not having to build new data centers due to its increased power efficiency while reducing overall operational costs.

I was thinking about what to write in my next blog and what I could share beyond what I have written previously about Intel Vs RISC in terms of TCO, performance and the customers that are choosing to move.

Luckily I didn't have to think too long on a Friday morning as a a topic came to mind instantly. There are numerous articles flying around this morning that picked up on the Oracle comments yesterday about how SPARC based systems compare to Intel. Thanks for providing me with an appropriate topic.

So in case you missed it, there was a question and answer session with Larry Ellison. When asked about SPARC, this was the reply "SPARC is much more energy efficient than Intel while delivering the same performance on a per socket basis. This is not a green issue, its an economic issue. Today, database centers are paying as much for electricity to run their computers as they pay to buy computers. SPARC machines are much less expensive to run than Intel machines"

1) SPARC more energy efficient than Intel?  Seriously, in what parallel universe does that exists?

SUN continues to use watts per thread as measure of energy efficiency. The recognized industry standard benchmark for measuring energy efficiency is SPECpowerand I don't see any SPARC based results in the 91 results published. The absence of a result certainly says something very clear to me - no story.

These UltraSPARCT2+ systems get loaded with a lot of memory to deliver the their results, so when you look at overall system power (what people care about) they are not as energy efficient as Intel based systems.

SPECpower is effectively based of SPECJbb-2005 so another way of loking at this is to look at the SPECJbb-2005 results for a 4 socket UltraSPARcT2+ system and a Xeon 7400 system. The 4s UltraSPARCT2+ delivers 693k BOPs while Xeon 7400 is 532kBOPs. So you conclude that SPARC is better than Xeon?. That would be the wrong conclusion

UltraSPARCT2+ system would consume 1525 watts Vs Xeon 7400 at 816 watts. If you look at BOPs per watt (another way of looking at energy efficiency and performance) then you would see that Xeon 7400 is 43% more energy efficient. Doing a similar comparison with Xeon 5400 (I haven't even talked about our latest Xeon 5500, Nehalem) would be up to 77% more efficient than UltraSPARCT2+.

And lastly before I forget to mention the 4s UltraSPARCT2+ had 128GB memory and costs over $150,000for the system, while Xeon 7400 based system had 64GB memory and costs around $32,000.

2) SPARC deliver same performance on a per socket basis?

2S Xeon 5500 has performance leadership over 2S UltaSPARCT2+ across a wide range of benchmarks. Up to 70% more performance and up to 60% lower system cost. 4S Xeon 7400 has price/performance leadership over 4S UltraSPARCT2+, UltraSPARCT2+ results achieved with system loaded with lots of memory that drives the cost up to 3-4Xthat of Xeon 7400 system

3) SPARC machine are less expensive to run?. I can't for the life of me work this one out!.

Hardware systems based on Intel have leading price/performance (read cheaper), lower energy needs (so electrivity bill lower) and any software product with a license per core strcuture is less expensive on Xeon system than an 8 core UltraSPARcT2+ (which also has higher multipler per core)

That's all for now folks. I just wanted to share some data on why I know that SPARC machines are much MORE expensive to run than Intel machines

The Intel XEON Processor 5500 is the new world record holder in >30 top performance benchmarks for 2-socket servers. Check out this video with Pat Gelsinger at the launch event in Santa Clara.

You can also check out all the performance results here: Server Performance Summary - Intel® Xeon® Processor

I've been in Las Vegas this week for the Blades Systems Insight event talking about data center transformation and data center efficiency (no white tiger sightings...just technology this week in Vegas).  This event draws attendees who are deploying high density compute platforms in their data centers and dealing with the power and cooling challenges that come along with these environments. So I was excited to share some of Intel's thoughts on power and cooling optimization beyond pure system refresh.  If you read the blogs on the server room you know plenty about the compelling financial benefits associated with refresh...and if you haven't seen this yet check out my friend Chris Peters' blog here.

But back to the show and the shower curtains...If you dip a bit deeper into the challenge of data center efficiency, three primary focus areas emerge:

Power: The underlying power cabling and infrastructure into your datacenter.  Ultimately you want the most efficient power delivery possible.

Cooling: The HVAC systems, fans, and ducting installed to remove heat from your datacenter and let you avoid thermal environments that make Las Vegas feel chilly.

Compute: Server, network and storage gear that drive business producitivity for your organization.  This is why you have datacenters to begin with so the ultimate goal is to optimize percentage of power flowing to compute and productivity spent on every kw of power within your compute infrastructure.

At the Blades event we were discussing the impact of high density environments to this fragile ecosystem.  High density environments a) require more power, more than the typical 750W per square foot that an average rack requires and far more than the 75-100W/sq foor that a typical datacenter facility supports.  High density environments also produce a lot of heat that needs to be dealt with by cooling systems that are often close to their cooling capacity.  So how much density is a good thing for datacenters and how do we deal with that gap between power delivered and power required?  I'd like to provide a few concepts but ultimately every datacenter is different...so I'd love to hear from you on how you've dealt with this as well. In this blog I'm going to start with cooling capacity as there are a lot of options to consider:

#1 Warmer datacenters.  ASHRAE recently updated their datacenter temp and humidity recommendations with a range of 18-27 C.  What this means is that server inlet temps can be set higher than what many datacenters are running today...the first step here is to measure your server inlet temp to get a picture of what your facility is operating at, checking with your manufacturers warranty spec, and measuring your power usage difference when altering the datacenter temp - remember to take before and after readings on your cooling power usage.

#2 Cool aisle containment: This is a pretty simple concept - placing barriers to control cool air and confining it to the area where servers need it.  Think about this as constructing a type of wall or ceiling around the cool aisle to control air flow.  So what are these walls made of? I've seen them made of plexiglass and plastic sheeting...and this week at the conference I heard about one of the largest banks in America who is experimenting with the deployment of shower curtains to control air flow and reporting a 15 degree drop in temperature associated with installation.  Now...last time I checked a shower curtain cost a few bucks so we're not talking about a major investment to test this in your datacenter.

#3 Ambient air cooling: Even in Las Vegas datacenters are utilizing outside/filtered ambient air economizers instead of their chillers to deliver cooled air at least part of the year.  This concept is simple - it's like turning on your furnace's fan setting to cool your house instead of your AC and in many regions of the country you can utilize this much of the year at a fraction of the cost of running a chiller.

#4 Liquid cooled cabinets - think of these essentially as a good Sub-Zero for the datacenter and especially applicable for the high density environments that we were focused on at the blade conference.  They basically contain a rack of compute equipment and chill this equipment utilizing liquid cooling.  This is a great way to isolate highly dense racks from your datacenter cooling equation completely and works especially well in heterogeneous environments where cooling requirements vary from rack to rack.

I will be back to you on the power and compute vectors next...in the meantime I'd love to hear if your datacenter has implemented any of these approaches and any results you've been able to measure.

With the introduction of the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series last month, I wrote a blog that discussed that server refresh was an intelligent investment in that it could deliver a rapid payback on investment. For the past few years, I have been working to understand the costs and benefits of server replacement and there are a few conclusions I can draw.

1)      Server Refresh is not new concept.  This approach has existed for decades.  People replace technology as it ages because new software and new technologies enable better business capabilities and as technology ages, the warranty expires and incidence of failure increases. How many of you still have your first mp3 player?

2)      ROI and Refresh Vary. The rate of refresh is a balance of the investment required (purchase, install, removal, validation, etc) and the savings achieved (operational costs, cost avoidance, employee productivity) balanced with the business opportunities available to you (business growth or new business markets, cost of capital, revenue generating investments)

3)      One Size Does not fit all.  Every business looks at financials and opportunities for their business a little differently and calculates their costs and savings differently.

So a few months ago, I embarked with some of my peers, with Intel IT, and industry leading ROI and TCO consultant Alinean, to apply what I have been learning and build an interactive tool to help you model your savings opportunity for server refresh and replacement. 

We identified and were able to model eleven cost and savings categories (both pluses and minuses) in the Server Refresh ROI calculation and make these cost category assumptions able to be included, excluded or modified by you.  You can model and view scenario output real time and print/email reports to share with others.

I invite you to learn more about the tool with this informal how-to-use guide , or better yet, use the tool and estimate how much you could save replacing old servers with new.  Try the new Intel® Xeon® processor-based Server Refresh Savings Estimator today.

You can provide feedback through the tool’s registration process or by responding directly on this blog. I look forward to hearing from you either way.

Thanks, Chris