This week I'm in Portland, Oregon, where I call home. Its interesting for me since this is my first Super Computing conference, and soo far, I'm really impressed, not only by the intense knowledge and the plethera of scientific discovery all around, but also by the fact this conference is so well attended. There -s a huge trade show floor, filled to capacity where you can see everything from genome research to oil and gas exploration, to bio-computing. . It's very cool to see NASA, Oak Ridge Labratory, and many top universities all showing off the lastest in High Performance Computing, some very cool stuff indeed. From the point of view of higher learning and how super computers are changing the world, this is the place to be. Here are a few shots of the Intel booth in case you get a chance to come by and see us.

I'll be capturing some cool videos from the conference and you should keep a look out for these on Channel Intel at YouTube. Thanks for stopping by The Server Room.

Most of the time, server ROI is measured on the data center scale, replacing tens, hundreds, or even thousands of servers with fewer higher-performing and more energy efficient servers.

But...have you ever wondered how much power you could save if you replaced every 4 year old server in an entire country with Xeon 5500 Nehalem-based systems?  What about how much CO2 that could be removed for those same 4-year old servers – and number of cars it effectively removes from the road?

Well, wonder no more!  Check out this short paper for an eye-opening comparison of the UK, Germany, and France, and how big of an ROI they can realize if the entire country refreshed ALL of their 4-year-old servers.  It looks at power savings, land reclamation, and monetary savings in slightly different terms, like how much space can be saved in comparison to the floor area of Notre Dame Cathedral?  You’ll need to read on to find out more… J

Additionally, all calculations were done using the Xeon ROI tool, so check it out and come up with some more interesting comparisons based on your city, state, or country data.  Be sure to post them here!

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-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)

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

When it comes to your car or fixing something around the house, you know there’s a tool for every job right? Well, it’s no different when you’re considering transitioning from a desktop-based server to a real server. That’s why we created the Server Transition tool for all small businesses.  It’s easy to use (a few clicks), and gives you what you need to make a sound business decision.

Now you have a comprehensive tool to understand your server options and how your current system measures up. All you do is select the year you purchased your current system and the tool makes an initial guess at the configuration you have right now. You can make adjustments so it better matches your actual set-up and then, PRESTO! You’ll see how your system stacks up to a real server based on the processor, memory, storage, business applications and form factor. This way, you’re making an apples to apples comparison with quantifiable data.  Well, I guess since it’s a desktop versus a server it’s more of an apples to apple pie comparison and maybe even apple pie a la mode….

You can even take the comparison one step further by answering a few usage questions to find a more customized configuration for your business needs. It’s really that simple – a few clicks and you have a recommended server configuration that will deliver greater dependability, productivity and performance to meet your needs today and tomorrow. Now, if only there were tools like that to help my sister find the right guy to date.  Maybe that would be more of a tool avoidance tool, if you know what I mean.

Don’t wait, check it out now.

I wanted to follow-up on the pre-IDF blog I wrote and what I and Sean conveyed regarding comprehensive IO optimization for enterprise cloud (based on virtualization infrastructure). A blog I owed to those who could not attend the IDF session.

In the last blog we identified 4 important vectors that drive I/O evolution.

1)      Balanced system that maps to the increases in CPU performance

2)      Scalability

3)      Unified fabric

4)      Security

In my view I state it an evolution as I feel that is the natural state things will head towards in the (near) future.

In a cloud environment you would anticipate automation and policies determine the consolidation possible on a system. If SSDs get broader adoption and virtualization performance increases due to hardware assists, I/O and fabric could become the bottleneck for the degree of consolidation and efficiency as it cannot map to the increased data rates from the storage and CPU performance.

Ways to address this is either to reduce or eliminate the overheads in the I/O stack caused by software emulation of devices in the VMM. VMDq is an example of a technology that can reduce the overhead or offload some of the VMM tasks through hardware assists in the NIC. Direct assignment with PCI-SIG SR-IOV support is a way to eliminate the overheads by by-passing the VMM. With SR-IOV, a single device can be divided into many logical devices known as Virtual Functions (like a pair or independent transmit receive queue). Each virtual function can be directly assigned to a VM using Intel VT-d thereby bypassing the VMM. This can work with Live VM Migration too. At IDF we showcased 4 demos of prototype SR-IOV software solutions running on Intel Xeon 5500 based hardware with prominent VMM vendors like VMware, Citrix and Redhat that have different hypervisor technology. The networking demos showcased working live migration with SR-IOV and VT-d based direct assignment. Direct assigned VMs could be even moved to an emulated mode and brought back to direct assigned mode. Intel has not only been working with software providers but also with other hardware vendors like LSI to demonstrate this capability. These technologies are as important to storage as networking particularly as SSDs gather steam. You can learn more from these blogs below on the demos.

Demo with Intel Xeon 5500 based Dell servers

An analyst view on the LSI solution demonstrated

If those multi 1GbE cables (that make your fabric look like pasta) be replaced by 10GbE and if SR-IOV and VT-d be used for performance, then it answers both the I/O performance and scalability requirements for a flexible datacenter.

Beyond those VT-d provides greater protection by allowing I/O devices to access only the memory regions allocated to them, and SR-IOV allows VMs to access only their portion of the device and restricts access to other Virtual Functions (owned by other VMs) on the I/O device or the entire device itself. Better security through better isolation.

Last but not the least of the requirements is the unified fabric. When IT can use a single I/O device for storage or for LAN traffic, the rigidity associated with provisioning of servers with some number of HBAs and some number of NICs is reduced. The I/O capacity becomes fungible and flexible. FCoE and iSCSI are key technologies in this direction. Adding capability to monitor QoS and shape the traffic makes it a good match for flexible datacenter.

Many of the technologies I discussed above (VT-d, SRIOV, FCoE, iSCSI) are here today… software such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux is already delivering the solution. In my view just a matter of time that ecosystem builds further and hardware is well tuned.

With these in perspective how do you see your datacenter shaping up?

…on my way to a customer meeting, and the thought dawns on me about why the car I’m getting into is a relatively new, clean 2008 compact car and not a 1966 Chevy Impala, which probably has enough steel to dramatically distort the earth’s local magnetic field.  Well the reasons are fairly simple:

• Newer cars are more reliable and require less maintenance - cars in the shop don’t make the rental car agency money, and don’t make customers happy if they break down
• Newer cars are typically more fuel efficient - that ’66 Impala’s gas mileage might be quoted in gallons per mile J
• Newer cars typically fall under a manufacturer warranty

As with rental cars, servers aren’t much different.  It’s all about keeping your business running smoothly, minimizing your operating costs, and keeping your customers happy.  While I’m guessing not many of today’s data centers have the server equivalent of a ’66 Impala in them, there are probably a bunch ready to be removed from the rental car fleet.

Think about it on your next business trip, and check out the benefits of refreshing servers that are only 3 or 4 years old with the Xeon® ROI estimator tool (link:  www.intel.com/go/xeonestimator).