One trend that is really starting to take shape in the server industry is that big servers are back! That doesn't mean big servers ever disappeared off the map. Historically bigger servers with 4 or more processor sockets have been 7-8% of the server market from a volume perspective. And bigger servers have always been used for scalable, data-demanding enterprise applications which IT values for it's performance, headroom and reliability. What we're seeing now is a greater shift in popularity towards these servers as IT invests more and more in this direction.

So, why is that? Well, check out this video and then let me know if you agree or disagree. After you watch it I'd also be curious to learn more about what you value as the most important buying criteria when you go big.

I have visited a number of customers recently. The discussions are usually straight forward where I provide them with a download of our current products, I tell them about things that we are doing in the future and along the way I ask them some questions about trends that they are seeing with their businesses. It will come as no surprise that enterprises are trying to keep up with their current requirements while also squeezing out increasingly flat or dwindling budgets to do something new. Many are turning to virtualization as a way to do more.

So who cares? CFO's care. I went out to visit a leading Fortune 500 company based on the West Coast of the US. Keep in mind I am planning to discuss our server platforms, why I believe they are leadership on performance and power and also all of the great new virtualization features we have recently introduced or will intro in the future. Before we get started they proudly walk me through their new datacenter and I stop in front of a rack that has two servers in it. Two 2U two processor servers. It is right next to another rack that has four servers in it. I inquire as to why both racks are only partially full and I receive a response that says one is owned by Finance, one is owned by a business unit. IT just manages them. You can look at this two ways. The glass half empty way would be that they are wasting an incredible amount of datacenter space and they are hopeless. The glass half full way would be that this is a great opportunity to really deliver value to this company's bottom line by first convincing them that physical consolidation (full up their racks) is important, then showing them a path toward application consolidation and finally sharing a vision of datacenter virtualization that includes compute, storage and networking. Their CFO will care.

IT employees care. One theme that seems to be coming through loud and clear is that people who drive some form of virtualization are usually considered as innovators or leading edge thinkers within their company. I have heard the term "IT Hero" to refer to someone who has delivered on a high ROI project, usually these days through the use of virtualization. I have met a number of IT folks at conferences and during visits and it is uncanny how many are trying to dig for more product information and how eager they are to hear about what new features we're putting into CPUs, chipsets, networking devices. A quick search of Youtube found this case study (here) that sums up the sorts of things I have heard.

It is also increasingly important that all of this stuff works well with the software, VMM and OS vendors product offerings. I know we are working closely with all of the ecosystem players because if we come out with an amazing new feature in our components it would be wasted if the VMM, OS or software didn't take advantage of it. There is some interesting banter here (here) about some of the pros and cons with virtualization. We are busy working on features that improve the performance and simplify the experience end users have when they virtualize. Why do you care about virtualization? What are you doing today that you couldn't do a year or two ago that has been made possible because of virtualization related technology?

Kirk was out at the Microsoft Server 2008 and talked about the "data center of the future". He discussed his thoughts on the data center of the future with some particularly interesting tidbits on the predictive enterprise, the world of Tera, emerging technologies and goings-on in Intel's IT shop.

Have you heard of the "predictive enterprise".? If you want to know more let me know as it is a very interesting topic.

So what's Intel been doing with NAND based Solid State Disk (SSDs) since my blog on our next generation broadband video streaming demo (http://communities.intel.com/openport/blogs/server/2007/11/14/). Two things: 1) we're close to launching Intel's SATA based SSD products and 2) we've been engaging you to get more details on your usage models and value propositions. In the last few months, there have been a number of announcements for SSDs in server and enterprise storage applications (e.g. EMC: http://www.emc.com/about/news/press/us/2008/011408-1.htm) including a number of small startups offering solutions targeted for server deployments. Based on my discussions with you and looking at what's going on in the industry, here's my view of the value of SSDs in servers and how that maps to server usage models.

As a person who focuses typically on the end-users, SSDs are interesting because they weren't designed to specifically solve an end-user server problem. As I said in my previous blog "because we could", SSD largely exist "because they can". They are what Clayton Christensen would call a disruptive technology. As SSDs are considered for server based applications, I look at how SSDs as a technology can provide greater value when replacing server hard drives (HDDs) or server memory and then build possible usage models from there.

When comparing to HDD usage in servers, I start with the following:

Performance: SSDs can have much better random access performance as measured by higher IOPS, higher throughput and lower read/write latency. SSDs are typically achieving a least 10 times the number of IOPs as HDDs, at least 2-3 times better random access read rate and on the order of 10 times less read and write latency than HDDs. For random access performance, most SSDs blow the highest performing 15K RPM hard drives away.

Power: SSDs use lower power especially when compared to a disk is that is active (i.e. spinning). Given that for most server based applications, the hard disk is always active, this is especially significant. My general observation is that SSDs typically use less than 1/5th of the power of an active HDD. Here they look to be a key technology for making data centers more power efficient.

Cost: When comparing cost per Gigabyte, SSDs are higher priced. Given this, SSDs today are largely being considered for applications where storage IO is the bottleneck - where many hard drives can be replaced with just a few SSDs.

SSDs can be compared to DDR memory with the same three value vectors:

Performance: Unlike the SSD to HDD comparison, memory has higher throughput and lower latency than an SSD. When comparing SSDs to memory for server usages, the primary consideration looks to be latency. SSD reads and writes are on the order of 100s of microseconds. On the other hand, memory based reads and writes are typically less than 100 nanoseconds. Even so, for some applications (e.g. video on demand streaming) 100s of microseconds of latency looks to be acceptable.

Power: Like HDDs, when comparing active power usage, SSDs draw much less power than DDR memory as measure by watts per gigabyte. How much is dependent on how the application uses memory. But generally, SSDs looked to consume 1/10th of the power.

Cost: Unlike HDDs, when comparing cost per gigabyte, SSDs are significantly lower priced than DDR memory. Generally, I start with NAND based SSDs as being half the price of DDR based memory. Depending on the size of the SSD and the technology (whether Single Level Cell (SLC) or Multi Level Cell (MLC)) the difference can be much more.

One final vector to look at is the reliability of SSDs when compared to hard disk drives and memory. Going with just the MTBF numbers being published, SSDs look to be better than HDDs and just as reliable as memory. One area that generates confusion is how the write cycle limitations of NAND technology affect the life-time (as measured by MTBF) of SSDs for server applications. Getting into details on this is a good subject for a future blog. But based on discussions with you, I haven't encountered a server application where the write cycle limitation is the deciding factor in a deployment for SLC SSDs (at least for how we expect Intel's SSDs to perform). For many server applications, it's not the deciding factor for MLC SSDs either.

Using these value vectors, here are my generalizations for the SSD value for enterprise and portal applications:

• Use SSDs for the server boot device. When compared to HDDs, SSDs enable faster boot (typically 30%), consume lower power, and are more reliable.

• Use SSDs for high throughput, high IOP, low latency application storage. If storage IO is the application bottleneck, replacing with SSDs shifts the bottleneck back to CPU utilization. Example applications include video streaming, search query, and OLTP.

• Use SSDs for building a high performance storage tier. Many applications have hot and cold (or long tail) data. By creating a storage tier, the solution cost of a deployment can be reduced significantly. Example applications include using SSDs for improving performance in a NAS or SAN (e.g. what EMC calls Tier 0) or to creating a high performance direct attached storage (DAS) solution (e.g an SSD optimized server).

• Consider SSDs as a lower cost alternative to placing application data in memory. Many applications create memory based databases to achieve low latency access times. These applications create custom data structures, use RamDisks or rely on caching through the OS (e.g. SWAP). For many IO bound applications, memory is typically being used as a buffer for disk data. The lower latency and higher throughput of SSDs promise to require less memory for buffering while maintaining the quality of service objectives of the application.

Bottom line for servers today, SSDs look to be cost effective for applications where storage IO throughput and low latency are key. They move the application bottleneck from IO to back to CPU utilization. Get back to me on whether you agree and what additional usage models you're finding.

During my blog post last week titled "[processors-cpus-cores-arent-they-all-the-same|p-10936]", I got a request to talk more about server terminology, going beyond the CPU. So here we go.

The processor does all your computational calculations. The chipset is attached to the processor and manages information and data flow from the processor to the other system components like memory and other I/O (input / output) devices. If the processor is the "brain", then the chipset is the "heart". Memory and I/O devices are like "arms" and "legs" - you need them all working together. The term chipset, memory controller, and memory controller hub (MCH) are often used interchangeably

At Intel, we refer to the platform as the combination of all of these devices that comprise a server. From a hardware perspective, I see the following terms used interchangeably: platform, solution, system, server, workstation, and there are probably others I'm missing. However, I have also seen platform refer to the software stack, as well as the complete hardware and software solution together.

Another term that you may also here is form factor. Form factor refers to the size and shape of the final system you would buy from a manufacturer. The most common server form factors are rack mount, pedestal, towers and blades.

Many utility companies in North America are encouraging energy efficiency in datacenters in a big way. Some are offering incentives to non-residential customers for making energy efficient choices including servers, storage, and other datacenter equipments. Most of these utility companies require customers to make thier rebate/incentive application prior to starting the project and obtain thier approval. I compiled a short informative article regarding various rebates/incentives offered by the utility companies and it was recently published in the datacenterjournal. Read through......

http://datacenterjournal.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1475&Itemid=41

RK Hiremane

In the second comment around the right time for datacenter refresh, I'd like to look at Costs. Power is covered in the comment from Chris and I covered some comments on Space already in the discussion forum. So what it really boils down to is cost of running your existing datacenter versus the costs of throwing the servers out and replacing them. It is clear also from the other comments, that it doesn't make sense to throw out servers which are utilized in average 15% and have them replaced by new servers, which are 5 times faster and utilize the servers 3%... Great achievement hu?... Server Refresh makes therefore most sense to do only when consolidating the environment. How do I consolidate the environment? By using virtualization. See Helmuts blog and the whole theme next week on that topic.

Therefore let's look at the real cost factors, when refreshing the servers:

• Cost of new hardware: That is obviously a significant capital expenditure and starting at about 2000$ for a reasonable DP server. But the trick is also that a lot of server companies offer financing models which make this an operational expenditure. But key is also to understand, that by consolidating your servers at the same time the depreciation costs of the servers may actually decrease, as you have less hardware to depreciate!

• Maintenance costs: Again, reducing the number of servers running given applications, and at the same time unifying the environment helps significantly to reduce the maintenance costs. This can be a significant step in unifying on a given OS or hardware platform.

• Power consumption: Similar to utilization, it doesn't make sense to just look at the power consumption by server, but at the consumption by performance and therefore I can save about 38% in power bills, on a given workload vs. the previous generation hardware and about a 10^th of the power of hardware which is 2-3years old. Again, obviously only, if I do this in combination of consolidating the servers. Trick often is, that those costs are often not taken into consideration, as those are not billed to the IT department but to the facilities group. So it becomes an executive decision to ensure they are looked at!.

• Switching costs. Obviously very hard to measure, as this depends on the environment of the customer. And I talked to the customer who said: "No I will never touch this AS400 system, as it just runs and runs and runs." On the other hand I had a customer who replaced just those AS400 systems and saw huge synergistic effects, because he put the application on a standard based architecture and was able to finally integrate it in the other production system and therefore have one reporting and analytics tool.

I try to make a long story short. This is not something you do very often, but you don't get married every year either. But most of the time it's worth going through the efforts. So thinking about replacing the servers which are older than 2-3years is definitely worth while and often an effort which pays off in the first year!

Watt do you care about more?

the Power Consumption of your servers (watts) or the Power Efficiency of your servers (performance / watt)

... or maybe you prefer the Performance per Watt per SqFt argument

I have spent a lot of my time the last several years discussing this topic with IT professionals around the world - and there are a lot of varying opinions.

I believe that Performance per Watt is a better measure of overall value for the data center and server room.

The power consumed by a server is an important measure, but power only comparisons can be misleading.

Example: If server ‘A' consumes 50W less power than server ‘B', then it can save IT $79 per year per server in power and cooling costs (assumes $0.08 kW/hr power costs and cooling costs equal to power costs). Scale that $79 savings per server across a data center with thousands of servers and it can be a pretty impressive number.

However, if a server with 50W lower power delivers lower application performance ... is the power savings worth it? The answer of course depends ... but generally in my experience the answer is a resounding No.

Example: What if server A (the 50W lower power server) underperforms server B by 33% in performance. This means that you need to deploy more ‘A' Servers to get the same performance as ‘B' Servers. In fact, with a 33% performance advantage, you need only 3 ‘B' servers for every 4 ‘A' servers. The higher performance per Watt delivered by server B reduces acquisition costs, reduces power consumption (less servers) and minimizes space and eases manageability. This example is shown graphically above

What do you think? What power and performance metrics do you look at before purchasing servers

... Lower Power or Higher Performance per Watt?