Competition, Comparison, Self Improvement, Benchmarking.

We do them in business. We do them in our careers. We do them in our leisure. ... and if you are like me you like to watch them on TV or live as well. Who is watching Lance Armstrong? or Tiger Woods? or their favorite sports team compete regularly.

IT professionals are no different.  Today, one of the business emhpasis points for IT is energy efficiency.  Now there is a way for you to quickly compare your own IT organization against itself and others.  This IT self-assessment tool takes about 2-3 minutes to complete and will answer these three questions

1. How efficient is your server infrastructure today?
2. How do you compare to your peers?
3. How much more efficient could you be?

The Community Window: Server Efficiency is a tool hosted on the Intel Premier IT Professionals website (http://ipip.intel.com) where registration is free and so is the information and best practices shared by other IT professionals throughout the industry.  Join and conduct your Server Efficiency self assessment today.   Chris

Your most valuable employee is the one that creates tomorrow’s successes.  Providing them tools that help them do that faster will help your organization create new products or optimize old ones more rapidly.  The benefit to the organization is increased opportunities to win the customer’s attention via new products or your responsiveness to their request; the employee gets to brag on what he or she just helped bring to market.

Before we get too far let’s look at Intel’s mission with respect to workstations.  We are laser focused on supplying technology that provides users with an uncompromised experience in transforming their ideas into reality.  With that in mind we look at how users create; we try understanding their obstacles and work with the ecosystem of hardware and software providers to deliver solutions to real problems that may be inhibiting their opportunity to innovate.  

One technology that is helping users innovate faster is virtualization. 

No, we are not looking to remove the workstation from the user’s desk or share his or her workstation with peers, who also need a workstation.  We are using virtualization to deliver the performance they need to innovate faster.

The Observation

We saw workstation user’s innovation slow as they multitasked between tasks – some of them not even theirs.  The involuntary tasks included deploying IT security patches, updates, and system backups to name a few.  We also saw that users were no longer just doing Computer Aided Design (CAD) alone, but they were doing CAD, using productivity tools, meshing, web surfing for supporting facts, collaborating via video and Instant Messaging (IM) tools, digital white boarding and trying to do analysis-driven design.  They were very busy people who can’t afford any downtime or slow time.

In some cases we noticed that some users actually had not one, but two or more workstations running in completely different environments, many times with different OSs.

The Problem

What the above really lead to is a conclusion that too many tasks were going after too few resources and that the experience we had hoped the user would encounter was not happening.  In fact the reverse was happening – interactive creative tasks were slowing, system sluggishness was at an all time high.  The “uncompromised experience in transforming their ideas into reality” we wanted for a workstation user was not there and any innovation that was possible was slowed down to a crawl.

A Potential Solution

Intel® Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (Intel VT-d), once just thought of for servers actually has a place in the workstation market. 

This technology provides an important step toward enabling a significant set of emerging usage models in the workstation. VT-d support on Intel platforms provides the capability to ensure improved isolation of I/O resources for greater reliability, security, and availability.  That is a mouth full let’s see it in action.

There are two key requirements that are common across workstation usage models.

1.       The first requirement is protected access to I/O resources from a given virtual machine (VM), such that it cannot interfere with the operation of another VM on the same platform. This isolation between VMs is essential for achieving availability, reliability, and trust. This helps you get the performance you want from your workstation.

2.       The second major requirement is the ability to share I/O resources among multiple VMs. In many cases, it is not practical or cost-effective to replicate I/O resources (such as storage or network controllers) for each VM on a given platform.

In the case of the workstation, virtualization can be used to create a self-contained operating environment, or "virtual software appliance[RC1] ," that is dedicated to capabilities such as manageability or security. These capabilities generally need protected and secure access to a network device to communicate with down-the-wire management agents and to monitor network traffic for security threats. For example, a security agent within a VM requires protected access to the actual network controller hardware. This agent can then intelligently examine network traffic for malicious payloads or suspected intrusion attempts before the network packets are passed to the guest OS, where user applications might be affected. Workstations can also use this technique for management, security, content protection, and a wide variety of other dedicated services. The type of service deployed may dictate that various types of I/O resources, graphics, network, and storage devices, be isolated from the OS where the user's applications are running.

The Result

In collaborating with virtualization and automation leader, Parallels, on its Parallels Workstation Extreme solution,  we identified two impediments to workstation user productivity.  The first was the issue around general resource overhead that afflict a traditional virtualized workstation system due to  insufficient resources to address the overload of requests. The second issue explored includes the more complex problem of a single workstation with the need to support multiple OSs and display visualization programs at near- or full-performance within virtualized machines.

The first issue was more straightforward - create VMs, partition resources and now the user has a very resilient workstation that is capable of delivering the intended experience.  IT can have their VMs and the user has his or her workstation back and the concept of digital prototyping to create and explore a complete product before it is built is a reality.  The creative innovator in the company can now iterate through more ideas in less time and your company created more opportunities to catch the customer’s attention just went through the roof.

The second issue offered a more complex challenge.  We identified certain industries such as the oil and gas exploration space where users actually had two or more physical workstations - one running Windows, the other running Linux. Both workstations had visual display requirements by the end user and both computers acted on the same reservoir data with applications that while similar in many ways, were still different in their functionalities and purpose.  In oil drilling projects that typically involve millions of dollars in capital investment, the confirmation of expected end results is an asset that far outweigh the costs of a few workstations. Nevertheless, in today’s economic setting, the ability to get the same functionalities at a lower cost is one of many key drivers in helping companies achieve healthy bottom lines.

The Proof Point For Virtualization In A Workstation Engineers from Schlumberger, a leading oil field service provider, run performance-demanding applications such as GeoFrame* and Petrel*.  These applications serve to analyze complex geological and geophysical data and determine the viability of potential reservoirs, or to optimize production at existing sites. With GeoFrame running on Linux* and Petrel on Microsoft Windows*, Schlumberger engineers have been using these applications on two separate physical workstations, driving IT spending higher, pushing down user productivity and increasing both power consumption and IT maintenance costs.

A New Paradigm For A New Day

With the availability of Intel Xeon processor 5500 series-based workstations, game-changing workstation virtualization software such as Parallels Workstation Extreme has opened up new horizons with breakthrough graphics performance with Intel’s latest processor technology. Parallels Workstation Extreme is built on top of the Parallels FastLane Architecture that effectively leverages the full potential of hardware resources such as graphics and networking cards to offer optimal workstation performance.

In comparison testing, Schlumberger compared the concurrent performance of applications running side-by-side on a virtualized Intel Xeon processor 5400 series-based workstation with the same setup on the newer Intel Xeon processor 5500-based machine. The results were astounding. The first machine with the older processor without Intel-VT-d support ran Petrel on the host OS at full native speed, but performance for GeoFrame in a VM slowed enormously. While Petrel refreshed its graphics at a rate of 30 frames per second, GeoFrame crawled along at a graphics refresh rate of JUST one frame every 19 seconds, an agonizingly slow performance on an older workstation without Intel VT-d support.

When the group tested the same applications on the newer Xeon 5500 series workstation with Intel VT-d support, the results were striking: Both applications – Petrel running on the host OS and GeoFrame in a guest OS in a VM - ran at full native speed, and both were able to refresh graphics at near 30 frames per second—a 570 times improvement over the first workstation.

Russ Sagert, Schlumberger’s Geoscience Technical Advisor for North America said “our engineers were blown away by the performance. We hammered these machines with extreme workloads that stressed every aspect of the system. Amazingly, the new workstation based on the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series provided performance enabling this multiple OS, multiple application environment for the first time.”

The key element in Schlumberger’s new environment is Intel Xeon processor 5500 series-based workstations with Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT) for Directed I/O (Intel® VT-d).  Together, these technologies enable direct assignment of graphics and network cards to virtual machines, enabling the machine to circumvent the interrupt and exit loop and clearing the previous performance problems.

Running in conjunction with Parallels Workstation Extreme, which effectively leverages Intel Virtualization Technology, including VT-d, the solution revolutionizes virtualization for high-end users. “High-performance virtualization on Intel Xeon processor 5500 series-based workstations is a game-changing capability,” says Sagert. “We can allocate multiple cores, up to 64 GB of memory and a dedicated graphics card to each machine. The results are spectacular.”

In the final analysis, moving to the Intel Xeon Processor 5500 series of next-generation workstations does far more than cut costs. It impacts the way that work gets done. If you have clients running the kind of resource-intensive, graphics-rich applications that traditionally slow to a crawl in a virtualized environment, consider the benefits of finally moving beyond the I/O barrier.

A fully configured Intel Xeon Processor 5500 series-based workstation running Parallels Workstation Extreme delivers the performance level that makes a virtualized workstation a leading contender for users with multi-workstation requirements. A streamlined work interface, reduced office noise and clutter, access to the same data repository and significant performance gains works on the user side. But the IT organization also gains benefits by lowering capital, management, support, provisioning, data protection, space, and energy and cooling costs.

Moreover, the IT team can now standardize on a single OS image while addressing alternative requirements.

Learn More

Intel Workstation Processors http://www.intel.com/products/workstation/processors/index.htm

Parallels Workstation Extreme

http://www.parallels.com/products/extreme

The computer industry is filled with pundits, speculators, visionaries, salesman, brilliant architects and professors. Each provides invaluable insight into their experience, their intelligence, their alma mater, their ticker symbol, their ego and what’s next. Some win the “what’s next lottery”, others work for years of brilliance in relative obscurity.

Seemingly, a world that has deployed over 1 Billion devices a year for the last 3 years , is incapable of understanding the gravity of a new programming models, a new hardware architecture, a sleek new design that delivers on a vision that Gene Rodenberry thought of in the 1960’s or Da Vinci in the 15^th Century. What is old is new…..and let me tell you why? It will revolutionize the industry (not evolutionize…a term reserved for slower growing industry’s that require government assistant every decade or so…), transform your environment and provide freedoms you had only hoped to enjoy….and we invented it 40 years ago. Does any of this sound familiar?

It should. These are the paraphrased slogans of an industry in transition. Real products matters, product differentiation matters, standards matter, interoperability matters….and shareholders pay for future expectations.

The future of computing…is NOW. The future of the computer industry is NOW. The next generation of computer programming, software architectures and transformational technologies is NOW. As an industry we have finally begun to embrace interface, architectural and software programming standards to usher in a new era of interoperability and scalability. Behind us are the days of “proprietary interfaces” (What does that actually mean other than I am going to sell you some extra accessories that will be worthless in 2 years?), which do not provide a differentiated performance/cost advantage. Gone are the days of developing programming languages that lock-in customers to individual companies, whether vendors innovate or not. These rules of the past are slowly melting away, allowing the entire industry to embrace interoperability and standards at the highest level in history. Industry diversity is healthy and insures that the most innovative and technologically relevant companies will “win” most of the time. Allowing the 1 Billion and the Next Billion customers of the world to enjoy the best interface technology yet developed….each other.  It also provides us with a unique ability to move to the next phase in our dynamic industry’s growth, autonomic instrumentation.

At Intel, we are constantly working to develop the next great performance architecture, filled with new innovative “goodies”, as our Chief Virtualization Architect Rich Uhlig calls them. These “goodies” (a technical term that Rich borrowed from his nephew, I believe) come in the form of virtualization technologies (Intel VT-x, Intel VT-d and Intel VT-c), security technologies (Intel LT-SX), performance technologies (Hyper-Threading, Turbo Boost) and energy efficiency instrumentation (Node Manager and Data Center Manager). Soon they will also include differentiated services in the cloud which facilitate ease of use and growth for a host of vertical industries in need of innovation. The resulting architectures that emerge will be instrument rich, feature capable and as scalable as users are willing to pay for.

Why is this important? Instrumentation matters. As we apply business and personal rules to our growing compute environments it has become increasingly clear that the more tools we make available to users the better informed we are in making decisions. The more disclosure we provide to investors through the use of autonomic programming architectures the more informed they will be of their investing decisions.

How can you day trade $1B in 35 different stocks without clear autonomic controls in your data center, your database, your application and your client devices?

How can you move 450 Million people efficiecntly throughout a country for 2 weeks without autonomic controls on transportation: plains, trains, boats and automobiles, as they do during the Spring Festival in China?

How can you process 1 Billion text messages a day without clear business rules? What happens when these messages are also coming from machines to other machines, modifying databases, applications and clients?

As humans, we must apply guidelines, much like laws,  for our machines to take action when we are asleep, when we are tired, when we are not present, when we are just simply being human….to slow to react to a rapidly changing environment.

The innovators of the computer industry today understand this NOW. We do not need to discuss a vision of 40 years ago without a plan to act NOW. Claiming ideas without action is dishonorable at best, criminal at worst. The innovators of today must build products and services that help solve the problems of today. We do not need to look to 2050 without a plan to act NOW. The visionaries of tomorrow are…..not born. The visionaries of today…can call me in 10 years.

Autonomic controls are in place today, machine to machine computer architectures are here today, scalable compute engines are here today. Are they perfect, no. Are they effective, yes. The design architects, product engineers and systems designers of today need to address these concerns. Autonomic Instrumentation delivers control to the administrator, the user and the developer. Rules engines can be modified to maximize efficiency, minimize consumption and increase productivity. All of these will lead to increase shareholder (read: No just people who buy shares of stock) value across your enterprise, your school, our hospitals, our governments, and your home.

When executed properly, Autonomic controls should be able to deliver 20-25% performance and efficiency increases with each new generation of Moore’s law. In some cases, as in the Intel Xeon® 5500 Series these increases have been over 150% in virtualization performance, these increases will be a combination of software architecture enhancement and silicon optimization. In other cases, it will be through the dedicated hard work of increase instrumentation capability of a processor platform at the same price of the previous generation through energy efficiency and memory controls.

Autonomic controls will also allow end users to avert disasters in our data centers, our homes and in our hands. Autonomic instrumentation design frameworks, allow users to set parameters on data migrations, data backup, security, memory access, power consumption and virtual machine architectures.

For Intel and our new Xeon® 5500 Series processor family, and our recently announced

Intel® Nehalem-EX platform provide the new generation of platform instrumentation. As product developers, designers and architects we should all find a way to increase the tools available to our customers to take advantage of these instrumentation capabilities. I look forward to being able to announce more of these new features as we announce them and help to provide development frameworks for developers, engineers and architects to build new products and services, ushering in the future of autonomic computing innovation…today.

Running multiple Unix environments across a range of locations adds increased complexity and cost to the IT environment. I came across an interesting case study and wanted to highlight some of the key findings

YPF SAis the largest company in Argentina operating in the Oil and Gas industry. The company has 29 gas plants around Argentina running different Unix environments such as HP-UX, AIX and Solaris.

YPF SA consolidated their SAP ERP and Oracle DB environment from multiple Unix environments to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with integrated virtualization running on Intel Xeon based platforms from IBM System X

Some of the key findings to highlight

• Key requirement from Unix Administration Team that "migrating from old RISC/Unix and proprietary servers to open and flexible platforms would pose no risk to the reliability, availability and performance of the systems"
• Positive impact on cost and performance; Lowered costs, simplified management and increased compatibility
• Reduction in costs especially when compared to license costs of RISC based platforms
• Increased performance and availability drove decision to scale with RHEL and Xeon
• Ability to leverage Redhat integrated virtualization. Free up internal hardware and technical resources for other projects

I guess the combination of Redhat and Intel deliver the business results that customers are seeking. What do you think?

Non-x86 RISC architectures, Power or SPARC, have been used in high end business critical virtualization solutions for a long while now. These come with a vertical stack of solution including the hardware, software, manageability tools and services provided by one vendor. This often leads to lock-in to the proprietary virtualization solution and services, and can be expensive from an end user perspective.

There are reasons why companies that can afford RISC based solutions have subscribed to it. This has been mainly due to Reliability, Availability and Serviceability (RAS) features, scalability and dedicated resources for quality of service (QoS) and isolation.

The world of virtualization however has significantly changed in the last 5 years. x86 based hardware and software products today offer well accepted and high performance virtualization solution. With the eminent availability of highly scalable and resilient Nehalem-EX products with 16-threads per socket and extensive RAS capabilities in the near future, the line between an expensive RISC solution and x86 based virtualization solution could blur further.

From an end user’s perspective, Nehalem-EX could provide sufficient capabilities that they have come to expect out of a RISC based virtualization infrastructure. Looking at it:

• Hardware partitioning of Nehalem-EX platform would be possible. Along with this OS virtualization and full commercial hypervisor support for logical partitioning already exists on Xeon processors.
• Nehalem-EX hardware infrastructure allows software ecosystem to deliver capacity on demand. For example extra CPU capacity can be dynamically added as needed. Moreover VM migration and policy based load balancing capabilities that already exist in commercial hypervisors complement this and provides IT easy methods to manage capacity at the datacenter level.
• Memory can be dedicated by not oversubscribing the available physical memory.
• CPUs can be dedicated by creating CPU affinity.
• Dedicated I/O assignment is possible using VT for Directed I/O. It can also restrict DMA access from devices to certain areas in memory, increasing isolation and system reliability.
• Single Root IO Virtualization feature would be available as part of Intel VT for connectivity in the networking devices. This allows a single NIC to be shared amongst multiple VMs directly, while isolating the traffic from a NIC queue to a VM for better reliability. Per VM bandwidth allocation can also be supported.
• Nehalem EX adds virtualization feature that could help increase VM performance in a processor oversubscribed environment with high system utilization.
• Nehalem-EX will add new reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) such as Machine Check Architecture (MCA) Recovery that allows error detection, error recovery and VM isolation.
• Inherent power technologies in the CPU, Turbo mode, and Dynamic Power Node Manager for system wide power capping all deliver IT the essential keys to balance power and performance.

While Nehalem-EX measures up to the infrastructure needs, it also enables horizontal solution that would allow customers to take advantage of best of breed software from the virtualization ecosystem thus reducing lock-in. This could result in faster innovation leading to an array of choices for business critical virtualization.

Based on http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh042808-story03.html, a Power virtualization solution with Power6 based 4 Socket P550 box (~$93,000) and PowerVM Enterprise Edition for large system ($1,969 per core, with $220 per year on the maintenance) will totally cost an enterprise $109,000, just in one server acquisition.

While pricing of NHM-EX 4S system is not available, approximating a cost using current 4-Socket Intel server pricing and commercial VMM software would suggest that Intel based solution could cost at-least 50% less in just infrastructure. Other savings like not requiring specialized RISC based hardware, services, solution and staff would add to the lower cost of ownership in the long run.

Given the economy and Nehalem-EX features, would it not make sense to take RISC out of your investment?

The debate on how to best increase system capacity to accommodate growing applications has raged on for years; “scale up” with more CPU, memory, and I/O, or “scale out” with loosely connected systems.    Scaling out by adding networked systems to increase capacity has been a good economical solution for many IT managers because it allows them to grow by using less expensive, industry standard building blocks.  However, there are some notable exceptions to this line of thought.  One is that the class of applications that require shared memory and large database support are much better suited to run on a single, expandable system that scales up.  These are typically transaction processing, business intelligence and ERP solutions.   Until now, IT managers running applications that require scale-up systems larger than 4 or 8 CPUs have had limited platform choices and most were proprietary and expensive RISC-based servers.

The other problem with the scale out approach is the people, facilities, software and overhead costs and complexity of managing very large numbers of servers, which can grow to a point where the costs outweigh the performance and system cost benefits.  The industry solution to achieving better ROI has been to consolidate multiple scale-out servers onto single industry standard scale-up servers with virtualization solutions.  This is a good solution, but is limited by the number of application loads the IT manager feels comfortable placing on a single server, given the need to maintain peak performance and availability for each application.

Well, it looks like the scale-up, scale-out debate is about to take another turn.  In the server product update Intel gave on May 26th, they talked about new levels of system scalability and choice supported by the upcoming Nehalem-EX processor.  This processor will support systems that scale up to 8 sockets natively (shared memory, without any additional silicon), and up to 16 sockets and higher with node controllers from system manufactures that allow single systems to share memory beyond 8 sockets.   So far there are over 15 different designs from 8 OEMs that offer 8 socket or higher scalability.  But of course, for the class of application where scaling is important, socket count doesn’t tell the whole story of what’s needed for scalable performance.  Thread support, key for transaction processing and virtualization, scales at the rate of 16 threads per socket with 8 cores and Hyper Threading (2 threads per core).  That would be 128 threads for an 8-socket system, and 256 threads for 16 sockets.   And in order to keep those threads fed with data close to the CPU, each processor supports up to 24 MB of shared cache (1.5X current generation Xeon), and an impressive 16 memory slots per socket or 128 DIMMs on an 8-socket system.  In addition, the Scalable Memory Interconnect gives these systems 9 times the memory bandwidth of today’s top Xeon processor.  Finally, four QuickPath interconnect links per socket allow for high-bandwidth sharing of data across the system.

So the net of it is that the industry is going to see a broad selection of highly scalable, next-generation servers that significantly extend the economic advantage of industry standard scale-up solutions for business-critical, large database, and high-end virtualization/consolidation deployments.     I would expect these systems to give IT managers a very cost-effective alternative to the much more expensive and proprietary RISC-based servers they use today.

What are your thoughts?  Mike

Related Topics:

• NHM-EX Press Fact Sheet
• NHM-EX May 26th Press Briefing Video – condensed version
• IBM 8Socket Demo Video
• NHM-EX--A New Standard

I’m quite pleased with the ramp of the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series. As reported during the Nehalem-EX briefing (more info here), we expect the Xeon 5500 to reach more than half of our 2S server shipments by August 2009. All of our key OEM customers have embraced the new architecture with complete product offerings, which provides IT administrators a plethora of Xeon 5500-based systems to choose from.

For this blog, I am focused on data center advancements that Cisco is pioneering with their Unified Computing System (UCS). They intend to combine best practices for network infrastructure with data center virtualization. The Intel Xeon processor family, Intel Virtualization Technology and Datacenter Ethernet are foundational elements to Cisco’s strategy.

Already the industry has recognized the Cisco UCS blade platform with awards such as “Best of Interop 2009” for Data Center & Storage (link) and “Best Data Center Innovation” from BladeSystems insight (link). It is a bold move on Cisco’s part, and makes a lot of sense in light of the convergence of servers, storage and networking. See a video testimonial about Cisco UCS and Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) from our own Intel CIO, Diane Bryant, here.

Recently, Cisco announced further expansion of the UCS product portfolio with addition of three new rack-mount servers. All of them are based on the Intel Xeon processor 5500 Series and are expected to provide compelling performance, memory expandability and integrated virtualization capabilities. They are expected in the fourth quarter. You can read more about the new rack-mount servers here.

Have you had a chance to evaluate the new Cisco offering yet? Have you made any plans to deploy in 2009? What do you think of unified fabric and the concepts that Cisco has put forth? Let me know!

-steve

Last week I wrote about the server product update for the upcoming Nehalem-EX processor and the expandable platforms based on it.  Today I wanted to provide you with a short 10 minute video captured from the event.  It’s a really good summary for those of you that want to learn more about Intel’s Xeon product roadmap but with limited time.

Also, as I mentioned earlier, look for some informative blogs over the next 1-2 weeks that will offer more of an in depth view of Nehalem-EX’s 4 Socket capabilities, performance, scalability, RAS, and Virtualization. 

bryce