It’s not just about energy-sipping systems—it’s also about your storage footprint

Most of us are familiar with the concept of green IT: increasing energy efficiency across the enterprise to trim costs and optimize resources. While you hear a lot about servers helping to reduce energy usage, not as much is said about storage. Intel and the storage industry are working together to provide green storage solutions, too.

For the storage community, every system has to be cost-effective as well as performance-driven, which means energy efficiency is a key consideration. It starts at the processor level, where the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series is extending the boundaries of energy efficient performance.

Many storage system providers have picked up on the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series since it was introduced last March. For example, the HP StorageWorks XP10000* Disk Array and 3000 Enterprise* Virtual Array are based on the new processors. Schooner Information Technology appliances leverage quad-core Intel Xeon 5500 processors and half a terabyte of Intel® X25-E flash memory. The bottom line for the Schooner appliances is an 80 percent decrease in power and cooling requirements versus ordinary servers.

But green storage isn’t just about power consumption at the processor or system level. An equally important green strategy is to reduce the overall storage footprint, and a number of technologies are available to help IT organizations implement this strategy.

Virtualization is driving huge data center energy savings by greatly reducing the number of physical machines in the data center. As Bob Fine, director of product marketing at Compellent, pointed out at the 2009 Storage Networking World conference last spring, many large enterprises realize that they’re approaching a cap. “They can only get a certain amount of power in their data centers and see virtualization as a way to reduce their power requirements,” says Fine. “Instead of building new data centers, they can stay in the ones they have, saving millions of dollars in the process.”

Many IT managers tell Intel that storage can be a big gating factor when it comes to scaling virtual environments. The Intel Xeon processor 5500 series uses Intel® HT Technology within each processor core, doubling the number of threads that can be processed at the same time. This option permits more efficient workloads and enables storage servers to virtualize more applica­tions. Intel HT Technology is also more energy efficient than traditional threaded processing.

Compellent and Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), both users of the Intel Xeon processors, recommend reducing the storage footprint in other ways as well. “Limit the amount of content you need to store by using technologies like data deduplication,” advises Asim Zaheer, vice president of product and competitive marketing at HDS. “Also, don’t have wasted capacity or wasted systems—that’s where tiered storage and virtualization come into play.” 

Compellent’s Fine sees tiered storage as especially important when using expensive disk resources like solid-state drives (SSD). By limiting SSD to the top tier, a company could save on drive costs and increase storage efficiency. “Only the active data would sit on SSD, and all the inactive data would go onto a tier-three SATA drive,” says Fine. “Since SSD drives are about 10 times the cost of Fibre Channel, it’s very important to gain those kinds of efficiencies.”

Isilon Systems, another user of Intel processors, has a pay-as-you-grow model for its clustered storage products that makes it easier to avoid over-provisioning and wasting power. If a customer needs to add more performance, Isilon can provide nodes with Intel processors and memory, but no storage. If the customer requires capacity only, Isilon sells nodes with just disks. In addition, Isilon uses ColdWatt power supplies, which it says are about 30 percent more efficient than traditional power supplies.

As Intel works with the storage industry to deliver more energy-efficient and high-performance storage solutions, we’d like to know what IT organizations are doing to implement green storage technologies in the data center. If you work in IT and have fresh perspectives to make your organization more efficient, you’re invited to share your ideas  here.   

Ok it may be that your IT department or enterprise applications are limiting your opportunity to adopt 64 bit version of your favorite CAD application, but your inability to adopt a 64 bit CAD application can be very limiting to your productivity. 

Here as an example from a recent discussion with some end users who are involved in a workstation pilot with Intel.  When they moved to a 64 bit version of their favorite CAD application the time to open a 2.5GB file dropped from 20 minutes to less than 1.  

Question - How many files does your engineering team open a day?  What is the cost of the 20 minutes?

Customers operating in a 32 bit world are forced to work with smaller models.  You knew that.  And of course smaller file sizes will open faster. 

But….

Rather than working with the chassis, engine and transmission in a single view, you will need to work each one independently.  The results is you may miss a design interference, a misalignment or another obvious design issue, because you only had a partial view of the entire design.  More rework and more delays.

Yes but... many of the enterprise applications you use are 32 bit and you need to have a 32 bit workstation environment in order to access these tools.  That may have been true once, but with technology like Intel® Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O and Parallels™ Workstation Extreme software you now have the opportunity for an uncompromised workstation experience.  You get all the benefits of a 64 bit CAD application and you can still work within a 32 bit environment when you need to.  You can even pass the data between workstation environments.

Do not be too slow to adopt a 64 bit version of your favorite CAD application, just opening files faster and working with a complete design can make eth cost of a new workstation irrelevant.

To learn more about Intel® Xeon® based workstations visit www.intel.com\go\workstation

Interactive Modeling and Simulation – Come on you are kidding!!

Recent advancements in mathematical modeling, computational algorithms, and the speed of computers based on technologies like the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series have brought the field of computer simulation to the threshold of a new era.  While not quite interactive, simulation and analysis can now occur at a pace that impacts decisions further upstream in the design process. 

Simulation and analysis tools are also no longer the domain of the expert.  Organizations can now potentially achieve a more efficient product development process by considering a reordering of product design activities and empowering engineers with easy-to-use and powerful 3D conceptual design tools and early access to CAE applications.

Why consider reordering your product development process?

This is not new news. Manufacturers know that when product analysis or simulation results trail the detailed design process that product changes are become significantly expensive and will most likely negatively impact new product release schedules. Worse yet, they also realize that changes made downstream in any design cycle are often “last minute” and almost always imply compromises on original design goals. This, of course, cuts into the product performance and profits of the new or updated product.

By reordering product design activities, manufactures may be able to achieve a more efficient product development process and reduce overall product development cost, time and risk.

No experts needed.

Don’t be fooled.  While ISV’s from ANSYS, ALTAIR, MSC, PTC, Siemens PLM, SIMLUIA, SolidWorks and others have made tremendous strides in making their simulation products easier to use, you probably still need an expert.  However, their collective advancements in tools, wrappers, and easy-to-use frameworks that guide the engineers through complex multi-physics analyses with drag-and-drop simplicity make it easier to move analysis further upstream. 

That means your expert can now focus on the really hard problems.

Workgroup Computing – Bringing “Real” HPC Computing To Your Department

Using analysis and simulation to get results before the detailed design process begins will help ensure the CAD models meet performance requirements and will almost always mitigate last-minute and expensive design changes.

Large scale compute intensive jobs used to require investments and/or access to a divisionally shared, large scale cluster housed in a controlled Data Center environment …supporting hundreds of users.

While this may have been true a few years ago, the advancements in mathematical modeling, computational algorithms, and the speed of computers based on technologies like the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series now makes it possible to quickly and efficiently solve large scale problems closer to the engineers responsible for dealing with them, on compute clusters supporting small workgroups or departments of engineers vs. large scale clusters shared by hundreds of engineers.

As an example let’s look at the Cray CX1™ deskside personal supercomputer.  Like others in this new usage category, it presents an organization with a solution that is the "right size" in performance, functionality, and cost for individuals and departmental workgroups who want to harness HPC without the complexity of traditional clusters.  Equipped with powerful Intel Xeon 5500 series processors the Cray CX1 delivers the power of a high performance cluster with the ease-of-use and seamless integration of a workstation.

OK, You Can Give Me The Performance, But The Support Can Be A Nightmare

Intel® Cluster Ready makes HPC simpler.  It boosts productivity and solves new problems. The Intel® Cluster Ready program makes it simpler to experience the power of high-performance computing. 

Intel Cluster Ready presents HPC users a certification program that is designed to establish a common specification among original equipment manufacturers, independent software vendors (ISVs) and others for designing, programming and deploying high performance clusters built with Intel components.

For users, this certification means that these certified HPC systems will run a wide range of Intel Cluster Ready ISV applications right of the box.  Tested, validated and simple.

By selecting a certified Intel Cluster Ready system for your registered Intel Cluster Ready applications you can be confident that hardware and software components will work together, right out of the box. Software tools such as Intel® Cluster Checker help ensure that those components continue to work together, delivering a high level of quality and a low total cost of ownership over the course of the cluster’s lifetime.

To learn more about Intel HPC Technology visit www.intel.com/go/HPC

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!

Why upgrade your hardware when migrating to SAP ERP 6.0?  Because it makes simple, practical, business sense that is all.  SAP has identified several key reasons why customers are concerned about migration and several among them are as follows:

·         Cost, Cost, Cost

o   HW infrastructure cost is highlighted as one of the key barriers of migration

·         Business Justification

o   Is there a compelling business reason to upgrade the hardware?

·         Additional risk of business disruption

o   Migration of ERP environment is complex enough…how much more risk is there when upgrading your hardware?

From a cost perspective, the perception that hardware is a barrier to migration can be easily overcome.  Based on research, the hardware cost as a percentage of the overall migration cost is only about 7%.  That means 93% of the cost is in licensing, consulting, etc, etc.  HW costs are only the “tip of the iceberg” and the real $ investment lies elsewhere in the equation.

Is there a compelling business reason to upgrade your hardware? Well…frankly, it does not make sense not to do it.   One, we showed above that the hardware investment is minimal compared to SW licensing, consulting, service, etc.  Two, the hardware requirements of ERP 6.0 are significantly higher than previous versions. ERP 6.0 requires up to 2.5x more CPU performance, 2.5x more memory and 1.5x more I/O!  You will need the increased performance and scalability that Intel provides in our microprocessors.  While the ERP performance requirements have increased 2.5x, Intel performance with SAP has increased 10X!  Oh, btw…energy efficiency does matter and in your new ERP environment you will be able to consolidate servers and save on power and cooling costs.  TCO will be significantly reduced and from hardware investment standpoint, you are likely going to recover the cost of the servers in a very reasonable timeframe.

From my discussions with the IT community, their major concern and number one focus area is to prevent business disruption and downtime.  This costs companies real and significant money.  The fact is that an ERP migration is a complex enough project managing the strategic, functional and technical portions.  Adding a server infrastructure change increases fundamental risk.  But, the key here is that it is done often and done successfully.  Intel IT has published several whitepapers on the subject and communicated “Best Known Methods” to minimize that risk.    A quick summary is inserted here:

Challenge:

•         Convert Intel’s Worldwide Warehouse Management Software

•         Upgrade from SAP* ERP version 4.7 to 6.0, change the DBMS, and perform a Unicode* conversion as well as a hardware upgrade

•         Minimize downtime

Benefit to Intel IT:

•         SAP ERP 6.0 improves Intel supportability

•         Increases ease of integration to SAP NetWeaver* 7.1 Suite

•         Provides access to Enhancement Packs and Enterprise Services

•         Intel^® Itanium^®-based servers provide access to 128 GB of memory for database and SAP operations and significantly increased performance from true 64-bit processing

Key Results:

•         Reduced downtime of upgrade by 50% by using Intel Architecture

In summary,  upgrading your server infrastructure when migrating your ERP environment is a very, very complex task, but form a business perspective, it should be fairly easy to see the true benefits from combining the ERP migration and hardware upgrade at the same time.

The digital workbench is like the workbench at home where you have pliers, nails and hammers that we use to build or fix things—the workbench holds all the best, most useful tools to complete a project and makes them available at your fingertips.

The digital workbench replaces analog tools with digital tools and software suites from ISVs (e.g. Altair, ANSYS, Autodesk, Dassault CATIA, Dassault SIMULIA, ESI, MSC, PTC, Siemens PLM and others).  These ISV’s are all laser focused on enabling designers to move analysis further up the design chain.  Couple this with recent performance gains available on workstations based on the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series from suppliers like Boxx, Dell, HP and Lenovo and you have the opportunity to now view your workstations as a digital workbench.  The result is a new environment that enables users to rapidly test and refine their ideas potentially at the speed of thought. 

The digital workbench, powered by two intelligent Intel® Xeon® 5500 processors based on the Nehalem microarchitecture, can help you transform complex and visually intensive data into actionable information at near-supercomputer speeds. 

Congratulations to Ron as the winner of the Intel Xeon Workstation Sweepstakes.  He has been a member of The Server Room for over a year and was able to complete the quiz on the first attempt. 

Good job!

"I was excited to hear that I won the Intel Xeon workstation sweepstakes.  With its incredible performance, the system offers me the flexibility to use it in so many ways that I'm not sure how to best utilize it at the moment. It's a welcome problem to have and I look forward exploring the possibilities. Thanks to Intel and the Server Room team for providing a great resource to everyone!"

Thank you all for entering and look for more sweepstakes offerings in the near future.

- Your 'The Server Room' Admin's

I’d like to introduce myself as a product line manager at Intel who has spent almost a decade ensuring we are creating the best servers to solve small business challenges. Part of my role is to influence future generation products and I’d like to learn more about your challenges, needs and desires so I can ensure we address them in our next generation products.

Here is a story I have heard in the past: “Ah geez, What Now? A customer just called to tell me they tried to enter an online order for my product and my web site is nowhere to be found.  I am lucky they called, but so much for spending a Saturday at my kid’s baseball tournament! Now I need to drive an hour to my downtown office to restart and possibly fumble with my server.  You would think that the desktop system that I am using as a server would just work so I can spend my free time with my family and my work time growing my business.”  

I can’t count the number of times I have heard a similar story from customers and colleagues that are trying to grow a small business, manage their own computers and have a personal life.  The answer to their problem is simple, buy a real server based on Intel®Xeon® Processors that is designed to keep your business running 24/7.   Our latest Xeon processors and chipsets are not only validated to run 24/7, but include features such as support for error correcting code memory and RAID for server operating systems that ensure dependability and differentiate a real server from desktop system used as a server.  However, a small business should not care about all this technical jargon.   I believe they only care that their server runs 24/7 without failure, enabling them to focus on business growth and life.

What are your small business challenges?  I’m all ears.