I recently found this simple animation that breaks down the Xeon processor family into bite-sized chunks and explains which Xeon-based servers are best suited to meet common IT and business needs.

I shared it last week when traveling with customers in Taiwan and it was well received.

What do you think of this video?

I get questioned often about the difference between these terms and it can be confusing. Now that we are in the era of multi-core, let's explore common terminology. What is the difference between a processor, CPU, a chip, a core and a socket? And how is threading different?

Processor / CPU: This is what Intel makes and OEMs design into their systems.
Processors and CPUs are sometimes referred to as CHIPs
*Sockets:* The physical location on the system board where the processor/CPU goes. Sockets are increasingly used to describe a servers capability. A 4S (4 socket) server supports up to 4 CPUs inside. Sometimes this might also described as to as 4w (wayness) or 4P (processor) server.

Cores: The number physical processing units contained within the processor. There can be one, two, four or more ...
*Threads:* Some Intel processors support multi-threading technology. This is simply the ability to run more than one software thread on a core (Single threaded means one stream of software per core at a time) (Multi-threaded means more than one stream of software is executed in parallel)

So ... Processor, CPU, Socket, and Chips are terms that are often used interchangeably. Cores and Threads are both features inside the processor. Was this helpful to you ? Let me know. Chris

I often get asked what type of server a customer should use when landing their virtualised infrastructure, the immediate response is an obvious one, given I work for Intel - an Intel based server ! But beyond this the answer is a little more complex and to some extent depends on the philosophical approach the data centre manager wants to take to architecting their data centre.

There are a number of choices that can be made when using standard Intel based server hardware - ignoring the obvious decision as to the hypervisor vendor - DP ( 2-way ) vs MP ( 4-way ) servers, rack mount vs blade.

Ultimately any server decision is the right one ( so long as its an Intel based solution ) but some of the factors that will influence the decision are :-

• How many virtual machines ( VMs ) are you prepared to host onto a single server - MP servers can host substantially more VMs than DP - over 2x more depending on the workload within the VMs - this is down to the better memory capacity and larger number of I/O slots that MP servers typically support compared to DP servers. Against this using a DP server may be a better solution as 2 DP servers may cost less than an MP server, and combined host as many VM's whilst not having as many VMs hosted onto a single server.

• Density & Form factor - DP servers typically have a higher density form factor than MP servers - at the expense of less I/O & memory capability. But you need to take into consideration that an MP server can host more VMs than a DP server so within a given rack space use of a lower number of MP servers may well enable hosting of more VMs than using more DP servers.

• Blades vs Rack - there is significant momentum building behind the move to bladed servers, mostly driven by the fact that the density achievable using blades is far higher than that possible use rack mount servers. Also the shared resources of a blade solution ( power supplies, cooling, network switches etc ) can lead to cost and power savings in high density configurations. The challenge with hosting a virtualised infrastructure on blade servers however is that blades tend to be limited in the amount of memory and I/O that they can support. The trade off of course is that with the increased density of a blade solution its possible with fewer VMs/Blade but more Blades/rack the overall number of VMs that can be hosted within a given data centre is greater using blades than rack mount servers.

Other factors to take into consideration are that MP servers typically have a higher level of built-in RAS ( reliability, availability & serviceability ) features than DP servers and when hosting multiple VMs on a single server the overall reliability of a servers and its ability to be serviced without shutting down all the hosted VMs becomes very important to the overall efficiency of the Data Centre.

As I said at the beginning - there is no simple answer and a lots depends on the approach you want to take in architecting your solution. Intel's own IT department has done lots of work in this area and have posted many of their results here for others to learn from their experiences.

The only thing that is for certain is that whatever decision is made on form factor the performance of the processors you specify has a direct impact on the number of VMs a server can host - the higher the CPU performance the more VMs that can be hosted and the lower the impact of the hypervisor overhead on the overall system performance, check out the latest virtualisation performance data here and here

Since this is the first time I'm blogging on this web site, let me briefly introduce myself. I'm working at Intel since 1984 and started right after University to develop software mainly for the Industrial Automation Industry (way back with good old iRMX for Multibus I/II). After a couple of years of running IT for several Intel sales Offices in EMEA, I'm now running a team of Technical PreSales people to work with End Customers in the Enterprise space.

When working with End Customers in the IT space, we often hear about the requirements of reducing costs but at the same time being more agile. Particularly in the Datacenter this is important to achieve, in order to quickly adapt to changing business requirement and thus swiftly enabling business opportunity through IT. On the way to get to real Business Agility through IT, Gartner has defined the Infrastructure Maturity Model**. This consists of 6 stages with the ultimate goal to deliver Business Agility in almost real time. Before a company can get there however, one important stage is to get to a virtualized infrastructure.

In the storage area we have seen quite some progress in this space which has been adopted already in a lot of medium and large companies. On the server side, I can see server virtualization being one of the hot topics, which almost every company is looking into or even deploying currently in order to achieve this datacenter agility at least in the infrastructure area.

In the past, people typically have used virtualization at large SMP machines to better utilize those; more recently virtualization was used to consolidate (mostly older) servers/application onto 4 way Intel Architecture based Servers to avoid a zoo of different machines and OS Revisions IT has to support. However from the cost efficiency perspective, it is also appropriate to consider using 2-way servers in virtualization too. When we discuss this with end customers, we sometimes got the concern that the ratio of Memory/CPU-Core is not good enough. While we have a great deal of Processor performance, particularly through the Quad Core Technology, which is available in Intel's Xeon^TM Processors since more than a year now, the memory capacity at the DP machines could not always live up to the desired ratio. Recently however there are some new DP Servers on the market (i.e. the Sun Microsystems x4150, http://www.sun.com), which implemented the full specification of the memory interface providing up to 64GB of Memory for Dual Processor Server hosting 8 Cores altogether. While I can hear you saying already that this would need the most expensive Memory Modules (4GB ones), I can tell you, that I was pleasantly surprised about an offer I got recently from one of our suppliers to get the full 64GB, for one of our lab servers, for less than 5900Euros (8400 US$, as you see I coming from Europe). 32GB of Memory would have been just below 2100 Euros (2940US$, 2GB Modules). Obviously prices may vary, but I just wanted to give a ball park figure what the costs are for a DP server containing 4-8GB/Core Memory. So with these types of systems you should be easily able to expand your 4-way system virtualization pool at much reduced cost.

But don't get me wrong here, I'm not promoting that the complete server virtualization pool in a DC should only consist of 2-way systems, I just wanted to point out that with the decrease of cost of the higher density Memory modules and the increase in the number of Memory slots in Dual Processor server space, you have a nice option to select that server type, that fits the best to your needs. If you have for instance applications that need a lot of aggregated CPU Performance or a lot of I/O Performance you sure would be better off using a 4-way server. But I'm sure there will be a blog soon covering the considerations of using 2-way or 4-way servers in the virtualization space.

If you agree in my train of thoughts, one thing must appear as obvious to you. Analysis of the computing resources used by your current applications and capacity planning to meet the need of your future business is the key to success for your virtualization strategy. And here we come back to the Gartner model. As IT you can only become a business value, if you understand the business needs of your company.

When speaking about agility you obviously have to have the possibility to easily migrate a Virtual Machine from a 2-way System to a 4 way system. With the recent introduction of the Intel Xeon^TM 7300 processor based 4 way servers this is possible too. Xeon 5100/5300 processors are sharing the same micro-architecture (Intel Core^TM Architecture) as the 4-way servers (Xeon 7300 Processor), which means you can live migrate VMs from DP to MP systems very easily. This live migration is offered in the various management suites from Virtualization Software vendors. In VMware's ESX (http://www.vmware.com/products/server_virtualization.html) this is called vMotion, at Virtual Iron (http://www.virtualiron.com/solutions/virtual_infrastructure_management.cfm) for instance it is called LiveMigrate.

So those of you, who carefully read Intel's announcement, might rightfully save that all the above is true but now Intel introduced the new Xeon 5200/5400 series using still the same Intel Core^TM Micro architecture, but with an extended instruction set, particularly for the SSE instructions. ...and you are right. If an application uses these new instructions you cannot do a live migrate of a VM from, say a Xeon 5400, back to a Xeon 5300 based system. But here the Intel Architecture offers some hooks (technologies) to still make this possible. For VMware for instance we have implemented a new functionality called VT Flex Migration. Since ESX has such a long experience in the Virtualization of Intel Architecture, it still uses Binary translation for 32 Bit OSs instead of Intel's VT-x (the hardware supported Virtualization). In VT-x Intel offers to mask some CPU functionality so that the OS/Application, when running in a virtualized environment, only sees a certain instruction set and thus can easily be live migrated from a Xeon 5400 to a Xeon 5300 Processor based system. So VMMs like for instance Virtual Iron or Xen (http://www.xensource.com/) may use this feature because they require VT-x. In order to enable the same functionality in ESX, Intel worked closely with VMware and implemented a hardware hook for VMware to allow even in Binary Translation (meaning outside VT-x) to mask certain capabilities (here SSE4) to be seen by the OS, hence making sure the OS uses only those instructions also available in Xeon 5100/5300/7300 Processors.

With this in mind you can setup a very powerful combination of 2-way and 4-way Intel Architecture servers being able to be shared in a virtualized Server pool and allowing live migration between them as the basis for a flexible and agile infrastructure. What you need on top of this now is the Management Software orchestrating the use of this server pool. Those are products like VMware's Infrastructure 3 or their Management and Automation tools such as Virtual Center. At Virtual Iron for instance this would be their Virtualization Manager. Those tools allow you to set rules and policies to automatically react on changes in the virtualization pool, such as a change of CPU load or memory requirements, to allow an automated move of VMs between the servers to still fulfill SLAs.

So I hope I was able to share my view of an agile infrastructure in the Datacenter, I realize that this is quite a hardware centric view of it, but after all I still work for Intel and server system oriented topics are the majority of my job.

I'm looking forward to hear your opinion or questions about it.

Best regards,

Helmut

*Other brands may be claimed as the property of others

**Source: Gartner, Inc. "Infrastructure Maturity Model," by Tom Bittman. Gartner Data Center Summit, 2006.

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?

Eco-Technology - what does this term mean and why would Intel use it instead of "Green Computing" or something more common?

Moore's Law gives us the ability to deliver more performance and greater energy efficiency with each generation of microprocessors - and reducing the energy consumption of our products is far and away the biggest impact Intel can have on carbon footprint.

We recently completed an analysis of a high-performance computing configuration that was originally deployed in 2002 (coming in at number 17 in the Top500 Supercomputer list for that year) and is still in use today. This configuration consists of 512 servers fit out into 25 racks using 128 kW and delivers 3.68 TFlops peak on the LINPACK benchmark. Today, that cluster could be replaced with a single rack of roughly 53 blade servers drawing 21 kW and still giving us that 3.7 TFlops of performance (Energy efficiency in the data center). More on whether that level of density is appropriate for everyone later.....

Think of the incredible increase in productivity - and new innovations - that have been made possible by this phenomenal growth in compute capacity. The explosion of information that's available at our fingertips and the evolution of many aspects of our global economy to bits instead of physical materials.

And that's really the point of "Eco-Technology" which is defined as an "eco-sensitive" approach to technology that takes into consideration sustainability in both manufacture and end-use of technology.

So we're increasing both the energy efficiency of our products and we're eliminating potentially harmful materials such as lead and halogen from our manufacturing, but we're also as an industry continuing to contribute to productivity and transformation. Both are important.

As companies explore their IT Sustainability programs and we all work to define what green computing should mean, what are your thoughts on how to balance the imperative to do more work, deliver more business value with the rising costs of energy and our collective desire to slow climate change? The US Environmental Protection Agency is contemplating Energy Star for servers. If you were in charge, what criteria would you use to award the label?