These are dog years for servers.   Pretty much every year Intel introduces a new Xeon processor.  Those who have heard the story recognize this as the Tic Tock model.  On Tic years the manufacturing process is updated, on Tock years the chip architecture is updated.  Every year customers get a boost in performance, and often a cut in power.  Typically this boost is in the 50% neighborhood, enough to make it worth the upgrade, and still achievable by engineering teams on a two year cycle.  Except, we are in dog years.

The Nehalem – Xeon 5500 – processor broke all prior boundaries on single generation performance gain.  Delivering two to three times the compute capacity of the Xeon 5400 (Harpertown) generation.  This is a big change, probably a once in a lifetime change – unless that quantum thing happens in my lifetime.  Roughly a 10X performance boost in less than 5 years.

During this same five years we have seen virtualization technology go from a lab project – something for test and dev – to mainstream data center process.  In 2005 it would have been heresy to suggest virtualizing the corporate ERP.  At that point virtualization overhead on the server could be as high as 25% and the entire server was needed to do “real work”.  Fast forward to today.  Virtualization technology in both the hypervisor and processor have reduced overhead to only a few percent, AND servers are 10X faster.  Not only can you virtualize the ERP, you are irresponsibly wasting resources if you do not.  Unless your ERP demands have grown 10X in 5 years, your ERP alone won’t even make a new Xeon 5500 system sweat.

If this advancement wasn’t enough, the announcements last month from Intel about the coming Xeon 7500 (4+ socket) processor were amazing.  All the benefits of the Xeon 5500, but on steroids.  The  new biggest leap ever.  With up to eight cores and four memory channels per socket, this is a monster.  Your ERP system will be barely a blip in perfmon.  It isn’t unreasonable that an entire data center for a SMB business could be virtualized onto one of these beasts.  And, how big is a Xeon 7500 server?  My guess is about the size of a breadbox…

Just wrapped up Oracle Open World…sitting at SFO, waiting for a flight back home. 

The event from a Nehalem-EX perspective was a success. Hit important points and accomplished what we had to deliver. 

Hit #1:  Michael Dell, in his key note, delivered Nehalem-EX message beautifully.  2.5x performance improvements coming from 9x memory bandwidth…compared to currently sold technology.  Thank you, Michael. 

Hit #2:  Dell placed Nehalem-EX demo at its Exhibit at Moscone West.  I missed seeing it in person but the Dell friends came to me reporting that the demo attracted a lot of attention from the audience.  Thank you again, Dell. 

Hit #3:  My Nehalem-EX demo at Intel booth was also a success.  The pre-production system ran throughout the event with 64 logical processors fully active with 1TB of Samsung DDR3 memory, running SPECjbb, stressing all the CPUs, cores, and threads.  Occasionally, I injected double-bit error to show off the MCA-Recovery function.  Windows 2008 R2 reported nicely that the system encountered a critical error but the system still running at full speed.  If not with MCA-Recovery function, I would have had blue screen each time I ran that error injection script and would have had to wait for few minutes to have the server come back up online. 

Also, I really liked the demographics of the audience this time.  Compared to the other events I went to this year, I had more conversations with the folks who actually purchase equipments, those who test new equipments at IT shops, and those from Oracle starting to realize that hardware choice does matter when selling Oracle software.  Many people specifically asked when Intel starts shipping Nehalem-EX and which specific OEM models would use Nehalem-EX.  I hope my responses to those folks were legitimate.  ;-)  I also hope Oracle sales folks now have true confidence that the Oracle software stack runs best on Intel, specifically, Nehalem-EX. 

Oracle Open World is said to be the largest IT event.  I believe that.  You don’t get to have lunch at the middle Mission St tarmac very often.  You don’t get to see four digit hotel bills very often for just couple night stay. Despite the fall storm hitting the peninsula dumping loads of water and gust knocking trees down on Tuesday, Intel booth continuously had heavy flow of traffic.  I admire the Intel team putting together our presence and admire the whole industry supporting the event. I also personally learned a lot from the event, meeting people, exchanging knowledge.  Three day booth duty is a tough one but worth it. 

Oh, and to wrap the whole trip up…

Hit #4:  cleared the wait list and getting home earlier with an earlier flight… 

AND…I wish today was Friday… 

With the Intel Xeon 5500 series (Nehalem) based processors, the X5500 chipset and instrumented power supplies, you can start with the most basic use case for Intel Node Manager - monitoring the power usage of your servers.

As you can see in the Intel Datacenter Manager (DCM) screen below - there are multiple servers configured into logical units:  HF2-EIL is the lab that these servers are located in.  Rack 1 and Rack 2 are the physical location of these servers, and each Rack contains 2 servers each.

When you highlight one server (as above in DCM)- you can see the power characteristics over a certain time period.  The time period shown gives you the idle power, max power, and thermal measurement.  The 'hump' in the graph is a SQL workload which creates 'work' for the server and the process runs for about 5 1/2 minutes with no power capping.

Here's a graph of the 2nd server in that rack, performing a similar workload.  As you can see, the 2nd server power usage is different than the first.

The Intel Datacenter Manager SDK console can monitor multiple systems as well.  The next graph, is both of those servers in the rack, which accounts for both servers power usage during the same timeframe.

Finally, here is the final graph, showing the accumulation of all 4 servers, in both Rack #1 and Rack #2.  This shows the maximum power utilized during the workload, the minimum power (idle) and the inlet thermal temperature in the lab.  Something that hasn't been able to be done before without expensive equipment in the datacenter.

My next power based blog will show how power-capping can give you more effience use of your workload power while using Xeon 5500 series platforms.

Software scalability has been a big issue recently.  While modern servers are incredibly fast, many software solutions simply are not able to take advantage of it.  There are many reasons for this.  Some are easy to address and some require changes to the software.  Intel performance engineer and Oracle WebLogic performance engineer will jointly give a talk at Oracle OpenWorld on this topic.

Here is the session information:

ID#: S309892

Title: Ten Ways to Improve J2EE Application Performance on Multi-Core Systems

Track: Oracle Develop: Enterprise Java and Oracle WebLogic

Date: 13-OCT-09

Time: 17:30 - 18:30

Venue: Hilton Hotel, Room: Yosemite B

Here is the abstract:

The current economic environment and the new focus on being green demand greater efficiency from every IT shop, big and small alike. In this session, you will learn how to improve Java application scalability by using Oracle WebLogic Server on the latest multi-core systems. It examines various software and hardware features for getting the best performance out of your applications. In particular, it explores the pros and cons of 32-bit versus 64-bit environments and how having multiple Java virtual machine instances can reduce heap pressure and improve cache locality. It also discusses operating system and hardware features such as large pages and solid-state drives and their impacts on J2EE application performance.

As a bonus, we will be giving away a Netbook at the end of the talk.

We also wrote a technical paper on the topics that will be covered in this talk.  You can find this technical paper at http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/java-application-server-optimization-for-multi-core-systems/ .

“Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.” Albert Einstein

Today’s workstation can provide you with a magnificent digital canvas to create tomorrow ...... today!

With workstations powered by two Intel® Xeon® 5500 series processors, engineers have the opportunity to create, shape, test and modify products before they become real. Engineers can now design, visualize and simulate products from the conceptual design phase through the entire manufacturing process. This is done virtually before any investments are made in a prototype.

“Any color—so long as it's black.” Henry Ford

Like the automobile, the workstation has morphed into something much more than what it once was. It now has more capabilities and features than its predecessor and, if you allow it to, it can help you accelerate the pace of your innovation.

Today’s workstation gives engineers a new tool that can be likened to a digital workbench. This tool is powered by two Intel Xeon 5500 series processors with Intel® Turbo Boost Technology and Intel® Hyper Threading Technology to take advantage of the processor’s power and thermal headroom to enable increased performance of both multi-threaded and single-threaded workloads. 

Today's workstation can host a suite of software applications from ISV's like Autodesk, SolidWorks, PTC, Bentley and others to create and test their ideas. The pliers, hammer and nails found on a workbench in a garage or basement have now been replaced with digital tools that promise to accelerate innovations via a process known as digital prototyping. Its enablers include application tools like detailed CAD, CAE and PIM. Together they represent the new digital workbench—a powerful innovation tool you can use to bring your ideas forward faster than ever before.

“I confess that in 1901 I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years.” Wilbur Wright

You think all you need is an entry-level workstation with a single Intel® Xeon® processor. After all, you only do CAD—right?  You may be thinking like Wilbur Wright.

Innovation in the workplace is paced by how well you can use technology to test and improve your ideas. As you begin to adopt modern workflows you may realize the dramatic impact that simulation-based engineering or digital prototyping can have on your product development cost and schedules.  You will soon realize that the cost of the second processor and additional memory necessary to support digital prototyping was far less expensive than the cost of multiple physical prototypes and the associated time to produce them. Instead of investigating hundreds of digital prototypes, you only have time to look at a single physical prototype and ask: What if I …?

Those “what ifs” could have been played out on a dual-processor Intel Xeon processor 5500 series-based digital workbench faster, and your time and cost of physical prototypes could have been significantly reduced.

Are you ready to adopt modern workflows and accelerate your innovation?

In March '09, former Intel executive Pat Gelsinger predicted that Nehalem-based Xeon 5500 servers would become "cash machines" for the IT industry, due to unprecedented power-efficient performance gains that can deliver a very short ROI for IT.  Pat's description of the Xeon 5500 was validated during a briefing with Intel CIO Diane Bryant in San Francisco on October 6^th, as reported in TG Daily.

She discussed the ROI achieved and the impact that a proactive serve refresh strategy has had on Intel’s bottom line, as reported in PC World.  Some of her key points:

·         Intel is expecting up to $250M savings over 8 years, saved $45M in 2008 alone.

·         Despite these results, economy forced Intel to re-evaluate capital spending in 2009.  Found that delaying server refresh would cost us $19M more than continuing.  So we continued. 

·         Getting an average of 10:1 server consolidation with Xeon 5500 in design computing environment and 20:1 virtualization server refresh ratios in Office/Enterprise. 

Did you know that Server Refresh is also the #1 driver of Intel’s Carbon Footprint reduction as well, with an initiative to reduce Carbon footprint by 5% per year.  We are projected to reduce by approximately 4K metric tons (2009) and this server refresh strategy is forecasted to be #1 project to help IT reduce Carbon.

Staying on the green IT theme, the newest ally for IT to help drive carbon-reduction and energy cost savings is the energy utilities.  A prime example of this is the Energy Trust of Oregon, who offers cash incentives to motivate Oregon businesses to make energy saving investments.  Intel gained access to a $250K incentive from them as a result of energy savings gained by replacing older servers with newer, more energy-efficient servers in our data centers. If you are replacing older servers with modern energy-efficient Xeon 5500 based servers and you haven’t had this conversation with your utility yet – please do so.  You may be eligible for utility incentives for energy savings that can lower your operating costs and reduce the impact of your business on the environment.  To estimate the energy savings associated with server refresh, go to www.intel.com/go/xeonestimator. 

You’re going to hear more about these “cash machines” in the very near future…stay tuned!

Bryce

Really good case study for a leading Turkish bank that used the Xeon ROI tool to justify their server refresh with Xeon 5500 and 7400 platforms:  http://communities.intel.com/docs/DOC-4114#cf