Just completed 8 city roadshow with Dell and Red Hat, talking to customers face to face over lunch about how a migration should be planned and done from UNIX/RISC to RHEL/Intel/Dell. 

I had opportunities to attend two of the seminars in different cities, meeting few different customers.  Customers came to our seminar to look for a template to quickly develop a plan that could also be approved quickly and get the project going to counter the enormous management pressure they get to do more with less. 

Most of the customers I had conversations with were from medium size business. 

One customer clearly said, it is no brainer, there is no reason to advocate to purchase new AIX/Power or Solaris/SPARC machines any more. 

The other customer said, much of the knowledge accumulated to manage UNIX servers can immediately applied for migration activities while he saw the needs to get the UNIX administrators trained on RHEL through the training programs offered by Red Hat. 

Consistently, there were the nuance that customers needed to act now, for a short term result. 

For those who needs to get going on planning, Red Hat has put together a very good migration guide. The document helps you start thinking about and resourcing your migration.   Register, to get started.  Also, a lighter version to get an idea. 

Please contact RHEL, Dell, or Intel representative for the next steps, and if you don’t have such resource, let me know.  I’ll help dispatch one to you. 

Looking for an excuse to sneak out of the office for a RISC migration seminar?  Here's one for you which you can't resist.  How about a seminar associated with a spectacular lunch at a great Greek restaurant in the city of San Francisco? 

Dell, Red Hat, and Intel are hosting a RISC migration seminar over lunch, during Oracle Open World next week. 

Register here for the seminar held at the Kokkari restaurant, 12pm, Wednesday, October 14.  It is not too late.  Small number of seats still available. 

Don't miss this opportunity to learn when and how the migration should be done and ask questions to Dell/ Red Hat/ Intel team members present on site.  I am hoping the hosting members do their job not just busy enjoying lunch. 

Register and mark your calendar.  On Sep 23, 10am EDT (New York) / 14:00 GMT / 16:00 CEST (Paris), Red Hat and Intel team will host another webinar, guiding you through the steps to take to migrate your enterprise workload from UNIX/RISC to RHEL/Intel.  The "why" and economics of the migration is now quite evident.  This webinar presents "how" a migration should be carried out.  The time is scheduled best for audience in Europe, Middle East, and Africa, but also works well for those on the east coast of Americias.

In the mean time, Red Hat has written this migration whitepaper that walks you through methodologies of a migration.

Happy migration!  and drive your data center cost down!

Intel's Clayton Craft shows and discusses a HP Z600 Workstation featuring the Intel Xeon 5500 processor at the HP Tech Forum.

Today, I was made aware through my twitter contacts about the Cray CX1 product. Since i have been doing several online webinars and blogs recently talking about the advances in HPC performance over last decade and what innovation has enabled for mainstream HPC users. So i wanted to share what i found about Cray.  In short, the CX1 is an HPC solution Purpose-Built for Offices, Laboratories or Other Constrained Environments and sized to fit under a desk, contains up to 8 server blades and an awful lot of storage and I/O.

Read more straight from Cray's CX1 product brief ... "Who says world-class high performance computing (HPC) should be reserved for large research centers? The Cray CX1™ supercomputer makes HPCperformance available to everyone, combining the power of a high performance cluster with the affordability, ease-of-use and seamless integration of a workstation. Equipped with powerful Intel® Xeon® processors and state-of-the-art visualization and storage capabilities ... (more)

Chris

http://www.twitter.com/chris_p_intel

I'm not sure who first coined the phrase "Innovate or Die" and there is some debate  - however in tough times, innovation is a proven way to both save money and get ahead.  Recently I had the opportunity to co-present a seminar on this topic with Anita Campbell of MidMarket Innovators and Sun's Mac McConnell.

This seminar was more interesting from others i've done or attended since it was discusion heavy and content light.

Also surprising was that over 40% of the participants were anticipating IT budget increases in the next 6 months.   I haven't heard that kind of a statistic in a long time.

We touched on the key subjects below

• Business Outlook
• Strategies & Tips for Success
• Customer Case Studies
  • Practice-IT, an online training technology provider, utilized VMware and was able to significantly expand its capacity to support increasing workloads without increased cost as the company added new customers.
  • NaviSite, a medium-sized hosting company, has 17 data centers around the globe. The company has a large VMware environment and needed to consolidate this environment to save costs while increasing the agility to respond to their customer’s needs.
  • Catholic Diocese of Boise, a non-profit providing services and support for 54 parishes, 33 missions and chapels, 14 K–12 schools, a library, and 40 offices, has 38 employees who work at a central administrative office.  They were able to reduce 28 servers down to 4, by implementing Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V to minimize costs and increase server utilization.

Anita's recap of the seminar is here where you can also hear a re-play

Chris

This past April, as Intel was releasing their new Xeon E5500 series processors, we showed you some remarkable test results demonstrating a solid 53% performance improvement between E5400 and E5500 based servers when running a DBHammer SQL Server 2008 workload http://community.citrix.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=73564465. We now wanted to move onto a workload that represents the largest segment of the Citrix user community, XenApp. More specifically, XenApp 5.0 virtualized with the new XenServer 5.5. As we've seen in previous similar virtualization performance tests with XenApp on XenServer, when the XenApp guests are 32 bit (the majority of XenApp users still use use 32-bit applications), the opportunity for server consolidation can be significant. We wanted to see just how good the server consolidation opportunity is when an Intel Xeon E5500-based server is used as a XenServer host. In this case, we looked at how the server consolidation might look when going from 2.93 GHz Xeon X7350 physical XenApp servers to 2.93 GHz Xeon E5570 XenServer hosts.

For the purpose of this test, we ran the physical XenApp server with a single 32-bit workload (Windows 2003 SP2 with MS Office). It was given 2 CPUs and 4GB RAM, typical for this XenApp server workload. Using EdgeSight for Load Test (ESLT) version 3.5 we established a baseline of 25 seconds for users to login, run a standard MSOffice task script, and then logout (including network connect time). We added users until the threshold to run this sequence reached a latency of 30%, at which point the server was deemed to be at capacity. Using this configuration and test program, the maximum number of users was 47. This was a relatively small, single physical XenApp server, so 47 concurrent users was considered respectable.

Since we were testing with a Xeon E5570 server with dual quad core CPUs and 32 GB of RAM, we wanted to see how many users we could get onto a single host using multiple XenApp VMs, each with the same resource configuration as we used in the physical server test. We built 2 vCPU, 3.5 GB RAM XenApp virtual servers on the E5570 and ran two tests using the same ESLT workload. The difference between the 4 GB of RAM used in the physical server test and 3.5 in the virtual server test is due to the need for memory overhead when running multiple VMs. In the XenServer setup screen, we selected the option of running XenApp which automatically configured the VMs with the appropriate amount of shadow memory for XenApp workloads.

We also wanted to see the impact of hyperthreading to VM density per host as well as the number of concurrent users per VM. Intel describes hyperthreading as “delivering thread-level parallelism on each processor resulting in more efficient use of processor resources, higher processing throughput and improved performance.” It would be interesting to see how many more concurrent XenApp users we could get with an upgrade to the E5570 and by virtualizing with XenServer 5.5 and then see how many more users we might get once hyperthreading was enabled. Would hyperthreading allow us to run twice as many VMs on a single host? To find out, we ran our first virtualized XenApp test with hyperthreading activated and then repeated the test again with it turned off. With hyperthreading, the first thing we noticed was that even though there were only 8 CPU cores on the E5570 host server, XenServer was able to see 16 vCPU cores as resources available to be assigned to VMs. As a result, we were able to successfully run a maximum of eight VMs, each with the necessary 2 vCPU cores, generating an average of 69.25 users per VM for a total of 554 users.

When we ran the second test, this time with hyperthreading turned off, and noticed that the number of users per VM increased slightly to 88. However, the maximum number of VMs was now only four, due to the fact that we now only had 8 vCPU cores to work with. As a result, the total number of users for the host was now only 352.

In the end, we discovered that while hyperthreading doubled the number of assignable vCPU resources, it didn’t directly translate to a 2:1 increase in the number of users per VM. That’s a reasonable trade-off, since hyperthreading effectively doubled the number of VMs that we could create with the same number of CPU cores. So, while were able to generate 6.5x the number of concurrent XenApp users onto a single Xeon E5570 host server without hyperthreading as compared to a single X7350 physical XenApp test server, the number of concurrent users increased to an incredible 10.8x with hyperthreading. That’s a remarkable server consolidation opportunity for any 32-bit XenApp administrator. And while XenApp will virtualize very nicely with XenServer on that same dual quad core X7350 server, remember that the number of users per VM when using this test schema will be 47. Since hyperthreading isn’t available on the X7350, the maximum number of VMs on the X7350 host would be 4 making the maximum number of concurrent users 188. Not bad, but nowhere near the 544 concurrent users we get on the E5570 with hyperthreading. That’s an increase of 356 users, almost three times the number of concurrent XenApp users.

Pretty hard to ignore.

As we’ve seen here, the promise of Intel’s Nehalem technology is being realized in some very practical ways. As a result, the performance bar for XenApp, when virtualized with XenServer, is now higher than ever.

Here's the 5th video in my VMWorld Chalk Talk Series. In this one, Gerhard Schlabschi, Systems and Storage Marketing with Sun Microsystems gives a chalk talk on various virtualization systems and discusses some of the trade-offs in a virtualized environment. Enjoy .

In this version of my VMWorld Chalk Talk series, we have Intel's Marco Righini, Virtualization Solutions Architect discussing new technologies for virtualization. Check out his video here.

Join us at a video webcast where Novell, HP, and Intel, hosted by IDC, bring forward the power of Linux in today’s datacenter.  While we have seen customer’s embrace system refresh as a financial efficiency tool, IDC survey reveals that Linux is a key solution for survival in this economic climate, from front end to mission-critical back end.  The timing to consider Linux on Intel server platforms is right. 

Three speakers from industry leading companies will introduce what innovation in a truly open industry standard environment delivers to datacenter operations by saving money while meeting daunting performance and productivity requirements. 

Intel speaker:  Dylan Larson, Director, SPG Marketing

HP speaker:  Stephen Bacon, Linux Marketing, BCS

Novell speaker:  Justin Steinman, VP Marketing

IDC host:  Al Gillen, Program VP, System Software

The webcast will be held on June 9^th, 11am to noon, EDT. 

How do I migrate my solution from RISC to x86 architecture is one of the questions that I get asked a lot these days. It is a very fair question to ask as it is only human nature to want some level of comfort when planning a transition.

There are multiple different paths available to migrate solutions and there are numerous different variables which need to be considered. There is no 'one-size fits all' approach to migration. Factors such as operating system environment, type of workload, whether packaged application and the level of custom code in your solution all come into play when trying to plan out your migration.

So, without writing 'war and peace' (an extremely long novel) I just wanted to share some perspectives and point to some resources in that jungle of resources that might help you navigate your way through a solution migration

Firstly, if your solution is an off the shelf application then moving it from one architecture type to another is a straight forward  porting and recompile process. Contrary to some popular beliefs there is not a whole separate set of application vendors and titles where the applications just run on Unix/RISC combination. Most application vendors have made their products available on multiple different operating systems that run on multiple different architectures. Unfortunately there is no master index or website out there that I have come across that would simplify the process of seeing who supports what application on what operating and what architecture. (let me know if there is something like this). Unfortunately it is a hard grind and requires a visit to each application vendors website to ensure that their application that is part of your solution is supported on your choice of operating system and your server platform of choice.

Luckily, it is not all doom and gloom and hard work. One very useful site around Solaris is the tool on SUN Microsystems website that allows you to check what applications  run on Solaris sparc or Solaris x86.http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/apps/

The last I checked over 80% of applications that run on SPARC also run on x86.

My suggestion if you draw blank here is to approach your application vendor and make business case on why they should support a Solaris x86 version. Likelihood is that the application vendor has a version running on Linux/x86 already, so getting a version to run on solaris/x86 is not a huge engineering effort. Mainly the application vendor will want to see some real demand so they can justify the support model.

There are also some useful guides out there developed by HP, Dell, Intel, SUN, IBM, Redhat, Microsoft and others that are technically focussed on the 'how to' migrate your solution.

Here is just a sample of some of the resources.

• HP www.hp.com/go/sun2hp. Not only does this site have material on SPARC, also contains material on AS400, POWER, Mainframe and other architectures. There is a wealth of information on all the HP options from Itanium to Xeon, Solaris, Linux, windows, HP-UX etc. Technical guides, TCO tools, migration resources etc
  another site that focus on providing migration assistance is www.hp.com/go/migration
• Dell http://www.dell.com/unixmigration. Don't get thrown by the title of the link. Some good content here on how to move an Oracle database and DNS server to Solaris or Linux on Dell system. Also content on why to move and how to get some support
• SUN http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/howtoguides/installationhowto.jsp How to install Solaris 10 on x86.
• Redhat http://www.redhat.com/intelligence/. This site has whitepapers, migration guides, webinars, how Linux compares to unix etc

Lastly migrating custom code is a more challenging project. There are many organizations with significant experience and expertise that offer services to assist in migration projects. Leverage these organizations to help. I know at first blush there may be concerns of the cost of paying for migration services, but look at the bigger picture. In a lot of cases the TCO benefits and improved performance will deliver business benefits that will outweigh the cost of migration in the long run.

Hopefully this is helpful. I would really like to hear what have your experiences have been with migration or what are the challenges that you face as you look forward towards migration?

We all have an attachment to legacy…

I have one myself.  A 25 year old sports car I adore to drive and to take care of.  It is the mighty legacy of the car’s history carries that makes it meaningful for me to own.  It may require more attention and cost to maintain than the cars sold today with the latest technologies.  But the additional cost of ownership very much makes sense to me as it is the hobby I love. 

In my work, I also see other examples of those attached to legacy.  I talk to people attached to mainframes and RISC/UNIX technologies, legacy technologies.  IT managers pay extra to keep legacy up and running.  It is not cheap to run mainframes and RISC/UNIX platforms.  How are they justifying the extra cost required?  I’m sure they use a different justification than my keeping a beaten up car running.  It’s not a hobby for them. 

I’ve come to this question since it is no longer true that mainframes and RISC/UNIX platforms are the only choice for enterprise workloads, even for the ones most important to businesses.  Increasingly, Linux and Intel architecture technology alternatives are accepted to run such business critical workloads.  Why?  Because they are both capable and cost effective.  Enterprises always are seeking to operate at the most efficient cost structure as possible, and today’s economy makes this even more important. Hence the choice.  Cost justification only gets easier. 

I joined a small team of Red Hat and Intel employees, working on highlighting all of the ways that Red Hat/ Intel technologies do wonders for enterprise workloads.  We continually ask the question is it still acceptable for an enterprise to pay extra for the legacy.  We ask what is it that Red Hat/ Intel technology combo lacks inhibiting replacement of legacy platforms.  We ask how do we change the perception so that we accelerate adoption of Linux and Intel technologies in enterprise datacenters. 

Our studies uncovered a major opportunity for consideration of RHEL running on Intel platforms as the choice for workloads conventionally ran on RISC/UNIX.  We recently delivered two webinars which you can download here: 

April 28 webinar:  https://jboss.webex.com/jboss/lsr.php?AT=pb&SP=EC&rID=34561582&rKey=4622272C3CAF908A

May 14 webinar:  https://jboss.webex.com/jboss/lsr.php?AT=pb&SP=EC&rID=34623362&rKey=EAAA254FB353DA23

Anyone interested in the topic, go explore our web site, http://www.redhat.com/intelligence/, which is still in early stage.  We will be adding content as we move forward.  Download webinar contents just delivered and learn how Red Hat and Intel are teaming up. 

I am encouraging Red Hat team also to participate in this community.  . 

More to come… 

Today's video blog features Massimo Re Ferre', IBM Senior IT Architect, giving a chalk talk on some of the scenarios where you are looking to "Scale Up" or "Scale Out" your virtual infrastructure. Check out this short video from VMWorld Europe 2009:

Penguins are Fun … And Their New Servers Are Even Cooler!

Next week I will have the privilege of being a guest speaker at an online seminar hosted by Penguin Computing on how a Nehalem refresh can impact your HPC environment.  I will be joined by Matt Jacobs, VP of WorldWide Sales, Penguin Computing where we will cover the performance and economic benefits of upgrading to the latest Penguin systems powered by the Intel Xeon 5500 family of processors (Nehalem). With dramatic improvements in performance, efficiency and density, you may be able to own the latest systems for less than the cost of operating your current systems. Learn how and get more details on this exciting new platform from Penguin and Intel. 

Join Matt and I Live on May 20, 2009 11:00 am - 12:00 pm (Pacific Standard Time).  Register Todayhttp://www.penguincomputing.com/press/events/webinars/nehalem_and_penguin_computing

Chris

ð        Learn more about Penguin Computing here

ð        Learn more about the Intel Xeon Processor 5500 series in the Server Learning Center here

Powerful Technology. Compelling Savings. Competitive Business.

Sharing others success is always really cool.  Here are my Top 10 success stories captured off of the intel customer references page located at www.intel.com/references.   These leading IT shops from around the world have successfully taken advantage of new technology to transform their business .. saving money, boosting performance, driving productivity, and increased competitiveness into their business.

Did I miss your favorite? Want to nominate one for my Q2 list? …or , just tell me your story – love to hear it

Chris

1.        Station Casinos virtualizes IT: To help control IT costs and ensure a robust customer experience, the IT group virtualized its infrastructure by running VMware* virtualization software on Dell PowerEdge* servers equipped with the Intel® Xeon® processor 5100 and 5400 series. So far, the company has eliminated almost 100 physical servers, avoided $190,000 in hardware acquisition costs, and accelerated the deployment of new services from weeks to hours. Virtualization enables Station Casinos to continue to deliver fun and relaxation while keeping the company successful even in tough economic times. http://www.intel.com/references/pdfs/StationCasinos.pdf

2.        Thomson Reuters:  With virtualization software running on rack servers based on the Intel Xeon processor 7300 series, the Thomson Reuters IT team is achieving a consolidation ratio of 18:1, reducing power requirements and freeing up space to absorb future growth. “We expect to increase that ratio to 25:1 when we move to the six-core Intel Xeon processor 7400 series in the near future,” says Crowhurst. The company’s power requirements are growing by nearly 20 percent every year as busi­ness expands. By optimizing the power and cooling strategy in its new data center and concentrating more blades in less space, the IT team was able to increase power density from 100 watts per square foot to 150 watts per square foot. As a result, there is less need for new data center construction, greatly reducing future environ­mental impacts. http://www.intel.com/references/pdfs/Thomson_Reuters.pdf

3.        TRW: Achieved server consolidation ratio of 20:1, Increased CPU utilization from 40% to 85%, Reduced server deployment times from two weeks to one to two days, Cut total annual power and cooling costs by 70% to 80%, Saved 50% in annual datacenter cooling costs in Malaysia alone, Enabled one IT staff member to manage up to 50 servers, Saved 80% on the potential cost of additional UPS systems across the datacenters.http://www.intel.com/references/pdfs/TRW_snapshot.pdf

4.        Business & Decision Group: Power consumption was reduced by approximately 30 per cent compared to the previous generation of processors. The pure performance gains and lower energy consumption helps us deliver new solutions for our customers and will lead to a return-on-investment in less than one year. Could gain virtualization rates of 20:1 and with a processor load slightly below 55 percent.  http://www.intel.com/references/pdfs/Business_and_Decision_All_Systems_Go.pdf

5.        BMW: The Intel® Xeon® processor 7300 series performed 2.75-3X faster than the implemented RISC-based servers. Based on the Intel® Core™ mircoarchitecture, it is manufactured using new materials such as hafnium-based high-k gate dielectrics and metal gates, which significantly reduces electrical leakage. http://www.intel.com/references/pdfs/BMW_SAP_casestudy_FV.pdf

6.        Carnegie: Reduces yearly energy costs by approximately SEK I million (USD 167,000) thanks to an estimated 1.1 million KWh annual saving arising from the server consolidation. Carnegie then replaced 100 of its legacy servers with 16 HP ProLiant 380 G5* servers powered by the Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor 5300 series and in the process created approximately 140 virtual servers. Thanks to the reduction in physical servers it also shelved its plans for extra cooling equipment while also making a SEK 10 million (USD 1.7 million) saving by avoiding the need to physically rebuild its data centre. http://www.intel.com/references/pdfs/Carnegie_final_version.pdf

7.        Kelly Blue Book: Refreshing aging servers with new Dell* servers based on multi-core Intel® Xeon® processors enables Kelley Blue Book to accelerate performance of key applications by up to 50 percent, increasing business agility. Loading and processing business warehouse data was taking 16 to 20 hours each time - now it’s taking half that amount of time. Server consolidation ratios of up to 15 to 1 and reduced energy costs with the new hardware - saving KBB approximately $10,000 each month in power and cooling costs.http://www.intel.com/references/pdfs/Kelley_Blue_Book_CaseStudy.pdf

8.        PLAY: Processing all of PLAY’s historical roaming mobile transactions for 2008 to make the data available for the Optiprizer windows user application, takes just 44 minutes running on the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, compared to 102 minutes on the Intel Xeon processor 5400 series. This represents a performance increase of 230 percent. Similarly, complex business intelligence tasks can now be performed twice as quickly. http://www.intel.com/references/pdfs/PLAY.pdf

9.        Yahoo:  Upgraded their Mission Critical Oracle database with Intel Xeon 7300 based servers. Yahoo is able to support a 1.4-petabyte database with 16 servers without any additional training or operating costs, while cutting the time to run the most demanding queries by 93% (20 hours to 73 minutes). http://www.intel.com/references/pdfs/Intel_ESS_Yahoo_7300_Case_Study_HR.pdf

10.     Turtle Entertainment: Europe’s largest online gaming community supports its 875,000 members with Intel Xeon processor 7400 based servers.  Consolidation with larger servers reduces network, power/cooling and space costs and enabled a 35% reduction in TCO while improving their customers gaming experience (time it took to load a web page went from 177 milliseconds to 72 milliseconds). http://www.intel.com/references/pdfs/Turtle_Entertainment_V3.pdf