IT@Intel Data Center Blog

Intel Lowers Energy Costs for High Performance Computing

Ilene — Fri, 30 May 2008 00:18:58 GMT

The current uptake in high performance computing means mostly good things, but it also comes with a few built-in challenges. The paradox of this particular progress is this: when you scale hardware, you oftentimes scale power consumption, right along with it. My colleague, Shesha Krishnapura, a senior principal engineer from Intel IT Core Systems Engineering group, has some good news to share, in this podcast speaking with The Register’s Tim Phillips. Shesha says that “In the past, that power relationship has existed. But with Intel’s core microarchitecture based platform, the power envelop has remained constant while performance has climbed significantly.”

Check out Shesha’s podcast below.

http://www.podtech.net/home/5166/intel-lowers-energy-costs-for-high-performance-computing

Intel Helps Developers with Multi-Threaded Software Community

Ilene — Thu, 22 May 2008 21:58:30 GMT

In this podcast, The Register's Tim Phillips speaks with my colleague, Shesha Krishnapura, Senior Principal Engineer from Intel IT Core Systems Engineering group about developers' adoption of multi-core technology. Shesha sees that, while multi-core processors have become mainstream, now is an especially critical time for multi-threaded software, given the uptake in the industry and the increasingly urgent need for the software that will help to realize the higher performance potential of multi-core platforms.

Check out the podcast below.

http://www.podtech.net/home/5177/intel-helps-developers-with-multi-threaded-software-community

Before you throw it away....make sure you know where it is going.

Ilene — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 16:44:49 GMT

I'd like to introduce myself--my name is Ilene Aginsky and I'm the new site community manager for the IT@Intel zone on Open Port, Intel's online IT community site. I started out in IT about two years ago and got very interested in the green aspect of IT.

We have had quite a few discussions out here in the community on green versus efficient Greening Data Centers or Make 'em Efficient? and I'm not as concerned by what it is called but rather what we must do to ensure we don't damage the environment.

The issues are not simple and require a balancing act. It is important to look at the picture holistically, from cradle to grave. For example, Intel IT will be refreshing approximately 20,000 servers this year with new servers that will consume less energy and reduce our carbon footprint. This begs the question: what happens to the old equipment and what are we doing to prevent it from ending up in a landfill?

I asked my colleague Robert who is the Secure Data Control Program Manager for IT and he told me that all end-of-life (EOL) servers at Intel follow the same process. We make sure that we secure all the data by removing and sanitizing the hard drives.

Once the data has been sanitized there are three possible paths:
Resale - we prioritize re-sale
Donations - some organizations need servers, even without disks
Scrap - anything deemed worthless to resale or donations is sent to scrap vendors for material reuse and recycling

What does your organization do with old equipment?

Intel IT Deploys Virtualization - How we did it!

BillSunderland — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 17:58:16 GMT

As this is my first blog on this forum, I'd like to introduce myself. My name is Bill Sunderland and I have been working at Intel for 12 years primarily working on Server Hardware Engineering and the last three years of which I have focused my efforts on Program Managing the Virtualization Engineering release for Intel IT. I have recently published a WP demonstrating the methodology used as described below.

Intel IT planned, engineered, and has begun deploying a virtualized business-computing production environment at several data centers, a rollout that will continue through 2008. Our initiative has already confirmed anticipated virtualization benefits such as faster, more automated deployment. We are initially consolidating older servers running applications that are not mission-critical; we see opportunities to achieve 16:1 consolidation ratios.

Click here to read the WP: Implementing Virtualization in a Global Business-Computing Environment

I would be interested in hearing your experiences and/or questions regarding virtualizing IT environments!

Comparing Two- and Four-socket Platforms for Server Virtualization

Sudip Chahal — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 00:39:46 GMT

The relative positioning of 2 and 4-socket servers for server virtualization has been an open question for a long time - a question that has stumped the most astute of IT professionals time and again. In fact it might not be an exaggeration to say that this open question is almost in the same class as the famous Riemann's hypothesis that has remained unsolved for over a century! (If you accept that premise, then there's some real estate on the moon that I'd like to bring to your attention as well). Although advocates for either class of servers have been emphatic in their respective positions, compelling data-points supporting their positions have been few and far between.

To remedy this sorry state of affairs, an Intel IT team conducted in-depth tests and analysis using current quad-core processor based 2 and 4-socket servers in a virtualized environment. This effort culminated in a comprehensive framework for comparing server platforms for virtualization. This comparative framework encompasses the majority of common deployment scenarios and usage models and answers - once and for all - the long unanswered question "which server is more appropriate for my virtualization project?"

The whitepaper detailing the findings can be found here Comparing Two- and Four-Socket Platforms for Server Virtualization. If time is short, click on the icon below for a short video overview.

The Three R's of the Data Center

travis.broughton — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 21:36:16 GMT

My daughter recently brought home from school a photocopy of the lyrics of Jack Johnson’s “The 3 R’s” (from the Curious George soundtrack), which encourage us to “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle”. This struck me as relevant in some of the recent discussions I have been having about Greenwashing in the Data Center.

A fair amount of our data center strategy deals with driving down costs. We’re trying to spend less money to deliver the same or better results. Along the way, we find opportunities to be green. While I would love to have more meetings that start out with the question of “what can we do to help the environment?” rather than “what can we do to cut costs?”, we do talk about both. This is somewhat similar to consumer-oriented eco-efforts, encouraging people to save the world while saving money: unplug electronic devices when they're not being used, replace your appliances with more energy-efficient ones, etc. I don't know of many people or organizations who wouldn't like to spend less money, and when we can help the environment at the same time it's win-win.

Which brings me back to the song lyrics. Our cost-cutting measures tend to be related to at least two of the three “R’s” – reducing what we consume, many times by reusing what we already have. I’ll spend my next few posts exploring this a bit further, giving some specific examples of our cost-savings initiatives that ultimately contribute to a greener data center and IT infrastructure.

Happy Earth Day...

Part II: What if you invested a dollar and it returned 10?

Laurie Buczek — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 16:54:36 GMT

Doug Garday continues his podcast series with part II, which continues the discussion around a heat recovery system to reduce the total cost of ownership. In this podcast, Doug plugs in numbers that show potential energy cost savings.

http://www.podtech.net/home/5079/roi-of-data-center-heat-recovery

To listen to Part I go to What if you invested a dollar and it returned 10?. View the full brief at Data Center Heat Recovery Helps Intel Create Green Facility.

Is the Data Center Green or is it Efficient?

Brently Davis — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 18:03:32 GMT

I won't go into a long dissertation, but I would like to hear what the masses are thinking about Green or Efficient efforts for the Data Center landscape.

As you all know Green is taking off -- our world is becoming concerned with the legacy we'll leave for our children and their children. I admire that because it identifies how we're a caring nation in the U.S. as well as a compassionate world.

But I believe we're mixing the messages down at the lower levels; In my opinion, "Green" means giving something back to mother earth. It means offsetting your carbon impact by planting trees (as I learned from one of the earlier companies I worked for ), or it means buying energy from alternative means such as wind power -- the direction Intel and other companies are moving towards. Those are green efforts from my point of view. However "Efficiency," is defined by Encarta's North America dictionary as this.. "The ability to do something well or achieve a desired result without wasted energy or effort."

Those are two different directions as I see them, and companies running programs to enable more efficient Data Centers must understand how to correctly identify their approach.

So, what does everyone else thing about Green vs. Efficient?
Share your opinion Greening Data Centers or Make 'em Efficient?

The Role of Abstraction in Data Center Transformation

Alan Ross — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 21:17:31 GMT

Most data centers have a very long history with the enterprises they provide services for. Data centers grew up around the users they provide services to and are generally located within a close proximity to the user base. As LAN capabilities improved, performance of local applications became less of an issue for enterprises but new capabilities were generally landed in existing facilities. As the enterprise grew through mergers and acquisitions, additional data center capacity was generally co-located with the new users.

When availability was the key metric for measuring performance of applications, it became customary for each new application that the enterprise was rolling out (whether developed or purchased) to have its own dedicated hardware, to protect the integrity of the application and improve stability. Over time this has led to data centers around the world that are full of hardware that operates at a fraction of what it's capable of! Application owners were loathe to consider the idea of ‘stacking' applications on the same server, looking to avoid potential conflicts that arise in a shared resource environment.

We now have multiple vectors for driving efficiency into our data centers: energy efficiency, sustainability and cost are some that are moving organizations toward initiatives that will transform the way we provide services from the data center and how we support those services going forward. Driving efficiency is a painful but necessary step in the overall transformation.

Transformation can mean many things to the enterprise but part of a data center transformation generally involves consolidation of data center facilities and compute resources that provide services to the enterprise. This can cause some amount of nervousness on the part of the end users, application developers and administrators who have grown accustomed to unfettered access to resources over time.

Why is this abstraction of resources from users, developers and administrators necessary? A primary driver is to standardize facilities, network, compute and storage resources so the operations staff is sustaining a small number of standard offerings, which provides them with a very predictable environment that they can become expert is sustaining. By centralizing to fewer facilities and driving toward higher utilization of existing resources (i.e. network, servers and storage) the enterprise can obtain more work out of their data centers for less energy and therefore less cost.

Removing the users, developers and administrators from the data center is a process and mindset change that will take resolve and ultimately executive support. So many IT pros feel they need to ‘touch' their environment but this leads to custom configurations, unknown/undocumented changes and instability in an environment that we're trying to standardize. Building the competency within the operations group will facilitate a change in the way excursions and outages are dealt with and will form the basis of a much more predictable environment that the operations team will feel proud to own. This is one piece of the transformation that cannot be overlooked when considering the evolution of the enterprise data center.

Intel's Data Center Strategy, explained

travis.broughton — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 15:36:59 GMT

If you've attended any of the Intel Premier IT Professional events or if you have been following our Data Center blogs, you're no doubt aware that Intel is in the process of transforming our computing and data processing back end. We're moving from a sprawl of resources spread across over a hundred data centers to a much smaller footprint. We've been deploying grid computing and virtual servers to slow the rate of growth of our computing capacity. We're also changing our operations processes, applying disciplines that were originally developed for our factories to improve the way we manage our data centers. A little over a year into the project, some of our team (Uttam Shetty, Alan Ross, Brently Davis, and I) have put out a white paper to summarize our goals, focus areas, and preliminary results. We've uploaded the paper Transforming a Global Data Center Environmentas a resource, which you can read/download.

More on our Data Center Efficiency initiative

travis.broughton — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 22:24:00 GMT

I've posted to this blog a few times in the past, but my "day job" (Data Center Efficiency) has kept me away from blogging for longer than I'd like. My colleague Brently and I were recently in Folsom for meetings, and took some time out to talk about some of the key elements of our data center strategy: working horizontally rather than tailoring solutions for a particular business unit, giving transparent access to a global pool of resources, and improving data quality.

http://www.podtech.net/home/4724/virtualization-and-data-center-consolidation

I'll plan to increase my posting frequency, using this blog as a forum to share some of the things that have worked for us (or that haven't worked) as we reduce our data center footprint. I'd like for this to become a conversation rather than a broadcast, so please let me know if you have any questions or would like more details on any specific part of this initiative.

Data Center Efficiency

Alan Ross — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 17:26:00 GMT

Hello All, my name is Alan Ross and I'm a Principal Engineer in Intel's Information Technology division and currently leading our Data Center Architecture initiative. Our mission is to transform the way we do enterprise computing, which is easier said than done because there is a lot of history in this domain. Over the next several months I will be expanding on these ideas and providing insight into our approach to this transformation. To start things off, here is a short video where I speak about the topic of data center efficiency:

http://www.podtech.net/home/4660/virtualization-and-enterprise-architecture-the-security-architect

Here are the guiding principles that are being used to help us define the "To-Be" reference architecture for the data center:
1. Evolve our corporate data centers based on architectural governance and capability maturity-based methodologies
2. Enable a multi-tier service management and service delivery operational framework
3. Enable a service-oriented data center architecture
4. Enable a high-performance computing mindset for application environments
5. Design and build DC facilities modularity for flexibility, scalability and managed capital investment
6. Keep Intel legal and secure
7. Transform enterprise operations and scale TCO through innovation
8. Continuously optimize TCO and unit cost
9. Provide an environmentally friendly foundation

I would appreciate any input, feedback or questions you have and am looking forward to the discussions.

Virtualization and the “Datacenter Operating System” of the Future

Sudip Chahal — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 18:15:00 GMT

Is hypervisor based server virtualization basically a “useful” tactical consolidation “play” or does it form the basis for much more? For several years, server virtualization has been used with good success by many organizations to consolidate legacy workloads as well as to cost-effectively provision test and development virtual machines (VMs). During the same timeframe, there has been significant discussion pertaining to “the datacenter of the future” – a centrally managed “dynamic” datacenter where resources will be dynamically assigned “on demand” to workloads in an agile manner thereby allowing the datacenter operations teams to quickly adapt to fluctuating demands for compute resources. So, “where is the connection?” you ask.

The recently concluded VMworld 2007 may offer some hints. At that conference, VMware Chief Scientist, Dr. Mendel Rosenblum, demonstrated some key capabilities that show where compute virtualization is headed in its evolution to becoming the “datacenter operating system” of the future. Dr. Rosenblum demonstrated “storage live migration” and “lockstep VMs”. Transparent migration of storage “owned” by a VMs from one disk (LUN) to another (potentially on a different storage frame) without impacting application availability was demonstrated in the first demo. He also demonstrated the ability to transparently failover an executing VM to a “secondary” VM – on another host - that has been executing in lockstep with the primary VM! If you did not have a chance to see Dr. Rosenblum’s keynote, a webcast is still accessible here.

Per the VMworld demonstrations mentioned above, the hypervisor based virtualization capability and upcoming hardware assists for virtualization in combination with a “compute virtualization manager” that collectively enable policy-based management of the datacenter including virtualization hosts, VMs, storage is well on its way to evolving to the dynamic “Datacenter OS” of the future. This powerful Datacenter OS of the future – evolved from today’s “tactical” virtualization capabilities - will dynamically manage compute, memory, power, storage and network resources of the Datacenter in an automated, highly efficient manner. Pre-packaged applications in portable VMs will be landed on these dynamic datacenters in a flexible and agile manner.

While the hypervisor based virtualization based evolutionary path may not be applicable to highly specialized datacenters (e.g., HPC), its applicability to Business computing environments is clear. Am I oversimplifying and underestimating the technical challenges (security and scaling to name a few) along this evolutionary path? Probably. Am I glossing over the organizational and business process related challenges? Almost certainly. On the other hand, are all the major building blocks like efficient hypervisors, virtualization hardware assists, VM live migration, storage live migration, power management, record and replay, lockstep VMs…) successfully prototyped or better (in production)? The answer is an emphatic “Yes”. Do you agree or do you forsee insurmountable barriers that will thwart attempts to evolve the virtualization capabilities of today into the dynamic data-center of the future along the lines suggested by the ground-breaking capabilities demonstrated at VMworld? Either way, I’d really like to hear your perspective.

Intel IT 45nm test results

Laurie Buczek — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 17:48:00 GMT

We wanted to determine whether the adoption of the new Intel 45nm process technology could deliver additional benefits to our data center strategy: Improving virtualization performance while reducing power consumption. Intel IT is using server virtualization to substantially reduce costs associated with underutilized servers such as higher capital, support, maintenance,power and cooling. Watch this video for the recent testing parameters and results found by Rob Carpenter.

For the full details behind the tests and results, read the white paper 45nm Quad-Core Processors for Energy Efficiency
Let us know how you think the 45nm processors would benefit your data center strategy.

Additional white papers on testing we did on the 45nm processors:
Chip Design using 45nm Quad-Core Xeon Processors

Accelerating EDA Application Performance with 45nm Quad-Core Processors

To read the predecessor to the 45nm testing done on the 65nm quad-core, see Rob's blog with video white paper
The specified blog post was not found.
The full paperComparing Multi-Core Processors for Server Virtualization

Lastly, a tribute to Rob Carpenter. Without his work, none of this would be possible: Fond Stories Over Coffee: The Passing of a Friend

Intel IT Data Center Efficiency Initiative - Going Green

Brently Davis — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 14:57:00 GMT

Like most other companies these days, Intel is facing a growing demand for computing resources. As a result, our computing costs are going up along with that demand. All of these issues prompted us to take a hard look at our data center strategy, to see where we could make it more efficient.

Therefore, we’ve launched into a significant undertaking. We’ve started the process to End of Life (EOL) or consolidate our data centers down to just eight strategic locations. This effort is planned to take us eight years, but we’re working to pull this in sooner. This initiative enables us to reduce costs, improve server and storage utilization, create higher density & more energy efficient data centers, and allows us to keep pace with our company’s rapid rate of innovation. The effort could deliver up to $750M in Net Present Value. View my video blog for more information.

I would be interested to hear your comments, questions and have you share with us what your company is doing to drive efficiency within your data centers.