Years ago, this might have been discovered weeks later as I run through the paper bills.  But in today’s world, these things happen in real time.  Just as technology may seem to make it easier for fraudulent charges, technology is accelerating applications on the other side as well.  The guys with the white hats have some pretty powerful tools as well.  Those tools allow me to go anywhere in the world and buy anything with confidence that it will be paid for.  When you stop for a minute and think that a piece of plastic with a magnetic strip helps me buy a CD in Taipei without pulling out local currency, it really is an amazing world that we live in.

What helps make all of this possible is the payment processing systems that have becoming increasingly more complex and powerful.  The processing technology available today, including the new 16-core AMD Opteron™ 6200 Series processor, allows for massive amounts of processing to be done quickly and efficiently, securing transactions around the globe and giving merchants an amazing amount of power to analyze their data to help spot trends.

Credorax has announced an update to their proprietary NextGen ePower™ Payment Processing and Acquiring Platform that now features the AMD Opteron 6200 Series processor. What is really interesting about this product is that this is the first acquiring platform that is designed for both online commerce and in-house bank services under one roof since Credorax is a principle member of Visa and MasterCard.  Normally the payment gateway is designed to capture the transaction information then pass it on to the acquiring bank.  Then the acquiring bank takes the transaction to the next step of getting the approval from the financial institution.  By combining these functions, Credorax helps achieve higher approval rates, lower transaction fees and the ability to offer fully comprehensive end-to-end services from a single provider.

By utilizing the power of AMD Opteron 6200 Series processors, this platform can process more transactions with more efficiency than previous generations as the 16 cores help to handle multiple data streams.  The web-based interfaces and connectivity of this system allows the payment processing to take place in the cloud, helping to lend more flexibility with integration into other financial systems.

With the growth of “Big Data” as well, the AMD Opteron 6200 Series processors are a great addition to business intelligence environments where customers need to crunch through terabytes of data quickly to help spot trends and identify data adjacencies. Credorax understands the power of having more cores to allow more simultaneous processing, and this is why the AMD Opteron 6200 Series processors are part of their platform.

John Fruehe is the Director of Product Marketing for Server, Embedded and FireStream products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

Recently I replaced many of the lights in my house with LED light bulbs. I was amazed at the difference in power consumption that you see between an LED bulb and a standard incandescent bulb just using a standard watt meter at the wall. Now you might want to ask about CFL bulbs, which are less expensive relative to LED bulbs, but the consistency of those bulbs (along with the power ramp up) really makes them unappealing. LED lights, in the most heavily used sockets in my house, are helping drive down my power bill.

Data centers are very concerned about power and putting AMD Opteron™ processors in those CPU sockets can help drive down the power for many workloads. Take a look at the difference in power per core when you look at three different processor families, the lowest power per core for each:

The Intel Xeon L5609 processor has a TDP of 40W and 4 total cores, or 10W/core . The AMD Opteron processor Model 6262 HE has a TDP of 85W and a total of 16 cores for a net 5.3W/core. The AMD Opteron processor Model 4256 EE has a TDP of 35W and a total of 8 cores, giving a net 4.375W/core.

For customers who are focusing on large, scale out web farms, for instance, think about the density that you can achieve with a rack full of AMD Opteron™ processors Model 6262 HE. With the ability to get 1,344 cores into a single rack (42 1U servers with 2 16-core processors), you’d need nearly three racks of Intel’s 6-core processors to get that same core count.

More cores, lower power per core – just the things that today’s dense data centers demand.

John Fruehe is the Director of Product Marketing for Server and Embedded products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

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http://ark.intel.com/products/47928/Intel-Xeon-Processor-L5609-(12M-Cache-1_86-GHz-4_80-GTs-Intel-QPI)

AMD Turbo CORE technology is designed for tackling workloads that are not maximizing power consumption and have additional need for more speed. Most workloads, except for those that have heavy floating point usage, are great candidates for boosting performance with AMD Turbo CORE technology.

There are two different “p-states” (performance states) that are utilized by AMD Turbo CORE technology. P1 is the “all core boost” that we talked about previously. The P1 state boasts 300-500MHz of extra performance across all cores, even the 16-core models. Most of the boost that customers will notice will be in this P1 state.  The P0 state is what customers will see if half of the cores are in idle and in C6 state; this level of boost will deliver 600-1300MHz of additional performance.

If you’re wondering why the 4-core part does not have any boost capability, it’s because it is a specialty part for some very specific customers. You can consider that part “pre-boosted” with 3.3GHz of clock speed, teamed up with four memory channels.

The real benefit is that it is available for environments that are heavily threaded. This isn’t a parlor trick that requires only one or two active cores in order to boost; this is a serious technology that works across as many as 16 cores – simultaneously.

Matt Lavallee, Director of Technology at MLS Property Information Network, Inc. shared with me why he’s excited about the AMD Opteron 6200 Series. “The MLS is a high-throughput, high-efficiency, and highly-available application that places rigorous demands on even the best hardware in the market,” said Matt. “The HP ProLiant DL585 G7 with AMD’s outstanding new Opteron 6200 and AMD Turbo Core technology is a perfect fit for our heavily-virtualized environment, and allows us to continue delivering maximum performance for our investment.”

This gives you the performance you need to tackle the biggest problems your business faces today.

John Fruehe is the Director of Product Marketing for Server and Embedded products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

How do you keep it all straight?

At Microsoft, they utilize their Bing application, Bing Maps, to sort it all out. One of the more interesting demos that I saw this year at the Microsoft Partner Conference was the “context-based search experience” from Bing.  If you have ever searched for something and found plenty of nonsensical results, you appreciate the work that Microsoft is doing to bring some order to searches.  Bing Maps does a great job of understanding all of the complexities of searching and tries to tie in not only what you are looking for, but the context around it.  And that takes a lot of horsepower.

To achieve their objectives for storing and correlating petabytes of information, Microsoft needed a massive number of cores, along with high power efficiency.  In their data center in Colorado, they deployed tens of thousands of AMD Opteron™ processor cores inside Dell Nucleon servers.  While the Nucleon may not seem like a household name, there is a reason for that.  These servers are customized through the Dell Data Center Solutions group, a team of experts who focus on large, scale out data centers and have a particular expertise around very large, dense data center deployments.

These servers delivered the density and most importantly, the power efficiency that Microsoft needed to make their Bing Maps come to life.

One of the most interesting aspects of this deployment is not what was being deployed, but how the servers were deployed.  Dell delivered complete containerized solutions to Microsoft that allowed them to quickly deploy and manage the server farm. The Dell Modular Data Center actually utilizes fans and cooling at the container level versus managing the cooling at a server level.  In the world of homogeneous workloads where thousands of servers are all running the same application, this makes tremendous sense because you scale the workload across nodes, minimizing power and heat fluctuations and allowing you to manage the power and cooling aspects at the container level for much greater efficiency.  Microsoft believes that by doing this, Dell helped them reduce power requirements by as much as 80% while simultaneously delivering up to 5X the compute density.

One of the key components in this solution was the low-power AMD Opteron 4100 Series processor, designed specifically for these environments where density and power efficiency are key.  But with 4 and 6 cores, it is clear that while customers are getting exceptional power efficiency and density, they are not doing so by sacrificing their core density – something that a large scale out data center really demands.

As the world continues to evolve towards the cloud, and these large scale out data centers continue to become more plentiful, we’ll hopefully see more customers opting to deploy the AMD Opteron 4100 Series processors in solutions like the Dell Nucleon server from the Dell Data Center Solutions group.  And that ultimately means clouds with high performance, density and power efficiency.

To me, that sounds like a perfect map to the cloud.  Bing Maps has is all laid out for you.

For more information, you can download the complete case study at: http://content.dell.com/us/en/corp/d/corporate~case-studies~en/Documents~2011-bing-10009998.pdf.aspx

John Fruehe is the Director of Product Marketing for Server, Embedded and FireStream products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

One of the most arduous parts of business travel is getting the trips approved, booked and then, finally getting paid back through your expense reports.

Concur is a leading provider of integrated travel and expense management solutions for businesses and they chose HP ProLiant servers based on AMD Opteron™ processors to help consolidate their IT environment.

Concur needed to drive more performance out of less hardware, and obviously virtualization is a great way for businesses to get more out of their IT investments.  Through the use of both VMware VSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V software, Concur was able to reduce their server footprint and get better utilization in their data center. Initially they started with a few servers, and eventually worked their way up to 70% of their environment virtualized.  And according to their statements, Concur expects to get to 80 or 90% virtualized in the future.

Some of the improvements that they saw included reducing the number of servers by 40%, making it easier to manage their environment. In addition, the virtualized environment allows them to increase data by 30% but still maintain the same number of virtualized host systems. Instead of taking four weeks to deploy a new server, they can now do it in 6 hours, helping IT react more quickly to the needs of the business.

All of this resulted in a 10% reduction in their total cost of ownership, a clear business benefit that anyone, especially in these difficult times, can appreciate.

For more details, you can check out the case study on HP.com:

http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=4AA3-4346ENW&cc=us&lc=en

Now, if someone could just figure out how to beam me from Austin to Tokyo, I’d be so appreciative. 

John Fruehe is the Director of Product Marketing for Server, Embedded and FireStream products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

We live in an age where virtualized environments have become indispensable to supporting an ever growing number of connected, internet-enabled devices, social networks and enterprise cloud computing environments. As a result, the need for legacy chip support will grow exponentially as IT departments play the catch-up game to expand their data centers to support this proliferation of technology. It is unrealistic to expect businesses to always “trade up” to the newest technologies in order to gain access to the latest features, regardless of the size of your company or wallet.

At AMD, we believe that virtualization is a mainstream technology. It’s not just meant for the elite. We foresaw that hardware virtualization would be indispensable to our customers large and small and designed processing platforms with the goal of democratizing performance and scalability. Instead of forcing customers to always cater to infrastructure vendors, AMD instead brings virtualization to the masses for the long-term, so information can flow more easily no matter what generation of hardware you have in your data center or PC. It’s also worth reiterating that AMD Opteron™ 6100 Series processors stand out from the pack because they are equipped with dedicated pipelines for up to 12 integer threads, resulting in dedicated power and performance for virtualized environments and full speed memory on all models.

Every dollar invested into IT hardware and software has a great impact on our customers’ bottom line, therefore, we do not want to force our customers into purchasing the latest shiny thing. We also understand that a one-size architecture does not fit all situations, so we want to work with our customers to see that their time and dollars are spent wisely on the tailored solutions. That way, they can gain the most utilization and performance out of their AMD-based systems to ensure improved operational efficiencies.

Vlad Rozanovich is a director of Commercial Business Development at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

It is a big world out there, and DigitalGlobe is out to map it all in amazing detail.

DigitalGlobe is a high resolution earth imagery and geospatial information product provider.  I am guessing that they have more than their fair share of white lab coats as they are not just people who are fascinated by the changes in our earth, but they are also scientists who started the company based on their need for this level of high quality imagery.

This week, at VMworld in Las Vegas,  Jeff Niggemeyer, and Bill Welty of DigitalGlobe,  are presenting some fascinating information about their IT environment and how they can manage huge amounts of data while also trying to meet the needs of researchers and businesses around the world.

Inside of their IT world, you see a host of Dell PowerEdge ™ servers that are being driven by, you guessed it, AMD Opteron™ processors. DigitalGlobe utilizes the AMD Opteron 6100 Series processors inside Dell PowerEdge servers in their HPC and virtualization layers. 

Inside of their business, they look at compute in two very distinct pieces, HPC and virtualization.  Both of these are areas where the AMD Opteron processors deliver great benefits.

The 12 cores of these processors deliver great parallelism across the systems, helping streamline HPC applications.  For HPC, core counts are king. In their world, higher core counts really matter because the core count determines the number of application threads that are hosted per node; ultimately this ties to the number of nodes that need to be deployed.  With high core density per node, fewer nodes need to be deployed in order to handle any particular level of threading.  Fewer nodes help make sure that power-hungry HPC clusters don’t break the bank when it comes to power costs. Today their HPC cluster has thousands of AMD Opteron processor cores and they plan to triple the number  in the next 3 months.  Their current high speed storage is growing rapidly into the pedabyte range and they expect it to grow 10 fold in the next year.”

DigitalGlobe also utilizes virtualization to help simplify the overall IT architecture, and today close to 60% of their servers are virtualized.  They can utilize less hardware, again, which helps minimize not only the management tasks but also drive better overall data center efficiency.  With the high core counts of AMD Opteron 6100 Series processors, DigitalGlobe can not only load more VMs per server, but also align more cores per VM for less overall CPU contention. Their 12 clusters are running VMware ESX and cover Virtual Desktop Infrastructure for client access, as well as the standard production, dev/test and DMZ that you expect in most virtualized data centers.

DigitalGlobe found that AMD processors provide significant benefits compared to other processors considered including reducing the processing time under load, better I/O performance both in IOPS and data transfer, and a reduced impact on the data center, driven in great part by the lower cost per core and the ability to run cooler.

For more information about DigitalGlobe, take a look at their website, especially the sample images: http://www.digitalglobe.com/index.php

And if you are going to be at VMworld, don’t miss their presentation “Journey to the Core with AMD” #SUP1002, Wednesday, August 31st – 1:00 p.m., the imagery is even more fascinating in a large format.

It’s a big world out there, but DigitalGlobe is delivering a high level of imagery that makes it feel just a bit smaller.

John Fruehe is the Director of Product Marketing for Server, Embedded and FireStream products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

I remember one episode that was particularly unsettling, about online dating. It played on our fears—particularly in those nascent days of Internet relationships—of meeting someone online who turned out to be a creep. In this case, being a creep meant that he was a serial killer who lived off the fat of the women he lured to his bachelor pad. These days, it’s likely each of you know (or are one-half of) some happy couple who met online. But, at that time we were often being scared by stories of such meetings “gone wrong,” and online dating sites had to counter those fears through marketing, PR and customer relations.

Some scary hypotheticals like the one above have a modicum of truth, others are handed down through the ages and completely false, but deeply believed. I just discovered, for example, that tapping a shaken coke can will not stop it from exploding, and yet I’m not sure that I’ll resist tap-tap-tapping the next time I accidentally drop one. Reading is not always believing; sometimes you have to see for yourself (as, apparently, do many on the Mythbusters forum). Which is why I’ll be looking for a “Mythbuster” episode that takes this one on.

At AMD, we know that   meticulously exploring a claim from start to finish is the key to uncovering the truth for our customers and prospects. This is why we have begun a series of videos to address common misperceptions in the datacenter. These myths come our way directly from the sales force, who hear them every day. The first myth in the series that we have chosen to dispel is the idea that you cannot have AMD- and Intel-based servers in the same datacenter. We are guessing that this is widely circulated because some think it is impossible to migrate virtual machines between AMD and Intel-based systems.. This video, our first “AMD Truth Squad” communication, shows step-by-step how fast and easy it is to migrate VMs between AMD and Intel.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNEiCv3pj18

Today we are also releasing a video that shows how an AMD-based server can act as a high-availability back-up server using VMware vSphere.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=143maoT43mc

We’ll take on more misperceptions as summer winds down and well into fall. Which ones would you like us to address? The truth is out there, let’s find it together.

Are you at this year’s VMworld in Las Vegas?  Don’t forget to visit us in AMD booth #311 at VMworld. See you there.

Julie Lass is a Sr. Public Relations Manager at AMD. Her postings are her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

I received a forwarded email the other day from one of our reseller customers with the following statement: 

“We recently received an RFP from one our large customers and they stated they were more interested in     having more cores instead of fastest processors. We sent them a comparison of a HP Proliant BL460cG7 server with 6-core processors vs HP Proliant BL465cG7 server with 12-core processors. They would have had to buy (18) of the BL460’s vs the BL465’s. With the BL465 option they were able to save roughly $20,000.  Whenever we have a customer that comes to us and requests ‘cores’ we automatically look at AMD-based servers.”

Customers are waking up to the fact that if you have a scalable application, more cores can drive more overall throughput. 

I remember back in 2005 when AMD introduced the first dual core AMD Opteron™ processors. At the time, I remember others in the industry who used to say things like “well, all of the software is really optimized for single core….” But the reality was that most enterprise software was running on 2-socket servers anyway, so multiple cores really mattered – they were just in different sockets.

Since that time we have seen a pretty strong growth, from two cores to today’s 12-core AMD Opteron 6100 Series processors. I had to do some quick math for a presentation the other day and I saw a pretty interesting fact. According to one of the analyst trackers*, from 2005 to 2010, the number of x86 servers grew 18%.  However, if you add up all of the cores for 1 socket, 2 socket and 4 socket servers, you’ll see the total number of cores deployed actually grew by 338%.  Quite a difference. 

Simply put, customers are asking for more cores because today’s applications are demanding them.

* Server Unit Counts, IDC WW Server Tracker, Q1 2011

John Fruehe is the Director of Product Marketing for Server, Embedded and FireStream products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

Thanks in part to AMD’s technological leadership in low-power processors and optimization of the server platform roadmap for density, the issues around power in the data center power are fairly well understood, and we have helped OEMs develop some smart solutions on the market today with more coming very soon.

However, it is not enough to think about this year or even the next 5 years.  What happens in the timeframe that is “off the roadmap” of today’s technology?  This is where AMD’s research team has posed some key questions and NYSERDA has stepped up along with Clarkson University in upstate NY, HP, and other industry partners to help answer the questions.

We know that renewable energy – solar and wind power – plays a major role in our future.  How do we link this vital resource to the data center and I mean directly link power source to servers?  (You know AMD is all about eliminating the bottlenecks!)  That is one key issue – getting power from a wind turbine directly to a data center like an HP POD without building a traditional electrical grid between the two. 

Renewable sources can also be intermittent.  What do you do if the sun does not shine one day or there is an atypical calm in the wind one evening?  A data center’s reliability cannot tolerate lulls in the action, so a big question from our AMD Research labs that takes this all one step further is “How can we shift a compute load automatically and reliably between renewable energy sources without resorting to a traditional electrical grid?”

This is a multi-faceted problem and we expect the solutions will fundamentally alter how we design and build computing resources in the future.  The economic implications are not insignificant.  For example, the cost of laying optical fibers is orders of magnitude less than the cost of building power lines.  Estimates can range from $500/mile for “dark” fibers to $15,000/mile for new optical fibers compared to $750k-2 million/mile for new electric transmission lines. The potential gains for the IT industry and the energy sector are exciting and, frankly, huge.  You can bet you will be hearing more about this in the months and years to come.

Alan Lee is the corporate vice president of Research and Advanced Development at AMD.  His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

Many people in the cloud and dense computing world have data center racks that are packed that tight.  Every watt counts because at load, they are maximizing everything in their power budget per rack. 

For customers like this we have a new feature in our upcoming processors codenamed “Interlagos” and “Valencia”: TDP Power Cap. [eWeek takes a look at TDP Power Cap and potential impact for cloud/mega datacenter customers here.]

In today’s products you can cap the power of a server by turning off processor states, though that ultimately can lead to somewhat lower performance. There are a lot of our customers who value power efficiency over performance, so it is not a real issue for them.  But what if you could set low power limits AND get the performance that the platform offers?

With today’s AMD Power Cap Manager, you can limit the processor P-states and cut power consumption although this limits the processor’s ability to get to the top frequency (which is also the most power-hungry spot on the curve as you can imagine…).  By essentially “locking out” the top P-state, the processor never gets into that state, even under heavy utilization, helping cut down total power to the processor.

With the new TDP Power Cap for AMD Opteron™ processors based on the upcoming “Bulldozer” core, customers will be able to set TDP power limits in 1 watt increments.  This means that instead of having to choose between different TDPs for processors, you can actually buy any power range and then modulate down.

Why would someone want to limit TDP?

Well, let’s say that you have a maximum power draw on your fully configured server of 300W, and you have 42 slots in your rack.  The simple math says that you have 12.6Kw of power load that you need to be able to support.  Now, if your power budget only allows you to bring 12Kw to the rack, you essentially have 2 slots that need to be left open in the rack because you can only support 40 and not 42 servers.  But, by utilizing a custom TDP, you could drop the max power that some servers could draw, bringing you in under the limit of 12Kw and still getting 42 servers in the rack.

Best of all, if your workload does not exceed the new modulated power limit, you can still get top speed because you aren’t locking out the top P-state just to reach a power level.

This is truly essential for blades, clouds and other dense environments where every watt counts.

John Fruehe is the Director of Product Marketing for Server, Embedded and FireStream products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

Looking at the list for the top supercomputers this time around I saw some interesting statistics that show the strength of the AMD Opteron™ processor for high performance computing (HPC) environments.  The top 25 supercomputers on the list – clearly the “fastest of the fast” – have a great representation of AMD Opteron processors:

• AMD Opteron processors:             11 (44%)
• Intel Xeon processors:                    8 (32%)
• IBM PowerPC processors:             4 (16%)
• Fujitsu SPARC processors:             1 (4%)
• AMD Opteron + IBM Cell:             1 (4)

Clearly AMD has a very strong representation in the very fastest computers on earth, more so than any other processor architecture. 

Even more impressive is that the AMD Opteron 6100 Series processors were integrated into a majority of the 12 top 25 AMD platforms – clearly there was a strong desire to get the higher performance of 8 and 12-core processors, and these customers were able to take advantage of a large number of cores to boost their supercomputers.

Of particular note are the Cray supercomputers: 9 of the top 25 are designed around an architecture that allows them to be easily upgraded to future technology.  Cray upgraded both the Jaguar and Kraken systems in the past and showed just how easy it is to do.  Cray has already announced its next generation supercomputer based on AMD’s upcoming 16-core processor codenamed “Interlagos”, based on the powerful and HPC-optimized new “Bulldozer” core.

These supercomputers are used for everything from weather prediction to medical research as well as helping unlock the secrets of energy to help the world find solutions to our current energy needs.  Congratulations to everyone that worked so hard on this most recent round, your efforts are going a long way towards turning computing cycles into real discoveries that are making life better for everyone around the world.

John Fruehe is the Director of Product Marketing for Server, Embedded and FireStream products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

But rendering is not just about entertainment; it’s real business.  Fovia, who has developed a 3D volume renderer, has customers like General Electric, Pfizer and NASA that are all utilizing its software to help professionals analyze and assess data in high definition.

What Fovia excels in is the practical application of volume rendering to help people make better decisions.  In business, the more data you have, the better your decisions will be.  But the paradox is that the longer it takes to gather, analyze and view that data, the less valuable it becomes.  For instance, as a person who spends a third of his life flying in large aluminum tubes, you could increase airline security by opening up every bag and thoroughly searching the contents before letting someone on the plane.  Last week in Moscow I received quite the pat down before getting on the plane, but that also required me to be on at the airport much earlier.  There is a cost to be paid. But what if you could see more in a shorter amount of time?

Real-time decisions like medicine and security can be greatly boosted by delivering larger and more detailed data.  Doctors often have to make decisions about treatment in a short period of time, sometimes because of costs and sometimes because a life is hanging in the balance.  Clarity, as well as speed, matter.

Fovia helps these situations with its High Definition Volume Rendering software, which happens to be a great platform for more cores.  With every additional core you are able to display and interact with more data in the same amount of time.  Need more clarity and performance?  Just add more cores.  Best of all, the software scales extremely well on multiple cores.  To see how well the software scales, we asked Fovia to run a rendering job on different core combinations to see how the performance was at each core count level.  The results showed that their engineering team did a great job of handling the parallel tasks, with almost linear scaling:

This shows that with 5 high usage clients all accessing the server simultaneously the server is able to scale the load evenly across all of the cores.

When you compare the difference in performance per core, you see that at 48 threads running on 48 cores that you are at 93.77% of the per-core performance of a core when only 8 threads are running.  Truly amazing scalability – with every core you throw at the problem you are receiving almost pure linear scalability, truly a feat both for the platform and for the software.

Now I am sure you are thinking how does this help the decision making process?  It’s simple – the amount of time that it takes to render the image is the same for all core levels, but by having more cores you can get more depth, more detail, and faster interactivity in the same amount of time.  With improved visual performance per core, the doctor can see far more of the problem, allowing for a much more accurate diagnosis of the patient.

Now, imagine taking that same level of detail and applying it to the mess of cables and devices in my backpack as it runs through the airport scanner.  It’s much easier to see that I am carrying an iPhone, a bunch of USB cables and a set of noise canceling headphones instead of a bomb.  If you can identify those items quickly, you can move me through security faster (which is a benefit to me) and you can have higher confidence in your decisions (a benefit to you).

Clearly, having more cores helps drive better decision making. If you have all the time in the world to accumulate all of the data points that you need, then this level of detail may not matter.  But in a world where decisions have to be made quickly, having High Definition Volume Rendering running on AMD Opteron 6100 Series processors helps professionals make the right decisions – and faster.

All benchmarks were run on a Dell PowerEdge R815 server with four 12-core AMD Opteron 6100 Series processors.

John Fruehe is the Director of Product Marketing for Server, Embedded and FireStream products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

Fovia, High Definition Volume Rendering and HDVR are registered trademarks of Fovia, Inc.

How much is that tax bill you ask?  Well, I did a little digging recently and found some amazing detail. 

To begin with, if you are going to compare an “apples to apples” configuration between 2 servers, you generally have your hands full.  There are so many variables, that you have to use what researchers call “control factors.”  For this comparison, I decided to use performance of a 4P system in SPECint_rate20061benchmarks as the control factor.  By holding the performance constant, you can estimate what a customer needs to pay for a comparable level of performance.  The difference was shocking.

The AMD-based 4P server clocked in at $18,700 for the tested configuration2.  The comparable Intel performance(technically ~1% higher) for a system based on Intel’s brand-new E7 processor was priced at $38,9253. That is more than double the cost.  Now, to be fair, which I always strive to be, the price does reflect a huge amount of memory.  So, I thought, is there another system with a more comparable configuration to compare to for this? 

I managed to track down another system, based on the older Intel Xeon 7560 processor that was in approximately the same performance range (this is about 3% lower in performance, but that is close enough for most people to get treated as a “rounding error…”) This one utilized half the memory of the other Intel-based system, but at $34,320, was still more than 80% more expensive4than the AMD Opteron-based system.

What this tells me is that in the 4P market, where customers are deploying larger systems that are the backbone of virtualization, database and business applications, there is a significant difference in the costs at the platform level, even though the performance of the systems is on par with each other. And based on the fact that the systems are from two of the leaders in enterprise computing, it’s a pretty safe guess that customers would be comfortable deploying any of the systems.

That leads us to a simple, yet extremely important conclusion:  at similar performance levels, you’ll find much better value for your data center and get much more for your budget dollar when you are choosing platforms based on the AMD Opteron™ 6100 Series processor. The “4P Tax” that we keep telling you about is not only a factor at the processor level, but it apparently extends all the way to the platform level.

Now, one could argue that to do an “apples to apples” comparison you need to have exactly the same configuration.  The problem with that logic is that you as soon as you change the configurations, the performance changes. If you wanted to hold configurations the same, perhaps choosing the top bin speed processor for both, we’d still be much more affordable.  But then someone would argue about performance if we had exactly the same configuration.  Hold performance constant, they’ll complain about configuration, hold configuration constant, they’ll complain about performance. Sometimes there is no winning.

Which leads me to the point of this blog (yes, I actually have one.)

As you may recall, AMD recently had a contest for businesses, highlighting that we had done away with the 4P tax.  Two lucky customers won HP notebooks based on the new AMD APU – the HP Pavilion dm 1z Series Notebook.

Well today we are announcing our two lucky winners:

Ashley Smith-Jenkins of CV Tech Computers in Merced, CA and William Wong of Liberty Mutual in Portsmouth, NH

Congratulations to both of you and enjoy your new HP notebooks.  To help keep your data secure on those notebooks, I recommend a strong password.  Perhaps “No4Ptax” might be a good one

John Fruehe is the Director of Product Marketing for Server, Embedded and FireStream products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

[2] Based on HP DL585 G7 server with SPECint_rate2006 score of 782; pricing configuration based on four AMD Opteron 6176 SE processors, 128GB of memory, four 72GB 15,000 RPM SAS hard drives as configured on www.HP.com on 5/17/2011.  SPEC results at: http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2010q2/cpu2006-20100608-11617.html

[3] Based on Dell PowerEdge R910 server with SPECint_rate2006 score of 792; pricing configuration based on four Xeon E7 4830 processors, 512GB of memory, one 500GB 7,200RPM hard drive as configured on www.dell.com on 5/17/2011. SPEC results at: http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2011q2/cpu2006-20110328-15327.html

[4] Based on Dell PowerEdge R910 server with SPECint_rate2006 score of 759; pricing configuration based on four Intel Xeon X7560 processors, 256GB of memory, one 300GB 10,000RPM hard drive as configured on www.dell.com on 5/17/2011.  SPEC results at: http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2010q1/cpu2006-20100315-09980.html

For those of you, like me, that might be a bit fuzzy on the difference, even after their second cup of coffee this morning, fusion is about joining two things together and fission is about breaking things apart.  Fission is an important part of the study of nuclear energy because when you break atoms apart, it releases energy.

That is probably why the Idaho National Labs called their new supercomputer “Fission”, because it is involved in energy research.  This new supercomputer will be capable of 91 teraflops of performance. It will utilize 12,512 AMD Opteron™ 6100 series processors to generate that performance. The 12-core AMD Opteron processor is a great choice for these supercomputers that must generate huge numbers of FLOPs (floating operations per second) because each processor has up to 12 floating point units capable of supporting up to 48 floating point instructions per cycle.

INL chose Appro as their supplier, utilizing the Appro Xtreme-X™ server for their cluster.  The Xtreme-X server is an excellent choice not only for its compute density but also for its manageability and power efficiency. 

One of the many tasks that this supercomputer will embark on include a 3D model of nuclear fuel rods that will allow researchers to see the long-term effects of heat, pressure and other variables on these fuel rods.

If you look at last fall’s Top 500 list, you’ll see that the peak performance of 91 teraflops would put this system in range of the top 100 super computers in the world.

Appro International has 7 different supercomputers on the Top 500 list today, so when the next list comes out in June, we can expect that this will be the 8^th Appro entry onto the list.  Impressive work from a company that really knows the high performance computing market.  Maybe I am biased, however, because six of their seven top 500 entries are based on AMD Opteron processors – and “Fission” will make it seven out of eight.

John Fruehe is the Director of Product Marketing for Server, Embedded and FireStream products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

This data explosion also means that datasets are becoming increasingly large and difficult to manage via conventional database management tools. As data sets grow in size – typically ranging from several terabytes to multiple petabytes – businesses face the challenge of capturing, managing, and analyzing the data in an acceptable timeframe. Organizations are also struggling to understand the opportunity information provides through advanced analytics. The IDC study suggests that organizations with high rates of change in their business think about business operations differently. These customers often put data analytics to use as part of a wide range of business decisions often using data analysis to develop business strategies. In short these users make data based decisions both more efficiently and at faster speed than peers typical of their industry.

Barriers to big data adoption are generally cultural rather than technological. In particular many organizations fail to implement big data programs because they are unable to appreciate how data analytics can improve their core business. Business executives need to improve their ability to convey complicated insights to the organization and drive an effective action from the data analysis process. When getting started it is helpful to think of the following:

• Identify a problem that business leaders can understand and relate to – one that commands their attention.
• Don’t get too focused on the technical data management challenge. Remember that resources need to be invested to understand the uses for the data inside the business.
• Define the questions needed to meet the business objective and only then focus on discovering the necessary data.
• Understand the tools available to merge the data and the business process so that the result of the data analysis is more actionable.

Traditional business intelligence systems have historically been centrally managed in an enterprise datacenter with the scalable server and high-performance storage infrastructure built around a relational database. Now enterprises are working to extract competitive business value – and ultimately revenue – from a growing sea of data. These big data implementations leverage diverse sets of distributed semi-unstructured and unstructured data types which frequently start with mathematics, statistics and data aggregation efforts. Big data analytic software is increasingly deployed on massively parallel clusters leveraging Apache Hadoop framework, distributed file systems, distributed databases, MapReduce algorithms and cloud infrastructure platforms (for time-to-market and scale needs). These big data applications are becoming a source of competitive value for enterprises as firms monetize information by building data products and services. Despite the uncertainty many organizations face, several things are clear:

• Big data is not an extension of traditional BI and requires new thinking.
• New skills will be required including mathematics, statistics and business capabilities necessary to build revenue models around data.
• New tools and architectures such as Hadoop and MapReduce algorithms will be required to deal with largely unstructured or semi-structured data.
• Many of the resulting business opportunities created through big data will be industry specific (genomics, healthcare, oil & gas, finance, etc.) making the focus on time to revenue more critical.

Because speed is strategically important, it will be tempting for business to move forward without IT support. IT needs to recognize that it needs to think differently (and quickly) and fight for a seat at the table as big data strategies are developed. CIOs need to both understand what their organization is planning around big data and begin developing a big data IT infrastructure strategy. In doing so CIOs need to understand the potential value big data represents to their organization and industry. Skill sets will also need to be evaluated with a focus on training as core analytical skills are not widely available in the market and in many cases will need to be developed internally. IDC believes that building successful business cases around big data can only be accomplished through a tight alignment critical thinking across both IT and the business. This will require out of the box thinking as well as moving outside the traditional IT comfort zone as traditional data warehousing models may not be appropriate in order to effectively monetize the big data opportunity.

Matthew Eastwood is the Group Vice President of Enterprise Platforms for IDC. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

Back when dinosaurs ruled the earth and 4P x86 servers were invented, the 4P capable processors for these servers were given a special price and were prohibitive for all but the most critical applications.  That is why the 2P market eventually started consuming the 4P market – it was becoming harder to justify paying “the 4P tax” just to get greater performance and scalability.

Perhaps you will recall back in 2010 when AMD introduced the AMD Opteron™ 6100 Series processors.  For the first time, we actually cut the premium between a 2P and 4P capable processor so that they are the same price now, bringing new levels of performance, scalability and value to a suddenly revitalized 4P market.

Just to illustrate the real world application of the tax difference, I did some cursory shopping this afternoon as I sat in my hotel room in Taipei, and found that the average price of an Intel Xeon X7560 processor is $3,820.  Then I checked on the AMD Opteron 6180 SE, our brand new 2.5GHz 12-core processor and found that price was $1,571. That would be less than half the price of the X7560 for 50% more cores (not to mention that the Intel is only running at 2.26GHz….).  That means the difference between the two processors is $2,249 – the “4P tax.”

The AMD Opteron 6100 Series processors were the first to break the “4P tax,” and now, as we approach the 1 year anniversary of this revolutionary product, we want to share the wealth, by giving some lucky companies a chance to win some prizes.

Here’s how it works:  simply go to this link and fill out an entry form.  This is a promotion targeted at businesses, so be prepared to answer some questions about your company. The winner will be a business entity, not an individual. Please check the contest rules for eligibility.

The contest starts April 18^th, 2011 at 12:01am Eastern Daylight Time (“EDT”) and ends May 2, 2011 at 11:59 pm EDT. AMD will choose the 2 winners and we will post the names on this blog.  Good luck!

John Fruehe is the Director of Product Marketing for Server, Embedded and FireStream products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

If you use the internet, that massive “series of tubes,” there is a good chance that you are passing your electronic bits through an AMD Opteron^TM processor.

Last year we did some quick calculations and realized that we had sold more than 2 million AMD Opteron processors to companies that are involved in the web and cloud business.  So if you are searching for data, sharing vacation photos, streaming media, collaborating or sharing those funny dog videos, odds are you are relying on AMD Opteron technology somewhere in the chain. And typically those bits are passing through some of the largest data centers on earth, dubbed “mega datacenters.”

The interesting thing about these large web/cloud companies is that their datacenters are very different from what you typically find in most glass houses.  Imagine tens, or even hundreds of thousands of servers all packed very densely into the same building, all chugging away on the same application. That is so different from the typical environment where servers can be like snowflakes with every one being slightly different.

The guys who run these mega datacenters know a lot about efficiency, so much so that they often build their own systems.  One extra USB port might only be an extra watt to you, but when it is multiplied across 100,000 servers, suddenly it starts to add up.  But the problem is that as you start to branch out into this world of mass customization, you lose the ability to share best practices.  Your infrastructure becomes your secret sauce and you don’t want anyone to know your secrets – even if that could achieve a greater good for society. 

This week AMD joined Facebook, a  worldwide leader in social media, in an ambitious new project that is very counter to the way the industry has run up until now. Today, Facebook announced the Open Compute Project for server / data center designs and architecture. The goal is to make many of Facebook’s design decisions, requirements, and best practices available throughout the industry.  Companies will be able to share best practices around software, hardware, and datacenter design. Through this open communication, collaboration and sharing of best practices, more of the “know how” will seep out into the industry, and at the same time, more of it comes back to Facebook and the people on the Open Compute Project as standards.  And standards are good.

Cooperation between the design and development players in the cloud computing space can help to drive a more efficient energy consumption model, ultimately helping to get out in front of the challenge of power consumption in the data center.

As a representative for AMD on the Green Grid, I certainly have had exposure to a lot of different companies that are wrestling with their power efficiency challenges today, and seeing a leader like Facebook stepping in to open up their knowledge and best practices is a great benefit to the rest of the market.

AMD and Facebook have collaborated in the past on platforms and power efficiency and we see participation in this project as being critical to our continued mutual success, as we both continue to drive towards more power-efficient compute capacity.

Today marks a new chapter in the era of power efficiency in the mega data center, and AMD is happy to be there with Facebook as a part of this new initiative.

John Fruehe is the Director of Product Marketing for Server, Embedded and FireStream products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

The first question that follows that declaration is: “What is Big Data?”

As will become clear in future blogs, Big Data isn’t a specific technology, though many link it to Hadoop and MapReduce.  It isn’t about any particular type of data, though many link it to unstructured, social media, or machine generated data.  It isn’t even about solving a specific problem, though many link it to goals such as fraud detection or smart grids.

Big Data is about the use of technologies (hardware and software) to manage, mine and analyze large collections of information to solve a wide range of complex problems.  Virtually all of these Big Data projects address one or more of the following challenges:

• Dealing with heterogeneous data from multiple sources, often structured and unstructured (e.g., a diagnostic system that can simultaneously scan medical images, medical/pharmaceutical journals, epidemiological/genetic databases, and a patient’s own records)
• Dealing with high volumes (in terms of both size and rate) of data that are dynamic and constantly changing (e.g., a smart grid electric metering system that delivers 3,000 times as much data per site as traditional systems)
• Dealing with unpredictable content that has no apparent schema or structure (e.g., scanning public twitter streams of people praising/complaining about a new product launch to anticipate demand spikes or brand image challenges)
• Enabling real time or near real time collection, analysis and use of information and conclusions.

This final challenge, getting from data to value in hours, minutes, seconds, or less, is the “new” development that makes Big Data so important.  Government agencies and companies in industries such as retail, healthcare, and telecommunications dealt with large volumes of information for decades.  The perception that Big Data projects are also major science projects that are expensive, risky, and require skills not found in many traditional IT organizations remains the biggest barrier to broader adoption.  In the past, the ability to find, analyze and use the data often required massive investments in people or computing resources. Results were measured in months or at best weeks (usually, long after the danger or opportunity passed).

If you did a little investigating inside some of your own business units, you would likely be surprised what’s already there in terms of Big Data projects.  Thanks to a sustained and dramatic decline in the costs of compute power, memory and storage capacity (along with new data handling techniques like Hadoop and MapReduce), it’s possible for some bright folks in your organization to effectively deal with all of the data variety, volume, and complexity problems.  Even better, they can do so while it’s still possible to take advantage of the knowledge.

One final word of caution, however.  Many of these Big Data projects are best described as “junior science projects” with a small core of servers and storage assets. They aren’t the next iteration of a Google-like compute grid, at least not yet.  From a business and IT governance standpoint, however, these kinds of “junior science projects” can quickly turn into the next “Manhattan project” with company-wide and industry-wide business, organizational, and legal consequences.

For your IT organization, integrating Big Data initiatives and requirements into data center and IT services plans will be vital.  IDC expects many of your primary IT suppliers to make sustained investments via acquisition and new product packaging in solutions that target the “Big Data” environment.   Beyond more classic IT product companies, however, IDC also expects Big Data to be an area where leading cloud service providers (the early leaders in developing and deploying Big IT solutions for their internal needs) will launch more targeted cloud-based offerings as part of expanding their market reach into critical business areas. Expect that some smart team will soon be coming to talk with you about this great new idea that will transform the company, your customers or your community.

Welcome to the world of Big Data.

Richard Villars is Vice President of Storage and IT Executive Strategies with IDC. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

When our friends at VMware developed VMmark 1.x the world was spinning in the era of server consolidation. Data centers were breaking the “one application per server” model and moving workloads from their racks of underutilized, energy consuming servers into Virtual Machines (VMs). In the world of VMware 2.x virtualization is a mainstream strategy for data center agility. The VMmark 2.x benchmark reflects this maturation – it is a multi-server virtualization benchmark that includes traditional application-level workloads along with a variety of common platform-level workloads such as live migration of virtual machines, cloning and deploying of virtual machines, and automatic virtual machine load balancing across the datacenter.

So let’s take a look at some of the new VMmark 2.1 results. For this comparison we will examine a 2-socket Intel-based server compared to a 4-socket server powered by the AMD Opteron^TM 6100 Series processor.

² based on vSphere pricing from VMware web site http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/pricing.html

Conventional wisdom would say the 4-socket system would roll up a bigger system price – which it does. And the 12-core AMD Opteron 6100 Series processor required the purchase of an Enterprise Plus license per socket. However, the HP ProLiant DL585 G7 with more real cores can also support almost twice as many VMs – which results in a lower cost per VM. Take a close look at the two Cost per VM rows on the chart – you can immediately see that the HP ProLiant DL585 G7 provides a lower cost per VM regardless of whether you look at the hardware cost or combined hardware and software costs. For equity we showed the HP ProLiant BL490 G7 evaluation with Enterprise Plus licensing cost – many of our customers are moving to this version of vSphere for its rich set of features.

There are some real advantages in the purchase of the 4-socket HP ProLiant DL585 G7 that are not immediately obvious in looking at the VMmark 2.1 scores. Like the fact that it offers 4 memory channels per processor as opposed to the 3 memory channels offered by the competitive system. This 33% more memory bandwidth can be a real advantage for memory intensive virtualization. Other advantages include the amount of memory and number of available PCIe slots. The HP ProLiant BL490c G7 is capable of a maximum of 384GB of memory and offers two PCIe slots. The HP ProLiant DL585 G7 is capable of a maximum of 512GB of memory and offers 5 full height PCI3 slots – along with the ability to add another 6 if desired. In fact, in a review done by PC Pro magazine, the HP DL585 G7 was rated at five stars and noted as excelling at expansion. This translates into a server that can seamlessly scale to handle today’s demanding virtualization environments.

Right now the HP Proliant DL585 G7 has a top score on VMmark 2.1 charts – and more importantly offers superior value. We will keep a tab on new VMmark 2.1 scores and continue to do this type of real world evaluation.

If you are interested in reading a very good scalability study of Dell systems powered by AMD Opteron 2000 Series processors and AMD Opteron 6100 Series processors running VMmark 2.1 – check out the Exploring Generational Scaling with VMmark 2.1 on the VMware VAROOM! Blog.

And let me close by answering a question on everyone’s mind – can you compare this shiny new VMmark 2.1 score to VMware 1.1 scores? The answer is a resounding no – VMmark 2.1 is a horse of a different color.

Margaret Lewis (@margaretjlewis) is a Product Marketing Director at AMD. Her postings are her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

Pricing based on comparably equipped servers at HP online store as of 3/21 and 3/25/2011.

I believe talent has a lot to do with it, but most importantly it’s about hard work. My old basketball coach would say, “building a winning team begins with hard work, day one of practice, it’s not done in March. Hard work builds championships.”

I bridge this back to my day-to-day life as a Dell PowerEdge C Product Manager. Hard work can be defined in terms of understanding and listening to customers’ needs and pain points, the markets they serve, their workloads, and IT goals. Once this is understood, the hard work begins in building a complete portfolio of products that solves customers’ problems. To put it into basketball terms, our goal is to create championship products that benefit customers.

So here’s our winning line up, starting with the PowerEdge C6145 built for HPC workloads. John Wooden might consider the C6145 the “Kareem Abdul-Jabar” and centerpiece of the Dell dynasty. CRN wrote, “Dell has really outdone itself. On Tuesday, the company begins shipping a machine that the CRN Test Center can only describe as 2010 Server of the Year squared.” For customers looking to maximize compute, memory, and I/O density per rack for massively parallel applications, the Dell PowerEdge C6145 has the MVP-Most Valuable Performance.

The “Bobby Hurley” of the PowerEdge C portfolio, the PowerEdge C6105 is a 4-node 2U shared infrastructure 2-socket server providing the ideal balance of power, price and performance required for scale-out computing. Like Hurley, the C6105 isn’t flashy, but is dependable and gets the job done. Stretch your dollars and increase density while reducing energy use up to 29% over previous AMD processor generations. ¹

Rounding out the championship team is the PowerEdge C5125. The C5125 can be described as freshman sensation like “Kevin Durant”, it’s a game changer. Designed to help IT hosting and Web 2.0 companies achieve greater efficiencies in their data centers, Dell is introducing its third generation of microservers, the PowerEdge C5000 line, including the PowerEdge C5125. This new series of energy efficient microservers meets the unique demands for building out shared and cloud computing infrastructures by allowing applications to run on individual dedicated physical servers without compromising on price, power or density.

Each product has a focus and fit that is based on constant customer interaction and feedback. Hard work only pays off when it makes a difference for customers. The Dell/AMD portfolio has the right blend of performance, speed, accuracy, and focus to the win the Big Dance for our customers.

Build your IT Championship Team with the Dell/AMD PowerEdge C Portfolio.

Armando Acosta is Data Center Solutions Product Manager at Dell. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s or Dell’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD and Dell are not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied

¹The results above reflect SPECpower_ssj results for the best performing 2P servers using AMD Opteron processor models 4164 EE and 2419 EE published on www.spec.org as of March 16, 2011.. 126W and 409096 ssj_ops at 100% of target load and 2106 overall ssj_ops/watt using 2 x AMD Opteron processor Model 4164 EE vs. 178W and 406954 ssj_ops at 100% of target load and 1614 overall ssj_ops/watt using 2 x AMD Opteron™ processor Model 2419 EE.  SPEC and SPECpower are trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation.  For the latest SPECpower_sjj results, please visit www.spec.org.

WorldHostingDays is an annual event in Germany that covers the European hosting market, a market that is rapidly changing to meet the new realities of the cloud.  Cloud has such an impact on the hosting market, that the event changed from “WebHostingDay” from last year to its new name, reflecting that there is so much more than just web hosting that happens in the hosting business – and it takes more than a day to cover it all.

This week Dell introduced their new Dell PowerEdge^TM C5125, a 12-server dense chassis that I wrote about in an earlier blog.  I had an opportunity for some hands on time with this system and was even more impressed after seeing it live – quite an accomplishment to fit 12 servers into a 3U rack space.

I also had an opportunity to drop by the Rausch Netwerktechnik booth to see the new “Bigfoot” server and storage system.  This server is a bit larger, occupying 4U in a rack, but what it can deliver is truly amazing.  The chassis is divided into 2 different sections, the first holding up to 48 3TB hard drives, giving a total storage footprint of 144TB – all in one box.  But the more amazing part is that the other half of the chassis is occupied by a server motherboard.  Rausch offers several different choices of AMD Opteron™ processor-based motherboards, from as little as one AMD Opteron 4100 Series processor with four cores, to as many as four AMD Opteron 6100 Series processors for a full 48-core system.  So, whether you are configuring as a NAS and simply need a small amount of processing power to serve up storage, or whether you want to create a core-dense cloud platform that includes a large storage footprint and plenty of storage, this system will meet your needs.

My conversations with the hosting community were very straightforward.  The challenges that they face, especially with the onset of cloud computing, continue to be the need for more cores and more power efficiency, a combination that AMD excels in, delivering more cores per socket than anyone else in the x86 server business. And we do it with more power efficiency; today’s dense 12-core processors are in the same mainstream power band as yesterday’s 6-core processors.* As we move forward into the “Bulldozer” era later this year, the core count will go up to an amazing 16 cores, but the overall power and thermal footprint should stay the same – making for a very interesting back half of the year.

John Fruehe is the Director of Product Marketing for Server, Embedded and FireStream products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

*12-Core AMD Opteron™ processor Model 6100 Series and Six-Core AMD Opteron™ processor Model 2400 Series share the same mainstream power band at 115W thermal design power (TDP)

You’d think that having an upgradeable processor is not exciting to most customers, but there are a couple of things that really make this cool.

Upgradeability means that the current platforms that support AMD Opteron^TM 4100/6100 Series processors should be the same as the platforms that will support the new AMD Opteron processors that are based on the “Bulldozer” core.  (I say “should” because my lawyers always remind me that we make the processors, not the platforms so I can’t make statements for our partners….)

When we designed the current platform specifications we did so with “Bulldozer” in mind.  This means that platforms can have the same BIOS, drivers, and associated software, which helps greatly reduce the tasks around managing platforms based on the 2 different processors.

In addition, if partners get to utilize the same boards, the development time can be decreased so there is faster time to market.  And that is good news for customers.

Just to show you how easy it can be, we’ve put the following video together:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4v07kzah91A

Then again, if you do have a large cluster built on AMD Opteron 4100/6100 series processors and you do want to upgrade to “Bulldozer”, give me a call.

John Fruehe is the Director of Product Marketing for Server, Embedded and FireStream products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

Parallels, the host of the summit, is a very interesting virtualization company.  Founded in 1999, Parallels offers an innovative range of products that support all major PC platforms and operating systems covering both consumer and commercial segments. AMD’s intersection with Parallels has been on two fronts – servers and graphics. And if you stop by and visit us at booth #112 during the show you can check out our multi-core processor technology designed specifically for cloud environments, the AMD Opteron™ 4100 series processors – the perfect complement for the Parallels Virtuozzo Containers product. These processors feature energy-efficient innovations that make them one of the world’s lowest energy consuming x86 server processors per core.

And when optimal performance and VM density are the goals, the AMD Opteron 6100 Series processor delivers up to 12 cores per processor for an outstanding virtualization option. In fact, the AMD Opteron 6100 Series processor recently received an InfoWorld 2011 Technology of the Year award with its massive virtualization capabilities specifically noted.

You will also be able to see graphics virtualization technology from Parallels running with our AMD FirePro™ professional graphics products. Graphics virtualization is going to be another key discussion in the world of cloud computing this year.  AMD has partnered with Parallels to give high-end professional users the ability to finally get graphics acceleration in a virtual machine with Parallels^® Workstation 4.0 Extreme.  In other words, you can now get dedicated graphics within a VM with acceleration for all your professional engineering or digital content creation applications. In addition, as with all ATI and AMD FirePro graphics cards, this professional application is optimized and certified to provide one of the best and most reliable experiences demanded by users. With multiple cards in a single system you can achieve dedicated graphics acceleration with multiple virtual machines thereby helping to increase the efficient use of your hardware assets.

We’ll also be showing off AMD’s new ATI FirePro™ RG220 graphics card with Parallels Workstation Extreme. The ATI FirePro RG220 is a full performance graphics accelerator plus IP transmission card.  This combination enables remote graphics output with the PCoIP protocol over any LAN or WAN to a zero thin client device. So for those VDI sessions with complex graphics requirements you can now provide a dedicated, graphics accelerated, VM in the datacenter that is available to any user across the network.

I will be delivering a presentation at the summit on Thursday at 1:30 p.m. that will dig a little deeper into AMD FirePro™ and AMD Opteron™ processor server technology for the cloud.  And, as an added incentive, I’ll be giving away an ATI FirePro V5800 Professional Graphics Card immediately after the presentation.

And if that isn’t enough, while you’re at the booth don’t forget to register to win an HP ProBook 6555b laptop which we’ll also be giving away at the end of the show.

Hope to see you there.

Tim Mueting is a Product Marketing Manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

Let’s start with performance. The PowerEdge C6145 is one of the highest performing 2U servers on the planet.  It’s not hard to understand why. The C6145 houses 2x 4socket servers in a 2U space. Loaded with AMD Opteron™ 6100 Series processors, this server’s core count is a whopping 96.  The combination of core density and power efficiency provided by the Opteron processors is impressive. (Additionally, this server contains 12 x 3.5” and 24 x 2.5” hard disk drives and 10 total PCIe slots all gently nestled into the 2U form factor you know and love).

How did we do it? Dell Data Center Solutions listened carefully to customers with HPC clusters, render farms, and consolidated cloud infrastructure to shape the product to meet their specific needs.  Their requests were what you might expect:

• Make my workload as efficient as possible and help me maximize performance per watt per dollar
• Help me meet the increasingly aggressive demands of workloads for  compute and I/O
• Help me maximize compute and I/O per rack U to make  data center real estate efficient as possible
• My data continues to get more complex and computing data sets are taking too long, so I need a lot of cores with I/O scalability to speed my time of results.

So what can Dell customers expect with this new product? Well let’s just say they won’t take a bite and put it back in the box. For starters, with shared chassis, fans and power supplies, customers can save as much as 50% on port costs, cabling, and data center real estate.  Moreover,  we expect that with the PowerEdge C6145, our customers will achieve a huge performance per watt per dollar advantage over competing products in the marketplace.

This Valentine’s Day as you look across the candle lit table, start thinking about your own Dell PowerEdge C6145.  Oh, and if you sample a chocolate make sure you eat the whole thing, you won’t be disappointed.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBxny9OnBCU

Armando Acosta is Data Center Solutions Product Manager at Dell. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s or Dell’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD and Dell are not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.