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.

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.

The world of cloud computing got a wake-up call recently when Vivek Kundra, the Chief Information Officer for the U.S. Federal Government, announced his “Cloud First” policy requiring federal agencies to identify at least three in-house IT functions they could migrate to the cloud, and then move at least one of those services to a cloud provider (either private or government) within the next year.  

When the announcement was made, the government and vendor IT community started scrambling to prepare for the migration this year, as well as greater demand for cloud services in years to come.  Many government agencies, including NASA, Department of the Army, and the Securities and Exchange Commission, are ahead of the game having already adopted cloud services.*  Some have been firmly in the “let’s wait and see” camp.  Those agencies are now working quickly to put a strategy in place. 

As part of the announcement, Kundra also set an aggressive target of closing more than 800 of the 2,100 data centers the federal government currently operates over the next four years.  This creates additional pressure for agencies to move to the cloud and significantly improve the efficiency of the remaining facilities through virtualization, higher core counts, greater density, and other best practices.

According to Kundra’s 2011 Federal Cloud Computing Strategy, the plan is designed to reign in the federal government’s $80 billion annual IT budget (not including the electric bill!).  It’s also validation of the considerable benefits of outsourcing certain IT functions using a public, private, or hybrid approach to the cloud.

Like private sector businesses, government and education institutions are attracted to the flexibility, economies of scale, mobility and service oriented features cloud services can provide.  Yes, they may also share concerns about the loss of control, security, interoperability, and other issues, but those concerns begin to fade as one learns more about the different cloud service models, enhanced security, redundancy, performance and operational features that are available.  In fact, many public sector agencies are opting to operate their own private cloud as a way to maintain full control of their operations.  Others are adopting a hybrid approach that allows them to keep their most sensitive services and data in their own private cloud operation and outsource less sensitive operations to qualified public cloud providers.

We’re excited at AMD because our products are particularly well positioned for the cloud. True, we’ve been a processor of choice for major cloud vendors and date center operators for years.  And now we are poised for significant growth because our products offer an optimal mix of the features that matter for the cloud: performance, virtualization optimization, energy efficiency, security and value.  We also offer a broad portfolio of platforms to fit and scale for cloud implementations of any size.  And it just so happens that public sector IT managers tell us that is exactly what they are looking for as they begin their migration to the cloud.

For more information on AMD and cloud computing, read the white paper: Understanding Architectural Priorities Inside Government Clouds.

Attend this webinar and hear industry experts from AMD and HP discuss best practices and common mistakes to avoid when adopting cloud computing and other virtual technologies into your infrastructure: http://gcn.com/webcasts/2011/02/amd-building-a-cloud-computing-infrastructure-022211.aspx?tc=page0

Steve Kester is the Director of U.S. Government Affairs 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.

* State of Public Sector Cloud Computing, May, 2010 – Office of the U.S. Chief Information Officer -  http://www.cio.gov/pages.cfm/page/STate-of-Public-Sector-Cloud-Computing

With that in mind, NYSERDA, AMD, New York State, HP and GLOBALFOUNDRIES have all come together to address these issues head on, discussing them at the latest NY State Performance Computing Seminar on October 28.

The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), in collaboration with  AMD, have been instrumental in driving sustainable computing and business practices in New York.  Improvements in operating practices, coupled with installation of energy efficient systems, can enable significant energy savings and help reduce the strain information technology and data centers place on the electric grid while helping to ensure a reliable and affordable supply of electricity.  In addition, by improving the energy efficiency of data centers and working in synergy with NYSERDA and AMD, New York State and its IT businesses and data centers can make considerable strides toward achieving their respective energy and environmental goals, while supporting economic development in this growing industry.  More importantly, investments in energy efficient systems can help improve a data centers’ bottom line. 

NYSERDA’s Industrial and Process Efficiency program plans to invest more than $100 million over the next three years in new and existing manufacturing and data center facilities that help reduce energy consumption.  These funds can encourage sustainable load growth and help to significantly reduce the use of electricity and natural gas. 

For more information, visit www.nyserda.org

Sal Graven is a Technical Information Associate at the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA)

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.

Sun understands our customers’ increased focus on the economics of their data centers as well as their desire to reduce overall complexity.  Sun’s enhanced line of x64 servers and blades will take advantage of the greater performance, virtualization capabilities, and energy efficiency technologies powered by the Six-Core AMD Opteron processor.  Sun systems powered by AMD’s newest processor will deliver up to 50 percent performance improvements compared to previous generation systems, giving our customers the performance and efficiency to handle demanding workloads with superior economics and energy efficiency.

Ready to scale with a single, consistent platform that spans from 2P to 8P servers, Sun’s x64 systems offer many choices for customers to realize breakthrough performance and unmatched virtualization capabilities, for enterprise and web applications, while supporting multiple operating systems . And with AMD Virtualization™ (AMD-V™) technology, the Six-Core AMD Opteron processor delivers greater virtual machine bandwidth than ever before.

Sun is committed to continued innovation along our x64 roadmap  Companies small, medium and large are turning to Sun to quickly and easily upgrade, consolidate and virtualize their data centers to drive the overall efficiency and cost improvements their businesses demand.

As we optimize our new line of Sun x64 systems for the marketplace, stay tuned for more details on availability and pricing. Sun’s enhanced product lines and unique approach to Open Network Systems helps maximize the economics of computing by delivering maximum scale, efficiency, manageability, performance and sustainability. For more information, please visit www.sun.com/x64/amd today.

Dimitrios Dovas is Director of Systems Marketing, x64 Volume Systems at Sun. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Any claims made herein are based on Sun testing and have not been independently verified by AMD. 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.

Since the question was raised – I have reconfigured the VMmark systems as of May 6, 2009. I have listed valid memory configurations for the systems that match the total amount of memory used in the VMmark benchmark.

 * All cost comparisons are based on the difference in total system cost of the Intel processor-based system corresponding to the VMmark scores noted above, compared to the total cost for the AMD Opteron™ processor-based system referred to in the corresponding section of the above chart.  Prices are based on configurations submitted on OEM (Dell and HP) online system configuration tools as of May 7, 2009. 

 Now instead of focusing on who wins – AMD or Intel – let’s focus on details that are probably more important to customers who are really using these systems. As is shown in the chart above, with systems based on the AMD Opteron™ processor Model 2384, there are more options of memory speeds and DIMM configurations when purchasing 64GB of memory. This provides the ability to choose in terms of system price or performance.  I think this kind of choice puts the customer in the winner seat.

For another look at system configurations and pricing I suggest you go to the Solutions Oriented Blog. 

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.

Take a look at the server market today; 70% of the volume is in the dual socket space[i].  And it’s growing. Willie Sutton was once quoted (incorrectly) with saying that he robbed banks because “that’s where the money is at.” So why are we driving so hard in the two socket space?  Because that’s where the volume is at.  And you can quote me, correctly, on that one.

With our recent server roadmap update announcement, we are introducing the world to a new strategy for addressing the 2P market – G34 platforms on the high end, and C32 on the low end.  Hi-low.  It’s a big enough market that you would have to be crazy to think that it can’t be addressed by two different platforms.  Two different platforms that are more the same than fraternal twins, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

Think for a moment about where the 2P market is going. In the past few years we have been adding more cores, more expandability and more RAS features to our products – because customers have been demanding it for virtualization and other resource-hungry applications. But at the same time, a new class of application need is being driven by the low end.  Cloud computing, the growth of SMB applications and sprawling network infrastructure are creating a demand for lower power and lower priced, reliable servers.  The same density and business needs that drove AMD to add the AMD Opteron™ EE processors to our product line are driving a new platform that we expect will give you everything you need for most applications, but at a low cost, with very low power consumption.

G34 platforms, under the platform name of “Maranello”, are designed for expandability and performance. We plan to offer four memory channels per socket and 8 or 12 core processors perfectly suited to handle the most demanding 2P environments.  As an added bonus, these processors and platforms are expected to be able to scale easily to 4P. No longer will you have different models to choose from (2000 or 8000), we expect the new G34 processors to be able to easily handle both markets, simplifying the lives of those building servers as well as those maintaining servers.

C32 platforms, which we plan to bring to market under the platform name “San Marino”, are designed for the needs of the other half of the stack.  Scaling 1P and 2P solutions, the two memory channels and 4 or 6 cores are planned to perfectly match the hundreds of thousands of applications where 12 cores and 4 memory channels may be overkill.  Especially when it comes to electricity.  These processors sip electricity, they don’t gulp it.  They deliver the right level of performance for small/medium businesses, for cloud environments, and for network infrastructure needs. By utilizing a simple design, with fewer memory channels, AMD expects to deliver a relatively lower infrastructure cost.  And with planned power envelopes below the total range of current AMD Opteron processors, we expect that fewer fans, smaller heatsinks and smaller power supplies can help you achieve greater energy efficiency, lower noise, and of course lower cost.

So what about that twins comment?  What do these processors have in common?  Plenty.  They are expected to utilize the same core.  The same chipset design.  The same BIOS base.  We expect the C32 designs to be able to span 1P to 2P and G34 to span 2P to 4P.  They overlap is at that “meat of the market” intersection where the highest volumes live, for plenty of coverage in all directions. We expect that as a system designer, it will be a trivial feat to take a C32 design and change it to G34.  More commonality across a vendor’s products is a good thing.  As a customer this can help you drive down your long term cost of management.

Of course the question “so, you’re abandoning the 1P and 4P space” naturally comes up.  Nothing is further from the truth.  The C32 is expected to allow for a much more flexible 1P.  Low cost and simplicity to meet the needs of the 1P market, but with scale up capabilities to take it to 2P. Think of it as 1P on steroids (the good kind, not the baseball kind).

And 4P?  What can help turn the tide in a market that is slowly being encroached by 2P?  How about a platform that combines the best of both and allows a company to deliver a low-cost entry-level 4P server?  Talk about breathing new life into a market that sorely needs to adjust to the new realities of business in the post Y2K work. The time is right for this hybrid approach.

We’re very excited about how we plan to help our technology partners bring these new designs to market.  Without naming names, let’s just say that there is a renewed enthusiasm amongst our industry partners who have made comments about this truly being “game changing.” One even likened this strategy to the launch of the original AMD Opteron processor, an event arguably that did more to change the dynamics of the x86 server market than anything else.

We’ve laid our cards on the table now, and it it’s clear that in 2010, we expect AMD to be holding the winning hand. Let the games begin.

John Fruehe is the Director of Business Development for Server/Workstation products 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.

First, a short bit on VMmark . VMmark is a consolidation benchmark that generates an aggregate score of individual VMs for a given number of tiles. A tile is six VMs running common load-generation tools that represent typical workloads: web server, file server, mail server, database, java server as well as an idle VM. One client computer is used to generate the load for one tile.

Looking at top VMmark scores you find systems that can run over 100 VMs per server. And there is a lot of chatter about how a 2 Socket Intel Xeon “Gainestown” processor-based server can run 16 tiles (or 96 VMs). However, there is no reference to the cost of the systems posting scores. VMmark documents the system configuration for the benchmark so you can take a stab at pricing these configurations on-line at the hardware vendor sites. (See slides 3 and 4 of presentation) In doing so we found that some of the top VMmark Intel Xeon “Gainestown” processor-based server configurations price out at about 175% and in some cases even higher than the top performing AMD Opteron™ processor (“Shanghai”) configurations (based on April 16, 2009 prices). Even in the performance-oriented high performance computing world this would turn heads. Cost does matter.

Going a step further, we now have the information to evaluate the price/performance of some of these systems by taking the estimated system cost and dividing it by number of VMs achieved during the VMmark run. While large number of VMs might be impressive – most IT professionals in today’s economy are focused on balancing performance and price—looking at the cost per VM helps to better understand the cost of putting the system in action. What you find is the system with the top VMmark score is not the system that gives you the best cost per VM.

Now that we have looked at the VMmark systems configurations, what type of virtualization configurations are customers really running? When looking at customer case studies posted on hardware and software vendors’ sites we find servers configurations ranging from 16GB to 64G of memory as more of the norm. We also don’t find many data centers pushing 100 VMs on a system. Responses to SearchDataCenter.com’s 2008 Purchasing Intentions Survey reveals that only 5% of respondents are running more than 25 VMs on a server – 61% are running less than 10 VMs per server and 33% are running 10 to 25 VMs per server. And since many customers are implementing virtualization as a cost saving strategy – we don’t see many of these customers buying the top bin “performance” processor models, which by design tend to consume the most power.

We did the pricing on systems configurations using energy efficient processors and more typical memory configurations for virtualization (again based on April 16, 2009 pricing), comparing both system pricing and cost per VMs (see slide 5 of presentation). Take a look for yourself. We think you will agree considering performance and price can give you a better view of its overall value.

So the question remains: how do *you* define “simply spectacular” virtualization? Is it in terms of raw performance or is it price/performance? Hopefully after reading this post, you have a different answer than when you started.

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.

Have you ever seen one of those movies where the heroes realize that they don’t have enough fuel to make it to their destination? In the mad panic they start throwing everything out of the vehicle to try to lighten up the load so they can get better fuel efficiency and hopefully make it to the finish line.

Yes, some people actually approach processor design that way. They build a big, fat die, and then as an afterthought, to get any efficient processor, they “dumb down” the design. Strip out features. Restrict the performance. Reduce the capabilities.

We don’t do this.

The new AMD Opteron EE processors have all the features and capabilities of our other processors. As a matter of fact, if you were to run the same benchmark on the 2.3GHz standard power, 2.3GHz HE and 2.3GHz EE, they will all perform exactly the same; except at the wall.

The HE will draw less power that the standard and the EE will draw even less than the HE.

How do we drive such low energy consumption without compromising features? It’s in the genes. A great silicon design, combined with a very well-behaved 45nm process allows us to yield enough ultra-efficient EE parts that we can build a business on it.

If you are counting the watts in your data center, here are 2 numbers to keep in mind:  185 and 115.  In testing at AMD, a 2P server platform with EE processors idled at an amazing 115 watts of power.  And at full 100% load, it only hit 185 watts.  So if you were building a 42U rack with 42 of these 1U servers, your total power budget would be under 8KW.  Typically the customers I talk to these days are worried about 10-12KW loads per rack in their data center, and often they aren’t loaded floor to ceiling with servers because they max out their power load.  These new processors change the game – dramatically.

So where will you see these processors?  Take a look up into the clouds.

Typically 2P 2U servers, the “bread and butter” of the data center, use the high performance SE and standard power bands.  Dense 1U rack servers take advantage of the low power HE processors.  And ultra-dense environments, like cloud computing and web hosting, tend to have multiple system boards in a single chassis, so the extremely efficient EE processor is a good match.  These environments often have custom systems engineered rather than buying “off the shelf” systems, so you’ll see EE processors more in these custom designs than in stock configurations.

The genes of the Shanghai processor – highly optimized for energy efficiency, as well as outstanding performance – and careful nurturing in a state of the art 45nm fab, combine to give AMD a significant advantage when delivering low power performance to the data center.

So don’t look for what isn’t in there to figure out how we are driving such an efficient design, look at what IS in there, a pedigree with a long history of efficient design.  And nothing taken out; no compromises, the way it should be.

John Fruehe is the Director of Business Development for Server/Workstation products 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.

Having been around IT planning teams for the past 15 years, hearing any ROI statistic always sets my radar off.  This is no exception.  To me, this claim feels very unusual and there are only 2 explanations that I can think of; Either they are trying to oversimplify a very complex calculation by only looking at one factor (power); or they simply don’t understand the complexity of enterprise applications.  Either way they risk doing a major disservice to customers.

The argument that a company can pay off the investment in a new multi-core server by retiring 9 older single core ones is akin to buying a new hybrid car and raving about how much money you are saving every time you fill the tank, ignoring that you had to purchase a car in the process. Return on investment should encompass all of the costs of a solution; otherwise it risks overstating the return.

Let’s take a look at retiring 9 single core servers by consolidating them down to one multi-core server. Simplistically you are going to incur the following costs:

·         Consolidation prep – you have to actually do all of the planning and prototyping of the system, mapping data, etc., this is not a simple “copy and paste” exercise. Let’s not forget the data center planning piece of this exercise.  You are going to have to remove all of the systems and install a new one.

·         Migration of the data – this includes the actual movement of the data.  Maybe you get lucky because all 9 servers magically had the exact same data structures and can all coexist happily with each other.  Or not.  I’m going to bet on “not”, I’ve seen enough of these projects.

·         Security – You had 9 separate servers with 9 separate ACLs or security profiles set up to manage who could – and more importantly – could not access the data.  Whenever you start consolidation of systems, it is important to make sure that the Marketing Department can’t see the Payroll Department’s files.

·         Testing – once you have the new servers in the rack, you don’t actually just flip a switch. You are going to have to touch all the applications that touch that server.  Including middleware, backup, security, and network infrastructure.  One incorrect MAC address can result in a bunch of troubleshooting if you can’t quickly diagnose the problem.

·         Unplanned consequences – Did you ever add a new user and find another suddenly can’t print?  Most project managers I’ve worked with include some measure of “overage” to the project to help compensate for having to track down the “stragglers” of any project.

·         Licensing changes – Well, 9 servers running 9 copies of the old program might be a sunk cost in ROI, but I am betting that as you consolidate these servers you may end up needing to upgrade to the newest version of the software in order to handle the complexity of the new environment.

·         Disposal – you will need to get rid of the old systems, let’s not forget that you can’t just leave them in the dumpster (don’t forget to take the time to truly destroy the hard drives…)

And this is all just the tip of the iceberg, I’m sure that each one of you can provide your own list of hidden costs in trying to do a project. There is a human cost, and with the typical cost of ~$65/hour (the fully burdened cost estimate from the last project I worked on a few years ago) the human costs will likely dwarf the hardware purchase. If you don’t comprehend these costs, you can’t accurately assess ROI.

I’m not naïve in thinking that projects like this happen every day.  But it is a bit naïve to think that power costs alone can determine ROI.

Looking at the typical server deployment, you can rest assured that the hardware is the lowest cost of the project by far.  So if you want to do yourself a favor, don’t let your company fall for the “pays for itself in 8 months” hype that’s out there – do your own research and get the full story with all the costs revealed.  Otherwise you’ll be the one explaining things to the CFO.

John Fruehe is the Director of Business Development for Server/Workstation products 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.