Posts tagged with HP
Energy Efficiency Globally Must Start Locally
Posted by Guest Blogger in 2:02 pm
(3 votes, average: 4.33 out of 5)
Loading ...New York State is currently facing some difficult challenges including rising energy prices, an aging electricity delivery infrastructure, an imbalanced electricity generation portfolio and climate change. According to a 2007 EPA study conducted by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and sponsored by AMD, New York’s data centers – home to second largest concentration of data centers in the country – consume an average 4.5 billion kilowatt hours a year. This is the equivalent of nearly 700,000 single family homes with a year’s supply of electricity — at a cost of roughly $594 million. To meet these challenges, energy efficiency must play a central role in reducing consumption and improving reliability.
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.
Master of My Domain
Posted by John Fruehe in 4:08 pm
Recently I blogged about AMD OpteronTM processors in the world’s largest supercomputers. But what about the other end of the spectrum?
Like many of you, I have a second job as the network administrator for a small network – at home. The pay is non-existent but the working conditions are flexible. We all come home from our jobs, and as the de facto technical person in the house, it is my responsibility to keep it all running.
Over time I have managed to assign 16 different IP addresses on my home network. Consolidating print services on to a NAS allowed me to retire one print server this weekend, simplicity reigns supreme. When everything runs fine, it is a well oiled machine; but it generally always chooses the day I have just left for Asia to come tumbling down.
Here is what I grapple with when I get home at night:
The complexity of the network has grown over the years. The first server was NetWare 3.11, followed by Windows NT Server. Eventually it simply became Windows Vista on the server, again, in the need for simplicity and commonality with the other OS’s (and not needing an enterprise-class OS at home.)
What I have noticed about the network is that everything is purpose-driven. There isn’t anything that has just been added for the heck of it. I scrutinize IT purchases just like you, because they add complexity to my life.
Commonality is really important. The 2 NAS devices (one for data, one as a mirror backup) are identical models with the same drive models. Disaster recovery is simply changing the IP from the primary to the secondary.
I shoot for commonality on the motherboards so that when I have to update drivers, I can take care of all of those chores at one time. It’s funny that I talk to customers all the time who talk about the importance of commonality in their data centers, and even on a personal level, on a home network, it makes sense. They love the commonality of the platforms based on AMD OpteronTM processors and I can see why. Being able to count on the same driver to update different generations of AMD-based servers is a huge reduction in the amount of time spent managing the update process.
This past weekend I decided to build up another system and load Windows Home Server to see how the experience was. Deploying a new server, especially one with a new technology is always a challenge.
I am adding this server because I want to be able to allow my wife to have a universal file storage – with remote file editing (without having to deal with “upload/download.”) If I can figure out how to enable this functionality on the current system, then I would probably want to consolidate some of the functions with an HP MediaSmart Server because I really love that compact form factor.
Working with the WHS software presented an interesting challenge when it came to power consumption. The software is based on Windows Server 2003 but it was not very clear which drivers you need for power savings. I have the whole system around 45W in idle (where is sits most of the day), which is probably about $.10 a day in power (it consumes roughly a kilowatt hour and we pay ~$.10/KwH here in Austin). While that might not seem like a lot, consolidating down to the HP system would hopefully drop the consumption even more.
Walking around the house with a power meter, and doing some quick math, it looks like the network is drawing ~$10/month in power (based on that rough estimate of $.10/KwH). Sleep mode helps cut that number down a bit, but don’t let it fool you, even when sleeping, devices are pulling power.
The lessons I learned this weekend probably sound very similar to what you deal with:
1. Commonality is good
2. Consolidation reduces your management tasks
3. Software is never as easy as it appears
4. Power efficiency is very critical
Hopefully, by spending some time with WHS I can build the application that I need and then can consolidate some of the functions down to 1 box. Ah, the life of a network administrator.
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.
That Five-letter Dirty Word
Posted by John Fruehe in 9:24 am
Value. There, I said it. Someone once threatened to wash my PowerPoint slides out with soap for using it.
But customers care about it. Today, more than ever; but even in the crazy dot-com 90’s, people still gravitated to value. Who doesn’t want to get the best value for their IT investments? In the business world, people just don’t burn money; it never makes sense.
On the consumer side, people sometimes associate “value” with “cheap.” But that might be because consumers tend to buy one computer at a time. They research the purchase, they obsess, they compare. Nobody wants to go “cheap” because it is their one shot for the next few years.
However, in the enterprise world, server purchases are a constant fact of life, not a single point in time. Most companies, even in today’s environment, continue to deploy servers and look for the best value that they can get, usually with a price/performance or performance/watt metric. Rarely is the decision made just on raw performance.
I have been a critic of performance benchmarks as much as I have been a fan of them. One of the problems that we see in so many benchmarks is that they fail to comprehend the value of the solution – they only measure one vector. Typically that is raw performance.
Take VMmark for instance. If you take the results at face value, it shows you the approximate performance of different systems. But, it is showing the performance for a specific configuration. Perhaps a configuration that you may never actually deploy in real life.
We recently introduced our new Six-Core AMD Opteron™ processors, and along with those processors there were several new benchmark results introduced, including a VMmark benchmark.
Just looking at the raw benchmarks, one might conclude that a 2P Nehalem-based system is going to be a better choice because of the higher performance. However, Collin MacMillan points out in his Solution Oriented Blog that if you look at only one vector, raw performance, then you might miss the big picture. The reason is that, depending on configuration, the Six-Core AMD Opteron processor-based HP DL385 can be priced almost 2/3 less than the Nehalem-based HP DL380 server.
Just over one third of the cost. That is just stunning. Especially when you consider that the typical customer may be loading 5-10 virtual machines on a single 2P server.
Maybe I am going out on a limb here, but if I was trying to justify a virtualization project, I think that telling the CIO to replace 5-10 physical servers with a single server that costs nearly 3X as much as a competing product is simply a losing proposition.
My colleague, Margaret Lewis, takes a closer look at configurations and pricing of Six-Core AMD Opteron processor-based systems (“Istanbul”) and Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor-based systems (“Gainestown”) that have posted top VMmark scores.
In the enterprise world, value might not have the same stigma that it has in the consumer world, and that is why enterprise customers don’t seem to be afraid of it.
When you are lining expensive data centers with row after row of computing devices, someone is bound to ask you what all this is costing and where is the benefit. If you are buying servers based on our new Six-Core AMD Opteron processors you can rest assured that you are filling your data centers with a superior value – and that speaks volumes.
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.
A Million Reasons Why
Posted by John Fruehe in 9:40 am
Do you need a proof point for how the AMD Direct Connect architecture can help your business scale? I’ll give you a million. Well, 1, 009,384 to be exact.
This week, Fusion-io, a leading provider of enterprise-class solid state technology, announced a major milestone. You may already be familiar with the ProLiant DL785, the 8-processor powerhouse server from HP, which features eight AMD Opteron™ processors. Fusion-io reports it was able to pump out an astonishing performance level, more than 1 million IOPS using the fio benchmark. They also claim sustained throughput was over 9GB, or roughly the capacity of two DVDs, per second.
In the past, when you talked about the million IOPS performance level, you were always talking about mainframe-class systems. Today, we are talking about industry-standard x86 servers.
The HP DL875 takes the AMD Direct Connect architecture to new levels, providing the high end systems expertise to bring enterprise-class database and virtualization to x86 levels of value. With 8 processors and up 512GB of memory, this system provides the scalability and capacity for even the most demanding workloads.
Fusion-io uses NAND flash memory in PCI Express slots to help bring data as close to the processors as possible, helping reduce latency and helping drive up the IO throughput per second. HP also utilizes the Fusion-io technology in its BladeSystem products through a product called the HP StorageWorks IO Accelerator. Each BladeSystem server can support 2 or 3 of these IO accelerator cards to help drive greater performance while also helping hold power consumption down.
Yes, power consumption. And before you start thinking that power consumption and 8 processor servers don’t generally correlate well, keep in mind that the larger the server footprint is, the more energy efficiency comes into play, helping hold down the power budget for the rack.
So what does this mean to you? Several things.
As a Fusion-io customer it means that you can utilize state of the art solid state technology to break through the traditional system bottlenecks and reach entirely new levels of I/O throughput.
As an HP customer it means that you have platforms that can handle your most demanding enterprise applications. And you can be confident that the engineering know-how that helped reach this unprecedented level of performance in an 8P system also helps drive outstanding levels of performance in the ProLiant BladeSystems as well.
As an AMD customer, you know it means that the AMD Direct Connect architecture is scalable enough to handle any of your workloads with exception I/O throughput through our use of the industry-standard HyperTransport™ technology.
And, as a customer or Fusion-io, HP and AMD, you can smile, confident in knowing that the combination of these potent technologies and platforms is delivering just what you need to solve today’s business challenges.
You’ve got a reason to smile, or, more accurately, a million reasons to smile.
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.
Don’t Be Fooled (Again)
Posted by Margaret Lewis in 12:17 pm
As April Fools’ Day approaches, I remember Pavlov’s dog and just how conditioned we all can be – particularly in terms of technology. Swap the “n” and “m” keys on someone’s keyboard or change the language setting on your friend’s Internet browser and see how long it takes your victim to figure out exactly what has happened. These changes are hard to catch because the assumptions you make when you sit at your computer – the location of keys or language settings of your software – aren’t meshing with reality. You have to challenge the validity of your assumptions before you can fully comprehend the situation.
If someone asked you to identify the top performing and most energy efficient server processors that have been shipping for the last four months – what would you say? If you answered Intel “Harpertown” or “Nehalem” processors you would be wrong. The 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processor (code name “Shanghai”) has been shipping since November 2008, and has steadily gained solid marks in a variety of benchmarks, application performance evaluations, and power comparisons. More importantly, it’s gained the accolades of end customers who deploy AMD-based servers and rely not only on its performance, but on its energy saving properties and ease of management. Once again, assumptions and reality don’t always mesh.
Now you can accuse me of being an AMD “fanboy,” but the facts, not hype, support my position. Take a look at a couple of recent articles in Ars Technica and InfoWorld that make the same case I just did for “Shanghai” using third party performance and power evaluations.
One area where the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor really shines is virtualization. Currently the AMD-based Sun Fire X4600 MS server holds the record for the most virtual machines (114) on a server with VMware’s VMmark test running with VMware ESX 3.5U3, the currently shipping version of this hypervisor. A demo video posted on YouTube showcases the ability to perform a live migration between all generations of Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors with VMware ESX 3.5U3 – even our new 6-core “Istanbul” product which is due to release in the second half of 2009. John Troyer from VMware’s VMTN Blog was a guest on the AMD Virtualization blog and he showcased the combined benefit of AMD-V™ Rapid Virtualization Indexing and VMware ESX 3.5 for scaling a web serving environment on a HP ProLiant DL585 G5 server running theSPECweb2005 benchmark with Apache web serving software. Now that’s a mouthful, but it’s a real-world scenario that could easily be taking place in enterprise data centers today.
Let’s add another dose of reality. According to the survey by Enterprise Strategy Group the average number of virtual machines per physical server is between 5 and 10 – a far cry from the record 114. Live migration, such as VMware’s VMotion, is a much in demand feature but it requires a specialized infrastructure and does not support heterogeneous (AMD and Intel) processor environments. And while VMmark and SPECweb2005 benchmarks provide a way to evaluate performance aspects of servers, they don’t take into consideration what are perhaps the two major decision factors for most IT groups – the cost of the system and its power consumption. These realities don’t make the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor any less of a virtualization powerhouse – but it does show you what happens when you go beyond easy assumptions. As technology providers we should have an obligation to provide you with both “hype” and facts.
The server industry is on the cusp of a huge hype cycle that will go on for the next few weeks and you will be pounded with information meant to drive buying decisions solely based on assumptions. My advice – let’s not be fooled into making decisions based on automatic conditioning. Otherwise we night end up with many errors we need to correct.
Margaret Lewis 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.