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Roundup: New Intel Xeon 5600 Processors
March 18th, 2010 : John Rath
Boyd Davis, director of marketing Of Intel's Data Center Group, holds up an Intel Xeon 5600 processor
On Tuesday Intel (INTC) launched the Xeon 5600 series processor, blending security, performance and energy efficiency that the company says can significantly improve the economics of data center operations. Intel says one 5600 processor can replace 15 single-core servers, deliver 60 percent better performance than the Xeon 5500 and achieve a return on investment in as little as five months.
The introduction of the 5600 marks the next step in the transition to the Intel 32-nanometer processors, formerly code-named Westmere. The 32nm logic technology uses Intel’s second generation high-k metal gate transistors to increase speed and decrease energy consumption. Processors within the Xeon 5600 family range from a four core L5609 at 1.8GHz all the way up to a six core X5680 running a 3.33GHz. All chips have 12MB of L3 cache regardless of core count.
“The performance of the Intel Xeon processor 5600 series is so compelling that it’s absolutely justifiable immediately in terms of ROI, to simply replace Legacy service, a whole rack of servers, or whatever it happens to be with a single platform,” said Simon Crosby, CTO, Data Center & Cloud, Citrix Systems said. “We did it ourselves for our own IT workloads and reduced 264 servers to 16 and in the process got high availability and agility as a result.”
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Roundup: SGI, Level 3, Gartner
March 17th, 2010 : John RathHere’s a roundup of some of some of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:
SGI unveils Origin 400 Blade System. SGI announced the availability of Origin 400, an integrated workgroup blade system that features compute and storage area network (SAN) storage functionality. Targeting enterprise verticals such as healthcare, education and local government, the new blade system has extensive software certifications, including VMware, Linux, SAP, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server. In a 6u enclosure the Origin 400 can scale to six dual-socket compute blades and 14 2.5″ SAS hard drives. It also supports the new Intel Xeon processor 5600 series with up to 72 cores per system. “SGI’s new Origin 400 offering will not only help SGI expand further into the business computing market, but will be vital for resellers that serve small- to medium-sized enterprise markets,” said Jed Scaramella, senior research analyst, servers at IDC.
Level 3 Expansion of Switched Ethernet footprint. Level 3 (LVLT) announced delivery of a significant phase within its Ethernet Expansion Program. Level 3 will expand the number of Ethernet switches on its U.S. network by almost 400 percent. “This expanded architecture enables Level 3 to address a significantly broader set of enterprise and wholesale customer requirements for Ethernet services, said Sureel Choksi, chief marketing officer for Level 3. Level 3 will also make additional feature enhancements that will expand the company’s already comprehensive Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF)-certified Carrier Ethernet services portfolio.
Gartner’s Take on Data Center Networks. Gartner issued a press release Tuesday advising users to not assume that a single converged data center network is more efficient than two well-designed separate networks. Their research shows that a converged network requires more switches and ports, is more complex to manage and consumes more power and cooling than two well-designed separate networks. Joe Skorupa, research vice president at Gartner states “alternatively described as Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), Data Center Ethernet (DCE), or more precisely, Data Center Bridging (DCB), this latest set of developments hopes to succeed where InfiniBand failed in its bid to unify computing, networking and storage networks.” He continues the argument by saying that “while the promise that a unified fabric will require fewer switches and ports, resulting in a simpler network that consumes less power and cooling, may go unfulfilled, that doesn’t mean that enterprises should forgo the benefits of a unified network technology.” Additional information on this research is available in the report “Myth: A Single FCoE Data Center Network = Fewer Ports, Less Complexity and Lower Costs.”
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Liquid Computing Winding Down
March 1st, 2010 : Rich MillerServer vendor Liquid Computing is out of money and will wind down its business, the company’s chairman tells the Ottawa Citizen. The company historically specialized in the high performance computing market, but shifted its focus last year to try to sell to a broader market.
“We thought we were in position for a new round of funding but two of our three major investors were unable to contribute,” Liquid chairman Adam Chowaniec told the Citizen. “We have no alternative, but to start winding down the company to preserve as much of the intellectual property as possible.”
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Verari Sold, Driggers Back as CEO
January 17th, 2010 : Rich Miller
High performance computing specialist Verari is regrouping after a team led by company co-founder Dave Driggers prevailed in an auction of the company’s assets. On Dec. 11 Verari halted most operations and laid off most of its staff, and its assets were placed for sale in an auction run by Credit Management Association. The company never filed for bankruptcy protection, but instead sold its assets through a process known as Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors, with Silicon Valley Bank as the largest creditor.Driggers was CEO of Verari until 2006, when David Wright came from EMC Corp. to take over the CEO position and Driggers became Chief Technology Officer. When Verari was placed for sale, Driggers assembled a bid, and last week InsideHPC reported that he had won the bidding. Late last week the management page on the Verari web site was updated to list Driggers as the chairman and CEO.
What’s the plan for Verari and its technology? Is Driggers’ interest focused primarily on servers and blades, or will the “new Verari” also pursue the data center container business, where Verari offered the FOREST container? Sources tell us additional details may be released early this week.
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How Many Servers Can One Admin Manage?
December 30th, 2009 : Rich MillerThere’s a discussion today at Slashdot about how many servers or users an admin can manage. The question seeks to establish whether a department in which sysadmins each manage 900 user machines is understaffed. As in any discussion of IT or data centers, practices vary widely. But here are a couple of relevant factoids from our travels tracking the data center industry.
Jeff Rothschild, the vice president of technology at Facebook, said in a recent presentation that Facebook has 230 engineers supporting data for more than 300 million users. He says Facebook seeks to maintain a ratio of one engineer for 1 million or more users. Facebook is vague about exactly how many servers it has, saying it’s “more than 30,000.” But 30,000 servers and 230 engineers works out to a ratio of about 130 servers per admin.
Microsoft says it has automated its data center operations to the point where its admins can each manage between 1,000 and 2,000 servers. That matters, as the company may pack more than 300,000 servers into its new container data center in Chicago. It expects to support that facility with about 30 employees, including admins and facility maintenance staff.
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Busy Year For Dell in the Data Center
December 28th, 2009 : John RathWith all of the attention IBM, HP and now Cisco get in the server market, the number three player in the server business sometimes gets overlooked. But Dell (DELL) has been quite active this year in both the enterprise server market and the evolving market for cloud-optimized servers and containers.
ServerWatch has a nice article about Dell, its market position, and an in-depth look at the 11th generation of servers. The article details the entire PowerEdge line of servers, comparing target deployments, processors, operating systems, and pricing.
The Register discusses Dell’s “other server business” earlier this month by digging into the OEM Solutions Group at Dell. The Data Center Solutions (DCS) group within Dell is responsible for custom solutions sold to hyperscale data centers such as Yahoo, Amazon and Microsoft. The OEM Solutions group is apparently twice the size of DCS, according to Dell’s Rich Froehlich. Citing OEM deals such as medical equipment, kiosks, embedded controllers and various appliances, the OEM group has 1,300 customers in over 40 countries and leverages 6,000 engineers to work on design and six world-wide factories to deliver the finished goods.
Dell won the Google search appliance deal and there was a “container system in the works” reported in May 2008. That container data center was later confirmed to be used in the Microsoft Chicago container farm.
Tough server market
In tough economic times and and an even tougher server market, Dell has held its own. Gartner reportedin September 2009 that second quarter worldwide server shipments dropped 28 percent year-on-year, while revenue fell 29.4 percentage points year-on-year. Gartner lists IBM with a 32.5 percent share, HP at 28.9 percent and Dell with 13.3 percent of second quarter server revenue estimates.For server vendor shipment estimates Gartner puts Dell second, with 23.9 percent, behind HP’s 31 percent. Data from IDC shows third quarter server sales taking a steep decline. IDC market share numbers put Dell in third place as well with a 13.5% market share. Sun was listed in fourth but it was also noted that both IBM and Dell were taking market share away due to the prolonged delay in its takeover by Oracle.
Converged data center offering
Dell spent much of 2009 building partnerships and growing all facets of its business. Partnerships were inked with Brocade and Juniper and in September Dell acquired Perot Systems for $3.9 billion. Recently Ross Perot Jr. joined the Dell Board of Directors.Dell also maintains 16 spots on the top500 list for November 2009. Dell maintains a partnership with Cisco, but also does not see the value in their Unified Computing System. Dell’s Praveen Asthana was quoted in The Register as saying that “there’s a difference between a proprietary stack and a reference architecture. Our approach is to offer reference architectures, but we don’t restrict you to buying everything from Dell.”
Social networking saves the day
Slate’s The Big Money site had an article last week explaining how “How Dell Got Out of Hell”. Dell has made great strides from former customer relations and support issues and now has been very active in social networking. The article explains how Dell has recorded $6.5 million of sales using Twitter, using more than 100 employees tweeting through 35 Twitter feeds. The LinkedIn page for a company is always interesting to read. Dell’s shows that career paths for employees before, came from HP and IBM, and after, went to Microsoft and HP. Dell employees are most connected to Equallogic, Microsoft, CSC and Oracle.The server side of the business will have a little bit of that spotlight taken away though, as Dell is rumored to unveil an Android based tablet at CES and last month confirmed its smart phone plans.
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Canada: We’ll Only Buy Energy Star Servers
December 10th, 2009 : Rich MillerThe Canadian government this week pledged to only buy servers that are certified under the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star for Enterprise Servers program. “It’s important because the federal government is a huge purchasing power,” said Lydia Aouani of Natural Resources Canada, a federal agency that aims to ensure sustainable development of the nation’s natural resources. “Soon, any server purchased by our government will be Energy Star (certified).”
Aouani presented at the DatacenterDynamics conference in Toronto on Tuesday, and her comments were reported at the DCD web site. Aouani cited a 2008 study that concluded that data centers use 0.6 percent of Canada’s electricity. There are about 800,000 servers installed in Canada and the facilities that house them consume 3,400 million kWh of electricity, resulting in exhaust of 830 kilotons of greenhouse gases or equivalent substances.
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Has the Server Market Hit Bottom?
September 2nd, 2009 : Rich Miller
IDC has released its latest update on server sales, showing continued sales declines in the second quarter of 2009. The research firm’s Quarterly Server Tracker found that revenue from global server sales declined 30.1% year over year to $9.8 billion, the fourth consecutive quarter of revenue decline and the lowest quarterly server revenue since IDC began tracking the server market on a quarterly basis in 1996.
“Over the past four quarters, the worldwide server market has experienced significant revenue deceleration in all geographic regions as the economic recession has deepened,” said Matt Eastwood, group vice president of Enterprise Platforms at IDC. “Fewer servers have been shipped over the past four quarters than at any time since 2005 and it is clear that the worldwide server installed base is aging rapidly.”
So is there any good news? Maybe, says IDC. Here are some highlights:
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Roundup: CoreSite, NaviSite, Verari, 3Com
August 19th, 2009 : John RathHere’s a roundup of some of some of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:
- CoreSite plans 6 megawatt expansion in northern Virginia. National data center and colocation provider CoreSite announced Tuesday that they are planning a six Megawatt expansion (PDF) of their northern Virginia data center. Other initiatives planned for this site include water-side economization, variable speed fan air conditioning units, 95% efficient UPS units, Tier II generators and zoned lighting. When completed later this year the site will offer a total power capacity of 12 Megawatts.
- NaviSite awarded GSA contract for Managed Hosting. NaviSite announced that it has received a General Services Administration (GSA) schedule contract allowing it to sell a full range of managed hosting and infrastructure services to U.S. federal government agencies and all branches of the military. NaviSite Chief Revenue Officer Brooks Borcherding said “the new GSA contract is a significant milestone for NaviSite as it allows us to extend the benefits of our enterprise class infrastructure solutions to government clients.”
- Verari Systems offers up to 26 Petabytes in 2nd generation FOREST container. Verari Systems announced two storage related items Tuesday by integration of a 2TB hard drive. The first was increasing the total storage capacity of a FOREST container, up to 26 Petabytes. The second was supporting up to 1.3 Petabytes of storage per platform in Verari’s BladeRack 2 X-Series. The Verari FOREST recently won the 2009 Uptime Institute’s Energy Efficient Products: Facilities category. The 2TB drives for the FOREST container and BladeRack 2 X-Series blade platforms are available immediately.
- 3Com’s H3C sets new performance standard. 3Com announced Tuesday their H3C S12500 large core/data center switching platform. Results from Tolly Group and Spirent TestCenter validate the unmatched performance of the platform. 3Com Senior vice president Saar Gillai said “3Com set out to develop an industry-leading large core/data center switch with its H3C S12500 platform that delivers on the reliability, security, scalability and performance required to meet the demands of today’s network operations.” Testing categories included performance and efficiency, advanced video support, ultra resiliency and reliability.
