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.”

Two trends tied to the economic cycle may boost interest in the 5600. Corporate cost-cutting has prompted many companies to postpone major purchases, as Intel notes that “80% of the sever install base is up for refresh.” Enterprises that are spending on IT have focused on investments that can bring savings through improved efficiency. The 5600 offers savings opportunities on several fronts: either by keeping the same CPU power but gaining up to 40% more performance per watt, or by lowering power by 30% while retaining the same performance as a 5500 series chip.

The 5600 series processors also deliver two new security features – Intel  Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions (AES-NI) and Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT). These new features enable faster encryption and decryption performance for more secure transactions and virtualized environments.  Intel TXT will provide enhanced virtualization security through hardware-based resistance to malicious software attacks at launch.

As most of the major hardware vendors line up to offer the new chips, Intel boasts 12 new world records for two-socket servers and workstations. Here are some of the related vendor announcements and stories about the new 5600 line of processors:

• SGI announces immediate availability of Intel Xeon Processor 5600 series.  The new processor will be available across the entire scale-out server lineup, and boast increased performance, core density and power efficiency up to 60 percent.
• Dell refreshes its PowerEdge server portfolio.  Dell introduced nine PowerEdge blade, rack-mount and tower servers and three Dell Precision tower workstations updated with the new Intel Xeon 5600 series processors.
• Hewlett Packard (HPQ) refreshes the ProLiant line.  HP announced it has updated its ProLiant G6 portfolio of tower, rack-mount , blade and scale-out servers with the newest processors from Intel, the 5600 series.
• ZT Systems announces new server solutions.  ZT Systems announced the ZT Systems 1250 Ri Series 1U data center server featuring the powerful new Intel Xeon Processor 5600 series. The 1250Ri is the first of several server platforms that will support the new processor and provide ZT’s custom integration and delivery capabilities for precision-fit solutions to the unique technical and business requirements of individual data centers.
• Supercomputer provider Cray Inc. announced that its Cray CX1 line of deskside supercomputers will now ship with the Intel Xeon processor 5600 series.
• Super Micro Computer (SMCI) announced that it has launched a complete, optimized selection of server, workstation and blade solutions to support the new generation Intel Xeon Processor 4500/3600 Series.
• The Cisco UCS B-Series blade servers will offer up to two Intel Xeon Series 5600 multicore processors.
• IBM will update its HS22 and HS22v blade server lines to offer the new Intel Series 5600 processors.

ReliaCloud Offers enStratus Management Platform.  Cloud provider ReliaCloud announced a new partnership with enStratus, a national cloud management platform that delivers governance for enterprise applications in the cloud. ReliaCloud is a product of Minnesota managed hosting and data center provider VISI. ReliaCloud customers now have access to a suite of software management tools from enStratus that are also used with Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and Microsoft Azure platforms. ”The highly regarded management platform and experience in cloud security and availability management at enStratus is invaluable to regulation-heavy businesses or enterprises that are concerned about reliability and business continuity,” said Jason Baker, chief technology officer for ReliaCloud.  ReliaCloud and enStratus will be hosting the Minneapolis CloudCamp on Tuesday, March 2nd.

HP on Data Center Efficiency. Last week Hewlett Packard announced a range of services for small to midsize data center operations that help improve efficiency, increase flexibility of IT budgets and ensure service-level commitments.  HP services aim to simplify the management of multivendor environments and maximize return on investment.  Ron Silliman, Gartner principal research analyst said “organizations should take a whole-environment approach to operational efficiency to reduce risk and drive better business outcomes.” ZDNet reported that HP will launch its Singapore research hub, focusing on data center architecture, cloud computing services and sustainable processes and practices. Prith Banerjee, director of HP labs said that the Singapore site will aim to “lower total cost of ownership by 75 percent in data centers and halve the carbon footprint.”  The lab will support cloud research at other HP Labs sites that will then funnel into Cirious, HP’s enterprise cloud software platform.

Intel IT’s network strategy. The Intel Open Port IT Community blog posted a video explaining the data center network strategy for IT at Intel.  Supporting an enourmous global network, key focus areas include network standardization and WAN optimization.  The video highlights connectivity from their 3-4 blade centers per cabinet directly cabled to a communication cabinet in the center of every row and then on to a communication room, connecting the data center to the Intel wide area network.  The data center in the video is 25,000 square feet and contains 18,000 servers.  This video runs 4 minutes, 11 seconds.

We’ve put together a photo feature providing a look inside the new HP data center, which documents its innovations in airflow design and takes a look at some of the additional energy efficiency measures, which have helped the data center record an estimated Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.2.

The HP Cloud Design Service will evaluate customers’ existing data ceners and requirements and design a custom cloud infrastructure, along with an implementation plan. HP will provide cost estimates and guidelines for deployment, testing and operational management.

“We’re moving beyond the hype to put rigor in the financial analysis of cloud computing,” said Flynn Maloy, director of marketing, HP Technology Services. “We understand all the components. What we’re doing here is providing choice in a structured way.”

HP has designed some large-scale cloud environments, including the RACE cloud service for the Defense Information Systems Agency, which accelerates the process of provisioning computing services for applications used by the U.S. military.

Targeting the Hybrid Cloud
While HP says its approach will be flexible, it sees a large opportunity designing cloud infrastructure can support a hybrid sourcing model that includes private and public cloud options. “We believe our clients are going to be in a hybrid environments for a long time,” said Alan Wilson, vice president of infrastructure consulting, Technology Services for HP. “HP has the experience to help clients ensure the design and implementation of cloud infrastructure will deliver the expected benefits today and in the future.”

Here are some of the features of the HP Cloud Design Service:

• The HP Reference Architecture for Cloud acts as a common framework and accommodates different business requirements, technologies, software stacks and cloud service requirements.
• A design blueprint and implementation plan that can account for bot staff and technology cost estimatss and workload migration.
• HP’s solution includes tested planning and analysis tools from HP Labs, the company’s central research arm, Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) v3 best practices and proven methodologies developed from major cloud design implementations.
• The service features repeatable design principles that can integrate HP’s Converged Infrastructure technologies, HP software and third-party products into the overall cloud infrastructure design.

HP says Cloud Design Service is available worldwide, with pricing based on specific customer requirements. HP offers workshops and its HP Cloud Roadmap Service for companies that are still assessing their needs.

HP says its cloud services portfolio will continue to grow, and may include more hosted services along the likes of HP Adaptive Infrastructure as a Service, the IaaS platform HP debuteed last year. “There will be a lot more to come from HP in announcing our own cloud services,” said Maloy.

The Microsoft and HP pact – which is non-exclusive – involves the two companies “collaborating on an engineering roadmap” for a range of technologies including data management machines, prepackaged applications, virtualization, and management tools.

The companies will work to integrate Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server applications, and Microsoft Hyper-V Server with HP hardware, storage and networking gear into prepackaged “machines” for specific applications, including data warehouse, business intelligence, and online-transaction processing.

Customers could hand off the hosting of these systems to a third-party, or they could build private clouds.

HP already offers so-called Smart Bundles of Microsoft Hyper-V on HP ProLiant Servers for small and midsize organizations, alongside its Smart Bundles of ProLiant with VMware.

Microsoft said it would “continue to include HP hardware for Windows Azure platform”. Dell, is already heavily used in Microsoft’s Azure data center in Quincy, Washington.

To illustrate that the partnership is more than a bundling initiative, HP CEO Mark Hurd said in a press call that the companies will deploy 11,000 service reps to the alliance, according to an InformationWeek story. Hurd added that: “It’s the biggest alignment of infrastructure we’ve ever put behind any kind of enterprise offer we’ve ever had.”

GigaOm reports that the alliance would take on the Cisco-VMware-EMC collaboration, and would be a blow to vendors without such partnerships, such as Dell. GigaOm also raises the danger of vendor lock-in that these company alliances could present.

Longtime Microsoft pundit Mary Jo Foley, writing in ZDNet, poses that timing of the announcement – made a day after VMware’s acquisition of Zimbra — wasn’t purely coincidental.”There was an awful lot of emphasis by HP and Microsoft officials during the conference call today with press and analysts about the fact this deal has been in the making since April 2009,”she writes. “But remember, there were rumors days ago that VMWare, headed by former Microsoft big-wig Paul Maritz, was going to snap up Zimbra to supplement VMware’s story around providing an end-to-end stack. I’d bet that had something (and maybe quite a bit) about the timing.”

Foley cites another Microsoft watcher, Paul DeGroot, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, as saying that HP is the winner of the pact because “HP will drive customer choices toward whatever is the best deal for HP, VMware or Microsoft … plus they get the MS sales force and partners bringing HP into their accounts.”

• Patriot Act and its Impact on Cloud Computing Adoption. Mike Vizard’s IT Unmasked blog over at IT Business Edge has an interesting article about how the Patriot Act may hamper the adoption of cloud computing. The focus of the article is on email and Sendmail’s CEO Don Massaro’s comments about enterprise data sensitivity. The argument is that enterprises prefer private clouds because they don’t want their data in the hands of cloud providers who, under the Patriot Act, would be required to turn over records and data if asked to to so by the Federal government.
• Stratavia receives funding. Data center automation software provider Stratavia received $450,000 in debt funding according to CrunchBase. Additional $300,000 and $450,000 amounts in debt funding were received in November as well. In September they obtained two patents for the technology driving its Data Palette platform. Earlier this month Stratavia announced that they signed a definitive agreement with Hostway Corporation to be one of the first partners under its “Automation by Stratavia” program.
• 3Com and Spirent showcase solutions. Network companies 3Com and Spirent announced a live data center proof of concept demonstration that showcases the industry-leading capabilities of 3Com H3C S12500 and S5820X switches under a host of rigorous next-generation data center scenarios.  Spirent Communications provides enterprise network testing solutions.  The data center switches will be demonstrated in the Spirent Proof of Concept lab through January 2010 allowing data center operators to visualize the design and performance capabilities of a next generation multi-terabit data center.  Visitors to the lab will also witness the H3C Intelligent Resilient Framework, which allows network operators to seamlessly manage thousands of GbE adn 10 GbE ports as single virtual IP address.  3Com was purchased by HP for $2.7 billion in November 2009.

The process of improving information technology and data center efficiency not only reduces GHG emissions but also reduces cost for the enterprise. This means that the savings or business value derived from improvements far outstrips the incremental capital costs of “greening” the datacenter. Green IT means business improvement. Firms that rank highest among the “Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World,” such as Amazon, Toyota, and Nike, have realized that focusing on limiting energy calories in the datacenter and elsewhere pays profitability dividends on the financial side. IDC research indicates that companies reducing their metric tons of carbon per datacenter workload by a factor of 55% also incurred 35% less cost per user session on a server.

• Key milestone to 100 Gigabit Ethernet demonstrated. At the SC09 conference in Oregon Monday Infinera, Internet2, Juniper Networks and Level 3 demonstrated 100 Gbps data transport between Seattle and the SC09 show floor in Portland.  The 100 Gbps of test data was sent via a single slot on the Juniper T1600 Series Core Router, populated with a new 10×10GbE physical interface card and an Infinera optical system, over Level 3 and Internet2’s fiber-optic network.  An 802.3ba compliant 100GbE router interface was demonstrated by Juniper as well.  The demonstrations follow-up on an initiative announced at the SC08 conference last year between the same partners and the U.S. Department of Energy Sciences Network.  Kanalya Vasani, vice president of product management at Juniper said “with ‘Big Science’ projects like the Large Hadron Collider expected to be generating data flows of 100Gbps as soon as 2010, it’s clear that the world’s scientific research and education community needs to move beyond groups of 10Gbps waves and be ready with 100GbE solutions in the very near term.”
• IBM selected by LBNL for cloud research. Monday IBM announced that the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has selected an IBM System x iDataPlex server to run the Lab’s program to explore how cloud computing can be used to advance scientific discovery.  The LBNL program is being funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act through the Department of Energy and will allow scientists to accelerate discoveries in energy efficiency, climate change and genomics.  According to the August 2009 Green500 list, the iDatPlex system is one of the most energy efficient computers in the world.  It also will have the theoretical peak speed of more than 60 teraflops.
• NTT to Power OpSource Cloud: NTT America, the U.S. subsidiary of NTT Communications Corporation (NTT Com), and OpSource today announced their intention to accelerate the adoption of enterprise cloud computing by powering OpSource Cloud, which will use  NTT America’s secure data centers and Tier-1 global IP network. OpSource Cloud is designed to allow IT departments to manage their security as they would within their internal IT infrastructure. OpSource Cloud provides every user with a Virtual Private Cloud within the public cloud, allowing them to determine their own degree of Internet connectivity.

• IBM Analytics Cloud: Also on Monday, IBM announced the world’s largest private cloud computing environment for business analytics. Known as Blue Insight, the cloud will provide new levels of insight for 200,000 IBM sales teams and developers and will launch initially with more than a petabyte (1,000,000 gigabytes) of data and gathers information from nearly 100 different information warehouses and data stores.  Blue Insight will run on a System z10 mainframe with 48 processors and strong cryptography capable of handling up to 10,000 secure transactions per second.
• PhoenixNAP Gets Wired: The PhoenixNAP data center announced this week that it has arranged connectivity from Level 3, AGL Networks and AboveNet. PhoenixNAP is a new 160,000 data center facility in Phoenix being developed by Global Datacenter Trust.

“The ExSO portfolio was created to meet the demanding needs of scale-out as well as high-performance computing customers that require highly efficient and powerful computing infrastructures,” said Steve Cumings, director of Marketing for the Scalable Computing and Infrastructure organization at HP. 

The new BL2×200c includes two blades in the space of one and has 33% higher memory capacity.  The ProLiant SL165z G6 is the first AMD processor based HP ProLiant SL server and uses the “skinless” system architecture based on a lightweight rail and tray design.  The HP Cluster Platform 3000SL is a new HPC-optimized implementation of the new ProLiant SL series server. 

New integration products include the Moab Adaptive Computing Suite(ACS) integration for workload management, a new 40Gbps InfiniBand switch and host channel adapters, and a large port-count 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch via integration with Mellanox, Qlogic and Voltaire interconnect solutions.  HP will be at booth 1025 at the SC09supercomputing conference through November 20th.

• Larry Dignan at ZDNet reflects on the growing rivalry between Cisco and HP to grab mindshare and market share in converged networking for the data center. “At the Gartner CIO powwow last month, HP CEO Mark Hurd argued that the data center winner will be able to offer a complete portfolio of hardware, software and services. ‘You can’t do any part of the stack as a hobby,’ said Hurd.”
• As Cisco and HP compete hard for customers, Tim Fitzgerald predicts that “partners are likely to be caught in the cross-fire. Solution providers say this is personal for both HP CEO Mark Hurd and Cisco CEO John Chambers. And its personal for HP and Cisco’s direct sales reps working with partners on account strategy and planning. That means partners that refuse to choose to line up 100 percent behind one or the other are going to face recrimination and payback in the form of favored or unfavored treatment.”
• In a somewhat unusual move, Cisco issued a statement offering comments on the HP-3Dom deal, stating that “acquisitions in our industry only validate the fact that networking is becoming the platform for all forms of communications and IT.”
• Sramana Mitra notes the strategic importance of the Asian market as a driver in the deal. “3Com’s China cost-structure has got to be the biggest driver, making it attractive for HP to hit Cisco where it really hurts. HP’s global channel will give 3Com’s products an excellent reach into the heart of enterprise and SME networks, as companies look to reduce total cost of ownership across the board.”
• Some viewed the HP-3Com deal in terms of what it means for other potential acquisitions. Shares of Brocade Communications (BRCD), which was rumored to be in play, fell in after-market trading as traders perceived a sale as less likely now.