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.

To become a testbed or Open Cirrus Center of Excellence, each participating institution is required to offer at least 1,000 cores to the cloud. There are 10 testbeds including facilities at HP Labs, Intel Research and Yahoo, as well as the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Intel donated to CMU some 148 high-end systems and an undisclosed amount of funds to invest in other equipment to enable the university to become a testbed. Each Intel system features two quad core CPUs and 16GB of main memory. Seventy eight of the machines house four 1TB disks. All in all, Carnegie Mellon’s Open Cirrus infrastructure has 159 servers and 1,165 processing cores, offering 2.4TB of memory and almost 900TB of storage.

APC helped to design the physical space that houses the cluster and provided its In Row Cooling technology, which provides close-coupled cooling for closets, server rooms and data centers.

CMU was already a user of the Intel Labs Pittsburgh Open Cirrus cluster on CMU’s campus. It was also the first university to use Yahoo’s M45 4,000-processor Hadoop-based cluster, which Yahoo opened to academic researchers in 2007. M45 became Yahoo’s Open Cirrus test bed when the search giant launched Open Cirrus with Intel and HP in 2008.

Greg Ganger, professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of Carnegie Mellon’s Parallel Data Lab said CMU would continue to use both its own test bed and M45 for research into projects such as enabling applications to translate into different world languages without human intervention, and to develop single sign-on for multiple clouds. As well as being used by CMU’s own researchers, the CMU test bed will be open to external researchers to tap into.

“This site embodies our commitment to the collaborative, open-source research environment that Open Cirrus promotes and to aggressively pursuing cloud computing research on this campus,” he said.

Dejan Milojicic, scientist and senior research manager at HP Labs says Open Cirrus is unique because it is offers researchers equipment that is spread globally. Not only does this enable researchers to test applications across multiple clouds, it also presents thorny cloud challenges such as global privacy issues for researchers to examine.

Since its launch, Open Cirrus has held several closed meetings among its contributors but Milojicic says it plans to invite other HPC cloud operators, such as IBM and Google to participate.

A look at the dense server configurations in one of the 97 data centers operated by Intel Corp, which runs more than 100,00 servers.

Chipmaker Intel has one of the largest data center management challenges on earth, with more than 100,000 servers housed in 97 data centers around the globe. About 70 percent of those servers support Intel staffers designing microprocessors, with the remainder dedicated to Intel’s office, IT and web operations. The company manages more than 18 petabytes of primary and secondary storage.

Those are just some of the data points Intel (INTC) shares in an interactive overview of its data center operations on its web site, which provides a series of videos to highlight different elements of its data center strategy.

Major Consolidation In Progress
Intel’s infrastructure won’t be this expansive for long. The company is several years into a massive data center consolidation that has already retired about 35 older facilities, and eventually hopes to compress its entire infrastructure into eight large, highly-efficient facilities.

When the consolidation is complete, Intel will have added about 300,000 square feet of new space in those eight sites, which will be strategically located in the US, Europe and Asia. The data center expansions will be built out using a modular structure, with each module designed to host 7,000 to 10,000 servers.

Efficiency Features in Newest Facility
The Intel web site presentation features a video walk-through of one of the company’s new data centers in Israel, which is still under construction. The initial phase houses 220 racks, which are fitted with rack-top chimney systems to contain waste heat, which is then used to warm the office space in the building. The data center also employs a thermal storage system, which can reduce costs by allowing companies to run air conditioning systems at night, when power rates are cheaper.

Intel says its consolidation and modernization effort has already helped it save about $225 million thus far, putting the company about 35 percent complete on its goal towards ultimate savings of $650 million. In 2010 the company is accelerating its virtualization program, in hopes of raising the total of virtualization from about 20 percent of servers to 70 to 80 percent.

For more on Intel’s data center infrastructure, see previous stories from our Intel Channel:

• Video Tour: Intel’s Greenfield Data Center
• Video Tour: intel’s High-Density Retrofit (Fab to Data Center)
• Video: Intel’s Data Center Consolidation
  Intel: How to Tackle A Major Consolidation
• Intel: Servers Do Fine With Outside Air

Microsoft starts from scratch
In the first public preview, Microsoft (MSFT) unveiled Windows Phone 7 Series Monday at Mobile World Congress. The new mobile OS is a very ambitious re-branding of Windows Mobile and an agreed much overdue release. Gadget sites Engadget and Gizmodo both have glowing reviews and pictures of the new interface and explain how Microsoft threw out everything from the old OS, started over, and produced a game-changing phone operating system that will give the Android phone and iPhone a run for the money.  Gizmodo actually calls the Outlook application on phone “stunning” and continues to elaborate on the big picture, where Microsoft brings together different services like Zune, Xbox and Bing in a way that “actually makes sense and just works.” The Windows Phone 7 Series isn’t due to be released until the 2010 holidays.

Intel and Nokia merge platforms
In another big announcement at Mobile Congress World, Intel (INTC) and Nokia (NOK) announced they would merge their popular Moblin and Maemo software platforms into an open software platform called MeeGo.  Hosted by the Linux Foundation MeeGo will be Linux-based and run on multiple hardware platforms and across devices such as netbooks, tablets, mediaphones, connected TVs and in-vehicle infotainment systems.  “Our vision for seamlessly communicating between computing devices from the home, auto, office or your pocket is taking a big step forward today with the introduction of MeeGo,” said Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini.  People are able to keep their favorite mobile applications when changing devices, since MeeGo runs on multiple device types.  The first release of MeeGo is targeted for the second quarter of this year with MeeGo-based devices from Nokia and other manufacturers expected later this year.  Other resources about MeeGo including the press conference replay from Barcelona can be found here.

Juniper’s new framework for mobility solutions
Juniper (JNPR) hit the ground running at Mobile World Congress, unleashing a flurry of press releases regarding new software, solutions and partners to transform the experience and economics of mobility.  The new mobility framework marries partner applications with Juniper MX 3D Series Universal Edge Routers and SRX Series Services Gateways to help mobile operators deploy truly open and secure mobile networks.  At the conference Juniper announced Junos ready software, Junos Pulse for Smartphones, Juniper Mobile Secure, Juniper Traffice Direct, Juniper Media Flow and Juniper Mobile Core Evolution.  “Mobile operators need their networking vendors to stop building new one-off boxes, band-aids and bolt-ons to handle mobile data traffic. They need networking vendors with real innovation that can offer immediate TCO relief, unmatched scale for the future, built-in security and open platforms to monetize new services,” said Kim Perdikou, executive vice president, Office of the CEO, Juniper. Juniper also announced that Sprint has selected them to secure their mobile data network infrastructure. Sprint will use Juniper SRX Series Gateways to securely deliver mobile data services.  Juniper also joined the IBM Service Provider Delivery Environment Framework Partner Program and jointly announced security solutions for fixed and mobile networks with Nokia Siemens.

The Mobile World Congress runs through February 18 and mobileworldlive.com has been setup for announcements and live broadcasts.

• Internap Enhances CDN for High Quality Video. On Tuesday Internap Network Services announced enhancements to its content delivery network (CDN) offering, including new ease-of-use functions and automation of key CDN capabilities.  A comScore Video Metrix service poll showed that in September 2009 more than 84.8% of the total U.S. Internet audience watched online video. Version 5.0 of Internap’s CDN MediaConsole includes an integrated rule-based transcoding that automatically converts video into the ideal formats for a broad range of devices.  It also performs a continuous bitrate adjustment that dynamically adapts video streams based on the capabilities and bandwidth of the network.  Internap is showcasing its CDN offering at the Streaming Media West conference November 17-19.
• Rackspace Launches Cloud Drive. Rackspace (RAX) announced a set of new product offerings that help businesses move their IT applications into the cloud.  New products include Cloud Drive, Server Backup, and an upcoming release of Hosted Microsoft SharePoint.  The new cloud products mark an aggressive move by Rackspace to expand into collaboration and backup applications and compete in the software-as-a-service market.  Rackspace Cloud Drive is a cloud-based, online file storage application that allows individuals and teams to store, share and backup files. Rackspace Server Backup is a cloud-based, online server backup application designed to protect file server data.  Both Server Backup and Cloud Drive are powered by technology from Jungle Disk, a Rackspace subsidiary acquired in 2008.

• Joyent Secures $8.5 million from Intel Capital. Cloud provider Joyent announced Tuesday that it received an infusion of funding from Intel’s global investment organization, Intel Capital.  The funds will be used to accelerate its product development, sales and marketing and an increased global expansion. “Joyent has developed its own data center virtualization technology that creates a flexible multi-tenant cloud,” said Joyent CEO David Young. ”As a result, Joyent’s technology delivers more than 70 percent utilization, which is eight times more than industry averages.”
• Isilon announces new scale-out NAS products. Isilon Systems announced the release of the Isilon IQ 72000X and 72NL scale-out NAS products, bringing to market a 10 Petabyte single file system and single volume for nearline archive and disk-to-disk backup environments.  The new products leverage Hitachi 2TB drives to double system capacity while reducing power, cooling and data center footprint by 50 percent.  The IQ 72NL combines 72 Terabytes of storage in a 4U chassis and will scale to more than 10 Petabytes in a single file system.  Both products are available currently in limited quantities, and will be generally available in January 2010.

For more news from Intel, visit our Intel Channel. For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

A diagram illustrating an implementation of Intel Power Manager.

Power usage has become a key priority for data center operators, who are assessing the best hardware and software options to track and manage the efficiency of their facilities. Yesterday Intel (INTC) became the latest tech titan to roll out an energy-focused offering, announcing Intel Data Center Manager, a software development kit that helps monitor and manage data center power consumption on servers using the new Intel Xeon 5500 processors. Data Center Manager uses Power Node Manager, a power management policy engine embedded in Xeon 5500 server chipsets, to collect and analyze energy usage data, set up alerts for power and thermal events, and set policies on power capping and workload management.

Intel tested Data Center Manager last year in a proof-of-concept installation at the Chinese search engine Baidu, which was experiencing power capacity challenges in leased third-party data center space. Baidu’s rack-level power constraints limited it to just 5 2U servers in each 42U rack. By using Data Center Manager to track and cap power usage, Baidu was able to put three additional 2U servers in each rack, for a total of 8 – providing 60 percent more capacity. Intel has a white paper detailing its work with Baidu.

For more information, see coverage at CIO.com and a blog post from Intel’s Jackson He with an in-depth look at the energy management features of the Xeon 5500.

Patrick Gelsinger, Intel senior vice president, holds up a wafer containing the new Intel Xeon 5500 series processors.

Intel’s news Xeon 5500 processor (Nehalem EP) was launched yesterday, and touted as a historic leap forward in power and energy efficiency. Each processor features four cores and automated energy efficiency enhancements, providing users with greater control of their energy expenditures. Intel says the Xeon 5500 features a processor idle power level of only 10 watts, enabling a 50 percent reduction in system idle power compared to the previous generation. New integrated power gates allow idle cores to power down independently.

The Intel Xeon processor 5500 series also offers up to 15 automated operating states, allowing significant improvements in chip power management by adjusting system power consumption based on real-time throughput. Intel says these features can allow customers who replace older Intel Xeon servers with the 5500 series to recoup their costs in as little as 8 months.

Here’s our roundup of analysis and commentary about the Xeon 500 launch:

• Why You Should Care About Intel’s New Server Chip: A high-level overview from GigaOm, offering three areas where Nehalem changes the game.
• Intel Showcases ‘Transformational’ Nehalem: The Register notes the energy advances, but also the fact that Intel has been slow to focus on low-power chips. “The Nehalem EP chip is exactly the high-volume, high-performance, energy-efficient chip that should have been launched years ago, not today,” writes Timothy Morgan.
• At VentureBeat, Dean Takahashi notes that the Xeon 5500 is the latest round in the processor wars between Intel and AMD, which has its Istanbul chips with six cores coming later this year, and plans to launch a 12-core server chip in 2010. 

• Rebooting the Data Center: “The high performance provided by the Nehalem microprocessor architecture makes the chip more competitive with RISC based microprocessors such as Sun Microsystems SPARC and IBM’s POWER microprocessors,” writes Tom Foremski. “This represents a massive market opportunity.”
• EE Times looked at the impact of the Xeon 5500 on the shift to 10 Gigabit Ethernet networking, noting that Intel used the launch to provide a first look at a new 10Gbit Ethernet controller supporting some FCoE functions in software.
• TG Daily reminded readers that the Nehalem processors are already on the market. “Apple jumped the gun on March 3 by announcing a new Mac Pro that integrates the chip,” the site notes. “Intel was not exactly happy that Apple did not care about any official launch dates, but still made every effort today to ‘launch’ the processor.” 
• The list of server vendors rolling out new products featuring the Xeon 5500 included HP, IBM, Dell and Rackable.