PCQuest

With enterprise data growing by leaps and bounds, organizations are feeling the need for more powerful, scalable, easily manageable and energy efficient enterprise servers. Let us look at some of the innovations in servers

Amrita Premrajan

Thursday, April 01, 2010

A common phenomenon that has been happening across organizations is the explosion in corporate data. Gartner Group has predicted a 650 percent growth in IT data over the next 5 years, with businesses facing the pressing need to deploy increasingly powerful and scalable enterprise servers to manage. Along with this would come additional challenges like managing the power consumption of these servers and the space they would occupy. Also the already existing problem of server sprawl, prevalent in many corporate data centers where numerous, under-utilized servers suck in a lot of space and resources, may aggravate and call for consolidation. We look at some of the innovation happening in the server space, that are aiming at creation of more efficient, powerful and energy efficient servers for enterprise data centers.

Buy memory instead of server
A typical x86 platform server, with its 30 year old architecture, has memory capacity tightly locked, alongside the server’s processor. With the shooting up of the memory-intensive workload, the only option traditionally resorted to, by the IT managers is to get in more servers to resolve the problem, which inturn directly pushes up the power and management costs of the data centers. How about buying memory that you need without buying new server and the related hardware?

IBM has tweaked the traditional x86 platform and has come out with its new x86 system � eX5, wherein they have decoupled the memory from the chip, using an independent memory scaling technology, called MAX 5, thus enabling IT managers to scale memory in their data centers without having to buy new servers. eX5 servers have incorporated IBM’s fifth-generation Enterprise X Architecture chipset with Intel Xeon processors, which is enabling them to double the amount of memory available in an IBM server when compared to other Intel-chipset-based servers.

The X86 blade servers generally come with 12�16 DIMMs and if these are used, then IT Managers have to buy a new server. With IBM’s eX5 blade systems one can add an additional 24, while rack systems will enable adding up as many as 32 DIMMs. With this upward scalability of memory for racks and blades, organizations can now support more virtual machines, leading to faster database performance and greater server utilization. This technology is said to allow running 82% more “virtual servers” for the same license costs and also drastically bring down the middleware and application costs. The eX5 portfolio includes three systems: a four-processor IBM System x3850 X5 server, a two-processor System X3690 X5 server and the BladeCenter HX5 blade server.

Servers for data-intensive services
There are a lot of applications and services that require processing of large amount of data and real-time analysis of large amount of data, for example, to control smart grids or analytics for financial markets. IBM is coming out with new Power 7 enterprise servers, based on its latest Power7 processor in March, in India. The Power7 processor has upto eight cores, each core being able to run four threads and with the ability to run 32 tasks simultaneously. Chips being made using the 45-nm process technology have 4 times the capacity of previous generation power systems, four times the virtualization capability and 2x-3x times the energy efficiency. Some interesting technologies included in the processor are:

Intelligent Energy � An energy efficiency technology that enables increasing or decreasing of the processor clock speeds on the basis of system usage or thermal conditions, either on a single server or across pools of servers, the advantage being, when the workload is demanding, it can be provisioned for by quickly speeding up the processor cores and if the workload is lesser, turning off of some cores or slowing the clock speed, thus saving energy.

Active Memory Expansion � A feature that makes the physical memory on the system appear to the application as if it were up to twice as large as it actually is. This enables a partition to have access to more memory, thus facilitating the usage of software such as SAP applications, that require large amount of memory or for virtualised environments where greater amount of memory is a necessity. TurboCore mode can be utilized for database or other transaction-oriented workloads. Switching to this mode will lead to utilization of up to 4 cores per chip with twice the cache per core and at a greater speed, just like having 4 sprinters. This saves costs of the clients, like software costs for those applications that are licensed per core, such as databases and some application servers.

Virtualize servers: save space and power
HP’s Integrity servers based on Intel’s quadcore Itanium processor 9300 series previously called Tukwila bring significant increase in performance along with a range of new reliability, scalability and virtualization features. It runs eight threads per processor, through enhanced Intel Hyper-Threading Technology. It runs eight threads per processor, more cache, up to 800% the interconnect bandwidth, up to 500% the memory bandwidth, and up to 700% the memory capacity, using DR3 memory.

The Itanium 9300 processor employs the second generation Intel Virtualization Technology to improve performance and with its Intel 7500 chipset it can directly assign I/O devices to virtual machines. Added to this is the HP Insight Dynamics � Virtual Server Environment, lifecycle management software for HP Integrity servers. It allows IT managers to quickly enable, plan, configure, and automate physical and virtual resources. With virtualization being facilitated this way, direct savings in energy, space and time required for maintenance can be observed.

HP’s Converged Infrastructure
This is a solution to check the IT resource sprawl. It involves creating management tools, policies and processes, that enable separation of applications from their underlying physical assets and unifying these apps into the virtual resource pools. It includes end-to-end virtualization, that virtualizes all resources in the data center: compute, storage, networking and power and cooling. This bestows the freedom to move application environments anywhere, anytime, thus enabling optimization of every data center resource and quicker response to business requests. This converged infrastructure is based on technologies that corporate data centers are already using, virtualization and blades.

Servers for efficient power monitoring
Fujitsu’s PRIMERGY range of servers are delivered with Server View Management Suite, which enables easy setting up, management and recovery of the IT infrastructure. Also the iRMC2 chip (integrated Remote Management Controller) integrated on the motherboard adds remote management functionality with the basic system management functions.

The iRMC2 chip and ServerView together perform certain power management functions, like remote, power management controls, enabling power on and off and shutdown for physical servers as well as on virtual servers, and power monitoring that enables analysis of the power consumption of a single or multiple servers. The iRMC2 chip enables controllingthe power consumption and the scheduler function allows switching between two modes.

The first is Minimal Power Consumption where CPU power is constrained to the lowest minimum used by the CPU type, and the second is Best Performance mode where the entire CPU performance is made available for the OS.

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