Innovations in Servers

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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Tech in Server CPUs