March, 2009

Intel set to release “Nehalem” Xeon processors

Intel may launch its next generation multi-core Xeon processors, code-named Nehalem, on Monday.

The company sent out invitations to a live webcast on March 30 “for the launch of a groundbreaking new server architecture.” If that doesn’t give it away, some server vendors have already announced products based on the Nehalem processors, including Cisco, which will use the Intel Xeon CPU’s in their upcoming Unified Computing System’s blade servers.  Rackable Systems already introduced CloudRack systems based on Nehalem, and Dell is expected to introduce Nehalem-based systems this week.

In earlier disclosures about Nehalem chips for x86 servers, Intel said the processor will have two, four or eight processing cores and provide better scalability than previous generations. It will also have scalable cache sizes and simultaneous multithreading, or Hyper-threading, which is already available on other Xeon processors.

While Intel prides itself on introducing multi-core processors at a faster pace than competitor AMD, some of the most significant enhancements to the new Xeon processor have existed in AMD chips for years.

For example, one of the major changes with Nehalem is integration of the memory controller into the CPU. This replaces the legacy Front Side Bus, which is a known culprit in traffic bottlenecks issues. AMD has been offering an integrated memory controller –called Direct Connect Architechture — in its Opteron CPUs for years now.

Another feature in Nehalem is the QuickPath Interconnect (QPI), which will give the chip faster access to a lot more bandwidth. This feature is similar to AMD’s HyperTransport technology, which has been around for a number of years as well.

That said, by adding QPI and an integrated memory controller, Nehalem will have access to a lot more bandwidth than its predecessors without relying on tons of cache memory, according to an ARS Technica report on Nehalem.

More importantly, what all of this means for end users is significantly better performance for applications that can take advantage of multithreading and multiple processing cores.

Is open source affiliation keeping upstart systems management tools out of the enterprise?

According to IT management blogger John M. Willis, upstart systems management vendors like Zenoss and Hyperic need to tone down their open source rhetoric and take a page from their competitors like Solar Winds and Nimsoft.

“Zenoss and Hyperic beachfront with open source too much and it keeps them out of the enterprise,” Willis said. “Stop it with the open source stuff. Stop even mentioning it. Solar Winds is kicking your butt all over the place and all they’re talking about is price and performance.”

Willis isn’t advocating that Zenoss and Hyperic drop open source altogether, rather make it a line item instead of a headline.

“Almost everybody I talk to in enterprise IT management isn’t keen on open source,” Willis said. “If there’s a team that wants to run Nagios, then they usually can get a checkmark on it if they don’t have anything already in place. But if you want to rip and replace Tivoli with Zenoss, management will say ‘Eh…. I’m not sure about that.’”

If a company is going the Nagios, Zenoss or Hyperic route, they’re going hook line and sinker, according to Solar Winds senior VP Kenny Van Zant. “They’ll suffer the manual cost of configuration and maintenance that open source will bring, because they don’t even have $5000 to spend,” Van Zant said. “Or people are open source fans who want to use open source wherever they can. When there is a gap on Zenoss, the fill it with nTop, Cacti, or some other open source product of the month and integrate them all together.

“We bump up against those free tools when the open source person leaves the company,” Van Zant said. “We replace Nagios deployments. It just takes too much to keep it up and running.”

Are you willing to bring open source systems management tools into your shop? Did your management team object? Email me or leave feedback in the comments.

Cisco’s Unified Computing System strategy; smart move?

I tuned in to Cisco’s web-based news conference yesterday to hear about their first server platform within the Unified Computing System, and my eyes are still rolling today.

Instead of showing off the new system - which they refer to as “the new movement” - with some demonstrations, we watched 90 minutes of Cisco’s CEO John Chambers and partners Intel, BMC, Microsoft, EMC and VMware congratulating each other on being masters of the universe. Good thing I had that barf bag nearby.

After Cisco and its partners were done talking about how revolutionary this new system is and how much they love each other, one reporter basically asked, where’s the beef? “We have been hearing about the California server for weeks now, but you haven’t mentioned anything about a server. Is this announcement related to that?,” he asked.

Before Chambers let his trusty engineer answer the question, he thanked all of his partners again. The Cisco engineer then reiterated  their strategy with this system while carefully avoiding the term “blade server” because the system is more than just that. And round, and round we went.

Bottom line, the system is a chassis full of Cisco UCS B-Series blades bundled with networking, storage and virtualization features. Take the pieces apart, and you have Cisco’s first blade servers. Some people may also have found it interesting that the Intel Nehalem-based servers come in both full and half depth options, so you can pack a ton of the half-depth boxes into a chassis (assuming they don’t throw off crazy amounts of heat).

So the fact that Cisco’s talking-head-style news conference was absolute torture doesn’t make the system itself any less interesting from a server market perspective. We already know their networking stuff works, so they really just have to prove themselves with some solid server engineering to compete with the existing x86 providers. (Cisco, I know you say you aren’t competing with those guys, but you are).

And in many ways, Cisco has come full-circle by introducing a server, said Anne Skamarock, a research director with the analyst / consulting firm Focus.

“When I worked at Sun Microsystems back in the mid-1980’s they debated becoming a Cisco putting intelligent switches (read: specialized servers) in the network. So in a very real sense, Cisco has been building servers for years – servers designed specifically for the work of switching,” Skamarock said. “If you think about it, the first “blade servers” were produced in the networking space years ago adding a form factor for multiple switches from the horizontal to the vertical.”

Cisco also talked about how much this system will save companies because it “radically reduces the number of devices and the required setup, management, power/cooling, and cabling,” but they didn’t talk about the acquisition cost. A Cisco spokesperson said they can not release any pricing details until April, but I am betting it is not a small number.

Even so, if Cisco has engineered a solid server and the system as a whole proves to be of good value, the Unified Computing System concept will catch on, but we aren’t sure when these systems will actually hit the commercial market.

And I’m sure server vendors like HP, Dell and IBM will follow suit with their own “me-too” unified systems similar to Cisco’s. Actually, those companies may even end up using their top networking partner for the plumbing. After all, in terms of virtualization, Cisco has come up with important technologies like VLANs and VSANs, which are now industry standards.

The way I see it, by creating this “new” market of Unified Computing Systems, Cisco is setting itself up for success in both the networking market and the server market.

Tideway’s latest mapping software offers data center clarity

How do you negotiate the best licensing deals with companies like Oracle? How do you provision servers and storage efficiently and make changes to software without screwing up the other software configurations in the data center?

The answer to all of these questions is “information,” said Richard Muirhead, CEO of Tideway, a New York-based software company with products that identify all the software - physical and virtual - within the data center.

“You have to know what you have and what you use to negotiate well, so understanding your environment pre- and post- virtualization is necessary to negotiate licenses,” Muirhead said. “We help people cut millions of dollars in costs in their data center by helping them find out what is already out there.”

Their newest product release, Tideway Foundation 7.2, is an automated discovery and application dependency mapping software that scans the data center continuously and tells the end user what is going on under the hood. It also lets IT analyze power consumption statistics for business applications, view their carbon footprint, and keeps end-of-life, unsupported software away from production.

“People usually don’t realize there is a product that gives this type of insight, so they muddle on as they always have…we have seen millions of dollars wasted on software licenses. One customer even had a million dollar server that they weren’t aware of that wasn’t being used,” Muirhead said.

According to Muirhead, users typically take about half a day to become proficient at using the software, which is deployed as a virtual appliance using the standard OVF format. The software is currently “optimized” for VMware, and will be supported for Hyper-V and XenServer later this year, Muirhead said.

Tideway’s software costs around $8-9 per server, per month, and a free community version, which can be applied to up to 30 servers, is available for download on their website. As for ROI, people typically see a 5X return within 90 days, Muirhead said. “It is very quick to deploy and cost effective.”

If you want to do some comparison shopping, other companies that offer application interdependency mapping software include IBM, BMC, CA, and Integrien.