Search results matching tags 'BladeSystem' and 'energy efficiency'

The ProLiant Collection at HPTF 2009 - 25 platforms in 73 days

Kristie Popp — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 16:05:00 GMT

HPTF showcased an overwhelming amount of demos, sessons, cool techies stuff everywhere you looked. Twitter crept into the scene this year with ten monitors showcasing all of the tweet buzz. ProLiant was certainly shouted about from every corner. One shout that caught my attention was the ProLiant Collection released 25 platforms in 73 days! I heard one key competitor released 6 in that time frame. ProLiant delivering on all three technology advances: performance, efficiencies, and cost savings - serious improvements in all three areas, each without compromising the other.

        Over the past 73 days ProLiant released:
               - 3 new SL6000 Family Servers, introduced at the show
               - 2 new DL1000 Family Intel Servers
               - HP BladeSystem Matrix
               - 13 new Intel G6 Nehalem Servers
               - 7 new AMD G6 Instanbul Servers

Key take-aways on the SL6000

HP’s Doug Tucker walked me through the features of the SL line in easy terms. The SL features front-end cabling and easy serviceability – just pull out the tray. The 2U design supports 2 expansion trays. With the SL,you have a good choice of mix & match configs.

HP ProLiant SL160z G6

HP ProLiant SL170z G6

HP ProLiant SL2x170zG6

Max expansion: 18 DIMM slots and 2 PCIe slots
Large memory – memory cache apps

Max storage: Up to 6 hard drives - Large Storage – Web search and database apps

Features internal storage, 6 LFF hard drives, way beyond a 1U. Half-width board with no loss in features

Max density: 2xP servers in 1U
High dense – HPC computing and web front-end apps

Doug pointed out the SL2x170z is a grat choice when you need to deploy a lot more servers - four servers in a 2U, 2x the density, 4 fans versus needing 20, only need 1 power supply (can have 2).

Tweets from the floor:

keesdenhartigh: #hptf How is the new ProLiant SL family different? The lowest possible cost and energy, delivering exactly what scale-out customers need

markfontecchio: Video demo of HP's new ProLiant SL servers at the HP Tech Forum in Vegas http://bit.ly/awbNw (expand) #hptf

Rich_Palmer: #hptf - SL line is percieved to offer the greatest opportunity to Vfarms, HPC and massive scale WEB farms.

Check out more info on the SL6000 product choices

Key take-aways on the DL1000

“Powerful, dense & versatile” – states Christina Tiner from HP. This family delivers improved density, power efficiency & cost. It has similar features of the new SL line. The DL1000 for 10-100 servers, SL for 10000s of servers.

Christina mentions customers are looking to the DL1000 for virtualization deployments in a 2U, as well as for HPC environments. The DL1000 is great for 2 -3 workgroups with little space, for general purpose apps, space saving deployments - good consolidation in a traditional rack mount setting. This family is also more flexible than SL – IO expansion, 3PCI slots, graphics controllers.

See the video with Christina Tiner showing the new DL1000 Multi-Node Server at the HP Tech Forum, see how the DL1000 allows the user to put 4 server nodes in single 2U chassis.

Tweets from the floor:

hogbiker: The HP DL1000 Servers are some pretty rockin' technology! I can see these for lots of applications for our customers. #HPTF

Check out more info on the DL1000 product choices

Key take-aways on the HP BladeSystem Matrix

Check out Jason Newton’s blog The future is coming into focus …and BladeSystem Matrix is your lens.

Whether you were at HPTF or not, please let us know your thoughts on the latest ProLiant releases by commenting here. We are listening.

Applications Matter - What Affects Server Power Consumption: Part 2

Tony Harvey — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 22:21:00 GMT

How does the application you are using and what it is doing affect the power consumption of system.

The first thing that everyone looks at when talking about power consumption is CPU utilization. Unfortunately CPU utilization is not a good proxy for power consumption and the reason why goes right down to the instruction level. Modern CPUs like the Intel Nehalem and AMD Istanbul processors have 100s of millions of transistors on the die. What really drives power consumption is how many of those transistors are actually active. At the most basic level an instruction will activate a number of transistors on the CPU, depending on what the instruction is actually doing a different number of transistors will be activated. So a simple register add, for example, might integer add the values in two registers and place the result in a third register. A relatively small number of transistors will be active during this sequence. The opposite would be a complex instruction that streams data from memory to the cache and feeds it to the floating point unit activating millions of transistors simultaneously.

Further to this modern CPU architectures allow some instruction level parallelization so you can, if the code sequence supports it, run multiple operations simultaneously. Then on top of that we have multiple threads and multiple cores. So depending on how the code is written you can have a single linear sequence of instructions running or multiple parallel streams running on multiple ALUs and FPUs in the processor simultaneously

Add to that the fact that in modern CPUs the power load drops dramatically when the CPU is not actively working, idle circuitry in the CPU is placed in sleep modes, standby or switched off to reduce power consumption. So if you're not running any floating point code, for example, huge numbers of transistors are not active and not consuming much power.

This means that application power utilization varies depending on what the application is actually doing and how it is written. Therefore depending on the application you run you will see massively different power consumption even if they all report 100% CPU utilization. You can even see differences running the same benchmark depending on which compiler is used and whether the benchmark was optimized for a specific platform or not and the exact instruction sequence that is run.

The data in graph below shows the relative power consumption of an HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure with 32 BL2x220c Servers. We ran a bunch of applications and also had a couple of customers with the same configuration who wre able to give us power measurements off their enclosures. One key thing to note is that the CPU was pegged at 100% for all of these tests, (except the idle measurement obviously).

As you can see there is a significant difference between idle and the highest power application, Linpack running across 8 cores in each blade. Another point to look at is that two customer applications, Rendering and Monte Carlo, don't get anywhere close to the Prime95 and Linpack benchmarks in terms of power consumption.

It is therefore impossible to say what is the power consumption of server X and comparing it to server Y unless they are both running the same application under the same conditions. This why both SPEC and the TPC have been developing power consumption benchmarks that look at both the workload and power consumption to give an comparable value between different systems.

SPEC in fact just added Power Consumption metrics to the new SPECweb2009 and interesting enoughly the two results that are up there have the same performance per watt number, but they have wildy different configurations, absolute performance numbers and absolute wattage numbers. So there's more to performance per watt than meets the eye.

The first part of this series was Configuration Matters

Taking a closer look at the "Power On" capabilities for blade chassis

Kleinch — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 20:55:00 GMT

Some of our Blade Specialists give us the workings of the BladeSystem "Power switch" . David gives us these words of wisdom.

"I've always referred to the "power switch" on the front of the blade not as a power switch but a " may I?" switch. When actuated, the blade asks the OA if there is enough available power to power on and spin up the drives (the act of powering on takes a higher load than steady state operation). If at that moment there is not enough power, the blade pauses and tries again in a moment (there's an algorithm in there that determines the actual length of the pause so that if several blades had asked for power at the same time, they don't all use the same delays and end up in deadlock). If after requesting power several times (sorry, don't know how many) there still isn't enough power, it will stop trying. If a blade has not been successfully turned on, the command can be issued again.

Net/net: the blade infrastructure is designed to prevent more power demand than is available. The illustration above is equally valid if power-on is initiated from power switch, OA/iLO command, or via Wake-on-LAN..."

And Tony added in his experience.

"David is correct but there are some subtleties about how the server will respond. On a cold boot - insertion, enclosure power-up, etc. if Automatic Power-On is set, then the server will retry power on requests if they get denied.

Power-On commands like the power button or iLO Virtual Power/OA commands are one time things - if the request fails it will not be retried. Therefore as David said the application needs to be able to detect if a server has powered on after the request is issued."

Hope this helps.

Least Favourite Question

Tony Harvey — Wed, 13 May 2009 21:15:00 GMT

I'm sitting here thinking about writing my first Blog post and trying to come up with something to say. So I figured I'd start by trying to answer one of my least favourite questions (and before you all start to correct my spelling I'm not originally from the USA) and explain why it's so hard to answer.

The Question: "So much power does a blade enclosure use?"

The answer: "It depends."

What does it depend on? Everything.

How many Blades and which Blades do you have in the enclosure, which CPUS, are they the 50W, 60W, 80W, 95W or 120W versions, how many DIMMs and what size and rank are they, which mezzanines are installed, which Interconnects are installed, how many fans, what's the ambient temperature, what applications are running and how heavily loaded are they?

Even if you gave me all this information I still couldn't answer with any degree of accuracy, those final two items applications and application load really do have such a huge impact it makes it almost impossible to give the right answer. The best that I could do would be to give the maximum and minimum power usage based on that configuration and say you'll be somewhere in-between those two values.

In the next few posts I'll go into some detail about this starting with the affect hardware configuration has on power consumption.

Did we miss something?

Gary Thome — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 21:35:00 GMT

Every time a competitor introduces a new product, we can't help but notice they suddenly get very interested in what HP is blogging during the weeks prior to their announcement. Then when the competitor announces, the story is very self-congratulatory "we've figured out what the problem is with existing server and blade architectures". The implication being that blades volume adoption is somehow being constrained by the very thing they have and everyone else is really stupid.

HP BladeSystem growth has hardly been constrained; with quarterly growth rates of 60% or 80% and over a million BladeSystem servers sold. So I have to wonder if maybe we already have figured out what many customers want - save time, power, and money in an integrated infrastructure that is easy to use, simple to implement changes, and can run nearly any workload.

Someone asked me today "will your strategy change?" I guess given the success we've had, we'll keep focusing on the big problems of customers - time, cost, change and energy. It sounds boring, it doesn't get a lot of buzz and twitter traffic, but it's why customers are moving to blade architectures.

Our platform was built and proven in a step-by-step approach: BladeSystem c-Class, Thermal Logic, Virtual Connect, Insight Dynamics, etc. Rather than proclaim at each step that we've solved all the industry's problems or have sparked a social movement in computing; we'll continue to focus on doing our job to provide solutions that simply work for customers and tackle their biggest business and data center issues.

9 Trends in 2009: What's Hot and What's Not in the Data Center

newtonja — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 13:30:00 GMT

We can’t let Illuminata, Gartner, IDC and Forrester have all the fun, so we sat down and came up with our own "What’s Hot and What’s Not in the Data Center" list for 2009.

NOTE: This blog post will self-destruct on December 31, 2009 should anyone feel the need to analyze our prognosticating skills in 2010.

1. Power as a resource is HOT. Power as a commodity is NOT. If you knew your old refrigerator in the garage was sucking fifty bucks in juice a month, you’d pitch it or replace it, right? The problem is; you have no idea how much power it costs you. In 2010, you’ll never think about power in the same way. It’s no longer just a spigot of electrons with a bill that goes to the suits upstairs. Power is a precious resource to your data center and a big part of your budget that stands in the way of growth in 2010. “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”, so 2009 is the time to start measuring your power usage in detail so you understand what you need, what you have and what you’re wasting.

2. TCO is HOT. TCO is NOT. Huh? TCO will be reprioritized in 2009. Take Cost Out is the new TCO. Okay, we don’t want to overplay this one. Of course you want to be as efficient as possible down the road once the 2009 storm passes. However, if you’re ever going to get there, you have to take cost out now. That’s going to mean you have to make tough choices and some big leaps forward in order to put in place an infrastructure that can deliver savings today and be ready for tomorrow. We believe very few stones will be left unturned in 2009 as businesses scourer their data center to find hidden pockets of cost – cables, steps in processes, HA, fibre channel, aging servers, wasted watts, unused A/C – nothing can hide from the new TCO. Those trying to limp through 2009 by patching up some aging technologies will find themselves in world of hurt in 2010.

3. Knowing is HOT. Guessing is NOT. Whether you’re talking capacity planning for your apps and virtual machines, the power and breaker size you need per rack or the storage for your data explosion, using the old ‘rules of thumb’ for quarterly budgets aren't going to cut it in 2009.  Getting better data out of every circuit board that you can then use to take informed action will be critical to justify growth and to help you squeeze the most cost out from your consolidation projects.

4. Packaged infrastructure is HOT. Piecemeal infrastructure is NOT. Sorry IBM, the mainframe isn’t part of this one. We’re talking about pooled and shared infrastructure based on industry standard components. We think you’ll see more packaged infrastructure solutions tailor-made to different applications and environments whether it’s a rack at a time for mega clusters or a unified communication platform for a small branch office. You already see it with ExDS, BladeSystems, PODs, NeoView, NonStop blades; the trend is probably already here but it’s going to really take off in 2009. The idea is simplified delivery, integration and expansion. You just won’t have the time in 2009 to try and figure out how to get widget A to talk to widget B.

5. Unified is HOT. Siloed is NOT. Whether it’s Cisco, Microsoft, IBM or us, the vision of unified infrastructure is clearly our shared goal. We just have different names for it. The only question is how do we make progress in 2009? We know one thing for sure; you can’t get there by forcing the perspective one silo one on another. Network packets won’t unify your infrastructure any more than processor architectures will. The only path to the unification you seek is from the top down starting at business and application services. Understanding and managing in a unified way provides a different perspective on what tomorrow’s infrastructure looks like. When you recognize that, you see that the center of the universe can’t be found inside the network, the storage or the servers. It’s at the business level.

6. Performance per sq ft, per dollar per watt is HOT. Moore’s Law is NOT. The days of chasing the tail of processor performance are quaint, but the new global economic reality will create a whole new class of benchmarks to help you better compare your choices. Whether your issue is space, power or cost, you’ll be empowered in 2009 with a whole new set of much more relevant benchmarks to see where you stand. SPECPower, VMmark and others are just scratching the surface of what will be a renaissance in data center metrics.

7. DAS is HOT. SAN is NOT. Okay, okay. The SAN isn’t going anywhere. But there will be a lot more choices in 2009 that flip the economics of storage on their head and put server admins in more control of their storage needs. Last night I was browsing for some home storage backup and came across a deal for a 1TB home back-up for $149. Buying your first TB in a traditional SAN will set you back $30 to $50k. (Calvin Z's going to kill me). Basically, storage is delivered by drives. Shouldn’t you be able to pile up all the drives you have, DAS or otherwise and carve up that capacity how you see fit? Check out some of the cool stuff we can do now with LeftHand’s innovations and you’ll see what we mean.

8. Virtual infrastructure is HOT. Virtual machines are NOT. Or said another way, “Virtualization is dead! Long live virtualization”. 2009 will shift priorities from optimizing server capacity with virtual machines to looking for new opportunities at the server edge to extend the savings and consolidation to the network, management and storage realms. Virtual infrastructure will be the new mantra and managing it, coordinating it and aligning it to the business will be the key. In 2009 more people will think differently about infrastructure as service and something that you simply carve up and allocate capacity based on your demands. It aligns to you, not the other way around. With this in place, automation starts getting real too!

9. Dynamic Core Utilization is HOT. Multi-core apps running one application is NOT. This one almost fell to runner up status simply because it was a mouthful and a little geeky, but we needed 9 things. Seriously though, the flexibility to adjust core utilization to match a workload has been a long time coming for the x86 world. As 2009 starts to move us beyond quad-core processors, it makes no sense to continue the old, tried-and-true practice of one app per server.

The runners up:

Dynamic Power Capping is HOT. Power Face Plates are NOT. This one can be summarized above with “Knowing vs. Guessing”. The low hanging fruit for reducing power consumption is just about gone. It’s going to take more intelligence and coordination at the rack, row and datacenter level. The ability to reclaim data center capacity simply be allocating only the power you need makes too much sense to not make our list.

Converged Fabrics are HOT. Silo’d I/O traffic is NOT. Talk about an oldie but a goody, this one might start to make it over this hump this year. Aggregation of I/O to a single physical layer ushers in a whole new opportunity to simplify and cut big costs. See most of the bigger trends we mentioned above and you see that this one is key.

Industry standard gear for Telco is HOT. Telco-only gear is NOT. Ah, one of the last bastions of proprietary gear. This one has been predicted so often, it fell to runner-up. But the slow march continues and we think 2009 will speed things up a lot as more telcos start to see the benefits of gear like blades and standard rack servers on their balance sheet.

Battery back-up at the rack is HOT. UPS rooms are NOT. Nice idea that just doesn’t make as much sense as folks thought. Hogs of data center floor space, budget and that nasty little 10% loss in efficiency make this one at least worth of the runner-up list.

Blades are HOT. Mainframes are NOT. Give me a break. We are the HP Blade Team. It just wouldn’t be an IT hot/not list without one little jab at poor Big Blue. ;-)

We’d love to hear from you. Tell us what you think about this list and share what’s on your HOT and NOT to-do list for 2009.

Games vendors play . . . with power efficiency claims

Gary Thome — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 21:13:00 GMT

These days, server power efficiency is top of mind for everyone. Five years ago, most customers had no idea how much power a server used. Now, everyone knows - it's a lot. In some cases, customers are making power consumption the primary criteria for vendor selection.

So why is it so dang hard to get a straight story on exactly what options are the most power efficient?

In our experiences with power measurements, we found lots of ways to the results get skewed; whether intentionally or accidentally. We honestly try to avoid them, but here are some of the dirty little secrets a lot of vendors don't want you to know about their power testing results. Consider these red flags next time someone spends lots of money in the Wall Street Journal to post a big claim with lots of fine print on power savings.

Lab Queens

One easy way for vendors to skew power results is to cherry-pick low power components. Processors (even those in the same power grade) and memory DIMMs tend to consume significant power and can have wide variances in power consumed from one part to another.

We call units built by cherry-picking components "Lab Queens".

Generally, these do not represent what a customer might actually be able to purchase. Here's an example where we tried to avoid this scenario; the systems compared on this competitive power report on our website uses the exact same processors and DIMMs on all units tested, thereby eliminating differences due to component variances. It would have been easy to create a Lab Queen and bump the results higher, artificially.

Configuration Errors

Peak power efficiency for a given system always requires the "best" configuration. Memory power is mostly a function of DIMM count, and not capacity. Therefore, to achieve minimum power, the minimum number of DIMMs should be used to realize the desired memory capacity.

If you see a comparison where the DIMM count is different or not mentioned, you might notice the strong odor of dead fish.

On the infrastructure side of the equation, a blade system can be configured with varying numbers of fans and power supplies. Obviously some configurations will produce better power efficiency than others. For instance, 4 power supplies run more efficiently than 6, assuming that 2+2 power redundancy delivers adequate power for a given configuration. The most power efficient configurations though won't always be generated by a competitor when publishing a comparison. Honestly, there are such big differences here that an apple to apple comparison is tough. Only an HP BladeSystem dynamically throttles fan speeds based on demand across the different cooling zones in an enclosure.

Environmental Differences

The voltage level and room temperature can cause variances in the power supply efficiencies and the speed the system fans must run. Consequently it is important that when comparing servers to verify that these parameters are held constant. I once heard a story of an engineer setting up a box fan to blow air on his servers to try to reduce the fan power of the blades.

Obviously he wasn't planning on counting the power from the box fan!

Remarkably, there are published benchmarks that allow for external cooling to be deployed and not counted as a part of the system power.

Gaming the Benchmark

Any benchmark a vendor publishes is necessarily narrow in what it measures. When looking at a published benchmark, you should consider how close the benchmark mimics your applications. If the benchmark is similar to your applications, the results might be relevant to you. If not, then you might do best just to ignore them. Also, some benchmarks are very loose on configuration requirements, making it very easy to "game them" and making the results all but totally useless. One benchmark that is broadly published in the industry falls into this category.

Where to go from here?

At this point, you are probably thinking "Wow! This is much more complicated than I really thought!" And you are right. Benchmarking fairly is very tricky business, even if you are trying to be fair. The best results you can get are the ones you measure yourself. In my next blog post, I'll comment on some of the techniques and challenges with measuring power yourself.

One million and counting

Gary Thome — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:16:00 GMT

1,000,000. One million. 10⁶. No matter how you write it, that is a big number. I've never tried to count to one million. But now we have sold our millionth blade server; which is cause for reflection.

We created our blades products on the conviction that there was a better way to make IT infrastructure work. We knew from customers that deploying, managing and changing IT was challenging, time-consuming, expensive, and power hungry. It was this desire to help solve these challenges that lead us to create the BladeSystem that we offer today.

People's opinions vary on why customers have bought over a million blades from HP. Some people think it stems from Shorty's presidential run (after all there is some attraction to a candidate with a proven track record of saving time, cost, and energy!). Others think that BladeSystem is just a cool product. Perhaps it is cutting-edge products like our 2-in-1 ProLiant BL2x220c blade server.

As for me, I think customers like the time-saving, cost-saving, and energy-saving technologies built into BladeSystem. They like having a single point of infrastructure from which they can deploy their various servers and applications. They like the intuitive way BladeSystem is deployed and managed.

In any case, we are glad that we are able to help customers. We are happy whenever BladeSystem can be a part of addressing their biggest pain points. We are excited to be the first to achieve this milestone. But we are not done yet on helping customers reduce costs and energy; to make BladeSystem faster to deploy, manage and change.

So hang onto your hats - we have a lot still to come!

Gary

Green servers and ham

newtonja — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 14:21:00 GMT

I didn't know what I would eat for breakfast today, so thanks to Larry Dignan for the V8 slap up against the head this morning. After watching his video blog, "green servers and ham" doesn't sound so good anymore.

We know a lot of businesses wrestle with mandates to be "green". But at the same time many more are struggling to find any way to lower energy costs and to eek out more capacity from their facilities.

We agree with Larry that energy efficiency should not be an exercise in marketing. It's a serious business concern with a real-world engineering answer. That’s why we build Thermal Logic technology into every HP blade server to save power and cooling. That means energy efficient design married with energy efficient control - across the board. No special models, no “plant a tree” promotions, just common sense energy design + control with savings that you see on your electric bill every month and in the long life of your data center.

You decide if you want to take it to the bank or plant a tree with it.

Jason