Maximize power, minimize power costs with IBM and Intel

120 Post Road West, Suite 201, Westport, CT 06880 Phone: 203-429-8950 Fax: 203-429-8930


Increasing Energy Efficiency with
x86 Servers
Jerald Murphy Senior Vice President and Service Director Robert Frances Group



© Robert Frances Group, 2009 Increasing Energy Efficiency with x86 Servers 1 120 Post Road West, Suite 201, Westport, CT 06880 Phone: 203-429-8950 Fax: 203-429-8930 Executive Summary The current economic crisis has most companies scrambling for ways to get the most out of every dollar they spend. This process leads to increasing uses of automation, which adds costs to IT at the same time business are looking to rein-in costs. Many IT executives have moved to consolidating data centers and servers with virtualization and blade servers. However, to date, many of the gains have been illusory due to high server costs, lack of effective virtualization and management, and inefficiencies that make it expensive to power and cool these consolidated systems. Most large enterprises are now very familiar with the problems associated with escalating power and cooling costs in the data center. As more business processes have become automated, storage requirements have increased as well. This additional centralized capacity has resulted in a significant rise in energy and cooling costs for these systems. Over the last five years, the total power generated by individual compute platforms has grown by over 100 watts, with system power consumption increases of over 300 watts per server. The energy needed to power and cool data centers cannot be ignored by IT, since the total energy needed over the life of the server often exceeds the cost of the systems purchased. The current economic situation further exacerbates measures, since more money is not available to improve cooling, and power densities often cannot be maintained. RFG has seen that power efficiency has become the number one IT issue in the data center, and will continue to be an important factor for the foreseeable future. In addition, the ability to manage these new virtualized environments will take on an increasingly important role. IT executives need to anticipate and adapt future data center designs and operations to these new challenges RFG believes that IT executives are going to get the best chance of optimizing power, cost, and performance by selecting computing solutions that are designed to synergistically enhance capabilities in these three areas. IBM Corporation has teamed with Intel Corporation to integrate the benefits of energy efficient computing. On the one hand, Intel has added capabilities in its Intel® Xeon? Processor 5500 Series architecture that increase computational throughput for the same or less power. In addition, its integrated memory management has improved data throughput for less power as well. IBM has extended the capabilities of the Intel Xeon Processor 5500 Series based System x and BladeCenter offerings. They have improved memory management, adaptive energy management, and better virtualization. This helps get the most processing out of each data center element for the least cost. For example, HS22 offers outstanding performance, flexible configuration options and simple management in an efficient server designed to run a broad range of workloads. The new IBM BladeCenter HS22 offers 60 percent 1better price/performance on virtualization and 33 percent better on general business
1 60% price performance is based on SPECint_rate_base projected performance improvements comparing the HS21 using top-bin 3.33GHz 5400-series processors compared to the HS22 top bin 5500-series 2.93GHz processors. Pricing comparison based on standard list price with HS21 using 1 processor and 1GB memory versus HS22 standard list price for mode 7870-C4x, which has 1 processor and 2GB memory © Robert Frances Group, 2009 Increasing Energy Efficiency with x86 Servers 2 120 Post Road West, Suite 201, Westport, CT 06880 Phone: 203-429-8950 Fax: 203-429-8930 2 3applications. It also offers 50 percent more memory capacity and 12 percent less power used by the processor when fully utilized (50 percent less when idle) as compared to its predecessors. In addition, the HS22 is backwards compatible with all BladeCenter enterprise and office... [download for more]