Group Blog
Monday 27 October 2008, 12:09am
Intel Xeon pushes Sun higher
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Sun Microsystems has launched a benchmark blitz, designed to show it has the high performance crown - and much of the credit is for Intel Xeon-based machines.
On a new benchmark site, Sun claims five new world records on industry-standard benchmarks using x64 servers. These including the first-ever submissions on two new benchmarks - SPECjvm2008 and SPECmail2008 - and record-breaking results on SPEC CPU2006, SPECfp2006, ABAQUS and Fluent application benchmarks for high performance computing.
The Sun Fire X2250 server, based on quad-core Intel X5482 processors, has the world lead on the CPU2006 benchmark, with 27.8 on the SPECfp2006, benchmark. The Sun blog points out the role of system software in the achievement - and rightly so - but the full SPECfp2006 results continue to show Intel Xeon dominance.
The Sun Benchmarks site should be worth watching, as raw SPEC results can be difficult reading, and Sun's anonymous benchmark blogger livens them up with comments: "If you are interested in single-thread floating-point performance, here is a benchmark for you!"
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RedditFriday 24 October 2008, 02:10pm
Remote management - it's payback time
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Efficient desktop and laptop management is not just an optional extra. It's core to IT operations and can bring rapid returns by freeing up staff and financial resources.
Even if your IT budget is static or contracting, desktop management should come to the fore - because it saves real money. In fact it is one of the most cost-effective ways of investing in an IT infrastructure.
Return-on-investment calculations show the move to a managed fleet of desktops and laptops can pay for itself in a year - and deliver other benefits besides.
The major saving from remote management of desktops and laptops is the cost of fixing any problems. With remote diagnostics, IT staff can identify a problem without having to make a visit to the desk, or call a laptop in for investigation. Remote control can fix that problem remotely too.
Asklepios, a German health company decided to build in remote management when it unified the disparate IT administration of the numerous hospitals it runs across Germany.
Previously, IT staff spent an average of 90 minutes on every support request, often needing to travel to users' desks - multiple times, if a special piece of equipment turned out to be necessary.
Now, the average downtime has been slashed from seven hours to a few minutes. Fixing PCs quicker will make the IT department more productive - 12 percent of third-level support can be moved down to the quicker and cheaper second level. More importantly, quicker fixes will make the health practitioners better able to do their work.
In a similar project, Spanish financial services company Banco Popular found it could eliminate at least 20 per cent of the IT department's desk-side visits through remote management, which would cut the total cost of desktop problem resolution by around 10 per cent.
There are many ways to do remote management but Asklepios and Banco Popular both chose Intel's vPro. It stood out because it is based on a simple but clever concept: vPro has a management engine (ME) within the chipset. Secure access to the ME over TCP/IP from an enabled management console provides additional management features that are independent of the OS and power state.
Because it's separate from the main OS, it can operate even when that OS is broken or the machine is switched off. It can be launched with a signal over the network, so there is no need for the machine to be turned on.
This feature can deliver many benefits:
- Faster fault repairs With vPro on board, IT staff can query the hardware and software on a PC remotely, even when it will not boot. They can adjust the settings, boot the system remotely, and then work within or outside the OS, using console redirection, without any interaction with the user.
- Better asset inventories vPro will identify remote laptops, and accurately report their state and what hardware and software they have installed. Without vPro, laptops will go missing or be miscounted.
- Smoother software distribution Application software and patches can be pushed out more rapidly, reducing the amount of time IT staff have to spend securing the enterprise,
- Faster response to security incidents vPro systems will raise alerts when their behaviour is outside set limits and can be configured automatically to protect them. Full logs are kept, so any diagnosis is easier.
According to research carried out by services giant Wipro, if a business has a large fleet of laptops on a three-year refresh cycle, vPro can reduce management costs by 10 per cent in the first year, rising to 60 per cent in the fourth year when the whole fleet has been replaced. Similar benefits are available for desktops, Wipro says.
For its laptop research, Wipro asked 41 CIOs at larger companies what benefits they expected, and how much laptop management was costing them already. It turned out that 72 percent of remedial patch management can be eliminated with vPro, and other costs were similarly slashed.
Buying into desktop management requires the user to have a management console and third-party software. But in many cases the company already has one and extending it to the PC inventory is easy.
According to analyst firm Gartner, vPro is the de facto standard and is sufficiently mature that organisations should expect it to add no more than $20 per machine over comparable non-vPro systems.
In fact, there is no realistic price comparison between vPro and non-vPro systems. vPro is only available in top-end laptop ranges, which use high-end components throughout, so the cost of vPro will be buried in the difference between consumer and business kit.
Uwe Pöttgen, chief information officer of Asklepios, says, "The potential of Intel vPro technology with [Intel] AMT is significant." He is particularly keen on the way it works unattended.
Banco Popular is also looking to the future. Having used vPro for fault-handling, it is looking to apply it to inventory management soon - a move that should save it even more money.
Friday 17 October 2008, 01:01am
Cheaper ‘personal’ supercomputers from Cray
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Once the leading name in supercomputers, Cray still has a lot of cachet in the world of high-performance-computing (HPC) - and its devices are getting more affordable.
In the CX1, for the first time, Cray has used Intel processors. It has eight nodes, 16 Intel Xeon processors, and up to 4 terabytes of internal storage.
The machine is also the result of co-operation between Cray and Microsoft. It runs Windows HPC Server 2008 - based on 64-bit Windows Server 2008, and is designed to be cheaper and easier than previous supercomputers, while still packing enough power for weather forecasting, astrophysics, protein folding and all the other compute-intensive tasks supercomputers are designed for.
Consider it a personal supercomputer, if you like.
The specs of the CX1 compare astonishingly well with those of the Cray's first computer. The original Cray-1 was the fastest and best computer of its time in 1976. The Cray-1 could deliver 160 MIPS or 136 MFLOPs (megaflops, or million floating point operations per second), and had a ground-breaking 8Mb of main memory.
By comparison, today's processors tend not to be measured in MIPS (modern processors got to around 20,000 MIPS before we stopped counting like that), and the CX1 has 16 of them! With up to 64Gb of memory on each of its 16 nodes, the new machine has a total of up to a terabyte of memory, or around 100,000 times that of the Cray-1.
But perhaps the most surprising thing is the price: the Cray-1 cost about $5m - the CX1 costs $25,000.
Thursday 16 October 2008, 01:01am
Xeon keeps mainframes alive
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You don't hear much about mainframe computers these day - but they are still around. And surprisingly, the microprocessors which all-but killed them off in the last century are keeping them alive in this one.
When IBM ruled the earth and mainframes held sway over the data centre, IBM's rivals were the BUNCH (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data and Honeywell). There's some complication for companies like NEC, and Fujitsu/ICL but, basically, the only one of those left in the game now is the descendant of Boroughs and Univac: Unisys.
Unisys' ClearPath mainframes still go on. The company still makes its own CMOS mainframe processors, just as it did in the old days, and the machines still support the old OS 2200 and MCP operating systems, from Sperry (Univac) and Burroughs. The company just announced a new Dorado mainframe - based on its own CMOS processor. Though, ironically enough, the processor is manufactured for Unisys by IBM.
Despite the continued existence of bit mainframes, based on proprietary CMOS processors, the future direction is clear. Unisys' mid-range mainframes are based on Intel's Tigerton quad-core Xeon 7300 processors. It's also been running MCP on Xeon Windows machines for some time, and OS2200 on Intel X64 processors.
The raw performance of the latest ClearPath mainframe isn't particularly great compared with that of any microprocessor - but it's great at sequential operations needed for batch procession, and has good I/O. It does 525 MIPS (million instructions per second) and 500,000 IOPS (I/O operations per second).
Meanwhile, its smaller brethren look more than ever like the way of the future.
Wednesday 15 October 2008, 10:00am
Small businesses get SaaS-y with vPro
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Small-to-medium businesses haven't yet got all the benefits they can from software as a service, simply because they are small and don’t have the scale of larger organisations.
Remote management set-ups are often only cost-effective when applied to a big fleet of PCs and, in the past, that has meant a large organisation. Intel's vPro makes remote management easier and can be used by a number of different remote management platforms - but one offering from Intel aims to bring the benefits to smaller businesses.
Multi Site Director allows service providers to manage PCs at multiple sites, and was launched in April.
"Reseller business models are increasingly under pressure as hardware average selling prices fall," says Dave Byrne, who runs MSD in Europe. "So the ability to exploit service opportunities is increasingly important. MSD allows them to take on more outsourced service business.”
"The remote management tools enable them to offer a broader service, for example anticipating the need to replace consumables like printer toner," he added in a report at Hexus. "It allows them to pre-empt problems before they arise."
Service providers can have a rolling contract for MSD, and get the first month free, he says.
