Smaller, stronger servers

Powerful, efficient and compact servers with some sort of intelligence and management capabilities in-built to ease data centre management are the order of the day. By Faiz Askari

The ongoing economic boom across verticals has sent IT heads into a tizzy over growth inside their data centres particularly on the server side. Servers are considered to be among the building blocks of a data centre. Enterprises are looking to save money and enhance production by consolidating workloads onto more power yet energy-efficient servers that can bring down the cost of operating a data centre.

Virtualisation has engendered a good level of confidence amongst CIOs and data centre architects. Virtualisation technologies separate software from hardware letting users eliminate multiple physical servers and get the processing power that they need from fewer boxes.

This brings about the need for virtualised servers interconnecting with each other. Such technologies speed performance and ensure security. HP, IBM and Sun have all looked at or developed these server-interconnection technologies. Other technologies such as InfiniBand, the high-speed I/O switching fabric and 10G Ethernet, also are emerging or have emerged.

Suresh Menon, business manager, Business Critical Systems, HP India Sales says, “Today every enterprise needs a robust and agile IT infrastructure. Real-time access to data and communications is the lifeline of all businesses and basic IT infrastructure has now evolved into a mandatory business requirement.”

Giving an insight about the technologies that are driving this market, Arnab Roy, general manager, Marketing, Sun Microsystems India says, “The technologies that are driving the server markets currently are most definitely the Unix servers.”

However, the technological acceptance of low end servers is greater than that of high end ones and hence their growth is much faster. Blade servers have gained ground.

Roy adds, “Low end servers will set the tone in the Indian market. These systems are making a mark as they assume important tasks such as virtualisation and are also having large amounts of memory as well as internal storage.”

Surendra Arora, head of the South Asia Enterprise Solution Sales Group and the World Ahead Program of Intel highlights some technologies that are driving the market of servers for data centres. He says, “Technologies such as multicore, virtualisation and service oriented architecture are actually driving this sector.”

In the data centre

Data centres are evolving. Most companies that earlier had unstructured data are ramping up facilities and there is a growing level of awareness among CIOs and data centre managers as to how they can manage their infrastructure optimally.

A lot of R&D is going on with regard to optimising server power consumption. This is happening from the processor level all the way up to disk and cooling technologies. Processors will have the ability to slow down or reduce power consumption when not being taxed by heavy loads. Similarly cooling fans which operate at differential speeds depending on a server’s requirements reduce power usage. Viswanath Ramaswamy, country manager, eServers xSeries & Intellistations, IBM India/South Asia says, “Earlier we had to sell the concept of blades to the client. Today instead, it is the client calling us to enquire about blades or solutions to reduce the energy requirements of his data centre. So I think ease of management, consolidation and energy efficiency are also factors driving buying decisions and not price alone. The concept of TCO has finally begun to take root and is no longer alien to most data centre customers.”

Arora says, “Server consolidation is a key growth driver. As such CIOs are looking for dual or multiple processing platforms to optimise the data centre. Blades are also driving the market on account of the scalability that they offer.” Ramaswamy says that IBM is taking this a step further with the launch of Power Executive software that it is shipping free with almost all of the company’s rack and blade servers. This software is designed to work with Intel’s Demand Based Switching (DBS) and AMD’s PowerNow! to reduce the amount of electricity consumed by servers when in an idle state. It also goes a step further by allowing users to cap power available to a server. Thus these technologies are helping remove the cooling or power availability bottleneck that many data centres face, allowing for the purchase of additional servers.”

Data centres are growing in numbers as well as complexity, providing a huge business opportunity for both solution providers as well as vendors. Menon adds, “The growth of the data centre market in India is attributed to the move towards centralisation and consolidation at the business process, application and infrastructure level.”

Performance per watt

Performance per watt was a new thing until last year. Indian customers today are looking for data centres that are much more optimised for space, power consumption and performance. Customers today have adopted a three dimensional view of evaluating not just the cost of acquiring infrastructure but also the cost of running it.

With the emergence of dual core architecture, customers are getting more bang for their buck. Ranjan Chopra, CMD, Team Computers says, “At the same time, investment in power and cooling are less, resulting in lower cost of ownership and running expenses.” Arora adds, “Performance per watt is an important metric. As the number of data centres and density of data centres increases, IT managers have to think about the cost of operation. Intel’s Xeon 5100 (Woodcrest, dual core) and 5300 (Clovertown, quad core) series are widely regarded as the most energy efficient processors in the world.” Intel is the only vendor to offer quad core servers today. The Xeon 5300 series maximises energy efficiency and gives the most performance head-room.

According to Ramaswamy though Performance per watt is an important barometer abroad, the concept is still in its infancy in India. However he also said, “We see this as a major driving force in future purchases, especially as the trend of offshoring data centres to India continues. The ability to get maximum performance out of limited or minimal power is already a major decision criterion for some of our EDA clients in India and we expect this to percolate to other industries in the coming months.”

Putting this across in other words, customers are now looking beyond price and performance to performance per watt per rack unit of space. Roy adds, “Sun has place SWaP (Space, Wattage and Performance) which helps CIOs to calculate and make comparative notes of the performance of the server that they are going to purchase. When we say that our servers are the most energy efficient, we have gone ahead and asked customers to try it out themselves.”

Agreeing that this is an emerging concept in India, Menon says, “Enterprise customers are evaluating this trend very closely. Performance is still the key parameter, but Performance/Watt is becoming an important measure as it directly starting to show as operational expense.” Having the lowest Wattage per server does not matter. It is the combination of high performance and low power consumption that is needed.

Roy says, “Efficiency in every aspect of an organisation is necessary, and Sun Fire servers with CoolThreads technology consume one-third less energy, generate less heat, and take up one-half the space in the data centre while delivering twice the performance.” Sun avoided approximately $24 million in energy and systems costs last year by using its own technology.

Arora adds, “CIOs need to start thinking about refreshing their data centres. Last year, Intel IT proactively retired legacy single core systems. The team saved nearly $9 million, increased performance by 80 percent and reduced power consumption by 40 percent.”

Management and maintenance

Roy says, “Sun Managed Services provides a perfect solution for managing and maintaining data centres. Sun Managed Services is a broad portfolio of dynamic, heterogeneous IT infrastructure and management capabilities aimed at helping customers enhance the business value of their IT investment through improved operational efficiency and service levels.”

Blades and virtualisation when combined help reduce age old problems experienced by even the most proficient of IT professionals. Chopra says, “Problems such as deployment of servers, patch management and getting by with less physical hardware can be overcome with the help of virtualisation.”

Menon says, “HP has simplified the management tools. Consolidation and virtualisation which provide great cost reduction and flexibility can add to the management requirement. Also most data centres have multiple operating environments, such as Unix, Windows, and Linux.” Management tools from HP are browser based, requiring little or no training and are common across all categories of HP servers and storage and are available out of the box to manage HP UX, Windows or Linux environments. These can be easily integrated with enterprise management tools such as the HP OpenView suite of products.

Server consolidation

The complexity of the IT environment and systems has seen consolidation in the enterprise data centre. Data centre operations have been consolidated across industries due to falling costs.

Menon adds, “Consolidation is gaining momentum not only in large enterprises but also the SMB segment, though at different levels. The need for additional capacity is now being contested with consolidation and centralisation leading to better resource management and lower downtime. In the present environment where businesses are trying to bring down costs, consolidation makes sense on a broad level.”

Agreeing to the fact that server consolidation is an emerging area, Roy says, “There are apparent hidden costs to any infrastructure, which is becoming apparent for many enterprises. For e.g. with respect to x86 servers, there are issues such as poor server utilisation rates at 20 percent and server sprawl that is costly to manage, maintain, power and cool.”

Arora adds, “Overall TCO decreases as servers are consolidated. The exact benefits depend on the application. An Intel IT study has found that for every 100 servers consolidated using the quad-core Xeon 5300 series, IT departments can save over $75,000.”

According to Roy, “Physical consolidation is one step in increasing resource utilisation and cutting infrastructure costs. However, any IT manager also wants assurances that this consolidation will minimise disruption in the data centre. Sun x64 systems address these issues head-on by enabling x86 server consolidation through virtualisation.”

Chopra highlights that consolidation helps reduce power, cooling and overall infrastructure costs. “By consolidating servers, less time is required for managing servers and data centres. This in turn allows organisations to invest more time and focus on critical areas that will directly impact business productivity,” says Chopra.

V is for virtualisation

Virtualisation is one of the most dynamic trends in the market. Companies are concerned about maximising their investment as well as increasing server utilisation. Menon says, “Virtualisation is about pooling resources. However, we believe that customers must consider more than just pooling of resources if it has to be useful in a business application environment. Thus we believe that a Virtual Server Environment is all about virtualisation integrated with high availability, pay-per-use models and superior management capabilities.”

Virtualisation is on the rise, even in the x86 server market. Traditionally, customers are used to running a single application on an individual server. With utilisation levels languishing at less than 20 percent for x86 hardware, the boom in processing power with the advent of multi core chips can only exacerbate this wastage. Hence the growth of virtualisation with IT managers choosing to run VMware, Microsoft or Zen OS to deploy multiple virtual machines each with its own application on a single physical server.

With processing power and memory addressability growing by leaps and bounds, the only remaining bottleneck to virtualisation is I/O. Ramaswamy says, “Even if your server can support multiple virtual machines in terms of processing power, having three or four 1GB Ethernet connections for eight to ten virtual machines can be a limitation.” The adoption of technologies like InfiniBand or 10G Ethernet can be used to address this problem. IBM has already announced products on the above standards in its blade and rack server lines and one of the major differentiators of the company’s Blade Chassis is the high I/O bandwidth availability—a must if you are looking for a successful virtualisation deployment.

There must also be tools and technologies which enable automation and integration with business applications like those from SAP and Oracle. It is only when all of these are addressed holistically that virtualisation will benefit a business organisation.

Highlighting some problems that a customer usually comes across in India, Roy informs “A sudden surge in a company’s customer base and transaction volumes is one. One of our banking customers saw a surge in their transaction volume from 50,000 transactions per day to 2.5 million transactions per day. Another big issue ahead of customers is to scale up as per the perceived market demand, without investing in additional IT infrastructure.”

Moreover, the development of online infrastructure, for robust and speedy transactions, scaling up the operation and reaching out to a bigger audience is a situation faced periodically that is addressed to IT engineers, and they, in turn, provide solutions such as ERP implementation as well as pooling. This is an aspect of virtualisation, which helps, in multiple applications as well as in reducing the footprint of physical systems and putting dedicated resources onto a task.

Currently, server virtualisation is most common on proprietary hardware in data centres, but over time, it is likely to become equally popular among smaller businesses. It will allow them to simplify deployment and improve reliability, availability, and security. Arora says, “Virtualisation lets you turn a physical server into multiple ‘virtual’ systems, or partitions, allowing multiple operating systems and applications to run independently on a single platform.” Intel’s virtualisation technology provides hardware enhancements built into the company’s next generation server platforms, improving the stability of what today is a software-only solution.

Applications hosted at a data centre, big or small, must be accessible at all times. This translates into a requirement for robust server architecture. Features such as component level redundancy and in some cases, server level redundancy help make sure that the client always has access to data, ensuring business continuity.

Robustness is a confluence of RAS-Reliability, Availability and Serviceability. This is an integral aspect of any server architecture. Vendors have some offerings that sport mainframe class RAS features, which have been brought down to the Unix environment at affordable prices. Roy says, “We have a rich history in terms of features like dynamic system domain, ability to run mixed generation clock speeds, ability to service a running system without a reboot of the OS and extensive virtualisation.”

Arora adds, “Robustness of servers is extremely important for any data centre environment. That is why Intel has taken a platform approach to server designs. For example, Intel I/O acceleration technology improves data throughput. We also offer demand based switching which reduces average system power consumption and potentially improves system acoustics.”

Calling server robustness the most critical requirement in running mission critical business applications in a data centre, Menon adds, “The server and solution architecture must be designed to handle any eventuality as downtime can result in tangible and intangible losses. Thus most customers choose servers and operating environments with proven capabilities and robustness for running their mission critical applications.”