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Everything changes, and in the server space, it often seems to change for the better. As always, raw performance remains a high priority, and the server products that can crunch the most data in the smallest time tend to grow quickly popular. But the rise of the blade server market a few years ago spawned a new awareness of the need for power efficiency that ran virtually in parallel with the mobile PC business. Desktop replacement notebooks tried for a while to integrate desktop CPUs, but the effort was doomed by thermal constraints. The same problem wasn't quite so drastic in the server world. Many customers are content to run hot servers if they get blazing performance in return. But the trend toward smaller systems is impacting the server and workstation spheres just as much as in desktop and mobile. Smaller platforms mean higher processor densities and thus a rise in thermal concerns. At the same time, electricity isn't getting any cheaper. The bigger the company, the more power efficiency is becoming a priority—both because of burgeoning environmental regulations as well as swelling utility bills. Transmeta stands as the lasting example of a company that understood the low-power concept long before the market was willing to embrace it. Crusoe processors delivered on promised power savings but yielded little battery life extension, and the chip family's performance was widely (and at times undeservedly) panned, thus stalling its push into the blade server segment. Transmeta developed many worthy technologies, but perhaps its most important contribution to the industry was to raise awareness about the relationship between performance and power consumption in multiple product categories.
This message did not go unnoticed by larger competitors, and soon enough Intel responded with a long line of low-voltage and ultra-low-voltage parts. One of the first of these in the server space was the 700 MHz Ultra Low Voltage Pentium III, which ran at just 1.1V and not coincidentally also appeared as a notebook processor. LV and ULV products continued to evolve, with the first quarter of this year seeing Intel's under-publicized "Sossaman" (Dual-Core Intel Xeon Processor LV), essentially the 31W TDP mobile Yonah processor repurposed for power-efficient blades and 1U servers alongside the E7520 chipset. While Xeon LV's suitability in the server space applies only to 32-bit applications, the chip offers four times the performance per watt of its predecessor, the single-core, 3.0 GHz, 55W "Irwindale," cumbersomely called the 64-bit Intel Xeon Processor with 2MB L2 Cache, which had non-optimized SKUs running at 110W.
Competing chip vendors have nothing similar to counter with. The problems of the 90 nm fab process generation are now swept away, and the Xeon news for 2006 is not good—it's amazing. And the story is not just about performance-per-watt. In the end, that sort of messaging is little better than selling systems according to price points. What matters even more than the chip itself is the ecosystem built around it. Therein you're likely to find the difference between being a system seller and a solution enabler. Once you dig under the surface, we suspect you'll find that the ecosystem surrounding the new "Bensley" Xeon generation is just as good if not better than the new chart-topping chips themselves. Behind the Spec Sheet In a way, Bensley marks the return of Intel to the server space limelight. Our industry still carries on a love affair with all manner of benchmark scores, and Bensley, spearheaded by the "Dempsey" processor, returned the Xeon line to toe-to-toe battling for the top benchmark spot against AMD's fastest Opterons. There are plenty of reasons we'll cover below as to why Dempsey has earned attention from a speeds and feeds perspective, but some of Xeon's most persuasive elements are more subtle. The headline grabbers for server chips are the trifecta of performance, power, and pricing. And for plenty of users, these are the key buying criteria. But if market share numbers are any indication, most businesses think otherwise. These are the vast majority of server owners who kept buying Xeon even when the chip family lagged behind in competitive benchmark tests. This dominant group understands that the "three Ps" are only one side of a server purchase decision. Among SMBs in particular, where strong management applications need to help perform and automate the tasks often shouldered by an enterprise's IT staff, platform software and validation can matter much more than a few benchmark percentage points. By now, few if any channel resellers should be strangers to Intel's idea of a platform offering. Intel rarely goes about touting this or that Xeon processor. Rather, the focus is on the entire current generation Xeon platform. In this case, "Bensley" embodies a succession of processors starting with the Dempsey SKUs, the 5000-series chipsets, FB-DIMM memory technology, and a formidable collection of advances enabled by these parts, several of which are worth special notice. Active Server Manager Few things matter more in the server and workstation worlds than uptime. A downed system can cost a business anywhere from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour, which is why it's imperative to have technologies in place that help prevent failures and, in the event of disaster, assist in the fastest possible recovery. With Bensley and its counterpart workstation platform, Glidewell, Intel has taken its Active Server Manager (IASM) to a new level of functionality by tying diagnostic and repair applications directly to the system's heart via the chipset. "IASM allows you to have things like hardware monitoring, thermal monitoring, system monitoring, logging—all these things that hook into different applications," says John Nguyen, worldwide channel marketing manager for Tyan, which now offers Bensley server boards supporting Intel's management features. "It's interesting because this kind of thing is usually seen in the LAN controller or super I/O but not the core logic. Intel did this because they're trying to support ASMI [Active Server Management Interface], which is like a special card slot for the boards. You can put an off-the-shelf card in there, and you don't have to program or anything. Just plug it in, and if the board can do monitoring, you can then do all these things with little to no trouble."
Intel Active Server Management requires a compliant chipset, network hardware, and software application(s). The technology's function range is truly impressive, enabling everything from remote boot-up initialization to remote repair even when the server's OS is fragged to network-wide antivirus updating. Intel ASM 1.0 debuted with Bensley in May, but version 1.5, timed with the Woodcrest CPU launch, allows for software asset tracking and management regardless of system state—a big perk for enterprises in particular—as well as a common interface for client and server management consoles.
The opportunity for resellers to offer management services based on this robust, simplified technology is substantial to say the least. According to Intel's Todd Garrigues, North America channel marketing manager for boxed products, the actual attach rate for server management modules, such as those that support ASMI, is "surprisingly low." A simple demonstration of what can be done with Bensley's IASM technology may be enough on its own to win over ranks of new buyers. ...more |
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