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RISC server consolidation

Wednesday, March 18 2009 12:00 AM

Eddie Toh from Intel explain the benefits of consolidating onto Intel® Xeon® servers. Find out how your organization can get better value and protection for your investment.

Hi everyone! My name is Eddie Toh and I'm from Intel.

Today I'm going to talk to you about server consolidation.

It is a topic that you would have heard of many times before.

The difference today is that we are going to talk about RISC server consolidation onto Intel servers,in other words, migrating from your current applications running on your existing RISC servers, whether it is a 1-socket, 2-socket, or 4-socket server, and consolidating them onto industry-standard Intel® Xeon® servers.

By consolidating your RISC servers onto Intel® Xeon® servers, the benefits are three-fold.

Firstly, you'll see an increase in performance. Secondly, you'll see an increase in your cost savings. Thirdly and most importantly, you'll see a reduction in your total cost of ownership (TCO). This is because the old RISC servers in your data center are more expensive to maintain.

Firstly, the older servers are not as energy-efficient, which means they have higher power and cooling requirements. Secondly, the older servers in your data center tend to take up more space and do not perform as well. Newer servers can deliver more performance in the same form factor.

In addition to reducing TCO and offering better performance, Intel® Xeon® servers give you more flexibility and choice, as they are available from multiple OEMs, offering you a broad range of cost-effective solutions, unlike RISC servers that are limited to few vendors that are promoting the proprietary architecture.

Intel® Xeon® servers also support multiple operating systems environment, like Solaris, all flavors of Linux, as well as Windows, whereas RISC servers will mainly support the one OS that is linked to the proprietary architecture.

This means that when you migrate from your RISC server to an Intel® Xeon® server and you prefer to stay on UNIX, Solaris is now available on Xeon.

Applications that run on Solaris 10 can run on both the Intel® Xeon® server as well as the Sun SPARC server, making it very easy for your to migrate.

The other option available is to migrate your application to Linux or Windows and there are resources available to assist you with the migration of your applications, porting, tuning, and optimization services.

When you consolidate your servers, you are most likely to be doing virtualization.

And the Intel® Xeon® processors has several Virtualization Technology features built in, like FlexPriority and FlexMigration.

FlexPriority will boost the performance of your virtual machines, whereas FlexMigration will ensure that future generations of Xeon servers will be able to work in the same virtual machine pool as the current generation of servers. This gives you better value and protection for your investment.

I'd like to end by sharing these results from one of our case studies.

This telecommunication company moved from Sun SPARC servers to HP ProLiant servers, running their database application on Linux, and they saw a staggering 428% performance gain.

This is Eddie Toh and I am from Intel.