Intel cloud computing marketing director Raejeanne Skillern presents "Unleashing the economic benefits of the cloud" at WebhostingDay 2010
The WHIR is reporting live from Germany at WebhostingDay 2010. Stay tuned to our news, features, blogs and WHIR tv for more updates from the event.
(WEB HOST INDSUTRY REVIEW) — The second keynote Thursday morning was delivered by Raejeanne Skillern, director of marketing for cloud computing at chip maker Intel.
She says she runs an organization (within Intel) that works deeply with a lot of the major service providers (along the lines of Google, Facebook, etc.) as well as with telcos and hosting providers, and tries to create products specifically for these businesses. As such, she says she’s got a few notions about areas of real opportunity that will arise for folks in the hosting business in the next few years.
She delivers some details on the potential increases in Internet-connected users and devices, and Internet content in the next five years, the general thrust of that being that there is an enormous increase in all three coming, and that we need a new kind of infrastructure to handle that increase – which is what she considers the cloud.
What she wants to demonstrate to hosting provider is how you can take certain cues from the big public consumer clouds, and the nature of service delivery to enterprise, and apply those principles to the kinds of service you’re offering to small businesses.
Among her principles for the future cloud architecture:
Efficiency – pretty self explanatory. Architecture for providing cloud services has to maximize the amount being done per-watt, or per-dollar.
Security – another pretty self explanatory point, but one that includes potentially shifting popular opinions about acceptable risk.
Simplicity – as architecture gets bigger and more complex, our systems for managing that infrastructure need to get simpler.
Open – this one was quick, but the general thrust was that we need to pursue interoperability.
She says Intel is relevant to the whole equation because about 50 percent of the total cost of ownership for cloud computing is on servers, which includes the cost for power and cooling. That is an area of major focus or Intel, because the company knows, says Skillern, that if it can take watts out of the system, it can add to a company’s bottom line. As such, Intel focuses on building efficiency into its processors.
However, along with the chips themselves, Skillern says, Intel wants to be seen as a company that is innovating within other platform layers, wrapping other technologies around the processor.
For a moment, she touches on the new Xeon 5600 Series processor launched this week, which requires 30 percent less power and provides a 60 percent performance boost. She says it can offer a consolidation rate of about 15:1, meaning you can get the equivalent performance of up to 15 old servers (or racks) with one 5600-powered server (or rack). But there’s more information on that elsewhere.
An example of one of the other areas of innovation, she says, is security, pointing to two technologies around the processor – the Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions, which increases the performance of encryption, and Intel Trusted Execution Technology, which provides a trusted launch environment for launching virtual machines.
The Intel intelligent Node Manager addresses power optimization requirements to aid power monitoring, help increase rack density, save energy by tuning to specific workloads, and push low-power policies en mass in order to, for instance, prolong operation during a power outage.
This is an interesting point, driven home by a video – showing a lot of big tech companies discussing how they’re using Node Manager to pretty directly impact their bottom line by building systems that can provision the amount of power required by the workload.
Continuing the tour of anything and everything, she discusses the notion – that might be of particular interest to hosting providers – of “micro servers.” Intel, says Skillern, has designed a “micro server” infrastructure component that can fit 18 at a time into a 4U case with two hard drives. They’re not blades, but they’re independent Xeon-based machines that can be set up within the box.
(I have to reiterate at this point that we were moving very fast, and really going all over the place – my apologies if I missed anything)
She discussed the company’s “Cloud Builder Program.” She says the program has three pillars: advanced research into the cloud, building clouds in several test bed environments, and documenting deployment best practices. More information on the Cloud Builder Program, including its first reference paper on how to build a cloud, is available at its section of the Intel website.
At the data center level, she says, the company is investing (partly just in the course of operating the company’s own very significant data centers) in best practices, optimization and the implications of future research – covering subjects such as operating temperature, data center management, density, containers and power delivery. Intel does a lot of publishing and consulting around these ideas.
Finally, a use case. She picked a hypothetical data center with 50,000 servers. Over the next three years, she says, optimizing the platform could save up to $6 million. Improving power management could save up to $8 million. Software optimization could save up to $20 million. And data center efficiency work could save up to $1 million.
The use case was a little more detailed than that, but it, like a lot of this presentation went by pretty quickly. Her point, in a way you could probably do some follow-up research on, is that Intel has been working on a lot of technologies that could potentially make your platform a lot more efficient, which, of course, would have direct benefits to your bottom line.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
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