Do you have too many servers

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 10:24:15 PDT

Do you have too many servers?

Many companies realize that they have too many servers or maybe they need to upgrade their SQL server. They know they are spending too much money on maintenance and equipment. Of course, they know that the cost would be enormous, & they are right. For 100 servers in a data center, the costs could easily reach over two to three million & that is not including the maintenance, electrical or cooling. Microsoft®, Intel® & NEC worked hard & did extensive research on this problem. The results of that research, & how that research can greatly facilitate your company is truly amazing. The following information has nothing to do with software upgrades, cluster or any other useless old solutions. The whole point is if you could set up one server instead of one hundred, decrease downtime, reduce the overall cost by a couple of million and generate a 30-40% increase in performance, would that help your company? You Bet! I will try to convey what is happening in the tech community, who is at fault, who is trying to make a positive change & what you can do. I will also talk briefly the benefits and features of this new technology. The rest is up to you.

We will show you how to seriously reduce the amount of servers you need, have a better database, SQL server or just how to increase your data center production while decreasing operating costs - all while getting 99.99% uptime, something clusters can not beat.

How can I consolidate and increase data center production?

So with that said what server can replace 100 other servers? We found many companies that have a special server called an Itanium and that is what this article is about. NEC developed a better quality server called an Itanium2. Before we go on I know what you're thinking, "but the cost must be enormous, after all, one server that can replace up to one-hundred servers?" Surprisingly we found out that is not the case at all. Although there are other Itanium type of servers out there, the NEC Itanium2 64 bit computing, not only had the best secure speeds (still holds the worlds speed record), best quality (with 99.99% uptime) buy also the best usable features and by far the best bang for the buck. The most important benefits are not how it will greatly increase production but how much money it will save your company.

Now how much do all your servers cost? What are the electricity costs? Do not forget all the licenses for the OS, applications, maintenance, upgrades etc. Of course down-time (which most companies still use clusters and other old solutions - read my other article on about a server with 99.999% guaranteed uptime without the need to reboot after updates).

Yes, it really adds up but let us look at a server that can really "serve" your business. There is a wave of 64-bit architecture based solutions entering the market place. More and more companies are inquiring about the benefits of migrating to a 64 bit system. Though the benefits may seem obvious it is important to understand exactly how different the 32-bit and 64-bit environments are and what type of hardware can best leverage the exponential performance capabilities offered by the 64-bit deployment. We found that NEC has established itself as the leader in the 64-bit hardware solutions space by introducing with the World's best non-clustered TPC-C results on Windows^TM .NET Server 2003 with SQL Server 2000 (64-bit).

What is 64-bit computing implementation, which applications benefit from 64-bit solutions, & the key differences and benefits of migrating from 32-bit to a 64-bit architecture? Though, the performance benefits of 64-bit can be experienced by many high-end workstations and server applications such high-traffic e-commerce sites, computer-aided engineering, & high-performance scientific & engineering computing, we will discuss specific benefits on Microsoft® SQL Server 2000 (64-bit). We will discuss how to leverage the 64-bit architecture to gain record performance on large database management systems, data mining & server consolidation solutions.

The Difference between 32-bit and 64-bit computing

64 bit operating systems supports far more virtual memory than a 32-bit operating system. For example, 32-bit Windows Server 2003 supports 4 GB of virtual memory, while 64-bit Windows supports 16 TB of virtual memory. Non-paged pool memory (an area of system memory reserved for objects that must remain in physical memory as long as they are active) increases substantially, up to 128 GB for the 64-bit platform compared to 256 MB maximum for the 32-bit platform. With these new higher limits, the scalability that the 64-bit platform offers is enormous in terms of terminal server clients, page pools, network connections, and so on. The 64-bit alone can increase speeds further than anything most people can comprehend. With the new Intel® Dual Core Processor with hyper-threading this increases the processing speeds, let me try to show you the magnitude of this. Let's say the fastest server is like a snail crawling on the sidewalk, the CPU in an Itanium with the Intel® 64 bit Dual Core Processor with hyper-threading would be equivalent to a fighter jet hitting the speed of Mach 1. NOTE: I am being very conservative here.

Extreme high performance servers are the top candidates for the 64-bit platform. Specially, large scale database management systems like Microsoft SQL Server 2000 (64-bit). The 64-bit environment allows large addressable memory pool & offers newly optimized processing capabilities leveraging the Intel Itanium2. Any application demanding high speed processor utilization, significant bus I/O speed, storing large amounts of data in memory cache, & high concurrency of hundreds and thousands of users, will directly benefit from increased performance by migrating to 64-bit architecture solution. For example, an existing 32-bit based application, after migration to a 64-bit software and hardware architecture, will see immediate surprising performance gains when taking on more complex workloads and processing large amounts of data.

Organizations that move to an Itanium 2-based platform can not only address current performance issues, but also gain familiarity with architecture that will be able to keep up with scalable demands in the near and intermediate future.

Scalability Benefits

Microsoft SQL Server 2000 (64-bit) has removed any remaining barriers left for scaling line of business applications. Applications that access a very large multi-terabyte database, data warehousing applications, business intelligence applications, decision support systems, modeling for scientific & financial applications, complex business applications & electronic resource planning systems (such as PeopleSoft, SAP, & Baan), online transaction processing (OLTP) applications, data mining & sleuth of other database applications, now have the ability to achieve exponential scalability when deployed on a 64-bit hardware solution. Microsoft SQL Server 2000 (64-bit) can support up to 64 CPUs and 512 GB of RAM. From a database performance perspective the 64-bit architecture provides super-computer like computing power to database applications. The bar of scalability for line of business and data warehousing applications has been raised by Microsoft SQL Server 2000 (64-bit) to levels unimaginable on the 32-bit versions. With NEC Itanium2 servers, customers can not only benefit from such record-breaking performance, but can also enjoy an overall reduced total cost of ownership.

Database and Server Consolidation Benefits

The concept of database & server consolidation has taken an all-together different dimension with the advent of 64-bit computing. Microsoft SQL Server 2000 (64-bit) supports up to 16 instances of database service on a single machine. Prior to 64-bit, enterprise customers were not really able to leverage this feature due to limitations inherent in the 32-bit Windows operating system. These limitations have been extinct from 64-bit implementations. For example, under 64-bit, NECExpress 5800/1000 series customers can expand from 8 CPUs all the way up to 32 CPUs. This allows customers for the first time to implement true database and server consolidation without having to worry about running out of horsepower as their business grows.

Last words: Folks, when we finished researching this data, we knew that NEC has a wonderful product, I just wished I owned more stock in the company because I sincerely believe this server has what it takes to dominate that field of servers. We couldn't believe this technology was being released to the public and truthfully, we also believe this will change what business use. Their server has nearly 10 times the throughput of 32-bit systems, over twice the performance of 32-bit systems. It is loaded with features like self healing system management and is 20-30% faster then IBM and HP RISC servers. We have found that it is 30% faster then other competitors servers at about 1/3 the price! It runs 90% of database applications, including SQL, DB@ and Oracle. NEC's Itanium machine is by far the MOST POWERFUL, SPACE-EFFICIENT, COST-EFFECTIVE 64-BIT COMPUTING SOLUTION AVAILABLE and is the only 64-bit blade server on the market.

NEC's crossover technology to fault tolerant RAM & CPU, they thought up of everything. To succeed you must have weapons, this is about as powerful as they come.

BeechTek Inc.

Do you have too many servers