cutting-edge agility - dell · “virtualization could also help us deploy new applications faster...
TRANSCRIPT
What do a wind farm developer, a clothing manufacturer,
a maritime security and tracking services provider, and
three institutions of higher learning have in common?
They heightened IT efficiency, reliability, and performance
using Dell™ blade servers.
Efficiency has become the watchword across virtually every
line of business. The good news is that technology advances
in today’s blade server infrastructures make it a snap to
optimize data center efficiency and manageability—enabling
organizations around the world to invest newfound IT cost savings
in initiatives that inspire innovation and accelerate growth.
The success stories highlighted here represent a small but
diverse sample of how organizations are putting Dell PowerEdge™
blade servers to work in ways that help maximize IT efficiency
and flexibility, whether to consolidate data center resources,
boost savings on power and cooling, virtualize servers for rapid
deployment, or process data-intensive applications on a high-
performance computing (HPC) platform. Their results may
surprise you.
16 2010 Issue 03 | dell.com/powersolutions
Blade solutions for the Efficient Data Center
Cutting-edge agility
Featuresection
Reprinted from Dell Power Solutions, 2010 Issue 3. Copyright © 2010 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.
dell.com/powersolutions | 2010 Issue 03 17
“ We’re confident that scientific users and engineers from across the nation will benefit from the reliability and performance of the Dell blade solution.”— David Lifka
Director at Cornell CAC
April 2010
Cornell University: Simplifying HPC solutions on the TeraGrid
HPC is the backbone of the work performed
by the Cornell University Center for Advanced
Computing (CAC), which supports Cornell
researchers and students from scientific
disciplines across the United States. The
center recently received a National Science
Foundation grant to deploy the MATLAB
numerical computing environment to a cluster
called “MATLAB on the TeraGrid.” The goal was
to demonstrate a working model for high-
performance utility computing with MATLAB,
and to encourage other software vendors to
develop similar capabilities.
The cluster uses Dell PowerEdge M600 blade
servers with Intel Xeon 5420 processors running
the Microsoft® Windows® HPC Server 2008
platform and DataDirect Networks storage.
Force10 Networks switches were sourced
through Dell. This HPC cluster allows a wide
range of scientific researchers and students to
use MATLAB to help reduce the time to solution
in a seamless experience, without having to
tackle the complexity and intricacies of parallel
computing. For example, external researchers
were able to remotely access all 512 cores of the
MATLAB cluster to model a hepatitis C virus, a
major cause of liver disease worldwide.
“We’re confident that scientific users and
engineers from across the nation will benefit from
the reliability and performance of the Dell blade
solution while, on the IT side, Cornell will benefit
from reduced power and space requirements and
the ability to maintain the blades with in-house
staff,” says CAC director David Lifka.
RES: Running like the wind on Dell blade servers
For rapidly growing wind farm developer
Renewable Energy Systems (RES), a power-efficient
HPC platform is mission critical. Having built
more than 80 wind farms around the globe, RES
continues to expand into new regions, including
Turkey and South Africa, and had to upgrade its
existing Dell HPC solution to quickly and accurately
assess these complex emerging markets.
Minimizing its carbon footprint and saving
space were key requirements, particularly because
an RES sister company was hosting the system
until a new data center could be built. Because
IT resources were scarce, simplified systems
management was also essential.
The Dell Global Infrastructure Consulting
Services team worked closely with RES to
understand its needs, and recommended
an energy-efficient HPC cluster built on
16 Dell PowerEdge M610 blade servers with
Intel® Xeon® X5550 processors running
Platform Cluster Manager – Dell Edition software.
Mounted in a PowerEdge M1000e modular
blade enclosure and connected with Dell
PowerConnect™ M6220 switches, the cluster
easily fits in the space available, and includes
a Dell PowerVault™ MD1000 direct attach array
for high-volume storage.
“Now we can complete the job in two to
three weeks—approximately 20 times faster—
which means we can get wind farms in place
quicker,” says Peter Stuart, technical manager at
RES. In addition, the company has reduced power
consumption by approximately 75 percent and
freed up valuable IT staff time.
Dell blade servers optimize data center efficiency—and boost organizational agility—through exceptional computing density, energy efficiency, network integration, and manageability
Powerful performance
In this video, learn more about how Dell blade servers helped RES meet its need for a high-performance, energy-efficient cluster.
youtube.com/watch?v= cwkDh-_pVnk
Reprinted from Dell Power Solutions, 2010 Issue 3. Copyright © 2010 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.
18 2010 Issue 03 | dell.com/powersolutions
Blade solutions for the Efficient Data CenterFeaturesection
Pacific Sunwear: Taking a shine to huge time savings
Performance and reliability are essential for
clothing chain Pacific Sunwear (PacSun) of
California. This top teen fashion retailer relies on
its high-speed reporting system to collect data
from stores daily, spot trends, and coordinate
deliveries with its distribution center in Kansas.
This system helps ensure that the latest products
reach stores in time to meet demand. If an IT
system goes down, it can affect the entire sales
chain and result in missed opportunities.
When PacSun needed to refresh its
infrastructure to increase availability, reduce costs,
simplify management, and enhance business
agility, it created a virtualized data center with
VMware® vSphere™ virtualization software running
on Dell PowerEdge M610 blade servers with
Intel Xeon 5500 series processors and a Dell
EqualLogic™ PS Series iSCSI (Internet SCSI)
storage area network (SAN).
“From a three-year ROI standpoint, we
could easily double our return with a virtualized
environment versus just replacing old servers with
new physical machines,” says Ira Ham, director
of network and information security at PacSun.
“Virtualization could also help us deploy new
applications faster and open up space in the data
center for growth.”
PacSun has also dramatically decreased its
operating expenses by eliminating more than
100 servers through virtualization, while simplified
storage management has resulted in a 20 percent
reduction in administrative time.
Thomas College: Making the grade in server reduction
Server consolidation through virtualization is
important to private liberal arts school Thomas
College in Maine, which serves more than
1,100 students with a cutting-edge IT infrastructure
designed to offer the latest Microsoft communication
and collaboration tools. The college’s IT department
needed a simplified system that would allow it to
provide high-performance laptops, desktops, and
portable computers while increasing management
efficiency in the data center. The college became
an early adopter of Microsoft Windows 7 on
Dell OptiPlex™ desktops and Dell Latitude™ laptops,
enabling IT staff to image computers more quickly
than in previous OS versions.
In the data center, Thomas is consolidating on
virtualized Dell PowerEdge M600 and PowerEdge
M610 blade servers with Intel Xeon processors
running the Microsoft Hyper-V™ platform—a
move that has helped the college consolidate
its footprint by 50 percent and reduce heat
generation by more than 30 percent, thereby
saving on power and cooling costs. Microsoft
System Center Virtual Machine Manager enables
IT staff to repair and upgrade physical hosts
without interrupting users simply by moving the
virtual machine images to a different blade server,
eliminating half of the planned downtime. And IT
staff can also set up a virtual machine in half an
hour, making it easy to accommodate evolving
needs of the Thomas faculty.
75%An energy-efficient cluster of Dell blade servers helped RES reduce power consumption by roughly 75 percent while minimizing the server footprint.
RES
512 coresCornell CAC demonstrated a utility that helped simplify a complex scientific solution involving access to all 512 cores of a Dell blade server cluster.
Cornell University
100 serversVirtualization on Dell blade servers helped Pacific Sunwear eliminate more than 100 physical servers and reduce administrative time by 20 percent.
Pacific Sunwear
50%Consolidation on Dell blade servers enabled Thomas College to reduce its server footprint by 50 percent and lower heat generation by 30 percent.
Thomas College
Reprinted from Dell Power Solutions, 2010 Issue 3. Copyright © 2010 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.
dell.com/powersolutions | 2010 Issue 03 19
Pole Star: Navigating maritime security requirements
When the International Maritime Organization
issued a regulation stating that every ship at sea
must report its position four times a day, Pole Star
Space Applications Ltd., a UK-based provider of
maritime security and satellite-enabled tracking
technology, anticipated a massive increase in sales
volume. With the new law pending, Pole Star had
less than 12 months to prepare its infrastructure
for the rise in demand.
The organization was running Dell servers in
hot standby clusters for high availability, but this
approach was relatively expensive and required new
hardware every three years. The company needed a
powerful environment that could scale quickly with
minimum expense, and recognized virtualization
as a flexible and easy-to-deploy solution. Working
with Dell, Pole Star IT staff designed and deployed
VMware vSphere virtualization on Dell PowerEdge
M600 blade servers with Intel Xeon E5410
processors and Dell EqualLogic storage, protected
by Dell ProSupport for IT.
The move to Dell blade servers cut the
physical server footprint by 83 percent, and
Pole Star estimates that the current virtualized
environment will serve business needs for the next
five years even with an anticipated 50 percent
growth in business volume within the next three
years. “We’re expanding rapidly, and having the
technology to support that process is incredibly
important,” says James Bayley, consultant head of
IT for Pole Star. “The Dell solution has delivered on
the promise of business agility.”
Stony Brook University: Leading the pack with Dell PowerEdge servers
Dell performance, reliability, and speed were
all put to the test—literally—when the Stony
Brook University team at the Supercomputing
Conference (SC) Student Cluster Competition
needed the components of an HPC cluster to beat
competing universities in processing large data
sets and compute-intensive scientific applications.
In the spirit of preparing students and
attracting interest in HPC, SC sponsors an annual
competition in which students compete on the
basis of benchmarking and scientific problem
solving. A quick response from Dell enabled the
Stony Brook University team to build an HPC
cluster of five PowerEdge M905 blade servers with
20 six-core AMD Opteron™ 2435 processors and
a 40 Gbps InfiniBand interconnect provided by
Mellanox Technologies.
As a result of Dell’s rapid response and the
system’s ease of deployment and simplified
configuration, cluster setup was quick, and the
students had the time they needed to prepare for
the event. The Stony Brook team came away with
the honors, and Dell performance was critical to
success: “The amount of memory we had on the
Dell machines allowed us to run much larger data
sets than the other teams, which was definitely a
factor in our winning,” says Aaron Pellman-Isaacs,
senior biology major and team leader.
Dell PowerEdge blade servers:
Standardized platforms for flexible growth
As IT decision makers run a gauntlet of financial and organizational
challenges, Dell PowerEdge blade servers ease the way with a compact
form factor designed to increase operational efficiency, reliability,
and manageability while saving big on power and cooling expense.
PowerEdge blade servers also provide diverse IT environments with
the computational density and intelligent fabric integration needed
to optimize availability and performance for a world of applications.
The six success stories featured here demonstrate that big results
can indeed come in a very small package.
Stony Brook University finished first at the SC Student Cluster Competition thanks to Dell blade server performance.
1st place83%Virtualization on Dell blade servers cut Pole Star’s physical server footprint by 83 percent while supporting an anticipated 50 percent growth.
Pole Star Stony Brook University
Reprinted from Dell Power Solutions, 2010 Issue 3. Copyright © 2010 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.