Intel looks to save $250M by consolidating data centers

Intel is maintaining a four-year refresh cycle for servers in data centers as it looks to save close to US$250 million in data center costs over an eight-year period, a company executive said on Tuesday. Intel had 147 data centers at its peak, with the now reduced to around 70. Intel hopes to save $250 million between 2007 to 2015 by cutting costs associated with data centers, including cooling, system maintenance and support. The company has already cut the number of data centers by half and is further looking to consolidate servers, said Diane Bryant, Intel's chief information officer, at an event on Tuesday. A four-year refresh cycle for servers, which started in 2007, is already helping the company reduce such expenditure, Bryant said.

Intel decided a four-year refresh cycle for servers would be optimal as older servers eat up financial resources and cost more to replace. The company saved $45 million in 2008 in data center costs, but there has been a lot more scrutiny on IT expenditure this year, Bryant said. Intel hopes to cut data center costs by implementing faster chips, consolidating servers and putting more applications in virtualized environments, Bryant said. That has helped reduce the hardware in data centers while increasing overall server performance, Bryant said. Intel has consolidated servers by replacing 10 single-core Xeon chips with one Nehalem-based quad-core Xeon chip. The company also cut hardware acquisition costs and related overhead costs per server, like energy and maintenance.

Implementing more power-efficient servers has helped reduce energy costs, but Intel has struggled in identifying an "efficient data center." Cooling costs relate to the power efficiency of servers, a metric that has been hard to calculate, she said. A big chunk of data-center expenditure involved cooling servers, Bryant said. Intel is working with U.S. government agencies like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to measure power efficiency in different server states from idle to maximum usage, Bryant said. The company is also using technologies to squeeze out maximum server performance by maintaining high utilization rates. The EPA issued Energy Star ratings for servers in May, with the main metric criteria being the efficiency of a server's power supply and the power consumed at idle.

Intel has about 100,000 total servers, of which 80,000 are in the high-performance computing environment. The company has 20,000 "office" servers for normal tasks, where the company maintains a 65 percent utilization rate for maximum efficiency. Intel looks for an 85 percent utilization rate in the HPC environment without overloading the servers, Bryant said. Getting applications out of dedicated hardware and into virtualized environments is one way Intel manages to attain high utilization rates, Bryant said. Intel is already experimenting in numerous ways to cut energy costs. At the same time, Intel wants to make sure it reaches the utilization threshold without overburdening systems. "Back two or three years ago, when virtualization became the focus, when everybody's data centers were running at 5, 10 or 15 percent utilization, the focus ... was to drive up utilization levels through consolidation and virtualization," Bryant said.

Last year proposed it experimented with a data center that uses minimal air conditioning. It is also working with academia and companies like Hewlett-Packard and IBM to determine the best techniques to cool equipment in data centers.

IBM adding data centers, cloud computing lab in Asia

IBM opened a new data center in South Korea on Thursday and said it is building another one in Auckland, New Zealand, to address a surge in demand for cloud computing and IT services in the Asia-Pacific region. The total investment by IBM in these three facilities is about US$100 million, said James M. Larkin, a spokesman for IBM Global Services. The company also announced the opening of a cloud computing lab in Hong Kong. The company, which already has over 400 data centers worldwide, will continue to invest in new data centers that offer cloud computing capabilities, while upgrading existing data centers to support cloud computing, Larkin said.

The data center at Auckland will be in operation by 2010 with IBM investing about US$57 million in that center over the next ten years. IBM is planning to announce by February next year a new data center in Raleigh, North Carolina, he added. IBM will locate the data center at Highbrook Business Park in East Tamaki. The company can add more stages to expand the data center as demand rises, it added. The 56,000 square-foot facility will include a 16,000 square-foot data center, IBM said. The center will support IBM's clients in New Zealand and neighboring countries in the Asia-Pacific region, Larkin said.

The center was built using green technology, according to the company. The data center in Seoul will provide IT services including strategic outsourcing, e-business hosting and disaster recovery to more than 20 clients which have entered into outsourcing agreements with the company, IBM said. The Cloud Computing Laboratory in Hong Kong is a development and services center, focusing on LotusLive messaging development, testing, technical support and services delivery, IBM said. The lab, which is IBM's tenth cloud computing lab worldwide, builds on the email technology and expertise of Outblaze, a company in Hong Kong, whose messaging assets were acquired by IBM earlier this year and included in the Lotus brand of collaboration services. LotusLive is IBM's collection of integrated, online collaboration solutions and social networking services for businesses. The lab is part of the IBM China Development Laboratory which has over 5,000 developers.

Storm8 says phone-number lawsuit lacks merit

On Monday, we covered a pending class-action lawsuit filed against Storm8, developer of numerous popular iPhone games. In an official statement on the company's forum, Storm8 attempts to clarify just why the heck it was gathering phone numbers, and just what the heck it was doing with them. The suit alleges that Storm8's games used "backdoor" methods to snag players' iPhone numbers. The short version: accidentally, and nothing.

Elsewhere in the forum thread, Storm8 claims that said code was removed from its apps in August 2009, that the existing database of phone numbers was destroyed, and that the phone numbers sent by users who haven't yet upgraded to latest versions of the games aren't stored. The long version goes like this: Early in the development process of Storm8's initial games, the company wanted a way to identify specific iPhones connecting to its massively-multiplayer games, so it tried using the device's phone number . Eventually, Storm8 "determined it was more suitable to use the device's Unique Device ID instead." But-and here's the big head-scratcher-somehow, the old number-sniffing code was left in place anyway. On the lawsuit itself, Storm8 makes this key claim: "Storm8 will ask the judge to dismiss the lawsuit in its entirety due to the lawsuit's complete lack of merit. To our knowledge, no user has incurred any damage or loss as a result of the matters discussed in the lawsuit." We'll let the courts decide, of course, but if Storm8's claims are to be believed, perhaps the only thing the company is guilty of is especially lousy code review. We believe that we have always complied with all of the statutes referred to in the lawsuit and never took an action that harmed or impaired users or your devices in any way.

Network IPS tests reveal equipment shortcomings

An independent test and evaluation of 15 different network intrusion-protection system products from seven vendors showed none were fully effective in warding off attacks against Microsoft, Adobe and other programs. NSS Labs, which conducted the test without vendor sponsorship of any kind, also evaluated the 15 network IPS offerings for their capability in responding to "evasions," attacks delivered in an obfuscated and stealthy manner in order to hide. NSS Labs, which conducted the evaluation, found that the Sourcefire IPS showed 89% effectiveness against a total of 1,159 attacks on products such as Windows, Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft SharePoint, while the Juniper IPS scored lowest at only 17% effectiveness.

In that arena, the McAfee and IBM IPS held up particularly well. Products tested came from Cisco, IBM, Juniper, McAfee, Sourcefire, Stonesoft and TippingPoint. Clear Choice Test: Cisco IPS 7.0 raises the bar   Rick Moy, president of NSS Labs, says he was disappointed overall that none of the 10Mbps to 10Gbps IPS products tested achieved 100% effectiveness in detecting and blocking the attacks, including buffer overflow exploits. Check Point, Enterasys, Nitro Security, Radware, StillSecure, Top Layer and Trustwave declined to participate in this round of tests, which were conducted in October and November. "The threats are continuing to get worse and everyone says they're keeping up with them, so we wanted them to prove it,"  Moy says. Under this measurement, McAfee, IBM and Stonesoft did well. The vendors that did participate were allowed to tune their equipment in one round of tests designed to find out how long it took to make changes to the default settings in order to try and improve performance based on policy.

The Sourcefire IPS, however, took the most time, which Moy says would translate into time needed for professionals to manage it in an enterprise. Sometimes lab tests simply "don't look like a real attack" to equipment. McAfee, which on Tuesday will make major announcements related to new network-security gear, was left at a loss to explain why the its IPS didn't achieve 100% effectiveness in the NSS Labs tests. "There are a variety of reasons you might not achieve 100%," says Greg Brown, McAfee's senior director of products marketing, who adds he hasn't read the NSS Labs report yet. He says McAfee focuses its efforts on "very new exploits." Details on the IPS effectiveness, evasion attacks, tuning, performance and cost-of-ownership issues are included in depth in the 50-plus page report "Network Intrusion Prevention Group Test" that NSS Labs is selling for $1,800. NSS Labs also anticipates conducting a round of tests for host-based IPS products in the near future.

Personal data of 24,000 Notre Dame employees exposed online

In an embarrassing security gaffe, personal data on more than 24,000 past and present employees at the University of Notre Dame was made publicly available on the Web for more than three years. Files containing the data are believed to have been posted on the site in August 2006 and remained there until this October this year when they were finally discovered and reported to university officials. The breach resulted when an employee inadvertently posted files containing the names, Social Security numbers and zip codes of the employees on a publicly accessible university Web site. The files have since been removed and secured and there is no evidence that the information has been inappropriately used, said Dennis Brown, Notre Dame's assistant vice president for news and information.

All of those affected by the breach have been notified and the university has offered to pay for credit monitoring services, he said. Included in the list of those affected by the breach are a "large number" of on-call and temporary employees, Brown said. Notre Dame last suffered a data breach in January 2006 , when unknown intruders broke into a server and accessed records belonging to an undisclosed number of individuals. On Sunday, a blogger discovered online a sensitive security manual containing detailed information on the screening procedures used by Transportation Security Administration agents at U.S. airports. This is the second time this week that an organization has found itself in the news over an inadvertent data leak.

The document was supposed to have been redacted before it was posted on a government Web site, but wasn't. As with the Notre Dame incident, the document was quickly removed once the lapse was reported but not before numerous copies of the document were posted at sites all over the Internet. This June, a 267-page document listing all U.S. civilian nuclear sites , along with descriptions of their assets and activities, became available on whistleblower site Wikileaks.org days after a government Web site publicly posted the data by accident. Though data breaches involving external hackers get most of the attention, inadvertent data exposures such as these latest examples are not all that uncommon. The sensitive, but unclassified, data had been compiled as part of a report being prepared by the federal government for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). In another incident in October 2007, a student at Western Oregon University discovered a file containing personal data on student grades after it had been accidentally posted on a publicly accessible university server by an employee. Numerous others breaches, including at government agencies, have also inadvertently leaked confidential and sensitive data over file-sharing networks.

Retailers taking orders for laptops with Core i7 chips

Retailers are now taking orders for what could easily be the world's fastest laptops, powered by Intel's speedy Core i7 desktop processors. The chips, launched in November, were dubbed the "world's fastest chips" by Intel until the company's Xeon server processors were introduced in March. U.S. retailer AVADirect and Canadian retailer Eurocom are offering variants of Clevo's D900F laptop with the Core i7 processor, a chip usually included in high-end gaming desktops. The laptops will come with 17-inch screens and are intended to be desktop replacement PCs. The machines don't skimp on features and include a full array of components one would find in Core i7 desktop systems, according to laptop specifications on the retailers' Web sites.

Laptop hardware usually lags desktop hardware by up to 12 months, so the desktop hardware needed to be redesigned for notebook usage, AVADirect said. AVADirect, in particular, decided not to wait to bring the Core i7 hardware to consumers in a portable form. "While power usage will be higher, AVADirect does not need to wait until Intel or some other company designs and implements mobile offerings of current desktop hardware," AVADirect said in a statement. The laptops come with Core i7 920, 940 and 965 quad-core processors running at speeds from 2.66GHz to 3.2GHz, and include 8MB of L3 cache. The laptops will support up to 6GB of DDR3 memory, which should provide a tremendous performance boost. The laptops draw 130 watts of power, and will come with the X58 chipset and an Nvidia graphics processing unit (GPU) to boost graphics performance. The machines will support up to 1.5TB of RAID hard drive storage and include wireless 802.11a/b/g/n technology.

The price crosses $6,000 for an extravagant configuration that includes the fastest Core i7 965 processor, three 500GB storage drives, internal Bluetooth capabilities, a DVD-RW drive and additional cooling features. They will ship with either Windows Vista or Linux OS. Eurocom's customized Clevo D900F system - which is called the Panther D900F - weighs a whopping 11.9 pounds (5.4 kilograms). With standard components, the D900F laptop's starting price is around US$2,500 on AVADirect's Web site. Intel's Core i7 chips are a significant upgrade over Intel's Core 2 Duo chips, which are currently used in desktops and laptops. Each core will be able to execute two software threads simultaneously, so a laptop with four processor cores could simultaneously run eight threads for quicker application performance. The new chips are built on the Nehalem microarchitecture, which improves system speed and performance-per-watt compared to Intel's earlier Core microarchitecture. Intel has integrated the chips and chipset with QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) technology, which integrates a memory controller and provides a faster pipe for the CPU to communicate with system components like graphics cards.

The chips, code-named Arrandale, will be dual-core and start shipping in the fourth quarter this year, with laptops becoming available in early 2010. Arrandale chips are expected to be faster than existing Core 2 Duo chips and consume less power. Intel later this year intends to introduce new chips for desktops and laptops. However, laptops with Arrandale chips may not match the speeds of Core i7 laptops, considering the chips will be dual-core and built to draw limited amounts of power.

IBM's Black Friday-like promotion pushes IT equipment leasing

As the holiday season approaches, IBM this quarter began its own Black Friday promotion by offering incentives it hopes will convince users to lease its hardware or buy used IBM equipment. IBM, like most other major IT vendors, operates its own financing arm and recommends that leasing is especially attractive for customers that have concerns about their budgets, about upgrade processes and about ultimate equipment disposal. When asked, Tom Higgins, director of IBM Global Financing, was hard pressed to provide any argument against leasing.

Industry analysts have said they expect that leasing will increasingly become the preferred path for many large users of IT equipment, especially as the economy continues to stagnate and large companies look to preserve capital. In addition to spreading out the cost of equipment, leasing may enable companies to speed upgrades, analysts said. And in most cases, analysts say, IT vendors have the backing to extend credit, giving them a leg up over many other financing options. For example, leasing could help a company more easily shift from a five-year to a three-year IT equipment replacement schedule. The cost of leasing the upgraded systems would be less than a company would have spent to power that equipment if it owned it, according to Braunstein's research. In a study of performance and energy use of IBM blade servers, Cal Braunstein, an analyst with the Robert Frances Group Inc., in Westport, Conn., found that over a three-year period a user could replace 1,000 blades with 250 blades due to constant performance improvements.

Joe Pucciarelli, an analyst at IDC, said the poor economy will probably continue to limit capital available to large firms, so he expects an increase in their leasing of IT equipment. Pucciarelli did note that companies that turn to leasing must have a good lifecycle management process in place so it can effectively utilize the new equipment. He said the benefits of leasing versus buying may be further justified by allowing IT operations to more easily upgrade to more powerful systems rather than have to build out floor space to house more older equipment. The IBM promotion offers a 90-day payment deferral on leased hardware, software and services, as well as zero percent financing on software products. In addition, the company said that during 2009 it has been passing savings from accelerated depreciation tax benefits to customers even though its global financing arm holds title to the equipment.

IBM also said it is offering its pre-owned equipment "at attractive prices" during the promotion. In the latest quarter, IBM Global Financing revenue fell by 15% to $536 million. By comparison, rival Hewlett-Packard's financial services unit reported revenue of $726 million in the quarter, up 5% from the prior-year period.