Nexenta Turns 2.0

Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer for SearchStorage.com, has an interview with Nexenta CEO Evan Powell about the release of NexentaStor 2.0 today. The open source storage vendor is making some fundamentally "enterprise focused" changes to its platform in this release by adding active-active high availability features and 24/7 phone support.

"Version 2.0 is Nexenta's attempt to "cross the chasm" between the open-source community and the traditional enterprise. Chief among these new features is the ability to perform fully automated two-way high availability between ZFS server nodes. Nexenta has already made synchronous replication and manual failover available for ZFS, which doesn't offer those features natively, Powell said. With the release of Nexenta's High Availability 1.0 software, failover and failback to the secondary server can happen without human intervention."

- SearchStorage.com

In a related webinar and conference call today, Powell reiterated Nexenta's support of open storage saying, "we believe that you should own your storage. Legacy vendors want to lock you into their storage platform, but with Nexenta you can take your storage to any platform that speaks ZFS." Powell sees Nexenta's anti-lock-in approach as part of their wider value proposition. When asked about de-duplication technology, he referred to Sun's prototyped de-duplication technology and the promise to introduce it into the main line this summer.

Tyan S8212 Spotted

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="210" caption="Tyan S8212 Istanbul SR5690+SP5100 Motherboard"][/caption]

Thanks to a tweet from @ErikBussink and the quick thinking of Charlie Demerjian at SemiAccurate we've been treated to a picture of the upcoming Tyan S8212 (2-way) based on AMD's new line-up of motherboard chip sets. While we see a x16 and 3 x8 PCIe slots, 6 SATA and 8 SAS ports, there is (conspicuously) no 10GE LOM - just 1GE.

What this board does deliver is HT3.0 and IOMMU support for Opteron/Istanbul and that's a good thing for virtualization. We know from earlier discussions with AMD that Istanbul needs the SR5890 SR5690 to unlock its hidden potential. Two internal USB ports cry-out for flash booting options...

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Strategy

Red Hat's recently updated virtualization strategy has resulted in an "oversubscribed" beta program. The world leader in open source solutions swings a big stick with its kernel-based virtualization products. Some believe one of the keys to successful large scale cloud initiatives is an open source hypervisor, and with Xen going commercial, turning to the open source veteran Red Hat seems a logical move. You may recall that Red Hat - using KVM - was the first to demonstrate live migration between AMD and Intel hosts.

"We are very pleased by the welcome we have received from enterprise companies all over the world who are looking to adopt virtualization pervasively and value the benefits of our open source solutions. Our Beta program is oversubscribed. We are excited to be in a position to deliver a flexible, comprehensive and cost-effective virtualization portfolio in which products will share a consistent hardware and software certification portfolio. We are in a unique position to deliver a comprehensive portfolio of virtualization solutions, ranging from a standalone hypervisor to a virtualized operating system to a comprehensive virtualization management product suite."

- Scott Crenshaw, vice president, Platform Business Unit at Red Hat

Red Hat sees itself as an "agent of change" in the virtualization landscape and wants to deliver a cost effective "boxed" approach to virtualization and virtualization management. All of this is hinged on Red Hat's new KVM-based approach - enabled through their acquisition of Qumranet in September 2008 - which delivers the virtualization and management layers to Red Hat's Enterprise Linux and its kernel.

Along with Qumranet came Solid ICE and SPICE. Solid ICE is the VDI component running on KVM consisting of a virtual desktop server and controller front end. Solid ICE allows Red Hat to rapidly enter the VDI space without disrupting its Eco-System. Additionally, the SPICE protocol (Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments) enables an standardized connection protocol alternative to RDP with enhancements for the VDI user experience.

Red Hat's SPICE claims to offer the following features in the enterprise:

• Superior graphics performance (e.g. flash)


• video quality (30+ frames per second)


• bi-directional audio (for soft-phones/IP phones)


• bi-directional video (for video telephony/ video conferencing)


• No specialized hardware. Software only client that can be automatically installed via Active-X and a browser on the client machine

Red Hat's virtualization strategy reveals more of it's capabilities and depth in accompanying blogs and white papers. Adding to the vendor agnostic migration capabilities, Red Hat's KVM is slated to support VM hosts to 96 cores and 1TB of memory with guests scaling to 16 vCPUs and 64GB of memory. Additional features include high availabitily, live migration, global system scheduler, global power saving (through migration and power down), memory page sharing, thin storage provisioning and SELinux security.

AMD Istanbul and Intel Nehalem-EP: Street Prices

It's been three weeks after the official launch of AMD's 6-core Istanbul processor and we wanted to take a look at prevailing street prices for the DIY upgrade option.

Istanbul Pricing (Street)

AMD "Istanbul" Opteron™ Processor Family
2400 Series	Price	8400 Series	Price
2.6GHz Six-Core, 6-Thread AMD Opteron 2435 (75W ACP)	$1060.77	2.6GHz Six-Core, 6-Thread AMD Opteron 8435 (75W ACP)	$2,842.14
2.4GHz Six-Core, 6-Thread AMD Opteron 2431 (75W ACP)	$743.74 $699.00	2.4GHz Six-Core, 6-Thread AMD Opteron 8431 (75W ACP)	$2,305.70
2.2GHx Six-Core, 6-Thread AMD Opteron 2427 (75W ACP)	$483.82 $499.99

Nehalem-EP/EX Pricing (Street)

After almost two months on the market, the Nehalem has been on the street long enough to see a 1-3% drop in prices. How does Istanbul stack-up against the Nehalem-EP/Xeon pricing?

Intel "Nehalem" Xeon Processor Family
EP Series	Price	EX Series	Price
2.66GHz Quad-Core, 8-Thread Intel Xeon EP X5550 (95W TDP)	$999.95 $999.99	Quad-Core, 8-Thread Intel Xeon EX	TDB
2.4GHz Quad-Core, 8-Thread Intel Xeon EP E5530 (80W TDP)	$548.66 $549.99	Quad-Core, 8-Thread Intel Xeon EX	TBD
2.26GHz Quad-Core, 8-Thread Intel Xeon EP E5520 (80W TDP)	$400.15 $379.99
2.26GHz Quad-Core, 8-Thread Intel Xeon EP L5520 (60W TDP)	$558.77 $559.99

Compared to the competing Nehalem SKU's, the Istanbul is fetching a premium price. This is likely due to the what AMD perceives to be the broader market that Istanbul is capable of serving (and its relative newness relative to demand, et al). Of course, there are no Xeon Nehalem-EX SKU's in supply to compare against Istanbul in the 4P and 8P segments, but in 2P, it appears Istanbul is running 6% higher at the top bin SKU and 27% higher at the lower bin SKU - with the exception of the 60W TDP part, upon which Intel demands a 13% premium over the 2.2GHz Istanbul part.

This last SKU is the "green datacenter" battleground part. Since the higher priced 2.6GHz Istanbul rates a 15W (ACP) premium over the L5520, it will be interesting to see if system integrators will compare it to the low-power Xeon in power-performance implementations. Comparing SPECpower_ssj2008 between similarly configured Xeon L5520 and X5570, the performance-per-watt is within 2% for relatively anemic, dual-channel 8GB memory configurations.

In a virtualization system, this memory configuration would jump from an unusable 8GB to at least 48GB, increasing average power consumption by another 45-55W and dropping the performance-per-watt ratio by about 25%. Looking at the relative performance-per-watt of the Nehalem-EP as compared to the Istanbul in TechReport's findings earlier this month, one could extrapolate that the virtualization performance-per-watt for Istanbul is very competitive - even with the lower-power Xeon - in large memory configurations. We'll have to wait for similar SPECpower_ssj2008 in 4P configurations to know for sure.

System Memory Pricing (Street)

System memory represents 15-20% of system pricing - more in very large memory foot prints. We've indicated that Istanbul's time-to-market strategy shows a clear advantage (CAPEX) in memory pricing alone - more than compensating for the slight premium in CPU pricing.

System Memory Pricing
DDR2 Series (1.8V)	Price	DDR3 Series (1.5V)	Price
4GB 800MHz DDR2 ECC Reg with Parity CL6 DIMM Dual Rank, x4 (5.4W)	$100.00	4GB 1333MHz DDR3 ECC Reg w/Parity CL9 DIMM Dual Rank, x4 w/Therm Sen (3.96W)	$138.00
4GB 667MHz DDR2 ECC Reg with Parity CL5 DIMM Dual Rank, x4 (5.94W)	$80.00	4GB 1066MHz DDR3 ECC Reg w/Parity CL7 DIMM Dual Rank, x4 w/Therm Sen (5.09W)	$132.00
8GB 667MHz DDR2 ECC Reg with Parity CL5 DIMM Dual Rank, x4 (7.236W)	$396.00	8GB 1066MHz DDR3 ECC Reg w/Parity CL7 DIMM Dual Rank, x4 w/Therm Sen (6.36W)	$1035.00

These parts show a 28%, 40% and 62% premium price for DDR3 components versus DDR2 which indicates Istanbul's savings window is still wide-open. Since DDR3 prices are not expected to fall until Q3 at the earliest, this cost differential is expected to influence "private cloud" virtualization systems more strongly. However, with the 0.3V lower voltage requirement on the DDR3 modules, Nehalem-EP actually has a slight adavantage from a operational power perspective in dual-channel configurations. When using tripple-channel for the same memory footprint, Nehalem-EP's memory consumes about 58% more power (4x8GB vs. 9x4GB).

Quick Take: Vyatta Takes Virtual Networking to Cloud

Earlier this month, Vyatta announced completion of its Series C round of financing resulting in US$10M in new capital led primarily by new partner Citrix. Vyatta provides an open source alternative to traditional networking vendors like Cisco - providing software and hardware solutions targeted at the same routing, firewall and VPN market otherwise served by Cisco's 2800, 7200 and ASA line of devices. Its software is certified to run in Xen and VMware environments.

In a related announcement, Citrix has certified Vyatta's products for use with its Citrix Cloud Center (C3) product family to "make it as easy as possible for service providers and enterprises to use Vyatta with Citrix products such as XenDesktop, XenApp, XenServer and NetScaler." With the addition of Citrix Delivery Systems Division GM Gordon Payne to the Vyatta board of directors, the now "closer coupling" of Citrix with Vyatta could accelerate the adoption of Vyatta in virtual infrastructures.

SOLORI's Take: We've been using Vyatta's software in lab and production applications for some time - primarily in HA routing applications where automatic routing protocols like OSPF or BGP are needed. Virtualizing Vyatta provides additional HA capabilities to cloud environments by extending infrastructure migration from the application layer all the way down to layer-3. In applications where it is a good fit, Vyatta provides an excellent solution component for the 100% virtualized environment.

ExtremeTech: Shanghai to Istanbul

ExtremeTech runs some tests on the AMD Istanbul 6-core processor and compares the 2435 (2.6GHz) part to the 2384 (2.7GHz) part in a drop-in replacement using PassMark and Spec_JBB2005. Testing was performed in the same Supermicro system running an updated (AGESA 3.5.0.0) BIOS supporting Istanbul processors.

"Perhaps, the most tell tale result comes from the BOPS rating scored using SpecJBB2005, which simulates a server's ability to process JAVA code. Here, there was a 20% increase in performance, with BOPS increasing from 380721 to 471440. That 20% performance boost would [definitely] be noticed on a busy server in a data center."

- Loyd Case, ExtremeTech.com

While not as thorough as Scott Wassman's drop-in testing at TechReport (reported earlier this month), ExtremeTech's results and conclusions were about the same: Istanbul makes a great upgrade processor.

"It all comes down to simple math, where one has to consider the cost of the CPUs and the time needed to perform an upgrade to see if the return on investment is worthwhile. Most will find that in this case, it is..."

- Lloyd Case, ExtremeTech

"And if you have existing, compatible Socket F servers, the Istanbul Opterons should be an excellent drop-in upgrade. They're a no-brainer, really, when one considers energy costs and per-socket/per-server software licensing fees."

- Scott Wassman, TechReport

Both ExtremeTech and TechReport make compelling upgrade arguments in their testing. Compared to a new system architecture like Nehalem, it is logistically less disruptive - technologically and economically - to certify a CPU upgrade versus as platform replacement. After internal certification, a BIOS and CPU upgrade takes about 20-minutes per system to implement. In a virtualized datacenter where low-level differences are abstracted-away by the hypervisor certification testing should be much less invasive. Likewise, rolling upgrades in a virtualized datacenter with vMotion technology can provide a non-disruptive path from 4-core to 6-core. As Case puts it:

"Simply put, by just upgrading five servers in a data center, data center managers can eliminate the need to purchase an additional server to meet performance needs."

- Lloyd Case, ExtremeTech

However, this "upgrade proposition" is a difficult position for AMD as it does little to sell new systems. Historically, CPU upgrades only happen in 10-15% of the installed base, making CPU sales based on BIOS/drop-in upgrades an interesting footnote. Integrators want to move new hardware with Instanbul pre-installed, not sell "upgrade packages." Perhaps the dynamics of the new economy will drive a statistical anomoly based on the strength of the Istanbul proposition. Datacenter managers face a familiar dilemma with some new twists.

Dell Posts Top 4P/16-core VMmark

Dell has posted a new VMmark for its PowerEdge M905 series with a score of 22.90@17 tiles for a 4P Opteron 8393 SE based system. Although newly posted on VMware's VMmark scoreboard, this test was performed on ESX 4.0 (build 159706) and completed May 19, 2009. This is the the first time a 4P Opteron system has exceeded 1-tile-per-core to achieve the highest composite score and bests the previous high score - a Dell R905 - by 1% and 1 tile (102 virtual machines total).

Dell's M905 was fitted with 128GB of PC2-5300 (DDR2/667) registered ECC memory, 4 on-board Broadcom NetXtreme 1Gbps, and a QLogic QLE2462 FC adapter for virtual machine storage. Three Dell/EMC CX3-4of's were used including 6 enclosures with 15 disks per enclosure to deliver 18 LUNx (6 per enclosure, 90 physical disks total.)

First 48-core VMmark Appears

Following in the footsteps of the first 12-core VMmark comes the current champion at 33.85@24 tiles using 48-cores - and, despite the timing, it is not an Istanbul server. In fact, today's leader is the IBM System x3950 M2 running 8, 6-core Intel Xeon MP "Dunnington" X7460 processors with 256GB DDR2/667 RAM (5.3GB/core).

This score edges-out the previous champion - the HP ProLiant DL785 G5 with 8, 4-core Opteron 8393SE processors - which reigned at 31.56@21 tiles. In contrast to the 4-socket, 24-core IBM System x3850 M2 Xeon leading the 24-core category, this doubling of socket/core count resulted in only a 50% increase in capacity. This scaling inefficiency is less typical in 2P-to-4P transition but seems to plague the 4p-to-8P segment.

"The x3950 M2 is based on the fourth generation of IBM Enterprise X-Architecture®, and is designed to deliver innovation with enhanced reliability and availability features that enable optimal performance for databases, enterprise applications and virtualized environments."

- IBM News Blurb

"I'm really looking forward to even more virtualization benchmarks which are coming very soon."

- Elisabeth Stahl, IBM Benchmarking and Systems Performance Blog

Looking at the virtualization notes we discover what it takes to keep 48-cores fed to achieve such a benchmark:

• 4-QLogic QLE2462 HBA's (Dual-port, 4-Gbps FC)


• 1-IBM DS4800 with 4GB cache
  
  
  
  • 19 EXP 810 storage expansion units for
  
  
  • 1.8TB in 49 LUNs
    
    
    
    • 280 15K disks total
    
    
    
    
  
  
  
  


• 21 IBM x336 clients
  
  
  
  • DP 3.2GHz Xeon
  
  
  • 3GB RAM
  
  
  • Server 2003 R2
  
  
  
  


• 2 IBM x335 clients
  
  
  
  • DP Xeon 3.06GHz
  
  
  • 2.5GB RAM
  
  
  • Server 2003 R2
  
  
  
  


• Eight vSwitches
  
  
  
  • 120 ports total
  
  
  
  


• 4 Intel PRO 1000PT Dual-port 1Gb Ethernet controllers
  
  
  
  • one per vSwitch
  
  
  
  

While the Dunnington tops the list by sheer brute force, it's safe to assume that - given the 32-core Opteron is nipping at its heels - the 48-core Istanbul results will displace it soon (possibly alluded to in Elisabeth Stahl's "Benchmarking and Performance Blog" reference above). More interestingly, will AMD's much touted "HT Assist" allow the 8P Istanbul to break the 4P-to-8P "curse" of scaling inefficiency? If not, it would show that much work is needed before the relatively "massive " core counts of 2010 are upon us.

Quick Take: PC Pro Recommends 4-node-in-2U Platform

Boston Limited UK has recently received a "recommended" rating from PC Pro UK for its 4-node-in-2U platform with AMD's Istanbul processor on-board. Dubbed the "Boston Quattro 6000GP" and following-up on the 2-node-in-1U "Boston 3000GP" platform, this systems allows for 4-nodes with 2x AMD Istanbul processors per node. This formula yields 8 processors (48 cores) in 2U resulting in a core density of over 1,000 cores per standard 42U rack.

Computational density like this is bound for virtualization and HPC clusters. Judging from the recent reports on Istanbul's virtualization potential and HPL performance, this combination offers a compelling platform alternative to blade computing. In its review, PC Pro UK touched on the platform's power consumption, saying:

"In idle we saw one, two, three and four nodes draw a total of 234W, 349W, 497W and 630W. Under pressure these figures rose to 345W, 541W, 802W and 1026W respectively. Even if you could find an application that pushed the cores this hard you'll find each server node draws a maximum of 256W - not bad for a 12-core system. Dell's PowerEdge R900, reviewed in our sister title IT Pro, has four 130W X7450 six-core processors and that consumes 778W under heavy load."

- PC Pro, UK

Advanced Clustering HPL Comparison: Instanbul vs Nehalem

Advanced Clustering Technologies, based in Kansas City, KS and specializing in HPC solutions, has just released a High-Performance Linpack (HPL) performance report comparing "equivalent" Xeon X5550 and Opteron 2435 systems. According to Advanced Clustering, their goal was "to show the peak performance in terms of GFLOPS (billion floating point operations per second)" of the comparison systems.

In their tests, Advance Clustering attempted to keep platform specifications as uniform as possible (OS, power supply, hard drive). Due to Nehalem's tripple-channel memory, differing amounts of memory were used in the comparison and Advanced Clustering compensated by making adjustments to the problem size in an attempt to utilize 100% of available systems RAM accordingly.

The results showed that AMD's Istanbul delivers 15% more GFLOPS  at a 30% savings in effective system cost ($/GFLOP). Advanced Clustering comments that while Istanbul delivered a higher GFLOP rating than Nehalem, it did so at only 79% of its theoretical potential due to the weaker memory bandwidth of the Socket-F system. From our conversation with AMD's Mike Goddard, we are told that a lot of Istanbul's potential - including much higher memory bandwidth - will realizable only in its sockted G34 incarnation. By that time, the comparison will likely be between Intel's 8-core Nehalem-EX and AMD's 12-core Magny-Cours product.

Tyan: New Istanbul BIOS Released

Tyan joins the AMD 6-core release cycle with "Istanbul-enabled" BIOS releases six 2P motherboards (and related systems). We here from a reliable source that the Tyan "twin" system (B2985, 2-node, 1U) BIOS is in "alpha" testing and will be released "soon." Here's what's available now:

Dual-Opteron Motherboards (2000-series)

S2912-E, S2915-E, S2927, S2927-E, S2932, S2932-E

Notes

These BIOS releases were only available from Tyan's FTP site (ftp.tyan.com, anonymous access) until now. As of 6/17/2009 you will find them on the BIOS helper from the product web page.

Also, we were surprised to find that the AGESA for the S4985 series (quad-socket) motherboards are still version 3.3.0.3 and are likely not Istanbul-ready. We do not have the S4985 in our testing lab to confirm of deny this, but we have been told by AMD that 3.5.0.0 is the minimum Istanbul supported AGESA.

Supermicro has more systems with BIOS supporting the AMD “Istanbul” 6-core Opteron processor. These all contain the AGESA 3.5.0.0 standard and include 12 more 2P systems including the Twin 1U and Quad 2U systems. This brings Supermicro's Istanbul support to 23 motherboards.

Dual-Opteron Motherboards (2000-series)

Newly Released: H8DA3-2, H8DAi-2, H8DA8-2, H8DAE-2, H8DMR-82, H8DMR-i2, H8DMT, H8DMT-F, H8DMT-IBX, H8DMT-IBXF, H8DMT+, H8DMT-INF+

Previously Released: H8DM8-2, H8DME-2, H8DMU+

Quad-Opteron Motherboards (8000-series)

Previously Released: H8QM3-2, H8QM3-2+, H8QMi-2, H8QMi-2+, H8QM8-2, H8QM8-2+, H8QME-2, H8QME-2+

Quick Take: Installing Missing Packages with Zypper

OpenSuse 11.1 has added a nice touch for minimal installs: repository index to commands NOT installed. In a most client installations, we installed only minimal OS footprints to reduce size and  attack surface. In the past, this has meant a trip to YAST to install "needed" packages that were not installed initially. While this is no big deal for OpenSuse vets, it can be a bit of a learning curve for clients.

Enter the repository index. Now, when a "missing" executable is attempted, the index is searched for the package containing the executable and guidance is offered on how to install it (assuming repositories are setup correctly.) Here's a sample of how this works on a low attack surface DNS server missing a "whois" utility:

nsarpa:~ # whois supermicro.com

The program 'whois' can be found in the following package:
 * whois [ path: /usr/bin/whois, repository: zypp (openSUSE 11.1-0) ]

Try installing with: sudo zypper install whois

-bash: whois: command not found
nsarpa:~ # zypper install whois
Retrieving repository 'openSUSE-11.1-Update' metadata [done]
Building repository 'openSUSE-11.1-Update' cache [done]
Loading repository data...
Reading installed packages...
Resolving package dependencies...

The following NEW package is going to be installed:
 whois

First 12-core VMmark for Istanbul Appears

VMware has posted the VMmark score for the first Istanbul-based system and it's from HP: the ProLiant DL385 G6. While it's not at the top of the VMmark chart at 15.54@11 tiles (technically it is at the top of the 12-core benchmark list), it still shows a compelling price-performance picture.

Comparing Istanbul's VMmark Scores

For comparison's sake, we've chosen the HP DL385 G5 and HP DL380 G6 as they were configured for their VMmark tests. In the case of the ProLiant DL380 G6, we could only configure the X5560 and not the X5570 as tested so the price is actually LOWER on the DL380 G6 than the "as tested" configuration. Likewise, we chose the PC-6400 (DDR2/667, 8x8GB) memory for the DL 385 G5 versus the more expensive PC-5300 (533) memory as configured in 2008.

As configured for pricing, each system comes with processor, memory, 2-SATA drives and VMware Infrastructure Standard for 2-processors. Note that in testing, additional NIC's, HBA, and storage are configured and such additions are not included herein. We have omitted these additional equipment features as they would be common to a deployment set and have no real influence on relative pricing.

Systems as Configured for Pricing Comparison

System		Processor		Speed		Cores		Threads		Memory		Speed		Street
HP ProLiant DL385 G5		Opteron 2384		2.7		8		8		64		667		$10,877.00
HP ProLiant DL385 G6		Opteron 2435		2.6		12		12		64		667		$11,378.00
HP ProLiant DL380 G6		Xeon X5560*		2.93		8		16		96		1066		$30,741.00

Here's some good news: 50% more cores for only 5% more (sound like an economic stimulus?) The comparison Nehalem-EP is nearly 3x the Istanbul system in price.

vSphere ESX 4.0: 450 Guest OSes Supported

VMware's support for a wide array of x86-based operating systems is one of its strengths. As cloud computing promises the "universal" import and export of application environments, we decided to compile a list of vSphere's guest operating system compatibility in a bit more "friendly" fashion than the on-line guide.

Here's the list as of today:

16-bit Operating Systems (1)
Microsoft		MS-DOS 6.22

32-bit Operating Systems (252)
Asianux		Asianux 3.0 SP1 Server, Asianux 3.0 Server
Canonical		Ubuntu 7.04 Desktop, Ubuntu 7.04 Server, Ubuntu 7.10 Desktop, Ubuntu 7.10 Server, Ubuntu 8.04 Desktop, Ubuntu 8.04 JeOS, Ubuntu 8.04 Server, Ubuntu 8.04.1 Desktop, Ubuntu 8.04.1 JeOS, Ubuntu 8.04.1 Server, Ubuntu 8.04.2 Desktop, Ubuntu 8.04.2 JeOS, Ubuntu 8.04.2 Server, Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop, Ubuntu 8.10 Server
CentOS		CentOS 4.5, CentOS 4.6, CentOS 4.7, CentOS 4.8, CentOS 5.0, CentOS 5.1, CentOS 5.2, CentOS 5.3, CentOS 5.4
Debian		Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 r3, Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 r4, Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 r5, Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 r6, Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 r7, Debian GNU/Linux 5.0
FreeBSD		FreeBSD 6.3, FreeBSD 6.4, FreeBSD 7.0, FreeBSD 7.1
IBM		OS/2 Warp 4.0, OS/2 Warp Server for e-Business 4.5.2

Supermicro: Istanbul BIOS Updates

Supermicro has just updated some of their "A+ System" motherboards to accept the AMD "Istanbul" 6-core Opteron processor. As we've indicated in a previous post, the Istanbul requires a BIOS that is up to the AGESA 3.5.0.0 standard. We've seen the H8DMU+ in AMD's testing lab and on TechReport's review of Istanbul so it appears that the "Istanbul" BIOS is pretty well baked.

Dual-Opteron Motherboards (2000-series)

H8DM8-2, H8DME-2, H8DMU+

Quad-Opteron Motherboards (8000-series)

H8QM3-2, H8QM3-2+, H8QMi-2, H8QMi-2+, H8QM8-2, H8QM8-2+, H8QME-2, H8QME-2+

AMD G34 Motherboards Spotted

Charlie Demerjian was first to post a couple of "spy photos" of two G34 motherboards on his site "SemiAccurate." Both of the boards sighted are dual-socket G34 and appear to carry on-board 10GE ports.

The G34 from Quanta appears to be 2-DPC (16 DIMM slots) with what could be Broadcom's BCM84812 100/1G/10G chipset, while the other looks to be 3-DPC (24 DIMM slots). The larger of the two, from Inventec, looks to be designed for low-profile/HPC applications and appears to support 10GE with a pair of on-board SFP+ connectors - possibly using Intel's 82599ES for 100/1G/10G compatibility.

As we know from our briefings with AMD on the subject of G34, these motherboards should be able to run quad-channel DDR3/1333 at 2-DPC. This allows AMD/G34 to offer more than twice the amount of DDR3/1333 than Nehalem-EP (8-DIMMs/CPU on G34 versus 3-DIMMs/CPU on Nehalem). With 2-sockets yielding 24-cores, 64GB RAM (16 x 4GB DDR3/1333) and on-board, redundant 10GE, AMD's IOMMU and these G34 boards, as Charlie puts it, "scream HPC and heavy-load virtualization."

Based on what we can see, expect to see these boards in the $375 to $450 price range in Q1/2010.

AMD Istanbul: Pricing, Specs and SKU's

Istanbul for 2P platforms are 2427, 2431 and 2435 running at 2.2GHz, 2.4GHz and 2.6GHz, respectively, and running at 75W average power. Initial pricing based on 1,000 unit quantity for the 2400 line-up is reported to be $455, $698 and $989 for the 2427, 2431 and 2435, respectively. As indicated, these will all be HT 3.0-enabled (backwards compatible to HT 1.0) and carry the improved memory controller.

For 4P and 8P systems, two SKUs are initially available: 8431 and 8435 at 2.4GHz and 2.6GHz, respectively. These 8400-series products are expected to be available at $2,149 and $2,649, respectively, in 1,000's quantities. We expect to see HT Assist play a big role in 4P/8P system refreshes/updates as 4-way stream memory bandwidth performance improve by as much as 60%.

Processor Pricing (1000's)

AMD "Istanbul" Opteron™ Processor Family
2400 Series		Price		8400 Series		Price
Six-Core AMD Opteron 2435		$989		Six-Core AMD Opteron 8435		$2,649
Six-Core AMD Opteron 2431		$698		Six-Core AMD Opteron 8431		$2,149
Six-Core AMD Opteron 2427		$455

Istanbul 2400 Specifications

AMD Istanbul Reviews

Let's look at what other sites are saying about Istanbul in detailed performance testing and reviews.

"Make no mistake, though: this Istanbul system is very much a match for the [Nehalem X5550] in terms of power-efficient performance."

Scott Wassman, TechReport.com

"Istanbul can work with “only” 6 threads, but each thread gets a 64 KB L1 and an in comparison copious amount of 512 KB of L2. In a nutshell, It is clear that the new AMD “Istanbul” Opteron targets a specific market: a few compute intensive HPC applications, large databases and most importantly: “heavy” virtualized workload. This is a relatively “new” market where the AMD 2435 shines."

Johan De Gelas, AnantTech IT Portal

Johan also correctly points out that VMware's VMM scheduler defaults to a logical processor partition boundary of 4-cores. Actually, the configuration entry - VMkernel.Boot.cpuCellSize - defaults to "zero" which signifies "auto-configure" and the auto-configure default is a value of "4." (Editor: we point this out because changing "auto-configure" defaults can have "unintended" effects when system updates roll-out.) While this works well for single-core, quad-socket through multi-socket, quad-core, it does not work well when cell count is a fraction of the core/CPU count. In the case of Istanbul (and Intel's Dunnington) the correct setting is:

VMkernel.Boot.cpuCellSize = 6

The resulting change elicited the following from De Gelas in his vAPUS Mark I tests: "The six-core Opteron keeps up with the best Xeons available!" These results were, of course, under ESX 3.5 and referred to performance relative to Intel's Nehalem-EP X5570. In ESX 4.0, the VMM is tuned for Intel's SMT and provides a boost in performance for Nehalem-EP SKUs with SMT. The vAPUS testing demonstrates some interesting performance and tuning characteristics. Again, it's worth the look...

"AMD’s strategy (blog) is to talk about virtualization and power efficiency and offering those features across all of its processors. AMD called out Intel for rejiggering features based on the chip."

Larry Dignan, ZDNet

"So, this is the death of the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor codenamed “Shanghai,” right? Hardly."

John Fruehe, AMD

"We are really excited about Istanbul and you can bet that we'll be introducing new AMD-based rack, tower and blade servers in very short order. AMD's execution was nothing short of flawless. Once again, they delivered ahead of schedule. And right around the corner you'll see a full suite of Istanbul server products from HP."

Paul Gottsegen, Vice-president, Integrated Marketing, Enterprise Servers & Storage, HP

"AMD is introducing its Six-Core AMD Opteron processors (code named Istanbul) ahead of schedule and Dell is pleased to offer it in our portfolio including the Dell PowerEdge 2970, R805 and R905 rack servers and the PowerEdge M605, M805, M905 blade servers. We are committed to bringing efficiency to enterprise computing by simplifying technology and lowering the cost of managing IT environments, and the AMD Istanbul processors in our servers help us do just that."

Matt McGinnis, Senior Manager, Dell Global Communications

"AMD-V technology coupled with our server design with massive memory capacity and I/O scalability, we are seeing whopping improvements in virtualization performance our initial benchmarks. We expect to continue to have industry-leading benchmarks for four-socket servers with Istanbul in the PowerEdge R905."

Sally Stevens, Vice President, Dell Platform Marketing

[caption id="attachment_622" align="alignright" width="182" caption="AMD Opteron "Istanbul" 6-core processor die"][/caption]

June 1, 2009 - Today, AMD is announcing the general availability of its new single-die, 6-core Opteron processor code named "Istanbul." We have weighed-in on the promised benefits of Istanbul based on pre-release material that was not under non-disclosure protections. Now, we're able to disclose the rest of the story.

First, we got a chance to talk to Mike Goddard, AMD Server Products CTO, to discuss Istanbul and how G34/C32 platforms are shaping-up. According to Goddard,"things went really well with Istanbul; it's no big secret that the silicon we're using in Istanbul is the same silicon we're using in Magny-Cours." Needless to say, there are many more forward-thinking capabilities in Istanbul than can be supported in Socket-F's legacy chipsets.

"We had always been planning a refresh to Socket-F with 5690," says Goddard, "but Istanbul got pulled-in beyond our ability to pull-in the chipset." Consequently, while there could be Socket-F platforms based on the next-generation 5690/5100 chipset, Goddard suggests that "most OEM's will realign their platform development around [G34/C32, Q1/2010]."

In common parlance, Istanbul is a "genie in a bottle," and we won't see its true potential until it resurfaces in its Magny-Cours/G34 configuration. However, at few of these next-generation tweaks will trickle-down to Socket-F systems:

• AMD PowerCap Manager (via BIOS extensions)


• Enhanced AMD PowerNow! Technology


• AMD CoolCore Technology extended to L3 cache


• HT Assist (aka probe filter) for increase memory bandwidth


• HT 3.0 with increase to 4.8GT/sec and IMC improvements


• 5 new part SKUs


• Better 2P Performance Parity with Nehalem-EP

That's in addition to 50% more cores in the same power envelope: not an insignificant improvement. In side-by-side comparisons to "Shanghai" quad-core at the same clock frequency, Istanbul delivers 2W lower idle power and 34% better SPECpower ssj_2008 (1,297 overall) results using identical systems with just a processor swap. In fact, the only time Istanbul exceeded Shanghai's average power envelope was at 80% actual load and beyond - remaining within 5% of the Shanghai even at 100% load.