Roundup: Intel Xeon 5600 News Abounds

GE offers new Intel processor on single board computer. GE Intelligent Platforms announced that its recently-released A10200 AdvancedTCA single board computer will now be offered with the option of the latest Intel Xeon processor 5600 series.  The GE A10200 is designed for telecommunications networks in applications such as Control Plane functions for WiMAX, and LTE (Long Term Evolution) and next generation networks.  “From a performance perspective, telecom applications are among the most demanding in the world, and the A10200 offers the compelling price/performance advantage that meets that need,”   said Juergen Eder, Director, Product Management, IPC & SBCs at GE Intelligent Platforms.

Verari blade servers feature Xeon 5600. Verari Technologies announced that its blade-based computing and storage platforms for conventional and modular data centers will now feature the Intel Xeon 5600 series processors.  “With the majority of an IT data center budget spent maintaining an inefficient and aging installed-base, the new Intel Xeon processor 5600 Series can provide a server investment payback in under one year by delivering up to a 90 percent reduction in operating costs," said Boyd Davis, General Manager Data Center Group Marketing at Intel.  Verari announced that new products utilizing the Intel Xeon process 5600 series are immediately available for order and will ship in the second quarter of 2010.

The Planet announces Intel Xeon 5600 availability. The Planet announced the availability of the Dell PowerEdge R710 server, equipped with the Intel Xeon X5600 series processor.  The Planet will offer the new server in its Virtual Rack platform, which allows customers to effortlessly scale computing capacity within their hosting environment without long-term commitments.  “This high-performance server offers hardware acceleration for virtualization and cloud instances, and improved security through Intel’s AES-NI and TXT technologies," said Todd Mitchell, general manager for Dedicated Hosting and Global Services. "It also improves the economics of multi-tenant environments such as cloud and virtualization, as well as Web hosting services."

Cisco UCS with Intel Xeon 5600 achieve record-breaking performance. The Cisco Data Center Networks blog details some of the breakthrough results achieved by the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS), using Intel Xeon 5600 series processors.  The UCS B250 M2 Blade Server based on the new Xeon 5600 processor achieved record results in the VMware VMmark benchmark, which measures virtualization performance using a server consolidation workload.  This was a 42% improvement over the previous record.  The same server set a new record for the SPECjAPPServer2004 benchmark, with increased performance of 30% compared with previously published results.

InfoWorld blade shoot-out. InfoWorld received blade systems from Dell, HP, IBM and Supermicro prior to the Intel Xeon 5600 announcement and was able to do a major comparative review of the new servers with the Xeon 5600 CPU.  Instead of HPC benchmarks the InfoWorld team opted for VMware tests made up of a single large-scale custom LAMP application, a load balancer running Nginx, four Apache web servers, and two MySQL servers.  Additional tests looked at compression, audio file conversions and network throughput between blades ussing Ixia's IxChariot tools. Test results for Dell, HP and IBM blade systems were all very impressive and very close, as IBM came out with only a 0.7 percent lead over Dell and HP.  The three vendors also performed equally well in network throughput tests, showing that the internal 10G switching fabrics have matured.  Complete test results can be seen in the InfoWorld article.