Intel Introduces Online Efficiency Calculator

Intel has introduced a new calculator on its Website for IT administrators that lets them determine the performance and efficiency of their servers.

The tool, on the Intel Premiere IT Professional site, also lets IT folks find out what their server performance and efficiency could be if they made changes to the systems, such as increasing the number of processor cores or using virtualisation technology.

In addition, IT administrators can compare the performance of their data centres with those from other members of the Intel site.

Technology vendors are increasingly offering customers online calculators that measure everything from total cost of ownership of hardware to energy efficiency to overall performance.

For example, earlier in July, Dell officials announced that they had refreshed their online power consumption calculator for PCs. Dell enhanced the Client Energy Savings Calculator—which had measured simply the power consumption of the systems and power supplies—by adding other components, including memory, graphics cards, hard drives and power management features.

Other similar moves in recent months include VMware’s Cost-Per-Application Calculator, introduced in March, that is designed to let customers estimate how much they’re saving using VMware technology, as compared with other virtualisation platforms, such as those from Microsoft and Citrix.

On the storage side, Acronis July 15 unveiled an online calculator businesses can use to estimate the savings they can get from using deduplication technology. There also is a second calculator from Acronis that charts ROI for more general data centre budget items, such as staffing, power and cooling.

Intel’s server efficiency calculator make several assumptions regarding customer systems, including that the servers are no more than 6 years old, that they all run at 10 percent utilisation with one workload, and that each virtual workload—up to 10—increases the watts used by the processor by 10 percent of the difference between the server’s idle power and that being consumed at full utilisation.

Baseline energy and performance metrics are created by determining how many single- or dual-core servers it would take to run a particular workload with no virtualisation.

Both Intel and rival Advanced Micro Devices have put a heavy focus on developing chips that increase performance and virtualization capabilities while driving down power and cooling costs.