Intel has showed its new Intel Xeon Processor E5-2600 v2 product family, which offers up to 45% greater efficiency and up to 50% more performance compared to the previous generation.
The processors are designed for use in the server, storage and networking infrastructure found in data centres.
The new Xeon product family is based on Intel’s 22-nanometer process technology, contributing to dramatic energy efficiency improvements of up to 45% when compared to the previous generation. The processor family also features up to 12 cores and delivers up to 50% more performance2 across variety of compute intensive workloads.
“More than ever, organisations are looking to information technology to transform their businesses,” says Diane Bryant, senior vice-president and GM of the Data Centre and Connected Systems Group at Intel. “Offering new cloud-based services requires an infrastructure that is versatile enough to support the diverse workloads and is flexible enough to respond to changes in resource demand across servers, storage and network.”
Much of the infrastructure today is not architected to support the growth in IT services. Data centre management is often manual and static. To enable on-demand, automated services, the next generation of data centres will need to evolve to a “software defined infrastructure” where many of the functions are managed in software. The new Intel Xeon processors provide a common, software compatible processing foundation and possess the features and tools to help transform data centres for the future.
The Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v2 product family is Intel’s most versatile processing technology and can address many of the constraints data centres face today. It allows the industry to innovate and build solutions for a wide variety of data centre workloads to meet diverse customer needs.
The Intel Xeon processors E5-2600 v2 product family will power the new IBM NeXtScale System, a high-density, flexible computing platform designed for high-demand workloads such as analytics, technical computing and cloud delivery. Intel’s newest processor family also will be used in IBM’s new x3650 M4 HD high-density storage server, ideal for managing big data and business-critical workloads, as well as all of IBM’s two-socket systems including System x racks and towers, Flex System, iDataPlex, and BladeCenter offerings.
Data traffic generated by connected mobile devices and the associated services is expected to have a 66% compound annual growth rate over the next four years. This puts additional pressure on networking infrastructure to be more agile and efficient to allow for much faster provisioning of services.
Today, network configuration requires manual set-up by skilled IT staff and it may take up to two or three weeks to deploy required networking resources to support new applications and services. Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v2 product family accelerates efficient processing of network workloads commonly handled by expensive and proprietary offload engines and accelerators found in networking appliances.
Using Intel’s Open Network Platform (ONP) server reference design, customers can use high-volume Xeon-based servers combined with industry open standards to consolidate virtualised networking applications. This allows them to deliver market leading throughput performance and latency for Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) workloads. Intel’s ONP server reference design is based on the Wind River Open Virtualisation Profile and the Intel Data Plane Development Kit Accelerated Open vSwitch.
Eighty-two percent of global telecommunications providers are expected to evaluate SDN and NFV this year to find the ways to reduce their costs and increase flexibility in dynamic resource provisioning.
To assist in accelerating the deployment of software defined infrastructures, Intel also announced the Intel Network Builders ecosystem. The programme allows ecosystem partners to take advantage of Intel’s reference architecture platforms to accelerate SDN and NFV deployments. With more than 20 leading technology companies contributing, Intel’s partners will be able to access a comprehensive reference architecture library of proven solutions to build and optimise software-defined infrastructure based on today’s telecommunications, cloud, and enterprise data centre requirements.
The Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v2 product family is also designed to power cost efficient scale-out, distributed, and software defined storage. From 2012 to 2020 the amount of stored data will double every two years, reaching 40ZB. Fast, on-demand access to this amount of data for tasks such as big data analytics require more intelligent compute and storage intensive solutions, as well as a dramatic decrease in the cost-per-stored terabyte.
System manufacturers from around the world are expected to announce Intel Xeon processor E5 family-based platforms. These manufacturers include Acer, Apple, Asus, Bull, Cray, Cisco, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi, Huawei, IBM, Inspur, Lenovo, NEC, Oracle, Quanta, SGI, Sugon, Supermicro, TYAN, Wiwynn and Unisys.