Xeon E5 Servers Cut Energy And Eat Big Data: In Pictures

All the major server vendors have lined up to show servers based on Intel’s Xeon E5 processor, emphasising their abilities to handle big data, and use less energy.

The synchronised announcement was not hard to manage, as Intel has been shipping the processor in volume since October, and all the vendors’ servers are in use with customers. Dell launched its servers last week, at an event which was somewhat hampered by everyone trying not to mention the phrase “Xeon E5”.

We spoke to Dell, HP and IBM, and saw their 1U and 2U servers at the London launch event, hearing again how the E5 processors will give “up to 50 percent” improvement in energy efficiency thanks to features such as the ability to switch workloads dynamically between cores, and adjust the clock frequency as necessary.

Intel also showed Node Manager, power management stack, which can set and manage power consumption policies at the level of rows, racks and individual servers.

Data will have a responsibility

The event also featured a talk from Genevieve Bell, Intel fellow and anthropologist-in-residence, on the changing roles of Big Data. “Data will have a responsibility,” said Bell. “It should transmit itself to people you trust.”

She warned that the rise of big data and analytics might aggregate data in a changing context. “As the first cities become ‘Internet-of-thinged-up‘, you will create databases which don’t always conform with each other.”

Not all data will be true, she advised, pointing out that 100 percent of subscribers to a US dating site admitted lying, which at least made the data easier to handle than data sets which are not 100 percent false.

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