“upon initial deployment, HPc should increase our processing power by 200 percent, which would in turn, result in much greater capacity for our clients.”
department and carefully examined the spreadsheet they compiled for him that detailed utility usage and costs. Using those figures, he was able to establish that the lower power consumption of multicore processors was netting Princeton’s Plasma Physics Laboratory an annual savings of $80,000 on power and cooling costs, compared to the previously used single-core cluster system. In addition to helping save on energy costs, it also helped lower the firm’s carbon emissions.
“We used the money we saved to buy new HPC systems that will help us get even better performance and become even greener,” Henderson says.
Steve Sommer, CIO at Hughes, Hubbard and Reed (HH&R), a 1,200-employee New York City law firm with offices in Los Angeles; Washington, D.C.; Miami; Paris; and Tokyo, is charting a similar course.
Sommer has already begun to compile a list of applications he says are ripe for the transition to HPC within the next 12 to 24 months.
“We have a definite need for HPC in core applications such as Microsoft® Exchange store-and-forward e-mail and messaging,
large databases, virtualization and disaster recovery,” Sommer notes. HH&R is already investigating Microsoft Windows® 2008 HPC software and gathering preliminary data on its current power consumption, application and disaster recovery costs.
“In this bearish economy, we are all acutely aware of the need to cost-justify all our technology upgrades and acquisitions. When I go before our executive committee and CEO, it’s not enough to say that HPC will save us money and boost performance; I have to have all the specific facts and figures at my fingertips,” Sommer says. “If I can’t absolutely make the TCO and ROI case for HPC or any new application or technology, there’s a very good chance that it won’t be approved.”
Depending on the size of the organization and the scope of the project, companies can expect to invest hundreds of thousands to millions when they upgrade their hardware systems and applications to HPC technology.
ARGI has 100 servers company-wide, none of which are HPC at this point. However, Baker says, the firm’s plan to move to HPC sometime within the next 24 months
will not only endow the firm’s systems with the necessary scalability to quickly perform large data-intensive computing operations but will also give ARGI’s systems the performance capabilities the company needs in order to deliver key analytics on the marketing databases it hosts for clients.
Baker recognizes that HPC systems will provide ARGI with “tremendous cost savings and ROI benefits” that will have a positive impact on its compute power and scalability while helping lower utility costs and power consumption.
“Upon initial deployment, HPC should increase our processing power by up to 200 percent, which, in turn, will result in much greater capacity for our clients,” Baker says. “And once HPC is in place, it will make management much easier. It is the realiza-tion of the dream we’ve always had of personalized, powerful and efficient distributed computing,” he adds.
To determine the TCO and ROI of its HPC initiative, ARGI must first evaluate the changes it needs to make to its applications and data to take advantage of HPC. The timing of the move is also crucial. ARGI must weigh whether or not there are advantages to an early migration or whether it will benefit more by waiting for large OEM systems vendors to build HPC solutions for ARGI’s vertical market space in database hosting solutions.
Additionally, ARGI must still determine whether or not there is a bigger TCO and ROI advantage to keeping its HPC initiative in house or using an external service provider to assist with the upgrade.
“We’ll probably do a combination of both,” Baker says. “We plan to do this right, so that we’ll achieve near-immediate ROI.”
Concludes Baker, “We’ll have to spend money to make money with HPC and realize its significant benefits, but we’re going to have to be very, very smart about it, as with any other major game-changing investments we consider.” n
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