Modernizing Data Centers is Vital
Enterprise Datacenters are at a crossroads today. The demand for compute capacity is increasing exponentially. Scaling out compute, data and AI (Artificial Intelligence) workloads have never been more important. At the same time, IT leaders are under continual pressure to reduce costs. As a result, many IT leaders are accelerating their modernization efforts and transitioning to more performant, efficient and cost-effective hardware.
For Enterprise workloads in such transition, the performance leadership provided by AMD EPYC™ 4th Gen family of processors is a strategic advantage for IT leadership.
Having delivered multiple Engineering/Enterprise infrastructure modernization transitions over the past 25+ years, I see opportunities for all scales of IT deployments today - small, medium, or large. The questions and concerns that are on top of the mind for engineering and IT professionals today resonate with me.
When and How to Modernize?
Undertaking modernization projects is a strategic choice. Modernization can improve business efficiency, increase engineering productivity, and accelerate innovation. In all such efforts, alignment with the business objectives of your organization is critical. Understanding the nature of the workloads and business processes helps drive value. The ability for IT to be a trusted partner is the deeper alignment that drives successful execution.
For all such projects, I begin with careful evaluation of the platforms. The key is to benchmark a representative set of applications that can provide success metrics from Proof-of-Concept (POC) that can reliably represent production scale outcomes. The ROI (Return on Investment) that I am looking for during the POC is multi-fold. First, I look for bare metal performance – double-digit or more percentage point increase would be ideal. Next, I look for application specific performance benefits. This, coupled with better scaling and operational efficiencies leads me to adding newer use cases within the same cost footprint.
Equally important for business, IT leaders must assess the ability of the compute platform to enable long-term innovation . We need reasonable confidence that we will receive significant year-on-year performance gains, as well as better scaling with a lower power footprint.
Risk and Complexity
Modernization efforts, however, can be a challenge for IT leaders to articulate to business and executive management. The potential risks of execution complexity and increased investment are rational concerns for the IT leader. While “leaving well enough alone” is a strategy with low near-term risk, it can leave the enterprise open to larger strategic risks and missed innovation opportunities. The right hardware platform can make all the difference for such efforts.
In your efforts to engineer the IT platforms of tomorrow, modernization is an opportunity for delivering exponential rewards. Using open, efficient, and highly performant platforms are key to your success.
Today, the momentum of open technology innovation from AMD EPYC™ based platforms can significantly reduce the risk while amplifying the rewards. AMD EPYC processor-based compute enables a diversity of power, performance, and throughput optimized applications to support tomorrow’s enterprises. As an example of the benefits of technological openness, x86 64-bit architecture is the base for x86 computing. X86 applications run unmodified on AMD EPYC processor-based platforms. Application software that can run on x86 platforms is delivered as a single package distribution across all x86 platforms. From OS, to apps, to in house development of software, there are minimal differences when they run on AMD EPYC platform versus others. Some applications do have optimizations for specialized or legacy use cases that were built on past workload history. For most applications, AMD’s platform provides a low risk, highest gain path for modernization today.
I can share a few examples from my experience.
In one of the largest engineering software solution spaces, our customers began facing the limits of 32-bit x86 computing. At that time, Linux® was a popular operating system for x86 computing and growing rapidly. The only alternative was to use software based “64-bit emulation”, or port software to an architecture incompatible with 32-bit x86. During this industry challenge, AMD delivered a 64-bit x86 platform that needed no re-architecture of the entire codebase. Our Engineering/Business units immediately realized the value. Working with our engineers, business, and hardware partners, we succeeded in delivering 64-bit x86 software in record time.
More recently, I migrated an entire fleet of non-AMD hardware to AMD EPYC™ 2nd Gen and 3rd Gen platforms. The benefits were 20-30% performance improvement for each transition. From POC to rollout, there was nothing more than swapping out the hardware and reclaiming the datacenter power.
This is the benefit of AMD EPYC platforms: replace other platforms, realize efficiencies, gain performance, reduce overall cost.
The Opportunity ahead
Today, AI holds great promise, which also comes with its own appetite for power. The best part of EPYC is that it gives you a future-ready end-to-end enterprise server platform for AI as well.
Modernizing with AMD EPYC processor-based platforms, you can optimize datacenter power, space, and buildout costs. The savings from these efforts can be retargeted to increase your hardware footprint for more scale, or towards the newer Generative AI applications.
The way to an AI future
Generative AI applications like State of the art (SOTA) large language models (LLM) require an exponential increase in additional compute power. To handle this, your datacenters will need to transition to higher densities, heterogeneous hardware, and/or blend a mix of on-premises and cloud.
To make this transition effectively, you can use AMD EPYC processor-based AI solutions today. As examples, a SOTA LLM for inferencing can run today on 4th Gen EPYC hardware, AMD GPUs, and AMD AI PC solutions within your enterprise. This usage will continue to grow, with more efficient LLMs being released and more on-premises data being used for your internal AI efforts.
Conclusion
High density heterogeneous datacenter/multi-cloud computing is the future of enterprises. Today, AMD EPYC CPUs are the best solution for migration of your HPC (High Performance Compute), BigData/Cloud, and Generative AI workloads, while simultaneously providing a future-ready path for tomorrow’s workhorse applications. The AMD end-to-end datacenter stack is a strategic lever for IT leaders to modernize their businesses today.
[P.S: The experiences shared in this post are from my work as a customer of AMD, and my firm had to make choices from the available alternatives in the market]
