A Foundation for Real-Time Insights via Analytics

For those of us that follow technology, it seems we constantly hear that big data will change life as we know it. While this is an interesting perspective, it misses an important point.  Data, by itself, is not a valuable asset for an organization. The industry transforming power of data comes from insights derived from analytics on that data – all driven by powerful computing systems.

To stay competitive in today’s world, business intelligence solutions are increasingly being woven into critical, real-time business processes across all industries. This is a game changer that can help businesses improve decision making, achieve better results, better connect with customers, and remap the ways they deliver value to their customers.  In fact, entire industries are being disrupted by the ability to harness the power of advanced analytics to business advantage.

Despite this promise, customers face many hurdles in fully harnessing the capabilities of advanced analytics.  Common struggles include trust, speed, and scale.  Can I trust the data and analysis?  Do I have the performance for real-time decisions?  Can I scale and unify massive datasets?  It’s worth noting that just 27 percent of executives say their big data projects are successful, and 65 percent cite determining value as their biggest barrier to adoption.

As we launch the new Intel® Xeon® processor E7 v3 family, we tackle these customer challenges head on – delivering the world’s fastest system for real-time analytics** on a trusted, mission-critical, highly scalable platform.  For the most complete information, on performance records see the full list.

Servers based on the new Intel Xeon processor E7 v3 family provide exceptional performance and scalability for real-time analytics operating core business data. These servers offer the industry’s largest memory per socket (12TB in 8S) to support in-memory data analytics, which improves analytics performance by moving data closer to the processors.

With 20 new world record performance awards, the Intel Xeon processor E7 v3 platform showcases  the benefits of the Haswell microarchitecture, 20% more cores, 20% more last-level cache, up to 32 sockets, and unique features like Intel® Transactional Synchronization Extensions (Intel® TSX). Intel TSX helps provide up to  6X online transaction processing (OLTP) performance for optimized database solutions, via a mechanism that accelerates multi-threaded workloads by dynamically exposing otherwise hidden parallelism***.  Xeon E7 v3 also delivers a trusted platform required for mission critical applications including the added cryptographic performance via new instructions like Intel® Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions (Intel® AES-NI) and Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 2 (Intel® AVX2) and supports Intel® Run Sure Technology for maximum uptime.

So what kind of use cases can all of this computing horsepower provide to the enterprise? I’d like to share a couple of interesting examples of big data analytics powered by Intel Xeon processor based systems.

Nippon Paint is one of Asia’s leading Paint and Coating companies with 57 manufacturing facilities and operations spanning 15 countries and regions.  They have deployed SAP HANA to accelerate social media analytics. With sophisticated real-time analytics, the company can capture consumer behaviors and preferences more accurately and quickly. Among other benefits, the insights gained through analytics help Nippon Paint create targeted marketing campaigns, improve customer interactions, and develop products that meet emerging customer requirements.

In another example, a power company used SAS Analytics software to analyze data gathered every 15 minutes from 38,000 smart meters in seven cities to predict the amount of electricity needed at certain times. This forecasting is important because electricity cannot be stored—it needs to be produced at the correct levels when it is needed. With the ability to frequently analyze smart meter readings, the utility improved its forecast accuracy by 9 percent, for a savings of $9 million.

A common thread to all of these stories is the use of the Intel Xeon processor based platform as the foundation for better business intelligence. As your data and analytics workloads continue to grow, these powerful servers can help you keep pace with growth while turning big data into big opportunities for your business.

For a closer look at the new Intel® Xeon® processor E7 v3 product families, visit intel.com/xeonE7.

Intel, the Intel logo, and Xeon are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the United States and other countries.

* Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

**World’s fastest system for analytics claim based on servers using Intel® Xeon® processer E7-8890 v3 being the performance leader of SAP BW-EML* @ 1B scalable records and 2B records as of 5 May 2015.  For the most complete information, see http://www.intel.com/E7v3records.

***Up to 6x business processing application performance improvement claim based on SAP* OLTP internal in-memory workload measuring transactions per minute (tpm) on SuSE* LINUX Enterprise Server 11 SP3. For configuration and result details, see http://www.intel.com/E7v3records.

Software and workloads used in performance tests may have been optimized for performance only on Intel microprocessors.
Performance tests, such as SYSmark and MobileMark, are measured using specific computer systems, components, software, operations and functions. Any change to any of those factors may cause the results to vary. You should consult other information and performance tests to assist you in fully evaluating your contemplated purchases, including the performance of that product when combined with other products.  For more complete information visit http://www.intel.com/performance. 

Configurations: http://www.intel.com/E7v3records.