At the beginning of this year, Redmond Magazine announced its Editors’ Choice Awards, handing VMware ESX the trophy for being “most reliable.” In second place? The IBM mainframe.

Why am I mentioning it now when the awards were handed out in January? Well, because I didn’t know of them. A couple colleagues were down at a VMware virtualization forum in New York City recently, and VMware was touting its awards from the magazine, and specifically noting how ESX beat out the mainframe in reliability.

Please keep in mind that this is a magazine focused on the Microsoft IT community, not the IT community as a whole. So for the mainframe, which doesn’t run Windows (yet), to even make it on this list is something. I’m pretty sure the mainframe was the only non-Microsoft related product that placed in any category. Anyway, here are Redmond Magazine’s descriptions for each.

On VMware ESX: “The least stable part of ESX is usually the administrator. The code is virtually bomb-proof.“

On the mainframe: “They’ve been running for more than 50 years, and probably will for another 50.”

Not everyone thinks ESX is “bomb-proof.” On the other end of the extreme spectrum, John Toigo said during a speech last year that ESX was “shoddy” and full of bugs. So the truth is probably somewhere in between. More reliable than the mainframe? That’s questionable, although maybe understandable coming from a Microsoft-focused magazine.

The latest version of Opalis Software Inc.’s flagship IT process automation server software was released a couple weeks ago. Among the enhanced features of the Opalis Integration Server 5.5 is a customizable executive dashboard designed to give high-level IT and other managers the ability to drill into graphs and get at the service data behind them. “The idea is to add value at all levels of IT from administrators, operators and up to senior managers,” said Charles Crouchman, the chief technology officer at Opalis. The executive dashboard, he added, is designed to provide senior IT managers who are responsible for managing the effectiveness of service delivery with relevant data.

Executive dashboards for IT process automation? Sounds a lot like business intelligence for the IT operations set.

Actually, executive dashboards aren’t that new to IT process automation in particular and systems management in general, according to Rich Ptak, an analyst with Ptak, Noel & Associates. “Most infrastructure management solutions have some sort of dashboard — executive or otherwise — that ships with the product,” he said. “What is important is the engine underneath the dashboard.” In the case of Opalis, things like powerful supporting analytics, strong report-generation capabilities, and the ability to correlate and compare data make its executive dashboard stand out.

As Ptak sees it, the emphasis that Opalis places on executive dashboards is beneficial to IT managers, who have often been reluctant to proactively build tools that demonstrate what they do and how it affects the business. “For too long, the game was to collect as much data as possible and throw that data and analytic tools at the end user,” he said. “Today the vendors are taking more responsibility for helping IT and their customers to get real information in understandable formats.”

Gabriel Consulting Group, based in Beaverton, Ore., has finished its annual survey of Unix users, and found that IBM narrowly topped Hewlett-Packard in customer satisfaction.

Last year, IBM had a little more breathing room. But Dan Olds, a principal at the consultancy, said that Big Blue and HP are practically in a dead heat, with IBM leading in technology factors but HP winning on system quality and overall data center issues. That represents a decent jump for HP, which had slipped into third place behind Sun Microsystems last year on customer satisfaction.

The Gabriel survey quizzed 290 users in the fourth quarter of 2007 on dozens of Unix issues such as system performance, ease of integration, and operating system quality. Some findings from the survey:

• IBM won 14 categories and tied five, doing best in “Overall Technology,” “Raw System Performance,” and “Processor Performance.”
• HP won 10 categories and tied five, winning on topics such as “Easiest Integration,” “Best Initial Quality,” and “Operating System Quality.”
• Users picked Sun as being the most committed to Unix and driving Unix innovation the most.

Olds said that although Sun came in third, they did beat IBM and HP on topics such as customer loyalty and energy efficiency.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program is trying to collect information from anyone with a data center to help the EPA get a sense of what’s happening nationally with data center energy consumption. In this video from the Uptime Institute Symposium, the EPA’s Andrew Fanara discusses how data center managers can participate in the program, by measuring their energy efficiency in a standardized way.

You can download the forms for the National Data Center Energy Efficiency Information Program from the EPA’s data center Web site.

Three Hewlett-Packard user groups — Encompass, ITUG (International Tandem Users Group), and HP-Interex — are consolidating into one big one called Connect.

The groups announced their intention to merge earlier this year, and just recently the membership of all three voted to do so. The new merged group will have more than 50,000 participants and will be led by Nina Buik, who was the former president of Encompass. The launch of Connect will take place at the HP Technology Forum & Expo in Las Vegas next month.

At least one of the reasons for the merger is to have a larger voice.

“One of the issues that’s at the top of the minds for all of our members is advocacy,” Buik said in an interview earlier this year. “You tend to get heard a lot more when your numbers are greater. When you go to HP or your vendor partners, they’re going to listen.”

That’s not to say they haven’t been listening; Buik said HP and other vendors have thus far been supportive of the merger.

“It can be looked at from two standpoints,” said Scott Healy, the former president of ITUG. “It can provde greater value because HP really does want to know what users are thinking.”

Buik said that IT folks in the trenches can no longer hunker down in the confines of the data center; they will also need new, non-technical skills, which Connect aims to help them obtain. “IT people really have to know how to pitch ideas to high-level business people,” Buik said. It goes without saying that communications skills free of technical jargon are increasingly required, as are project management skills and the ability to make oneself more visible to an organization’s decision-makers.

Through local, regional and national meetings, one of Connect’s primary goals is to educate members in regard to the brave new world of IT. For Buik, one of her personal interests is to help members safeguard their careers by engaging in some “recession-proofing” practices. “Yes, you should have green IT and virtualization current in your skills,” Buik said. “But don’t emphasize your technology knowledge; instead show how your skills can help reduce costs.”

Buik added that she didn’t think there would be a lot of overlap between the three groups, saying that each catered to different sets of HP customers. The groups’ board members will also be able to learn and share from one another — Encompass, for example, has conducted some webinars, while ITUG has more experience running shows internationally. The combined group will look to increase its online presence and add forums so that HP users can log on and talk to each other about IT issues they’re dealing with.

Features Writer Megan Santosus contributed to this report.

Last week at the Uptime Institute Symposium, I met with Ken Ostereich of Cassatt and we chatted about the need for a radical change in data center design and operations in order to achieve the Uptime Institute’s challenge for end users to reduce energy consumption in the data center by 50% over the next 36 months. Ostereich observed that the proposed solutions are so incremental, a 50% reduction isn’t likely.

Christian Belady, Principal Power and Cooling Architect at Microsoft, actually compared the level of innovation to the movie Groundhog Day, 1993 Bill Murray classic where he has to repeat the same day over and over again.

In the video below, Ostereich calls on the data center industry giants like Yahoo, Google and Microsoft to serve as a “Data Center Space Program” helping best practices and new technologies trickle down into the more traditional companies. Ostereich has an excellent rundown of the week’s events on his blog, Fountainhead.

While the pace of change can be painfully slow, I argue that the innovations Ostereich and Belady are calling for are already happening.

Microsoft is exposing its internal operations to the public, and while they might not be giving away the secret sauce, if you’re paying attention you can still see the shape of what they’ve got under the sheet. They’re proving it can be done.

I too have heard the cries for metrics, hot-ailse/cold-aisle and virtualization ad nauseum at every conference over the past two years. But end user panelists at companies like Ford Motors and Boeing are talking about using cloud computing for non-critical applications and shutting down servers during the off hours.

Granted, many companies are putting blanking panels in their racks, virtualizing a few servers and calling it the best they can do, but those companies likely won’t be running data centers at all in five years. Google and Microsoft will be running their IT for them.

This week I sat down with Microsoft’s Senior Director of Data Center services, Michael Manos at the 2008 Uptime Symposium to talk about Scry, the company’s data center analytics tool that they touted at AFCOM. According to Manos, this tool allows him to look at his data centers’ energy use, carbon footprint, power bill and more — all at an incredibly granular level. It also allows him to slice and dice data to make decisions, for example Microsoft can look at the energy consumption of an individual product like Hotmail. The program is especially slick in that it ties into Microsoft’s CMDB and assett management tools. Microsoft has been touting this tool at various conferences throughout the past few months, but it’s not likely to become a commercial product for other companies since so much of the tool was built around Microsoft’s specific homegrown internal software. But the main point of Manos’s data center road show is to prove to people that it can be done. Microsoft is measuring and improving its energy efficiency in the data center and Manos is not waiting for someone to hand down the perfect metric or the perfect tool. Check out the video below, where Manos outlines how he uses Scry and in the second video he talks you through a 3-D rendering of the new containerized data center being built in Chicago.

We have all seen the headlines lately regarding the H1-B visas, with lobbyists testifying at Congressional hearings about the need to expand the number of H-1B visas and thus the number of qualified workers in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. One of the leading proponents of expanding the program is Microsoft founder, Bill Gates, who testified to Congress about the need for more “innovation” in the United States.

“While America’s innovation heritage is unparalleled, the evidence is mounting that we are failing to make the investments in our young people, our workers, our scientific research infrastructure, and our economy that will enable us to retain our global innovation leadership,” said Gates. “If the United States truly wants to secure its global leadership in technology innovation, we must, as a nation, commit to a strategy for innovation excellence – a set of initiatives and policies that will provide the foundation for American competitive strength in the years ahead.”

Top on his list was strengthening educational opportunities for US school children. But next was “Revamping immigration rules for highly skilled workers, so that U.S. companies can attract and retain the world’s best scientific talent.”
However, Norman Matloff, professor of computer science at University of California – Davis, disagrees with the notion that foreign workers provide “innovation” to the United States. He recently published a study, H-1Bs: Still Not the Best and the Brightest, arguing that foreign workers are “are people of just ordinary talent, doing ordinary work. They are not the innovators the industry lobbyists portray them to be.”

Other controversies surrounding the H-1B issue include fraud assessment, which has been spearheaded by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). In 2007, Grassley partnered with Senator Dick Durbin (R-Ill.) on a bill to overhaul the H-1B visa program.

This controversy has been in the news for months, but what does this mean to you? Are you an IT professional who is having a hard time finding a good paying job, or are you a recruiter having difficulty filling positions? Do you think this is just anti-immigrant hype? Please share your thoughts.

One Tuesday, April 29, at the Interop 2008 conference in Las Vegas, Mellanox Technologies Ltd. was granted the Best of Interop award in the Data Center and Storage category for its ConnectX EN 10 gigabit Ethernet (GbE) server and storage I/O adapter with Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based interconnect product supplier announced its ConnectX EN 10 GbE network interface card adapters for VMware- and Citrix XenServer-based virtual environments in February.

According to Mellanox, adapters maintain 9.6 Gbps throughput as the number of virtual machines in VMware ESX Server 3.5 scales up to 16 in multicore CPU environments. This improves server utilization because more VMs can be deployed per physical server while maintaining application I/O performance.

ConnectX EN is also the first adapter to support FCoE hardware offload and Priority Based Flow Control, both of which boost performance.

With support for PCI Express 2.0, ConnectX EN dual-port FCoE adapters are available today in silicon form for LOM (LAN on motherboard) applications and as PCI Express adapter cards that plug into server and storage systems with various media interconnect support including XFP, SFP+, CX4, and 10 GBase-T.

The finalists for the 2008 Best of Interop Awards were selected by InformationWeek’s panel of judges. Other finalists in the same category include Foundry Networks Inc.’s BigIron RX Module and Imation Corp.’s SSD PRO 7000.

The race to develop software that can take full advantage of parallel processing is heating up, according to a story by John Markoff in The New York Times. Top microchip companies, computer scientists and software vendors are aligning themselves in three different research efforts to create software that can run chips that pack more cores than are available today. While the various research initiatives take different approaches, they appear to share an underlying motivation:

All three efforts are in response to a growing awareness that the software industry is not ready for the coming availability of microprocessors with 8 or 16 or more cores, or processing units, on a single chip. Computer and chip makers are concerned that if software cannot use the new hardware efficiently, customers will have little reason to upgrade.

Is there a real and compelling need for parallel processing? Or is it primarily an issue of driving hardware upgrade cycles? Let us know what you think.