The IT Skeptic says the CMDB tidal wave is actually a ripple. This blogger has called CMDB software a bloated dead elephant, among other things. Normally the phrase “IT Service Management” sends me into a narcoleptic coma, while the marketing person spends the next several minutes trying to revive me. But this Web site could change all that.

If ITIL or CMDB implementation have you in tears, this is the site for you.

From a recent blog posting: One wonders how many people “doing” CMDB are in fact putting in an asset database, or license management, or some other user-defined version of CMDB. Or how many are there where “doing” means Fred has been told to come up with something in his spare time with no budget. Or where “doing” means we bought a tool that says CMDB on the brochure but we haven’t got past implementing network alerting or incident tickets yet.

 Admittedly, recent research from SearchDataCenter.com shows increasingly more people are “doing” something with CMDB. Keep your eye out for mockery from the IT Skeptic once we publish it. I’ll be looking forward to it.

Opsware Inc. has upgraded its Server Automation System software to help in ITIL adoption, virtualization management and security automation.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company has products to help IT managers automate and keep track of processes on their data center servers. It works on Windows, Linux and Unix.

The new version’s features include:

• The ability to integrate with PowerShell, a command-line scripting tool on Microsoft Windows, so that any information about a system managed by Opsware software can be viewed in PowerShell.
• Integration with Opsware’s Process Automation System to help in ITIL compliance.
• The ability to manage servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0 and integration with Red Hat Network to automatically download the appropriate upgrades and patches as they become available.

Here’s the full press release.

Hewlett Packard Co. announced a smaller AC-powered Integrity NonStop server targeted toward emerging telecommunications companies in eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.

DC power has been the standard in the telco industry, but Bob Kossler, director of NonStop product management, said the market they’re targeting doesn’t have DC as the standard power source — they have AC.

“We are trying to provide this particular solution into those spaces,” he said. “We’re trying meet the customer demand for that demographic.”

The new server also doesn’t have earthquake hardening, which most DC-powered servers for the telco industry have to help maintain uptime during extreme weather. What it does have that is specific to telcos is what Kossler called the “whole protocol stack that telecom operators tend to use,” such as the SS7 protocol.

The Integrity NonStop NS3000AC can have two or four Intel Itanium 2 processors, scales between 4 and 8 GB of memory, and starts at about $350,000.

Emerson Network Power has announced Liebert Nform to help manage your network systems. The software will monitor any Liebert SNMP devices that support a network interface such as a Liebert NIC.

ATEN Technology — which sells keyboard, video and mouse (KVM) devices to remotely manage servers — has announced a new 8-port switch called the KH98 that can communicate with up to eight computers. The equipment is meant to monitor hardware-related issues such as CPU temperature and fan speed. It’s available now and costs about $500. Operating systems supported include Windows, Linux, Unix and FreeBSD.

You’ve often heard vendors talk about their BRIC strategy, which refers to their investment in the fastly developing nations of Brazil, Russia, India and China. Now comes a report out of IDC saying that 65 percent of Brazilian companies plan to undertake some kind of mainframe migration in the next two years.

Although a few companies are consolidating all of their applications within the mainframes, the majority are looking to remove non-mission critical applications out of the mainframe into cheaper platforms, IDC senior analyst Reinaldo Roveri told BNamericas.

Brazil’s strong economy and currency is giving companies the confidence to rethink their IT architecture, the analyst said. The high costs of maintaining mainframes and competitiveness are also driving the migration, he added.

So where are they going? Most often to Unix, according to IDC, followed by x86 Windows and Linux. Roveri was far from flat-out dismissing the mainframe in Brazil, however. He said that in the government, finance and utilities sectors — where mainframes are most common — many IT directors will find it too risky to migrate.

That is true, but there are certainly examples from the financial sector, at least in the United States; for example, the New York Stock Exchange is migrating from the mainframe to Unix and Linux. You don’t get much bigger than that.

IBM is partnering with Chartered Semiconductor, Samsung Electronics and a few other firms to develop the next generation of nanometer process technologies, according to an article in Scientific American. This next generation is reportedly taking the process to 32 nm, which, of course, reduces charge leakage. This in turn allows for more power efficient chips. Currently, most chip makers are at 65 nm process, which is an upgrade from the 90 nm process that chip makers were at five year ago.

IBM’s recent Power6 uses 65 nm process, which IBM claims offers twice the computing power as the 90 nm Power5 processor at the same amount of electrical power. According to an article in Forbes, chip monster Intel is hitting 45 nm by the end of this year and has plans to hit 32 by 2009.

Chatsworth Products Inc. has announced a new cabinet for networking equipment that can take the side-to-side airflow of networking switches and force it to the hot aisle.

The N-Series TeraFrame Network Cabinet is available in dozens of different height and depth configurations, and can be equipped with Chatsworth’s Network Switch Exhaust Duct, which isolates hot air from the side of a network switch and blows it out the back of the cabinet to assist data center managers in a hot-aisle, cold-aisle design.

This isn’t a rare problem. In a Q&A this January, Cisco’s director of data center solutions addressed the issue many customers have with one of its LAN switching products with side-to-side airflow.

Server shipments were up in the first three months this year from the same fiscal quarter last year, according to research firms Gartner and IDC. Here’s the rundown:

• Server shipments were up 6 percent, according to Gartner; 4.6 percent according to IDC.
• Server revenues: Gartner says they were up 4.5 percent; IDC says 4.9 percent.
• Gartner said that IBM led in server revenue, followed by HP, Dell, Sun and Fujitsu. In server shipments, HP is followed by Dell, IBM, Fujitsu and then Sun.
• IDC’s numbers showed that HP led in revenue, followed by IBM, a tie between Sun and Dell, and then Fujitsu.

Though IDC’s server numbers differ from Gartner’s server numbers, the two came to basically the same conclusion: overall server numbers are up. Midrange systems were static overall, but mainframes, x86 and blade servers all improved.

Sun chief Jonathan Schwartz suggested in a Q&A that Sun could start giving server hardware away and just charge for services. Responding to a question about how muchSolaris brings in service revenues, Schwartz talked about “Thumper” and finished his answer by saying:

And by the way when we start giving it away for free and simply charging 4,000 bucks a month to service it, then how would I characterize it?

When there was a follow-up question, Schwartz backed up a little bit, but not much:

Did I just preannounce that? I hope I didn’t. That’s not currently in the plan, but it is absolutely where the market is headed.

As you probably know, Sun has a pretty extensive Try and Buy program that allows users to take some of its servers — with the range going from the small x86/x64 2100 up to the big-box T2000 — on a 60-day test drive to see how they like it. Is giving the hardware away the next step?