Mark Fontecchio and I made our rounds on the floor of the Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas this week and we stopped by at two mainframe tool makers to talk about their projects.

In this first video, Jim O’Connor from Bus-Tech talks about eliminating mainframe tape storage from the data center:

In this second video, Murray Martin of MVS Solutions Inc. talks about the general availability of the Ontario-based company’s Z/OS batch scheduling software, ThruPut Manager:

This week we’re at the Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas and we caught up with David Boyes of Sine Nomine Associates. Boyes was demonstrating OpenSolaris running on an IBM System Zmainframe at the conference and we have him here in these five videos, giving you a first look.

Boyes’ team (which was responsible for bringing Linux to Big Iron) has been working on porting Solaris to the mainframe for 18 months. But Boyes won’t say when Solaris on System Zwill become available beyond “soon”.

According to Boyes, Sun customers that are sitting on a lot of small to medium-sized pizza box servers are facing the same problem as Wintel users - server sprawl. This port could allow users to consolidate some Solaris workloads onto the mainframe.

YouTube doesn’t like files over 100mb or movies over 10 minutes long, so we had to break the presentation up into five parts. Here are the rest of the videos:

Solaris on the mainframe demo Part II

Solaris on the mainframe demo Part III

Solaris on the mainframe demo Part IV

Solaris on the mainframe demo Part V

This cheesy commercial for DataDirect Shadow RTE integration software shows that mainframe modernization can be done successfully in a large institution. DataDirect isn’t the only one offering this kind of technology, it just has the only video I found with that local commercial feel to it. For example, you could choose to use the SOLA tool set from SOA Software, which specializes in modernizing apps like CICS and COBOL.

And so it begins. I registered last night here at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas to supposedly beat the lines, even though I still had to wait about a half-hour to get my packet. Now it’s Tuesday morning and the conference has officially begun, with a welcome address preceding keynotes and sessions this afternoon. I’ll be here until Thursday and will check in on the blog now and again.

Gartner analyst John Phelps said there are 2,000 attendees at the show. Some immediate polling of the audience has taken place. Here are some of the results:

• Gartner asked what server infrastructure people were running and offered nine combinations (mainframe only, Unix and mainframe,  Windows and Linux, etc.). The plurality said they run a mishmash: 40% said they run mainframe, Unix, Linux and Windows servers. Coming in second with 25% was people who are running Unix, Linux and Windows servers. The lowest: Mainframe and Unix at 0%, the old goose egg.
• 80% are either in the process of a server consolidation project or have already completed one. Only 3% have no plans for server consolidation.

The keynote this morning is called “The Future of Infrastructure and Operations” by Thomas Bittman, a Gartner analyst. I’ll be working on a full story about that speech later today.

You simply must check out the Yelavich Road Web site that SearchDataCenter.com editor Matt Stansberry found. It is the personal site of former IBMer and computer guru Bob Yelavich (which rhymes with “yellow brick”) in which he chronicles his career working on SAGE, the System 360, IMS, GIS and much more. But the real gem of Yelavich’s site is his retelling of the evolution of CICS and other CICS-related information.

Have you heard enough about the green data center yet? It’s a topic that has dominated the space this year, as talk of energy efficiency and EPA studies has been plentiful. And that’s understating it.

Well, Symantec has some more statistics. According to a recent survey of hundreds of data center managers, the software company found that only one in seven data centers has started implementing a green data center. What is a “green data center?” The survey found that 85% of participants thought it meant improving energy efficiency, 63% said reducing hazardous and toxic materials, and 56% said reducing polluting energy sources (respondents could pick more than one answer). Some other findings:

• 68% said energy efficiency was a high or critical priority in the data center.
• Only 37% have a hot-aisle, cold-aisle configuration.
• Respondents said that virtualization, consolidation, and energy-efficient CPUs are the technologies that most contribute to data center energy efficiency.
• 72% said that energy efficiency is very important or somewhat important when it comes to picking a vendor.

If you’re not yet green in the face about the green data center, there’s more information in the Symantec press release.

A couple recent threads on the IBM mainframe listserv have me thinking that being in IT isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be.

First there’s this thread, which mentions a New York Post story about a former IBM exec tired of the corporate life who decided to make a career change and sell waffles on a SoHo street corner instead. From the story:

DeGeest began selling his flavorful fare in October - and said though he’s not matching his former salary, he is making a living off the treats while bringing joy to the masses.

“A waffle makes people smile,” he said. “I basically sell smiles.”

While the original poster wondered whether the career change was prompted by the upsurge in outsourcing, some had other ideas. One said, “Yeah but I bet he’s a happier man and doesn’t get hauled out of bed at 0200 to make a waffle!” while another quipped, “actually I think this is just someone who decided he’d enjoy selling waffles a lot more than the day-to-day grind if IT, and it appears he’s doing great at it.”

In the second thread, a member posts a job listing for a software support specialist. The kicker is that the pay is $20/hour, a salary that one poster deemed “starvation wages.” Again the issue circled around to outsourcing, as one poster said: “But you see, they have no intention of filling these jobs with one of us: this will go to a foreign worker on an H1B visa or simply be outsourced to the third world. They are just fulfilling the legal requirement to advertise the positions before hiring foreigners.”

According to the folks at Slashdot.org, Sun Microsystems and a consortium of Japanese companies are building a data center in an abandoned coal mine in the Chubu region on Japan’s Honshu island. The data center will be created by lowering Sun Blackbox systems into the ground and the engineers plan to take advantage of the site’s constant 59F temperatures to cool the servers.

Unfortunately, as an astute Slashdotter pointed out, that heat has to go somewhere ”If you go inside a cave that’s been at constant 55F for a thousand years and you suddenly heat it with 50 kilowatts of power from your data center the temperature will settle at 255F in a hurry.”

Which was shortly followed by this user: “Whoa. Coincidentally, that’s the optimum incubation temperature for Mothra larvae. For the sake of humanity, let’s hope that Sun is factoring this into their cooling calculations.”

Associate Editor Adam Trujillo developed this simulation:

This week we published our 2007 data center construction survey and the results were staggering: 82% of the respondents said they would be building or renovating a data center in 2007 or 2008.

Further data from the survey:

Europe to be the next data center growth area:

According to Digital Realty Trust’s Senior VP Chris Crosby, More than 80% of European companies are planning data center expansions, which mirrors what the surveys found in the U.S.

“The main difference was the timeframe: The bulk of the European projects are out near the back end of the 24 month period we asked about. That indicates that the European is 18-24 months behind the U.S. in terms of when that wave will crest,” Crosby said.

 Europe’s energy policy may be driving more data centers to go green across the pond. “Europeans think they’re way ahead of us on the energy issues,” said Joe Clabby of Clabby Analytics. “Members of the EU have come up with energy credits. If you exceed your energy credits you pay fines, if you go under you can sell your energy credits and make money. In the EU there is heavy legislation to not waste energy.”

Data center glut coming?

We’re in a boom cycle now, but will the bubble burst? All of this data center construction could lead to a lot of raised floor real estate sitting empty on the market if trends towards virtualization and consolidation catch up. Are companies overestimating data center infrastructure demand?

From The Register comes this story about QSGI, a mainframe reseller that is thinking of getting out of the business because of IBM’s strong-arm tactics.

In a recent quarterly earnings call, the Hightstown, N.J.-based company’s CEO, Marc Sherman, doesn’t actually mention IBM by name, only referring to it as an “OEM.” But he says that this OEM’s desire to control all upgrades and downgrades of mainframes in the marketplace is making it harder for QSGI to sell refurbished machines. I just listened to the earnings call online, and here’s part of what he said:

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