Does this look familiar? A SearchDataCenter.com reader (who shall remain anonymous) sent these pictures in from his facility and let me post them here. You can click on the images to get the full-size version. His data center is currently in the midst of some CRAC maintenance, and this duct work is the result. Anyone else out there have similar experiences going on (past or present)?

Marc Wambeke over at the Mainframe Watch blog in Belgium has some issues with the latest release of DB2 for VM/VSE, a mainframe operating system mainly for smaller businesses.

The major issue is simple: lack of significant innovation. The latest version of DB2 for VM/VSE, 7.5, is due out later this month. The previous version, 7.4, came out three years ago. And yet Wambeke said there isn’t a whole lot of difference between the two:

Not that many new features for a new release after more than 3 years !

As far as I can see the only significant new feature for this release is the new DB2 Runtime only Client editions for VM and VSE features.

What’s more is that Wambeke claims the new feature is less of an innovation for DB2 on VM/VSE and more of an incentive — a carrot, if you will — to move to DB2 on mainframe Linux.

A lot of agonizing over the mainframe has to do with modernizing applications. Why? Presumably to broaden the platform’s appeal, particularly among younger people who often prefer Linux and Web-like dashboards with their applications.Presumably to broaden the platform’s appeal, particularly among younger people who often prefer Linux and Web-like dashboards with their applications.

On that note, IBM has announced updates to its Rational software geared toward modernizing mainframe applications for — get ready for the buzzword — service-oriented architecture.

Read more »

Thanks to the Mainframe Typepad blog for pointing out the new mainframe videos up on YouTube. If you missed the first three, you need to check them out — they’re pretty funny. The next three are good as well. My favorite part is in the fourth one (shown below), when the mainframe salesman says, “And that’s just part of my fundamental sales model that I refer to as the three C’s: confidence, communication, and energy efficiency.”

You can get all of them — including two others about life in the data center — at 360comedy’s YouTube channel.

The twice-yearly TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers released November 12 is dominated by IBM in number of systems and performance.

The TOP500 list was released at SC07, the international conference on high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis, in Reno, Nevada.

The top spot is held by reigning world champion Blue Gene/L System. Pictured below, the system is a joint development of IBM and the Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and is installed at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. The system was upgraded recently and now achieves a Linpack benchmark performance of now 478.2 teraflops (TFlop/s) — or trillions of calculations per second.

Coming in at No. 2 is a brand-new installation of the same type of IBM system, albeit a newer version. It is a Blue Gene/P system installed in Germany at the Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ) and it achieved performance of 167.3 TFlop/s.

It’s not before No. 3 in the TOP500 list that you find a non-IBM system. That honor is reserved for the New Mexico Computing Applications Center (NMCAC), which has a Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) system built on the Altix ICE 8200 model that posted a speed of 126.9 TFlop/s.

In the latest list, IBM regained a solid lead in the total number of systems with 232 (46.4%) over Hewlett-Packard (HP) with 166 systems (33.2%).

David Douglas, Sun’s eco-responsibility VP, has some questions about IBM’s announcement of data center energy efficiency credits. The basis of the program, done in collaboration with a company called Neuwing, is that companies can reduce the energy consumption of their data centers, get certificates for doing so, and then sell the certificates on an open market, either to other companies looking to meet internal goals or who want to boast of being “green,” or to utilities that need to demonstrate energy savings for regulatory purposes.

Douglas isn’t sure there’s a market out there:

I’d appreciate some real data on [energy efficiency credits], and if IBM or someone else with a datacenter has actually acquired some and sold them, I’d be interested in how it works and how much they were worth relative to the energy savings. Maybe this is the future and IBM’s just out ahead of everyone else. Or maybe it isn’t.

Another question pops up as well. Can a company move perforated tiles around the right way, get some certificates, sell them, and then move the perforated tiles back the way they were, negating the energy savings? My guess would be yes, but if they actually have realized savings, why would they? There would be no point unless they could repeat the same process to get more certificates, which they can’t.

Either way, Douglas raises some questions to think about. Would you participate in a data center energy efficiency credits trading market?

Jack Loftus interviews Greg Schulz about what data center technologies he’s bullish on and which ones are hype.

Chuck Goolsbee, blogger and data center manager, is multi-talented: The guy can put together a slick video too — check out the installation of a new rooftop HVAC unit at Seattle-based hosting company Digital Forest in this video. Make sure you’ve got the volume cranked. The music rocks.  

Though “data center documentation” and “fun” sound like oxymorons, The Lone Sysadmin provides a humorous example for us.

As data centers continue to grow in importance within an organization, writing down the data center operating procedures becomes crucial. Having detailed, step-by-step plans for dealing with every day and rare occurrences can make your facility run more efficiently, reduce downtime and help grant some peace of mind.

But yeah, it can be boring. Unless you decide to provide references to Fight Club within. Repeat after me: “His name was Robert Paulson, his name was Robert Paulson …”

I just read this story about a colocation facility that was robbed for the fourth time in just two years, and I had to laugh at the absurdity of it.

C I Host provides more than 250,000 consumers and small- and medium-sized business in 190 countries with managed web hosting, dedicated server and colocation services.

According to one report, “During the robbery, C I Host’s night manager was repeatedly tazered and struck with a blunt instrument. After violently attacking the manager, the intruders stole equipment belonging to C I Host and its customers…At least 20 data servers were stolen, said Patrick Camden, deputy director of news affairs for the Chicago Police Department.”

The company’s Family Colocation offering promises to house equipment in a secured 144 sq. ft suite inside one of C I Host’s data centers.

The website states “Your machine will be housed inside a SECURED (I didn’t put the caps on, they did) shared co-location area.”

According to Migration Solutions, acts of theft, fraud and vandalism in the data center are three times more likely to be an ‘inside job’ than perpetrated by someone who’s unconnected with the facility. Furthermore, around 65% of data center security incidents are driven by malicious intent rather than economic gain, and perpetrators are normally disgruntled current or ex-employees, Migration Solutions reported.

The fact that this facility, which is not some two-bit operation, has seen four robberies in such a short period of time seems ridiculous. I am interested in feedback from the industry on this.