Trevor Eddolls at the Mainframe Update says that IBM should embrace alternate mainframe technologies — such as those from Platform Solutions, Inc. — for example, instead of “smashing them like the Hulk.”

How do you get people interested in mainframes? The answer is to have lots of them around and let people play with them. Now before you start sneering and saying that will never be possible, let me suggest a way. How about FLEX-ES from Fundamental Software? It provides a way for developers to test mainframe software on a laptop. Or there was UMX technologies. And, of course, Hercules – the Open Source mainframe emulator. Platform Solutions has a product called the Open Mainframe. There’s even Sim390. If IBM was to embrace these technologies and not try to smash them like the Hulk, people would be more familiar with mainframe systems because they would be more commonplace.

The post really is about more than just the open mainframe, of which there has been much talk this year because of lawsuits between IBM and PSI and PSI introducing its own Intel-based mainframe. Eddolls also talks about IMS, saying that IBM should be more aggressive in selling it, and that it should try to get its VM operating system onto other platforms such as Intel.

BNIM Architects, a Kansas City, Mo.-based company, says that Google is considering the possibility of building a 20-megawatt wind-powered data center in Greensburg, Kan.

Bob Berkebile, a partner with the company, told Greensburg residents and officials about BNIM’s plan for helping to rebuild the city, which was destroyed by a tornado in May. No doubt it’s still early in the process, but Berkebile said Google is “currently doing feasibility studies on the possibility” of building the data center. The city is in the midst of trying to rebuild the city on the foundation of being green.

It’s no secret that Google is unafraid of seeking out rural locations for data centers if the economics and environmentals make sense. Its project in Iowa, for example, includes cheap power from a utility that plans to add more wind power to its portfolio. The search engine giant announced this summer that it wants to go carbon neutral by 2008 (note: that’s in a few days), and so seeking out alternative forms of energy is a priority. It’s already installing nearly 10,000 solar panels at its Mountain View, Calif. headquarters to provide 1.6 megawatts — about one-third — of that facility’s energy needs.

In a follow-up to a System i Network story about women in IT, blogger Chris Maxcer asked the audience if they would recommend information technology as a profession. The large majority of people said they would advise against it. One in particular said they would probably suggest that a young person get into plumbing rather than computing:

Recommend an IT career? No way!! I was in 3rd grade back in 1981. Back then everyone was saying that computers were the future. If you could learn computers, you would be in great demand and be rich rich rich!!

Hmmm, who would have known that plumbing would have been a better choice. I know that a plumber makes more per hour than I do. I have been continually learning new technologies for 20 years. It’s either learn or die in this field. A plumber learns his trade and nothings changed too much over the last 1000 years of plumbing.

What about you, our readers? What profession would you recommend to your children today over IT? Or if you would recommend IT, why?

I stumbled onto a Website called “Abandoned But Not Forgotten” today and found what the site claims are photos of a 30-year old Sun Microsystems Data center. Can anybody confirm or identify this data center’s location? Also, what happened with all of that equipment that’s still lying around in there? It doesn’t seem responsible to leave this stuff for the next building’s tenants or allow access to people that are in there shooting shotguns  and painting 4:20 on the walls.

Jim Porell at the Mainframe Typepad blog has an interesting post pondering whether Windows will be the next operating system to run on System z.

Now that Linux is on the mainframe and Solaris is getting ported to it, it seems natural to speculate that other OSs will make their way there as well. With IBM pushing big iron as an ideal consolidation server, the more operating systems on there the better, right?

Well, it turns out that this thought is nothing new. Back in 1994, folks at IBM started looking into this possibility but found that running Windows natively on the mainframe was not possible due to the difference in endianness between the mainframe and what Windows was used to running on, x86.

However, there is a way to get Windows applications to the mainframe, namely by using software from a company called Mainsoft that converts .NET applications to Java bytecode, which can then operate on System z.

But Porell points to eclipse.org, an application development group, as being the possible way to go when it comes to Windows application development on the System z:

If you really want cross platform deployment from the Windows desktop environment, eclipse.org is an open standards group comprised of a number of leading tooling vendors to facilitate rapid application development, good tool integration and provide a flexible choice for platforms to which those applications can be deployed. Leveraging this tool set will facilitate exploitation of mainframe technology and is highly recommended to deliver the best qualities of service for software running on System z.

2007 was a big year for SearchDataCenter.com. We published our first purchasing intentions research and our first data center products of the year awards. We brought on new writers and experts and launched Server Specs — our data center blog. This post is a digest of the most popular and some of the most overlooked content from the calendar year 2007.

The research projects:
In the spring of 2007, we conducted our first annual data center purchasing survey. Subscribers were contacted by email and invited to participate. We had a total of 374 respondents in North America. This report can tell you what your peers are buying and why. It’s broken down across the data center spectrum — covering everything from x86 servers, to big Unix, to facility infrastructure. And if that weren’t enough, our panel of data center pros and experts ranked the best products  in our products of the year awards.

Shameless plug — Read our book: The green data center: Energy efficient computing in the 21st century. The first four chapters are available now — Chapter one lays out the business case for going green in the data center. Chapters two through four go into the tactical details for saving energy in your computing environment, covering servers, infrastructure and storage equipment respectively. Chapter five — putting together a green data center plan — is due out in January 08.

Server hardware management:
Get tips from the trenches with our writers like Chuck Goolsbee and Kyle Rankin. Goolsbee busts Dell and Apple in this post for making servers that are too long to fit in the racks and vows to whip out the Sawzall. “The new [server] is two inches longer, the ports (network and power) have swapped sides, and the rack mounting hardware is completely different. What should have been a 5 minute operation turned into a multi-hour ordeal.”

Speaking of multi-hour ordeals, Rankin, a sys admin and author from the Bay Area spent last year’s company xmas party trying to put together a blade server jigsaw puzzle. In other major server news, Bridget Botelho outlines the processor rivalries and roadmaps between AMD and Intel.

Systems management challenges:
Thanks to the the Energy Policy Act of 2005, system admins were springing ahead early for Daylight Saving. While it wasn’t Y2K panic all over again, several vendors released patches to keep time-sensitive applications up to date.

Configuration management database software seemed to be on every data center manager’s wish-list. Megan Santosus outlines what to look for in a CMDB and expert Jasmine Noel asks users to evaluate whether or not they need one.

Data center facility management:
There are a lot of debates raging in the data center facility management sphere. Is Direct Current (DC) power feasible in the data center? What about using outside air to cool your servers? Some of the better debates are even more granular. For example — what is the right way to manage humidity in the server room? Should ASHRAE expand its recommended temperature range for server equipment? Are raised floors in the data center obsolete? Should you consider liquid cooling? If so, check out our liquid cooling buyers’ guide.

Mainframes in the data center:
High profile mainframe migrations are still big news this year as the New York Stock Exchange dumped its Big Iron (1,600 MIPS) for commodity HP servers running Linux and IBM’s System P servers running AIX. This was one of the most viewed stories of 2007.

Other big news on big iron: IBM rolled out its latest mainframe operating system and resident mainframe guru Robert Crawford outlined his favorite z/OS 1.9 features in this review. Joe Clabby debunked the myth of the mainframe skills shortage. And IBM trotted out a demo of OpenSolaris running on the mainframe.

Disaster recovery goes bonk:
Disaster Recovery is a perennial popular topic. But this year there were a lot of high profile flubs, including the downtime at 365 Main. It pays check your generators — especially since new low-sulfur diesel regulations may be hindering your gen-set’s performance. It might be a good idea to doublecheck your runbooks against the resources in our DR checklist and  Web resource guide.

Data center site selection and construction:
It’s a fact — data center construction is booming. According to our 2007 data center construction survey, 22% of survey respondents said they were involved in a data center construction project in 2007. More than 60% of respondents will be involved with construction in 2008. With all these construction plans, companies are going to be looking for optimal places to put their data centers. So it makes sense that our articles on U.S. data center site selection and a look at the international market did particularly well with readers this year.

All of this demand is driving up the demand for data center space – which is manifesting itself in booming business for colocation firms. But the data center bust is coming, so companies are making hay while they can.

The University of Manitoba recently held a New Orleans-style jazz funeral for its mainframe, whose nickname was Betelgeuse. The event included a pinata seen here that employees had some fun bashing.

Though the story, reported by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.’s radio division, doesn’t mention what it’s doing with the mainframe and what will be replacing it (the university’s site only says something about “25 servers”), the funeral itself is pretty hilarious. Here’s a quote from the “eulogist” in the story:

For 47 years, you served us well,
You cast us in your green-screen spell,
You processed transactions without complaint,
We’ve asked the Pope to make you a saint.

The university had been running a mainframe since 1960, when it bought an IBM 650. It then cycled through about 10 different machines, finishing up with an Amdahl Millennium 1015.

The full mainframe timeline, eulogy and funeral procession route are also on the university’s Web site.

Timothy Sipples, who works in the IBM software division, has a post over at the Mainframe Typepad blog about Web-like interfaces for mainframe users.

The post is partly a discussion of mainframe interfaces (Screen Definition Facility II or SDF II and 3270) and partly a pitch for WebSphere Dashboard Framework, which Sipples likens to SDF. The bottom line, Sipples said, is that Web interfaces have been on the mainframe for decades.

Most business users want graphical Web interfaces, so if you’re not delivering them, who (what) will? I directly interact with a mainframe every day, but I cannot remember the last time I used a 3270 terminal emulator. The face you present to your users is critical, just as the face your company presents to your customers determines your business success.

There’s nothing wrong with terminal interfaces per se, and many users are quite productive with them. I have a guess that many blog readers happen to like this traditional user interface, but what you use and prefer shouldn’t influence the service you deliver to most business users.

The features and benefits of the WebSphere Dashboard Framework are displayed in a demo on the IBM site.

Boom, bust, drought, and recovery, and now boom again. Is bust next? If so, when?

This post on Rich Miller’s DataCenterKnowledge.com got me thinking about those cycles, and the whys behind them. Mind you, I am not a journalist, nor an analyst sitting on the outside looking in, I am right in the thick of things working “in the trenches” of the data center economy. I have seen every one of those steps in the cycle in the last decade, while building, filling, moving, decommissioning, and expanding data centers. Demand of course is what drives the need to build facilities and demand is high right now when compared to the supply of data center space. Reading the trade press you see announcements every day of this company or that one expanding existing data centers, or committing to build new ones.

It was only a matter of time before analysts and journalists began asking and speculating about the next phase in the cycle. When will there be too much capacity? When will the market demand drop? Will supply outstrip demand? How much is too much data center capacity?

Speaking from a position inside the industry they are asking the wrong questions. Typical for analysts, especially the financial and investment sort, they are thinking of the right now, the next quarter results. If they would switch their macro lens for a wide-angle they might realize some simple truths about this business.

Demand
Conventional wisdom says that strong demand is what is driving growth, in the form of data center construction right now. It is also what drove the data center building boom of 1999-2001. However, if you look at demand from a long view, it has grown in a very linear fashion since the initial spark of the web-driven economy in 1993. The growth in the number of web servers has been steady, even through the “bust” days of 2001-2005. The Internet did not cease growing, rather, the rate of growth lessened slightly. There is no curve on the graph, just a long ramp at varying angles. Sharp inclines occur in 94-95, 99-01 and 06-present with shallower inclines at other times. The only graphs that have declines are those tracking pricing and players. Prices plummeted in the bust of 01-02 and are only now going up again. The same goes for players on the field. The bust of 01-02 left a lot of dead bodies. The companies died, but in many cases their carcasses, in the form of their datacenters, remain.

Supply
The data center growth graph may be a steady ramp, but the capital required to expand or build a datacenter is more of a staircase graph. Building data centers is an EXPENSIVE exercise. Significant amounts of money are involved, especially when commodities are in demand and prices are high. During the last boom fiber was one of the expensive limiters. Today the price of raw copper (for electrical infrastructure) and the scarcity of Diesel generators are the most acute pain points. The frequently quoted metric is $1000 per square foot to build a data center, however, building a facility to meet the current electrical and cooling demands costs much more. It is estimated (though not confirmed) that Google spends three times that figure on their data centers.

Where does this leave the data center operator? Spending only when the capital is available. If the analysts on Wall Street were smart, they would have been telling the investment community to put money into data centers between 2002 and 2006. Unfortunately they aren’t as smart as their salaries would seem to indicate. Trying to find capital to build or expand a data center at that time proved harder than finding WMDs in Iraq. The supply curve was on the flat of the staircase-shaped graph.

The demand ramp passed the supply staircase about eighteen months ago. Those mothballed “carcass of the bust” facilities were the first to be turned up as the demand incline grew sharper, mostly because the capital required to upgrade them, or in some cases just finish them, was suddenly available. Data centers built in 1999-2002 are just now showing profits, but they were also built to older specs, and are unable to manage the density that current deployments demand. This means they are approaching capacity, requiring more data center construction. That requires big bucks.

Now the big money is flowing, so data center operators are building what they can, while they can. The graph is on the vertical and looking to cross that steady demand ramp. Are they overbuilding? Of course they are. They are banking space now to tide them over after the capital flow stops, because it will stop. If history is a guide, the stop will come sometime in the next year or two. The valuation of Savvis is just the first hint that it is coming. We will have to be content with what was built, because the capital will stop flowing and we will coast along on that flat line until the demand ramp passes the supply and the investment begins again.

Market Maturity
Data centers being built today are going to exceed the current demand because they must continue to operate through the next cycle. It is a crazy system. A crazy system driven by simple factors. Unless we can find courageous investors who think further ahead than the next few quarters, we are stuck with it until the market matures. So is another bust coming? Yes, because the system dictates that one must. But in reality it is not really a bust as much as the point where the supply and demand curves swap positions. If you look at history and examine the infancy of any capital- and construction-intensive modern service industry, be it railroads or aircraft, or even telecommunications, you will see these curves swinging and intersecting in boom/bust cycles that modulate towards stability in the long term as the market matures. This is a very basic view, not taking into account other economic factors such as market and commodity prices; growth, failure and aggregation through M&A; technology shifts, and the like. Just basic Econ 101 supply and demand. Eventually the investment community will realize that it can not dump/withhold capital based on their limited perception of the market. Investment will smooth the supply staircase into a ramp that hopes to stay just ahead of the demand ramp. The very definition of a stable market.

Intel Corp. is consolidating 130 of its data centers worldwide to just eight global hubs to significantly reduce the company’s total data center footprint.

Intel has started the process and will execute it within eight years. This initiative will reduce costs, improve server and storage utilization, create higher density and more energy efficient data centers, Intel reports, and could result in $1.4 to $1.8 billion in savings.

The plan is being implemented by replacing older technology with new multi-core Intel Xeon processors (of course), and virtualization to create higher density, energy efficient data centers.

This Intel Data Center blog video interview with Brently Davis, manager of Intel’s data center efficiency initiative, contains a lot more detail on how Intel intends to accomplish this feat. For example, there are a lot of low-power processors on the market today, even though some data center managers don’t use them fully.

Intel calls this a Green data center initiative, which I suppose any power efficiency initiative is, by default.

Either way, it serves as a good example for other companies whose data centers are full of under-utilized servers acting as power sponges.