Several stories and various blogs speculating that IBM Corp. will acquire or merge with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in the near future surfaced this past week. But are the rumors true?

I contacted AMD’s spokesperson, Gary Silcott, asking whether there is any truth to the merger/acquisition chatter, and if not, where the notion came from. Silcott’s response was an official “no comment” which in my mind is more affirmation than denial. I can pretty much guarantee that if I asked, “Is AMD is being acquired by archnemesis Intel Corp. next week?” the answer would be a resounding no. But that’s just my assumption.

The acquisition would make sense in part because IBM has a microelectronics division it could expand and already has a close technology development partnership with AMD.

And I could see how AMD could entertain the idea of being acquired or merging with IBM after it fumbled its quad-core Opteron processor rollout. AMD’s Opteron Barcelona processor was officially launched this September and was supposed to ship shortly thereafter. AMD did not to go forward with widespread shipments of Barcelona after it discovered an errata, according to John Fruehe, AMD’s worldwide market development manager of serve and workstation products.

“We don’t believe customers would even see it, but we are conservative and would rather be safe than sorry, so we held back on bulk shipments,” Fruehe said, adding that AMD is on track for volume shipment in April with revision B3.

Unfortunately, AMD’s conservative approach to technology development has kept the company far behind rival Intel, which introduced its first quad-core processor in November 2006 and many others since then.

Throwing salt in the wound, far fewer of the prestigious Top 500 supercomputers were AMD based in 2007. In the 2006 list, there were 113 AMD-based systems, but this past November there were only 79, compared with 354 Intel-based systems, a BetaNews report points out.

AMD isn’t rolling in dough right now either. The chipmaker reported fourth quarter 2007 revenue of $1.77 billion, a net loss of $1.77 billion and an operating loss of $1.68 billion. The company saw an 8% increase compared with the third quarter of 2007 and was flat compared with the fourth quarter of 2006.

Some say that the IBM/AMD acquisition rumors are just that, although it has conveniently boosted AMD stock prices.

Either way, it will be interesting to see how this one pans out. It would be nice to see AMD catch up with Intel on its own accord, but an IBM/AMD merger would yield strong research and development for new technology as well as a formidable competitor to Intel.

The Uptime Institute has been one of the organizations at the forefront of the green IT movement, along with the federal Environmental Protection Agency, the Green Grid, vendors and other groups. One key challenge Uptime has been dealing with is how data centers can justify energy efficiency to the higher-ups, the executives, what Uptime and founder Ken Brill like to call the “C-suite” — that is, CEOs, CFOs, even CIOs.

At its conference last year, Uptime first tossed out the idea of giving awards to those companies that went green with their data centers. That idea is now the Green Enterprise IT Awards, which aims to applaud companies that have made their data centers energy efficient.

Brill said it’s a way to get more companies, in particular executives, to realize that this matters.

“The awards allow us to give them recognition from the bottom-up approach,” he said. “Then it challenges the rest of industry to ask, ‘Why aren’t we doing the same thing?’”

The deadline for applying for an award is March 15, and there are multiple categories: systems architecture, hardware asset utilization, energy-efficient hardware deployment, facilities site physical infrastructure overhead, and green IT beyond the data center. The awards will be announced at the group’s symposium this year, which is scheduled for the end of April in Orlando.

Michael Manos the senior director of Data Center Services at Microsoft is Keynoting AFCOM’s Data Center World Conference in Vegas, March 30-April 3rd. Microsoft is building massive data centers around the world and Manos will discuss his experiences working with facilities full of thousands and thousands of servers.

Knowing how many applications are in the data center is probably a good step toward determining how many you plan to eliminate. That was one of the problems HP dealt with in trying to consolidate 85 data centers scattered across the globe down to six.

According to a Wall Street Journal article today, HP CIO Randy Mott discovered that company employees relied on about 6,000 applications, almost twice as many as he thought. When he found out, it was early 2006 and HP was already months into the project.

“I was blindsided,” Mott told the Journal.

What’s more — and this is no surprise — people were clinging to their applications as if this was a life-or-death matter. That especially became a problem at HP with employees of higher standing than Mott.

In H-P’s case, obstacles surfaced as early as December 2005. At the time, several vice presidents “really dug in” and resisted, says Mr. Mott. Some units said, “‘We’re not going to give you a cost-benefit analysis (for why we use the IT we have). We’re just going to tell you what product we want,’ ” the chief information officer says.

Site editor Matt Stansberry did a story on the HP consolidation back in August 2006, and touched on some of the issues around application identification and consolidation. But at the time, it was still early in the consolidation process. The Journal story gives a good sense of the hiccups HP has had to deal with.

Emerson Network Power released a new 480-volt power distribution unit — a voltage configuration that data center infrastructure experts have been clamoring for recently due to potential energy efficiency gains.

Typically an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) operates at 480 V, and a PDU steps down that power from 480 V to 208 V or 120 V. By eliminating the step-down transformer in the PDU by distributing power at 400 V/230 V and operating IT equipment at higher voltages the power chain would be more efficient.

The rack-sized Liebert FDC was designed for new high-density servers that can handle 480V power, including new models recently unveiled by IBM, said Bill Barcus, product manager, Liebert AC Power.

Data center managers can achieve an additional two percent energy savings by eliminating the step-down losses, according to Barcus. This doesn’t sound like much, but a data center with 1,000 servers could save around $40,000 annually.

Lately, infrastructure vendors are paying a lot of attention to distribution of power at higher voltages. Virtually all IT equipment is rated to work with input power voltages ranging from 100 volts (V) to 240 V alternating current (AC). The higher the voltage, the more efficiently the unit operates. However, most equipment is run off lower-voltage power: the traditional 120 V.

According to new research from Eaton, a Hewlett-Packard Co. ProLiant DL380 Generation 5 server, for example, operates at 82% efficiency at 120 V, 84% efficiency at 208 V, and 85% at 230 V. A data center could gain that incremental advantage just by changing the input power and the power distribution unit (PDU) in the rack.

“People say that virtually everything is coming at 208 V but they have lots of equipment coming in at 120 V,” said Peter Panfil, vice president of power engineering at Emerson’s Liebert Corp. “The IT people are more comfortable with 120 V, but there is no safety tradeoff.”

Robert McFarlane, data center design expert and principal at New York-based engineering firm Shen Milsom & Wilke Inc. offers advice for data center pros exploring this approach in the future. “The first step is to look at your servers,” he said. “See if they auto-sense 208 volts, and see what you can do about running 208 to your cabinets instead of 120. There are plenty of PDUs that will deliver 208 and 120 to the same strip if you wire it right.”

Taking the voltage directly to 480 and avoiding ther stepdown altogether is even more efficient. Vendors have been rolling out these products in Europe, but Chris Loeffler, product manager at Eaton said the main factor holding users back from distributing power at 400 V/230 V in the U.S. is that the equipment to handle these voltages is CE marked (it contains the manufacturer’s seal that it meets the European Union safety standards) but not approved by Underwriters Laboratories, the U.S. product testing and compliance organization.

“The global UPS manufacturers all make 400-volt systems, and we’ve done a number of Google data centers at 400 volt, bringing in our CE-marked equipment,” Loeffler said. “But UL means something for some people and you would have a tough time looking at this as a partial upgrade.”

Barcus said the typical panel board vendors use is UL listed for 240 volts — while they are rated higher internationally — but the new Liebert FDC uses a higher rated panel board, which is UL listed.

“We’ve had some queries from customers, but not a lot of sales yet,” Barcus said. “This is the tip of the iceberg.”

Kevin Bross, Intel Modular Systems Architect and an avid fisherman says Forty-eight volt DC power is radically more efficient than AC in the data center. “Service providers were already running -48V DC in their central offices. So why not bring -48V DC to their data centers?”

 You can check out the Intel video on YouTube. Intel has a new energy calculator as well to check out the differences between AC and DC.

Coincidentally, Bross is fishing in this video, about 30 minutes from my house in Eugene, Oregon on the famous McKenzie River.

Gizmodo had a post last week on data center cabling masterpieces. While this photo came from the “nightmare” category, it is worth checking out some of the more artful data center cabling designs. Commentors on the post suggested it was in fact a cyborg incubator, the final resting place of Frodo Baggins, or just a really good way to get fired. Would this qualify as “Alien Crosstalk”?

Hewlett Packard Co.’s HP-UX operating system isn’t due for another major update until 2010 or so, according to comments from Brian Cox, an HP software marketing director. But when it does come, it is expected to “provide better manageability of virtualized environments and even higher uptime levels than currently possible.”

HP-UX is one of the three major Unix operating systems, along with IBM’s AIX and Sun Microsystems’ Solaris. Between major releases, HP has released upgrades with some added features. Its most recent one, codenamed “Vitality,” came out in the fall. The major announcement from that was HP-UX’s newfound ability to dynamically add and subtract resources to HP-UX hardware partitions.

Cox said that interim upgrades like this would emerge every six months. The next two are codenamed “Versatility” and “Vibrancy.” Most likely they’ll contain some added virtualization and uptime features as well. There’s no word on what following upgrades will be codenamed, but there seems to be a pattern. Velocity, perhaps? Viscosity? I’m not sure.

In a conference call with investors, IBM Chief Financial Officer Mark Loughridge mentioned that Big Blue will be rolling out its “next-generation mainframe” this year, with the announcement and availability coming in late February.

Loughridge said the new version of big iron will have 50% more capacity than the current System z9 and enable “unprecedented levels of workload consolidation,” as well as being more energy efficient. We haven’t heard about any special events that IBM is holding, but Share, the mainframe user’s group, is holding a conference in Orlando in late February, so don’t be surprised if IBM makes the announcement there.

It has been about two years since IBM introduced its latest mainframes, the Enterprise Class and Business Class.

Secunia is a well-known Danish company that tracks security vulnerabilities and viruses for thousands of software programs and operating systems. Vendors will often use information from Secunia to show how robust and secure their software is.

Check out this comparison of vulnerability advisories from Secunia for the major Unix operating systems — AIX, HP-UX and Solaris.