One Tuesday, April 29, at the Interop 2008 conference in Las Vegas, Mellanox Technologies Ltd. was granted the Best of Interop award in the Data Center and Storage category for its ConnectX EN 10 gigabit Ethernet (GbE) server and storage I/O adapter with Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based interconnect product supplier announced its ConnectX EN 10 GbE network interface card adapters for VMware- and Citrix XenServer-based virtual environments in February.

According to Mellanox, adapters maintain 9.6 Gbps throughput as the number of virtual machines in VMware ESX Server 3.5 scales up to 16 in multicore CPU environments. This improves server utilization because more VMs can be deployed per physical server while maintaining application I/O performance.

ConnectX EN is also the first adapter to support FCoE hardware offload and Priority Based Flow Control, both of which boost performance.

With support for PCI Express 2.0, ConnectX EN dual-port FCoE adapters are available today in silicon form for LOM (LAN on motherboard) applications and as PCI Express adapter cards that plug into server and storage systems with various media interconnect support including XFP, SFP+, CX4, and 10 GBase-T.

The finalists for the 2008 Best of Interop Awards were selected by InformationWeek’s panel of judges. Other finalists in the same category include Foundry Networks Inc.’s BigIron RX Module and Imation Corp.’s SSD PRO 7000.

The race to develop software that can take full advantage of parallel processing is heating up, according to a story by John Markoff in The New York Times. Top microchip companies, computer scientists and software vendors are aligning themselves in three different research efforts to create software that can run chips that pack more cores than are available today. While the various research initiatives take different approaches, they appear to share an underlying motivation:

All three efforts are in response to a growing awareness that the software industry is not ready for the coming availability of microprocessors with 8 or 16 or more cores, or processing units, on a single chip. Computer and chip makers are concerned that if software cannot use the new hardware efficiently, customers will have little reason to upgrade.

Is there a real and compelling need for parallel processing? Or is it primarily an issue of driving hardware upgrade cycles? Let us know what you think.

Alan Warn, a data center manager at ABN AMRO who I spoke to last week for a story on CFD modeling in the data center, also had some things to say about Cisco switches and EMC storage devices.

Neither are new issues for data center facility managers, but they bear repeating. A popular Cisco LAN switch, the Catalyst 6500, blows its hot air out the sides, wreaking havoc on facility managers who are trying to arrange a hot-aisle, cold-aisle configuration in their data center.

“Cisco switches are getting harder and harder to cool,” Warn said. “Their processing equipment, the cooling runs side-to-side. It’s just madness.”

Last year, we asked Doug Gourlay, Cisco’s senior director of data center solutions, about that exact issue in a Q&A we had with him. His answer? The Catalyst 6500 is actually offered in a front-to-back airflow configuration as well, but many data centers don’t buy it because you can’t fit as many ports into it as in the side-to-side version. The bottom line is that if you buy Cisco switches, you have sacrifice either proper airflow or port density, neither of which is very attractive.

Warn said he is looking at some APC cabinets that have special fans to take air from the sides and force it out the back.

Terry Rodgers, an associate partner at data center consultancy Syska Hennessy, recently wrote to us regarding our story on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling. He said that CFD modeling is too expensive to be used by data center managers simply to tell them that they should be following best practices on reducing bypass airflow.

“Why pay tens of thousands of dollars to find out that yes, you should follow accepted best practices?” he wrote. “CFD is not necessary to identify and seal cable cutouts, holes in the data center perimeter, use blanking panels in racks, and remove perf tiles from the hot aisle.”

He added that CFD isn’t even necessary to finding hot spots in the data center. “Just walk around and check and take a temperature sensor with you.”

The better strategy, he argued, is to correct all of those airflow issues that you can, and then use CFD modeling to help you rearrange server cabinets, for example, or determine whether your air conditioning units are providing the airflow pressure that they should.

“Another use for CFD is to validate design strategies before proceeding with costly construction,” he wrote. “But to tell me to seal cable cutouts???”

We agree. A CFD analysis can cost a pretty penny and should be used primarily to pick up the more nuanced cooling issues in your data center, the ones not easily seen with the naked eye. When half of your floor tile is gone to get some cables through it, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist analyzing complex algorithms to determine that you’ve got to fill them up. Thanks to Rodgers for writing in.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. has updated its Solaris 10 operating system (OS) today, The Solaris 10 5/08 OS, which is now available for free download.

Larry Wake, product manager for Solaris, details the new features in a video blog. Some of the features include new hardware support for systems based on AMD, Intel and SPARC processors, and increased performance and power management features for existing systems. In addition, a new feature called CPU Capping lets users set a limit on CPU usage for better management of system resources.

The new Solaris 10 also includes the ability for Solaris Containers to support virtualized environments based on earlier versions the OS - Solaris 8 and 9. This allows users running a physical instance of Solaris 8 or 9 to move those instances to containers running on a Solaris 10 system, according to Sun.

The Solaris 8 OS was originally released in February 2000, superseded by Solaris 9 OS in May 2002, and the Solaris 10 OS was initially released in January 2005.

More details on the updated version of Solaris 10 are available on Sun’s blog.

Since yesterday was Earth Day, I’m sure all you data center managers were out hugging trees, riding your bicycles to work and watching An Inconvenient Truth. But that was yesterday. Today, reality in the data center hits again. And the reality is that many of you aren’t that concerned with data center energy efficiency. I know, it’s a downer. But there are some hints of a silver lining if you can hold on a bit.

First, the reality: 37% are not in the middle of a data center energy efficiency project and have no plans for one. Perhaps some don’t realize that a server consolidation and virtualization project is an energy efficiency project, so that could be skewing the numbers somewhat. Pretty much everyone nowadays is doing virtualization and consolidation.

Second, almost half are getting their information about data center energy efficiency from vendors, either on the IT or infrastructure side. These vendors have one primary goal — to sell their equipment. If making their server or UPS 1/10% more efficient can help sell it, they’ll do it. Meanwhile, data center managers might be able to fill up cable cutouts and put in blanking panels for pennies on the dollar compared to what these vendors are selling, and save more energy.

“I’m not sure that’s surprising, but it’s telling,” Jay Fry, the VP of marketing for Cassatt, said. “They’re getting their data from interested parties, well-entrenched vendors who have a stake in incremental change, but not in a more innovative and potentially market-disruptive way.”

Cassatt, which provided these numbers from its own survey of users, is a server power management software company. And yes, Fry is a marketing guy. They’re a vendor just like the others, and Fry’s job is to sell, just like the other vendors’ marketing guys. So what is Cassatt pushing? Their software allows data center managers to power up and power down servers according to scheduled demand, thereby saving companies power costs they don’t need to spend when their servers aren’t being used. But not everything in Cassatt’s own survey is so rosy for them either.

In the survey, more than 41% said they cannot justify turning their servers off. Period, end of story. Sorry Cassatt, you’re not welcome here. Ouch.

But Fry said that was actually a lot lower than he thought; he was expecting that number to be about 90%. That’s what it has been in past years, he has found, so at least some people are thinking about changing.

“There’s still a lot of work to do,” he said, “but it does seem like people are thinking about ways to do things.”

There are some good things from this survey. About 40% said that either their primary or secondary reason for doing an energy efficiency project is “environmental responsibility.” See, so there are some tree-huggers out there. Also, in a response that seems to contradict the one about shutting off servers, almost half of respondents said they would be comfortable with an automated solution that “power-controlled” at least some of their production servers. Most likely they think that “power-controlled” means something less than shutting them off.

Finally, in a response that reflects results from a recent Uptime Institute survey, it seems that the IT-facilities gap is shrinking. About 54% said there is no gap or a small one. This result probably doesn’t have a direct effect on Mother Earth, but overall if communication between facilities and IT is better, power in the data center can be better monitored, thereby keeping power in check, thereby reducing strain on coal-fired power plants, thereby reducing their output, thereby making the shrinking gap an environmental concept. It took a while to connect those dots, but yes, we did it.

James Governor, an analyst at RedMonk, has a great post on CICS over at the Mainframe Typepad blog. His basic thesis: CICS is becoming a cash-cow because IBM is invested in SOA-ing it to death instead of in expanding the features of CICS itself:

What happens if you want to change the underlying enterprise data model, for example? You can’t do that without changing the code. You can service-enable all you want, but SOA is as much about component and service isolation, enabling flexibility and portfolio maintainability, than service reuse.

Governor, who lists IBM as one of RedMonk’s clients, adds that down at Impact 2008, an IBM conference on SOA held in Las Vegas earlier this month, it sounded to him like IBM was too interested in, as he wrote it, “extending existing investments” instead of trying to find “net new customers for the box.”

“Leverage existing workloads? I am most interested in net new workloads on Z - and I don’t just mean Linux-based,” he wrote.

It’s an interesting concept, and one that I’m always asking IBM about. New mainframe customers, especially in the United States, can be hard to find. It seems that IBM is investing in existing customers in the U.S. and then grabbing new customers outside the U.S. Whenever I ask about new mainframe customers, IBM always falls back on the BRIC acronym — Brazil, Russia, India, China. Hoplon Infotainment is one of IBM’s most-often touted new customers because a) they’re a new customer; and b) they do online gaming on a mainframe, which is a novelty all its own.

But as much as IBM talks about BRIC when it comes to new mainframers, it seems like they’re throwing bricks in the U.S. There may be some American companies new to the mainframe, but overall for new customers, IBM seems focused overseas.

Many mainframers to this day continue to lambast former technology writer Stewart Alsop for saying in 1991 that the mainframe would be dead in the next five years. Most people know that IBM’s big iron is thriving today. But without Lou Gerstner, who knows whether Alsop’s prediction may have come true.

As Frank Hayes writes in his Computerworld column, Microsoft is now in need of a Lou Gerstner to save its organization. As you probably know, Gerstner was CEO of IBM from 1993 until 2002 and is credited with turning the company around. Part of the company’s plans before Gerstner got there was to split into so-called “Baby Blues,” and most people in the organization felt that the mainframe would be going away. Hayes writes:

When he got there, Gerstner found a company that literally didn’t believe in its own future. The mainframe business — the core of IBM — was collapsing. Other business units were busy trying to turn themselves into stand-alone companies that could be spun off. The big blue ship was sinking, and everyone wanted off.

What Gerstner did was hold the ship together, but he did it by changing the entire culture within IBM:

What mattered was this: Gerstner led IBM to change. He had to. He understood that IBM’s old way of doing business just wouldn’t work any longer. With a plummeting stock price and 100,000 laid off, change was the only option.

Microsoft, Hayes said, is now at that moment, teetering on the edge of obscurity. Why? Because the core of Microsoft is Windows, and Hayes says that Vista is so bad that it could break the customer lock-in that Microsoft has had over users for years.

Vista breaks applications. It breaks device drivers. It breaks the strongest reasons for customers to stay with Microsoft. It actually threatens to break Microsoft’s customer lock-in.

That’s the one change Microsoft can least afford. And it’s the change Microsoft is actually plunging headlong into.

Hayes writes that he hopes Microsoft can right its ship in the same way that Gerstner righted IBM’s and kept big iron alive, thereby turning Alsop into a goat that the mainframe community cherishes like a household pet.

In mid-April, Qlusters Inc., opted to drop its sponsorship of the openQRM project, an open source provisioning and monitoring tool. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based provider of data center management products and services handed over openQRM to the open source folks at SourceForge where the project will reportedly continue under the tutelage of project manager Matt Rechenburg. In a subsequent blog post, Matthew Aslett, an enterprise software analyst at the 451 Group speculates on the fate of Qlusters, wondering whether the OpenQRM announcement signals the demise of the “little four” group of open source systems management vendors.

Could GroundWork, Hyperic and Zenoss possibly be on the verge of quietly disengaging from the world of open source systems management?

The folks at GroundWork took enough exception to Aslett’s post to contact me and give me their perspective. “Going with one of the big four, or going with one of the open source vendors isn’t an either or choice,” said David Dennis, senior director of product marketing at GroundWork. In terms of systems management tools, “there are alternatives from smaller vendors that are displacing or complementing specific pieces of what the big vendors offer,” he said. “What we see is a melding of the offerings from smaller vendors with big vendors.”

Andi Mann, an analyst with the Enterprise Management Group has long been a proponent of an ecosystem of systems management providers, believing that no single vendor can provide all the capabilities required by most customers. And vendors both big and small seem to share this perspective if a few timely announcements are any indication.

Just this week, Netuitive Inc., a provider of performance management software announced integrations with systems management tool HP OpenView with the idea of enabling an end-to-end view into the health of business service management. And big four vendor CA has teamed up with process automation company Opalis Software in an OEM agreement designed to overlay a process automation layer on top of CA’s data center tools for change, control and configuration management.

So, notwithstanding what happens with Qlusters in the future, the systems management ecosystem seems to be evolving nicely.

AMD announced today that Dell Inc. is now offering five server platforms based on AMD’s quad-core Opteron processors. This news follows last week’s announcement that quad-core AMD Opteron processors are generally available, and brings the number of available global OEM platforms based on the new processors to 13.

Additionally, VMware Inc. has completed qualification of Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors for use in VMware ESX and ESXi hypervisor deployments.

This is important because the erratum that impacted earlier versions of quad-core AMD Opteron processors was particularly relevant to virtualization environments. This certification signifies that AMD’s processor as compatible with virtualization environments, an AMD spokesperson said.

Dell servers supporting Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors include the PowerEdge SC1435, 2970, M605 blade server and 6950 platforms, all two-socket systems, as well as the new PowerEdge T605 tower server.

For more information on the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors visit AMD’s website . Information on Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor pricing can be found at http://www.amd.com/pricing.