Last week I attended a data center tour with Sun Microsystems’ Dean Nelson, Sr. Director of Global Data Center Design Services.

Nelson’s team consolidated four large Sun Microsystems campuses in California – consolidating over 200,000 square feet of data center down to 80,000 square feet, while still allowing capacity to grow.

This new data center, built into Sun’s existing office space in Santa Clara, is designed for modular growth and is very energy efficient (1.28 PUE in one of the rooms, according to Nelson)

In this first video, Nelson demonstrates the Starline Busway, a power component Nelson Describes as track lighting on steroids. These products allow Sun data center staffers to plug in anything from 120 single phase power to 100 amp 3 phase without an electrician, allowing for modular growth and flexibility. The busways also have IP connections that track power usage in real time.

In this second video, Nelson shows us the hot-aisle cold-aisle containment strategy Sun is using. It’s essentially a ceiling on the hot aisle that prevents hot return air from mixing with the cool intake air.

During the USENIX ‘08 Annual Technical Conference in Boston this week I attended a session titled “Playing Fast and Loose with the Sysadmin Space-Time Continuum” led by a jokester named David Blank-Edelman, the director of technology at Northeastern University.

The interactive session was designed to help the sysadmins in attendance solve their most pressing data center challenges, and some creative solutions were thrown around.

But the best part of the 90 minute session had nothing to do with problem solving; it was the debauchery that Blank-Edelman coached attendees to employ in their data centers.

Blank-Edeleman warmed up the room of about 40 sysadmins with some critical bonus interface ideas, like how to get bird chirp sounds into server rooms. He directed attendees to the site Peep, which lets sysadmins monitor their networks with bird sounds instead of the traditional beeping.

“It is quite lovely, as long as there aren’t any issues, in which case the server rooms becomes a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s movie ‘The Birds,’” he said.

Blank-Edelman, who also authored the book “Perl for System Administration; Managing Multi-Platform Environments with Perl” also showed his session attendees how to have some fun with Proxies. He told the story of a fellow sysadmin, Peter Stevens, who got sick of his next door neighbors using his wifi, and instead of encrypting it, decided to have some fun. Stevens arranged it so that any unauthorized users would be sent through a web browser that flipped the user’s webpage images upside down.

But of course, the purpose of introducing these antics wasn’t to inspire mayhem in data centers across the country - well, maybe a little - but mostly, it was to get the wheels of creativity turning.

“Being in the upper echelon of sysadmin society, you have to be able to improvise, and to do that you have to talk to other creative sysadmins and think outside the box,” Blank-Edelman said.

For instance, a creative firewall idea involving port knocking, which is used to keep external traffic - and hackers - out of systems. In general, when data gets transmitted to closed ports, it is received by a monitoring daemon that only opens ports when the correct port sequence is sent.

Blank-Edelman suggested starting out with a firewall that does not include any ports at all. Clients then attempt to open a random set of ports –say, 3, 7, 9, 12 - and only the clients that knock on the right set of ports are let in, he said.

“It’s a cool idea. When have you heard of starting with no access at all? People have taken this idea in all different directions,” Blank-Edelman said.

There were plenty of these little tips and tricks mixed in with funny antics during the session, and after a morning of technical whitepapers, this afternoon session was a sigh of relief.

I awoke this morning to a story that combined two of my main interests: IT and chocolate.

IBM’s Blue Gene is being use study the genetic code of the cocoa bean to help safeguard this precious resource. The cocoa industry has suffered a series of fungal diseases that have harmed the crop to the tune of $700 million annually. By sequencing the genome of the cacao trees, scientists at the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Subtropical Horticultural Research Station (SHRS) in Miami, Fla., can develop productive cacao (Theobroma cacao) trees resistant to these diseases. Genetic sequencing used to be a slow and ponderous process, but harnessing the power of supercomputing, the thousands of small gene sequences can be assembled into a large genetic code that can then be analyzed for gene function — similar to the Human Genome Project.

While high performance computing (HPC) on the scale of IBM’s Blue Gene is unlikely to be the charge of most data center managers, smaller HPC projects are being conducted by life sciences companies around the globe, harnessing the same technology on a smaller scale. More and more, HPC is being used by companies that previously would have shied away because of cost. But the off-the-shelf functionality offered by today’s HPC systems and the lower cost is making the advantages to harnessing the technology more attractive to companies in many different industries. The HPC market is expected to grow, and companies are responding as we have seen in recent announcements from AMD and HP among others.

While your company may not be focused on something as important as the improvement of chocolate, you may be using HPC in other areas. So, we want to know: Have you recently installed an HPC system? Why? Were there any big challenges?

We want to hear from you.

Photo by Leah Rosin. Chocolate alter made by Theo Chocolate in Seattle, Wa.

There are a number of new products emerging on the data center marketplace to address IT energy efficiency and greening the data center. Here are two videos recorded at the recent Uptime Institute Symposium, introducing CSRware and DegreeC.

In this first video, CSRware founder Karen Alonardo expounds on the need for tools to monitor a data center’s evironmental footprint.

In this second video, DegreeC engineer Wally Phelps discusses software used to optimize data center airflow with variable fan drives.

Network administrators who rely on traditional Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)-based network and systems management tools to monitor distributed network devices are at an inherent disadvantage when such in-band tools are used to keep tabs on remote network devices. That’s because by their very nature SNMP-based tools can’t detect problems unless the devices they monitor are readily available on the network. When remote devices aren’t available, the only remedy in an SNMP-based world is often to physically dispatch a network administrator to the remote site to identify the problem.

Into this remote management landscape steps Uplogix Inc., an Austin, Texas-based provider of remote management appliances. This week, Uplogix announced the release of Uplogix 430, an integrated monitoring appliance designed to manage IP-based network devices remotely. The product combines the access functionality of a console server, the monitoring and diagnostics of systems management tools and automation in a single integrated appliance.

Automating routine tasks remotely
According to Mark Piening, vice president of marketing at Uplogix, the 430, which has a starting price of $2,500, “addresses anywhere from 50% to 80% of the routine maintenance actions a network administrator takes.” The 430 utilizes the company’s Remote Management Operating System (RMOS), which enables automated detection and repair of network-related problems, such as configuration errors and telecommunications faults, and reduces support costs.

Piening said that Uplogix’s customers typically deploy the company’s products to reduce IT operating costs (by eliminating the need for in-person troubleshooting) and reduce capital expenses. Uplogix’s integrated remote management tools provide the same functionality found in server consoles, KVM tools and service processor management tools that are often deployed separately.

An integrated approach to remote management
Dennis Drogseth, vice president of IT research firm Enterprise Management Associates, said that Uplogix’s integrated offerings are unique in the marketplace. “Many network operations personnel in the data center are responsible for managing remote locations from a network perspective as well as actively configuring devices at a remote location,” he said. “Uplogix’s approach is to support network operations in the data center, and this separates the company from Avocent and Raritan.”

Avocent is a Huntsville, Ala.-based provider of appliances for infrastructure management. The company offers branch infrastructure management appliances and software for servers, routers, PCs and other devices such as point-of-sale terminals. Raritan, out of Somerset, N.J., provides remote office management infrastructure tools, including KVM-over-IP-switches, serial console management servers, power management products and centralized management products.

Drogseth added that Uplogix complements in-band network management tools from the likes of BMC, EMC and HP. “Uplogix provides added strength in terms of effecting change in network devices when connectivity is limited,” he said.

Last month I wrote a blog post questioning whether the mainframe specialty processors — and in particular the System z Integrated Information Processor (zIIP) and the z Application Assist Processor (zAAP) — can really save a mainframe shop money. It caused a little stir, from vendors and users alike, who contacted me and talked to each other in defense of the zIIP and the zAAP.

My goal of the post wasn’t to say that they can’t save money, because they can. My point was to explain that oftentimes, the savings comes in an indirect manner. In the case of the zIIPs and zAAPs, I said this:

So you might be able to save in software licensing costs, but the processors themselves cost about $100,000. In talking to users, it seemed to me that the benefit of the zIIP and zAAP was more indirect. By taking workloads to those processors, you can free up room on the central processors. That’s what might matter the most.

So instead of having to buy a new mainframe, you can just buy one or two of these zAAPs and/or zIIPs. The real savings comes not from the reduced software licensing costs as much as it does from being able to buy a six-figure specialty engine instead of a new seven- or eight-figure mainframe.

Some took umbrage with that, saying that savings can be realized immediately with software licensing costs, moreso than I was alluding to. Gregg Willhoit, the chief software architect for mainframe software at DataDirect, added that most customers of theirs don’t consider freeing up space on the central processors to be indirect.

“Most people consider deferred capacity upgrades and the ability to grow existing general purpose processors as close to real money as anything else,” he said. “A lot of people don’t mind considering deferred upgrades as immediate savings.”

DataDirect, which makes service-oriented architecture (SOA) software for the mainframe, has been working to get its applications eligible on the zIIP and zAAP. Willhoit said that for some products, such as Shadow z/Services, up to 85% of the work can be offloaded.

There are other software companies out there that are helping customers offload some work to the zIIP and zAAP, including CA, BMC, and Neon Enterprise Software. Hopefully the list will continue to grow.

Another issue at least one person took was how I said growth of the zAAP and zIIP hasn’t been the same as the Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL), which is another mainframe specialty processor. One person pointed out that IBM says year-over-year growth of specialty engines has been 85%. Impressive? Yes, if you look at the percentage. I would like to see the raw numbers to determine whether the large growth is due to a small base last year. I have yet to been able to get IBM to give me these raw numbers.

I remember a couple years ago when Sun was boasting that year-over-year growth of their x86/x64 servers was 81%. But that’s because they hadn’t previously been selling a lot of x86/x64 servers. If you sell two the first year and four the next, that’s a 100% increase, but it doesn’t necessarily mean there was a huge amount of growth.

IBM announced that it has built a data center that will be twice as energy efficient as the industry average, according to officials with the company.

If that is true, it means the facility will have a power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.25, as the industry average is 2.5 according to The Uptime Institute. That means for every 125 watts of power that enters the facility, 100 of it is being used to power IT equipment.

The Boulder, Colo. facility is the latest in a string of data centers IBM has at a campus there. This newest one is about 115,000 square feet, with about 70,000 square feet of raised floor. Including the new site, IBM’s Boulder campus includes 300,000 square feet of raised floor space, which makes it the company’s largest data center worldwide.

The facility will be used to host customer’s IT equipment. Joseph Dzaluk, the VP of infrastructure and resource management, said they already have 16 customers lined up. Some features of the new facility include:

• Construction started June 2007
• Submitted for LEED certification (first IBM data center to receive certification, if accepted)
• Free cooling for 75% of the year using a water-side economizer
• Will use about 1 million kilowatt hours per year of wind power purchased from Xcel Energy
• Variable-speed pumps and motors in the cooling systems
• Low-sulfur diesel in the backup generators to help reduce emissions
• Backup generators online in under 30 seconds
• Batteries provide 15 minutes of continuous power at full load (in case those backup generators don’t go online in under 30 seconds, I guess)

This morning, on the final day of the annual Red Hat Summit in Boston, Mass., Red Hat Product Manager, Mike Ferris, shared the Beta testing program of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing platform. Red Hat launched the service in November of 2007, and has been beta testing it, gauging customer interest and getting feedback on what type of services are needed. Prior to the conference, I talked to Ferris about the program and why Red Hat has partnered with Amazon to offer this service to their customers.

“When we looked at where our customers were today and where they needed to go as well as the converging aspects of virtualization and automation, we recognized that we needed to provide this service,” shared Ferris. “We asked how could we help customers go and leverage these technologies? We saw the evolution of virtualization and the availability of companies like Amazon to be able to provide compute capacity on demand. So, we partnered with Amazon to build out an enterprise support cloud for Linux.”

Red Hat has integrated the virtualization technology into Red Hat Linux 5.1, which makes it easy for the customers deploy the technology. The advantage to the cloud computing model is that users can get capacity on demand, for much less cost than the traditional hardware acquisition model. This savings and use in high-demand situations is something that many industry experts agree will make cloud computing an important extension of the data center of the future.

Ferris explained that Red Hat’s offering is “the same technology but available at an hourly basis in the cloud. A lot of this has absolutely been enabled by virtualization. It eliminates the need to spend money on capital for infrastructure to handle peak loads. Customers can leverage external clouds with same technology and the same APIs.”

So far, the feedback has been positive. Competitively priced at between $0.21/hour to $0.94/hour, the price has been considered fair by the market.

“We’ve seen interest from our customers during this beta period,” said Ferris. “A lot of core customers are leveraging the cloud infrastructure to run additional simulations and engineering analysis. Studios are looking at this for being able to render movies and televisions shows. We also see small companies that are looking to leverage low-cost infrastructure and get it up and running in minutes. Customers can dynamically scale their environments and do other business activities that they otherwise couldn’t have. With tightening budgets and a strong focus on efficiency, customers are looking at both cloud and traditional solutions.”

Further demonstrating their commitment to the cloud, on Wednesday the company announced that the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform is also now available on Amazon EC2 in beta. For more information on the Red Hat Summit, see a summary of TechTarget’s week-long event coverage.

Since Monday afternoon I’ve been in Las Vegas, Nev., attending the 2008 HP Technology Forum and Expo — enjoying the air conditioned oasis in the 100+ degree desert. The event is different than any I have attended, with it’s broad 7,000+ attendee base that spans the four “S’s” of HP (servers, storage, software, and services). Clearly the company is focused on sharing their new technologies through the Tech Showcase and in the workshops and breakout sessions. But the company is also showing both loyal and potential customers a good time.

The opening session on Tuesday morning was a prime example. The audience entered the Keynote to the beat of a live band playing, and then a troupe of professional hip-hop dancers arrived and performed with so much enthusiasm that even keynote speaker Executive Vice President and CIO of HP commented that it was a hard level of energy to follow.

But follow it he did, sharing the impressive conversion of HP’s data center infrastructure from 85 data centers in 29 countries to six consolidated, state-of-the-art data centers in three continental US locations. Following Mott, Executive Vice President of HP Technology Solutions Group, Ann Livermore discussed how the four S’s can help IT leaders meet the business challenges of the future. She also talked about how the company’s acquisition of EDS (in the works) will bolster the company’s service offerings. Livermore was “interrupted” in her presentation by HP CEO Mark Hurd, who insisted on personally explaining the the answer to the question “Why EDS?”

• Increase vertical market coverage — close to double
• Vertical solutions that complement HPs offerings
• The services business will aligns capabilities with product portfolio

Paul Otellini, CEO and president of Intel, also made an appearance, sharing the connection between Intel and HP and the longevity of their Itanium line of processors.

HP user groups consolidate
Taking advantage of the unique in-person forum for HP users, the independent HP user community, Connect made its debut at the conference’s Monday night opening reception. With the voted consolidation of Encompass, HP Interex EMEA and ITUG, the user group launched a social networking site that all registrants to the conference were automatically directed to. On the site, users can connect by special interest group (SIG) in 15 areas including a storage group, that according to this article from our friends at SearchStorage.com has a lot to say to the company. And that’s the point: The group literally “connects” HP users to the company.

Connect president Nina Buik, senior vice president of MindIQ in Atlanta, shared with me that Mark Hurd is very pleased with the group’s transformation. And he should be, Connect has launched a worldwide user survey — with 50,000 members the data should be significantly helpful to HP (as in, you can’t buy business intelligence that good). But HP won’t be the only beneficiary of the group, really, the end users stand to gain the most for their businesses. By using the social networking and Wiki sites through the Connect hub, users can share their problems and solutions and gain their own business intelligence for their IT operations and influence innovation at HP.

Thursday will be the final day of the event, and it will close with more fanfare than it opened with: a live concert featuring Matchbox 20… (if only I could remember just one of their hits…)

On Tuesday, June 17, 2008, at the HP Technology Forum and Expo in Las Vegas, Nev., Adaptive Infrastructure Consultant for HP, Russ Wagner, presented the introductory breakout session on Strategies and Best Practices for Constrained Data Centers. He emphasized the importance of bridging the gap and breaking down the silos between data center administrators and facility managers — especially in any discussion involving transforming an existing data center or designing new facilities.

Wagner suggested that those facilities guys have a “bit” of experience and knowledge in important things like Ohm’s law, the three power phases, the pros and cons of low voltage versus high voltage power supplies, and the all important conversion factor from BTU to Watts. They also may know a thing or two about industry standards such as NFPA 75, International Electrotechnical Commission standards, National Electrical Manufacturers Association standards, or BICSI cabling standards. Facility managers also will have familiarity with complex cooling standards, facility weather dynamics, and computational fluid dynamics (CFD).

Getting the facility folks in the mix is important when considering a new data center, but considering the knowledge and codified industry standards that are available through key organizations including the Uptime Institute, American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA), and the United States Green Building Council are also important. Membership in AFCOM was also suggested as a great way for data center personnel to share their knowledge and experience, and a great way for new entrants to the data center to learn from those who have been there and done that. He also suggested that data center managers and operators get involved in the Sustainable IT (aka Green IT) movement. Examples of this include The Green Grid, Climate Savers Computing, and the EPA Energy Star program for servers.

One of the main reasons that Wagner suggested involvement in and edification about these programs is because of the the critical resource constraints in data centers beyond the obvious power and space constraints, is experienced people. This is such a pertinent and timely issue, it was the topic of an article in the same day’s publication of The New York Times, “Demand for Data Puts Engineers in Spotlight.” The aging workforce that has worked in the evolving data centers of the past and learned the lessons is getting ready for retirement, said Wagner. This leaves a knowledge gap, and the best thing that older workers nearing the retirement point can do is join the organizations and help drive standards and information. The best thing that new entrants can do is learn from these sources of information. Together, these measures can help alleviate the big picture data center asset constraints.