Eaton, one of the big data center UPS manufacturers, is offering a free handbook on uninterruptible power supply (UPS) batteries. Most people know that the most vulnerable part of a UPS are the batteries. Knowing how charged they are and how much juice they have left can mean the difference between having enough through time to get the generators started, and leaving your customers without a data center.

I ordered one. I can always learn more about UPS’s and their batteries. According to Eaton, the guide “covers characteristics, performance and maintenance of UPS battery types along with a comprehensive glossary of battery terms.” Sounds good to me. And since I already get plenty of emails from Eaton for all their products, I didn’t care about putting my information in there. They can only send me so many emails, right?

In the category of data center jobs, even Google is out there aggressively looking for people. As we have reported before, it’s hard to find good data center leaders out there. Being a data center manager requires a mix of IT know-how with facility engineering knowledge that, frankly, not many people out there have.

Even Google is apparently having difficulty finding the right people. Shikha Wadhwa, who does engineering leadership staffing for the Mountain View, Calif. Web search giant, sent us an email looking to promote its data center openings, and in particular, “Datacenter Facilities Leadership Positions.” From the note:

Google is Hiring!

Google is looking for highly motivated individuals to provide leadership and oversight of our state-of-the-art datacenter facilities. Our datacenters are industry-leading examples of innovative capital- and energy-efficient designs in action. We are looking for people to provide leadership in areas spanning Data Center Facilities Engineering, Operations, Construction Services, Project Management and R&D.

The full Google job listing adds that they’re looking for a bachelor’s or master’s in a technical field and at least 10 years experience managing a mission-critical facility.

Working at Google has become something of an enigma, with articles devoted solely to describing how to get hired at Google. But with comments in the email to us such as “If you or someone else you know is interested in finding out more, we would love to hear from you!” and promising that they’ll “circle back with you asap!” it’s obvious they’re looking hard for qualified data center types.

Google was one of Fortune’s 100 best companies to work for in 2007, although you should have doubts if you think the Google day care is all it’s cracked up to be.

In a response to rising commodity costs, Emerson Network Power announced today that it would increase prices on its Liebert and Knurr brand products.

The increase averages 5% and is the result of “significant cost increases in many of the materials used in the products we manufacture,” according to a statement from Chuck Spears, the president of Liebert North America.

In a downturn economy, the upped prices tend to end up on the user’s balance sheet. Let us know if you’ve received similar notifications from other vendors.

Oracle too: A reader pointed out to me that Oracle recently increased their software licensing costs, in some cases by as much as 15 percent. Why? According to Forrester analyst Ray Wang, it’s due to the devaluation of the U.S. dollar.

It comes from IT Jungle: “IBM v PSI: The Operation Was a Success, But the Patient Died“

This, I think, is a pretty good summation of IBM’s purchase of plug-compatible mainframe company Platform Solutions Inc. (PSI), which was previously suing Big Blue.

There are plenty of ways to start measuring your data center’s Power Usage Effectiveness, or PUE, which is a comparison of the total facility power to the IT load. But in recent months Microsoft has opened the curtains on its own operations, thanks largely in part to two data center pros there, Michael Manos and Christian Belady.

Back in April, Manos spoke to us about Microsoft’s data center strategy. It was one of the first times the Redmond, Wash. The next month, Manos showed us a demo of Scry (video here), the tool the company uses to measure everything in their data centers.

Now Manos and Belady have written a series of three lengthy blog posts on PUE, why it’s important, and how to go about measuring it. For those of you out there still a little daunted by the task of measuring key analytics in your data center facilities, this could give you a good start.

Last week, when reporting on the IBM takeover of PSI, I was able to talk to Ron Avery, the operating systems manager in Polk County, Iowa. In addition to asking him about his thoughts on the purchase — Polk County owns a T3 server, which licenses technology from PSI — I was curious how they weathered the floods that ravaged the state last month.

He said they had to move several outlying offices, but the main data center never went down. Being on the third floor helped, he said, although the floodwaters never quite touched the administration building that the data center sits in.

“The river was within inches,” Avery said, referring to the Des Moines River, a tributary of the Mississippi. “The good Lord smiled on us and we didn’t have to fight that battle.”

He added that the main data center never went down. It ran on an external generator for 13 hours and then transitioned back to street power when that returned.

Flooding in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, which are about 100 miles east of Des Moines, was much worse than in Des Moines. The picture above is of Cedar Rapids.

On May 31, an explosion at Web hosting company The Planet affected about 7,500 customers, 2,600 of which experienced downtime for at least 3-4 days.

Between June 8 and July 8, The Planet gained about 3,500 new customers, according to Netcraft, which was the third-highest gain of the 50 hosters that Netcraft tracks.

So what gives?

I came across this little tidbit via Rich Miller, who wrote about Web hosters’ uptime over at Data Center Knowledge. That got me poking around the Netcraft Web site, where I found the section about “Sites on the Move.” Seeing as we had covered the electrical explosion at The Planet, I was curious how many customers they lost in the aftermath. They did lose quite a few — almost 900 — but their net change in customers was around 3,400 on the positive side, something I certainly wasn’t expecting.

A couple possible explanations. Management at The Planet kept an open dialog throughout all the downtime, which for some customers was almost a week. Doug Erwin, the company’s CEO, did two or three podcasts that they posted on The Planet’s Web site, detailing the reasons for the outage and any updates on what the company was doing to fix the problem. And one of The Planet’s message boards was dedicated to updates on the problem, which were quite frequent shortly after the explosion, and then waning off as more customers got back online.

Another, possibly simpler explanation? Many of The Planet’s customers are just looking to get their personal Web sites or some simple business Web sites online. As a result, they don’t do much research into the Web hoster of choice, and it’s fair to say that many of the 3,500 new customers probably didn’t even know about the explosion.

South Dakota’s two largest counties had hours-long lines at their administration buildings this week due to glitches in a new statewide computer system after migrating off the mainframe.

A story in the South Dakota Argus Leader detailed how people waited in lines for hours yesterday waiting to renew their license plates. According to the story, the system changed from a “mainframe system to a Web-based system.” It’s not clear what the “Web-based system” is, but it’s likely to be an x86 infrastructure.

“When a transaction is done on the computer, the computer boots them out, or the system doesn’t do it the way it is supposed to,” Minnehaha County Treasurer Pam Nelson said, according to the Argus Leader. “It doesn’t calculate fees accurately, and they are having to do them manually.”

Oops.

The director of the state’s division of motor vehicles defended the change, saying the first day wasn’t “as bad as (she) thought it could have been,” although Nelson said the new computer system is slower. One last quote:

Over the weekend, the state’s Division of Motor Vehicles changed its old system to the new South Dakota Customized Automated Registration System.

If you didn’t catch it, the new system, Customized Automated Registration System, can be abbreviated as CARS. Well hey, the new computer system might not work, but at least they were able to implement that cute little acronym…

(Photo above courtesy of the Argus Leader.)

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)