With the upcoming holiday sure to brighten the skies across the U.S. with colorful flashes of light, I thought it would be a good time to share some of the advancements in Flash-memory based storage devices. Solid-state drives (SSD) can help bridge the server and storage performance gap and decrease data center power requirements. A few weeks ago, at Hewlett-Packard Co.’s Technology Forum, a relatively new entrant into the field, Fusion io announced that is adapting Fusion-io’s ioMemory architecture to HP’s enterprise-class servers, including the HP BladeSystem c-Class system.

“Adapting this technology specifically for HP servers offers radical increases in associated performance for a broad range of applications and workloads and can dramatically improve the effectiveness of data center architectures,” said Fusion-io CEO Don Basile. “With our ioMemory architecture, we’re getting more than 200,000 IOPS [I/O operations per second] within HP BladeSystem c-Class server blades today.”

When I met with Basile for a mere 30 minutes, he shared an intense amount of information, including a variety of statistics that illustrate the power of the technology. The ioMemory technology is still costly enough that it’s not ideal for long-term archival storage, but the speed that it provides makes it valuable in the active data requirement area. Basile explained that the technology is capable of 3.2 GB/s of sustained bandwidth, with extremely low latency (50 microseconds). In terms of I/O, a traditional enterprise application server that is I/O-intensive may cost $15 to $20 per I/O versus $0.15 per I/O using the Fusion-io system.

In addition, Basile explained that all this speed is possible with less energy expenditure and less heat than a typical storage area network (SAN). Heat and power are reduced because of the lack of mechanical heat that would otherwise be generated by spinning disks. In addition to using less than 1% of the power required by a typical SAN, the footprint is minimal: 16 ioMemory cards can fit into 10U without any oversubscription. Basile noted that consumer electronics such as the iPhone have helped lower the cost of silicone chips.

HP is not alone in integrating SSD technology. Earlier this year EMC announced that it had added SSD in its enterprise Symmetrix system, and more recently rumors have circulated that the company will add it to the Clariion storage array. Sun has also announced that it will release a new version of the Solaris operating system designed to integrate flash and traditional disk-drive storage. And Sun’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz says that it’s not just a flash in the pan. Sun’s Adam Leventhal has also produced an informative technical article outlining the technology and its optimized uses.

In the age of increasing energy costs, efficiencies in data centers are welcome, and the Flash technology is likely to play a key role in the data center of the future. If you’re interested in the topic, check out the Flash Memory Summit in August.

When it comes to data center metrics the one most often talked about is square footage. Nobody ever announces that they’ve built a facility with Y-tons of cooling, or Z-Megawatts. The first metric quoted is X-square feet. Talk to any data center manager however and they’ll tell you that floor space is completely irrelevant these days. It only matters to the real estate people. All that matters to the rest of us is power and cooling - Watts per square foot. How much space you have available is nowhere near as important as what you can actually do with it.

If you look at your data center with a fresh eye, where is the waste really happening?

Since liquid-cooled servers are at the far right-hand side of the bell curve, achieving electrical density for the majority of us is usually a matter of effectively moving air. So what is REALLY preventing the air from moving in your data center? I won’t rehash the raised floor vs. solid floor debate (since we all know that solid floors are better) but even I know that the perforated tiles, or the overhead duct work is not the REAL constraint. A lot of folks have focused a lot of energy on containment; hot aisle containment systems, cold aisle containment systems, and even in-row supplemental cooling systems.

In reality however, all of these solutions are addressing the environment around the servers, not the servers themselves which are after all, the source of all the heat. Why attack symptoms? Let’s go after the problem directly: The server.

First of all, the whole concept of a “rack unit” needs to be discarded. I’ve ranted before on the absurdity of 1U servers, and how they actually decrease data center density when deployed as they are currently built. I’d like to take this a step further and just get rid of the whole idea of a server case. Wrapping a computer in a steel and plastic box, a constrained space, a bottleneck for efficient airflow is a patently absurd thing. It was a good idea in the day of 66 Mhz CPUs and hard drives that were bigger than your head, but in today’s reality of multi-core power hogs burning like magnesium flares it is just asking for trouble. Trouble is what we’ve got right now. Trouble in the form of hot little boxes, be they 1U or blade servers. They are just too much heat in too constrained spaces.

Virtualization won’t solve this problem. If anything it will just make it worse by increasing the efficiency of the individual CPUs making them run hotter more of the time. Virtualization might lower the power bills of the users inside the server, but it won’t really change anything for the facility that surrounds the servers in question. The watts per square foot impact won’t be as big as we hoped and we’ll still be faced with cooling a hot box within a constrained space.

So here is my challenge to the server manufactures: Think outside of the case.

This isn’t a new idea really, nor is it mine. We’ve all seen how Google has abandoned cases for their servers. Conventional wisdom says that only a monolithic deployment such as a Google data center can really make use of this innovation. Baloney. How often does anyone deploy single servers anymore? Hardly ever. If server manufacturers would think outside of the case, they could design and sell servers in 10 or 20 rack unit scale enclosures. They could even sell entire racks. By shedding cases altogether, both server cases and blade chassis, they could create dense, electrically simple, easy to maintain, and most importantly easy to cool servers. The front could be made of I/O ports, fans, and drives. Big fans for quiet efficiency. The backs could be left open, with electrical down one side and network connections down the other. Minimize the case itself to as little as possible… think of Colin Chapman’s famous directive about building a better race car: “Just add lightness.” The case of a server should serve one purpose only: To anchor it to the rack. Everything else is a superfluous obstruction of airflow. No need for steel, as plenty of lighter weight materials exist that can do the job with less mass.

Go look in your data center with this new eye and envision all those server cases and chassis removed. No more artificial restriction of airflow. Your racks also weigh less than half of what they do today. You could pack twice the computing horsepower into the same amount of space and cool it more effectively than what you have installed.

Ten years from now we’ll look back at servers of this era and ask ourselves “what were we thinking??” The case as we know it will vanish from the data center, much like the horse and buggy a century before. We’ll be so much better without them.

Microsoft Corp. announced today that a Windows HPC Server 2008 beta-based system now ranks among the top 25 supercomputers in the world, and the company also announced the release candidate version will be available for download in the last week of June.

To date there have been about 560 downloads of the beta version of HPC Server 2008 so far, said Ryan Waite, Microsoft’s group program manager. The final version of HPC Server 2008 will be available by the end of the year.

Microsoft also announced that the Beta 2 version of HPC Server 2008 was used for clusters by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) which ranked 23 on the Top 500 Supercomputers list, which is published twice a year by the International Supercomputing Conference.

The NCSA achieved 68.5 teraflops and 77.7% efficiency on 9,472 cores, making this one of the most powerful supercomputing systems in the world. This also marks the first time a Microsoft cluster made it into the top 25, Waite said.

Another Microsoft HPC Server 2008 cluster also popped up on the list. Computer scientists at Umea University in northern Sweden used beta version of Windows HPC Server 2008 on their supercluster and achieved 46 teraflops and 85.5% efficiency on 5,376 cores, making their system the second-largest Windows cluster ever deployed and the fastest academic cluster in Sweden, Microsoft reported.

Umea University will run the new supercomputer at its facility known as HPC2N. The university’s cluster is made up of 672 IBM blade servers, and also marks the first time that Windows HPC Server 2008 has been run publicly on IBM hardware.

“We are making serious engineering investments in HPC Server 2008 to make sure it works well with these types of workloads, and I think that shows here,” said Waite.

Microsoft would not disclose the amount invested in the development of HPC Server 2008.

The operating system is based on a Windows Server 2008 foundation, but can scale to thousands of cores because of features like a new high-speed NetworkDirect RDMA, Microsoft’s new remote direct memory access interface, cluster management tools, a service-oriented architecture (SOA) job scheduler, and cluster interoperability through standards such as the High Performance Computing Basic Profile (HPCBP) specification produced by the Open Grid Forum (OGF).

Sydney, Australia based-Ideas International Inc. has launched an open source-style website to compare and rate the functional capabilities of blade servers on Monday, April 7.

The IT research and analysis company’s new site for Collaborative Product Evaluation looks at medium-sized blade servers and will include enterprise-level blade server data by mid-summer, said Jim Burton, the vice president and senior analyst for entry-level servers and blades at Ideas International.

The site lets users compare various components of the servers that fall under the umbrellas of platform functionality, environmental footprint, virtualization functions, reliability, serviceability and manageability, and deployment considerations.

The information is based on the hardware specifications, interviews with end users, and performance data, Burton said.

“We establish the appropriate ratings, but it is an open source-style website, so users can affect these ratings too,” Burton said. Of course, Ideas International give the user feedback a credibility rating, so only statements supported by concrete data can actually bring a rating up or down, he said.

The site is pretty handy if you are on the market for blade servers, especially because the site allows you to make comparisons based on your priorities. If you need power efficiency, you can compare boxes based on that alone. Same goes for factors like “green-ness,” cost, networking and so forth, said Burton.

Ideas International also has evaluation sites for x86 virtual machine platforms and plans to create evaluation sites for Unix-based systems and Linux in the near future, so keep an eye out for those.

Server packaging: It’s an issue. When you’re unloading dozens, if not hundreds, of servers, you have to take into account how many boxes are piling up and where they will go. Will they sit in the corner of your data center gathering dust? It’s a distinct possibility.

Which is why Dell has taken the offensive against Hewlett-Packard when it comes to the packaging of its blade servers. Dell claimed that ordering 16 blades from HP with the chassis can result in receiving 78 cardboard boxes. This compares to two boxes for 10 Dell blades.

Of course, this comparison was done by a report that Dell paid for, and so HP wasn’t going to sit on its haunches. It responded with a blog of its own talking about cardboard boxes, saying that customers have a “Factory Express” option that gets all the HP blades shipped in one box and that a “majority of HP BladeSystem customer solutions are shipped this way, in one box, not 78.”

Dell responded with another blog late last month saying that blade innovation is about more than cardboard boxes, essentially backing off its packaging claims but going after HP for having servers that suck up more power but perform worse than HP servers. Dell’s source for this claim? The same study it paid for that made the packaging claims. In any event, the back-and-forth has some readers tired, as exemplified by a comment on a Dell blog post:

This nitpicking of rival products sounds juvenile and is definitely not in good taste.

C’mon folks. Grow up and just focus your energy on making better products and allow your superior product features and healthy publicity to caputure the market, instead of resorting to such tactics. Surely we can do better than that.

Does server packaging matter to you, and how do you deal with it?

Hewlett-Packard this week introduced “Shorty,” a smaller blade chassis looking to capture the attention of smaller companies in a similar way that the BladeCenter S aims to. It’s 10.5 inches high, fits eight blades and can plug into a standard 110-volt wall outlet. All in all, it’s a pretty good mini-BladeSystem.

Called the c3000, the chassis has its own MySpace page. Seriously. It must be a way to get “them kids” excited, right? The page lists as its hero the HP BladeSystem c7000 and has this to say in the About Me section:

I prefer working with smaller businesses like this over larger corporations because you feel like you’re taking the world by storm together, all while perched atop a Web 2.0 platform. It’s nothing short of electric.

The chassis also has diverse music tastes: Johnny Cash, Modest Mouse, and The Roots are all on the list. As of Friday afternoon, the page had seven friends (including Tom), most if not all of which are public relations people.

First of all, MySpace? Everyone knows MySpace is old, man. Facebook is where it’s at. And what’s next? Maybe the chassis will sign up for a Twitter account — “just got shipped out of the warehouse” and “user sliding blades in, and oooh, it feels so good” will be the requisite entries.

It appears virtualization has officially become mainstream.

More than 10,000 people packed into the Moscone Center in San Francisco for the VMware Inc. sponsored VMworld conference. There were 147 sponsors and exhibitors this year, compared to 7,000 attendees and 82 sponsors and exhibitors last year.

There were also over 250 sessions and 100 hands-on labs to participate in, so choosing which to attend and write about for SearchDataCenter.com and SearchServerVirtualization.com was a bit overwhelming. Lots of the sessions were vendor run, with a few analyst and customer panel sessions thrown in.

A ton of new product news came out of VMworld as well, including VMware ESX Server 3i; AMD announced the new “Barcelona” quad-core processor; Cisco announced the VFrame-VMware Infrastructure integration; HP announced the new “Shorty” blade system; NetApp announced integration with VMware Site Recovery Manager; and Stratus/NEC announced new fault-tolerant server support for VMware Infrastructure that will ship in Q1 2008.

On day one, the keynote addresses came from VMware’s President and CEO Diane Greene, as well as Intel and AMD reps.

On day two, John Chambers,Chairman & CEO of Cisco Systems, Inc., talked about how virtualization in the data center is leading to better ROI for CEO’s concerned about bottom lines, and less headaches for CIO’s.

SearchServerVirtualization.com also announced the winners of the first annual “Best of VMworld” contest.

The final keynotes were delivered by Mendel Rosenblum and Diane Greene.

All in all, I thought it was a really good conference – tons of attendees, tons of products to check out, and high energy throughout.

Intel Corp. made an announcement today saying it is joining 40 other server technology providers in support of the new Server Systems Infrastructure (SSI) industry specification for modular server platforms. 

The group plans to ”lower the cost of product development by providing design guidance that enables server builders to develop compliant and interoperable building blocks at the blade, chassis and manageability software level.”

Microsoft is in the vendor mix, but some glaring ommissions  from the group are the industry giants; Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sun Microsystems and Dell.

In talking to these vendors in the past, I’ve learned they aren’t keen on standardizing blades.

As of today, users who buy blades are locked into that vendor because blades from different vendors have different “ecosystems,” and blades from one vendor will not fit into another vendor’s chassis.

This is a fact that won’t likely change anytime soon, according to IBM’s world wide marketing manager of IBM’s BladeCenter Scott Tease. “There has been a push toward standardizing blade chassis, but I don’t ever see that happening,” Tease said. “I couldn’t imagine IBM getting together with Dell and HP to share chassis. It is what makes each unique.”

I think SSI has an uphill battle when it comes to standardization.

Glenn Keels of Dell’s server team wrote an interesting blog about the blade market and how to use them in an efficient manner in data centers.

Keels said, “We believe a “Blade Everything” philosophy is not in the best interest of our customers.  In fact, we believe that applying that philosophy could actually increase IT complexity.”

There are some good points in this blog to consider if you are thinking about using blades, like the following:

“Wholeheartedly adopting blade servers would require some customers to build entirely new data centers with greater and different power sources such as 220V to each rack which isn’t standard in many data centers, and cooling capabilities.  That makes no sense.  Customers want to build their business not new data centers. ”

IBM today announced a new BladeCenter chassis — BladeCenter S — that holds six blade servers and storage, sits on your desktop, and can plug into a standard 110 volt wall outlet.

The new BladeCenter S chassis will be available in the fourth fiscal quarter; prices were not available. Executives said there won’t be specific blades built for this chassis — that existing ones will do fine. At least at first.

Although IBM thinks BladeCenter S would be good for branch offices, they’re also clearly targeting small businesses with the announcement, so look for some integrated offerings from IBM and its software partners once this gains steam in the late fall and early winter.