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…)

 Trends in data center power was the topic at AFCOM New England Chapter’s meeting this week, and apparently it’s a subject that resonates with members—at least judging by the nearly 100 attendees who showed up. (As the New England chapter enters its third year, President Rocko Graziano, whose real job is manager of infrastructure operations and services at L.L. Bean, said this was the largest meeting yet). Two speakers gave the audience their take on the some emerging trends they see taking shape.

Rudy Kraus, CEO of Validus DC Systems, a provider of direct current (DC) power infrastructure for data centers and telecommunications facilities, naturally sees a bright future for data centers powered by DC rather than AC-based electricity. Kraus cited a number of statistics from the likes of the Uptime Institute and McKinsey outlining just how much power data centers can save by switching to more efficient DC power. If data centers in the United States converted only 10% of their capacity to DC power, that would eliminate $1 billion in electric bills. The co2 emissions for a 10 megawatt data center with 17,500 servers would drop from 99,776,400 pounds to 59,865,840 pounds. Kraus invited members of the audience to do their own comparison by visiting an online calculator offered by Intel that analyzes facility-level efficiency of AC and DC servers.

The other speaker, Brian Ouellette, of J.S. Fleming Associates, a provider of power and cooling systems, spoke about the five power trends heading to a data center near you. The top trend, that energy efficiency is gaining importance, is pretty self-evident. The other four trends centered on ways to make data centers more efficient: New ways to scale UPS architectures into adaptive models that can adjust to changing power requirements; two-stage power distribution that reduces restrictions to cooling air flow, among other benefits; increasing use of monitoring with tools such as smart power strips (that monitor in-rack power) and branch circuit monitoring (that monitor each PDU output circuit). Ouellette also pointed out that data centers don’t have to go high-tech in order to become more efficient. When Ouellette asked the audience whether they use blanking panels in their data centers, only five people raised their hands. “Blanking panels are a great way to get the air where you need it,” he said. “Otherwise, you’ll get cross-contamination of air from your hot aisle and cold aisle.”

Three Hewlett-Packard user groups — Encompass, ITUG (International Tandem Users Group), and HP-Interex — are consolidating into one big one called Connect.

The groups announced their intention to merge earlier this year, and just recently the membership of all three voted to do so. The new merged group will have more than 50,000 participants and will be led by Nina Buik, who was the former president of Encompass. The launch of Connect will take place at the HP Technology Forum & Expo in Las Vegas next month.

At least one of the reasons for the merger is to have a larger voice.

“One of the issues that’s at the top of the minds for all of our members is advocacy,” Buik said in an interview earlier this year. “You tend to get heard a lot more when your numbers are greater. When you go to HP or your vendor partners, they’re going to listen.”

That’s not to say they haven’t been listening; Buik said HP and other vendors have thus far been supportive of the merger.

“It can be looked at from two standpoints,” said Scott Healy, the former president of ITUG. “It can provde greater value because HP really does want to know what users are thinking.”

Buik said that IT folks in the trenches can no longer hunker down in the confines of the data center; they will also need new, non-technical skills, which Connect aims to help them obtain. “IT people really have to know how to pitch ideas to high-level business people,” Buik said. It goes without saying that communications skills free of technical jargon are increasingly required, as are project management skills and the ability to make oneself more visible to an organization’s decision-makers.

Through local, regional and national meetings, one of Connect’s primary goals is to educate members in regard to the brave new world of IT. For Buik, one of her personal interests is to help members safeguard their careers by engaging in some “recession-proofing” practices. “Yes, you should have green IT and virtualization current in your skills,” Buik said. “But don’t emphasize your technology knowledge; instead show how your skills can help reduce costs.”

Buik added that she didn’t think there would be a lot of overlap between the three groups, saying that each catered to different sets of HP customers. The groups’ board members will also be able to learn and share from one another — Encompass, for example, has conducted some webinars, while ITUG has more experience running shows internationally. The combined group will look to increase its online presence and add forums so that HP users can log on and talk to each other about IT issues they’re dealing with.

Features Writer Megan Santosus contributed to this report.

This week I sat down with Microsoft’s Senior Director of Data Center services, Michael Manos at the 2008 Uptime Symposium to talk about Scry, the company’s data center analytics tool that they touted at AFCOM. According to Manos, this tool allows him to look at his data centers’ energy use, carbon footprint, power bill and more — all at an incredibly granular level. It also allows him to slice and dice data to make decisions, for example Microsoft can look at the energy consumption of an individual product like Hotmail. The program is especially slick in that it ties into Microsoft’s CMDB and assett management tools. Microsoft has been touting this tool at various conferences throughout the past few months, but it’s not likely to become a commercial product for other companies since so much of the tool was built around Microsoft’s specific homegrown internal software. But the main point of Manos’s data center road show is to prove to people that it can be done. Microsoft is measuring and improving its energy efficiency in the data center and Manos is not waiting for someone to hand down the perfect metric or the perfect tool. Check out the video below, where Manos outlines how he uses Scry and in the second video he talks you through a 3-D rendering of the new containerized data center being built in Chicago.

SearchDataCenter.com ransacked Las Vegas last week, video camera in tow, to bring you the latest data center news from AFCOM’s Data Center World. We met with dozens of vendors and experts, and this is a summary of what we found:

Emerson rolls out new monster Liebert UPS
Emerson Network Power introduced a new uninterruptible power supply at AFCOM, the Liebert NXL, which comes in 250 kVa, 300 kVA and 400 kVa models. We spent some time at the Liebert booth checking out the NXL and going through the latest products with Fred Stack, the vice president of marketing at Liebert. We looked into the new monitoring tools, flywheel technology and more in the video below.

APC Capacity Manager Demo
We also met up with the folks at American Power Conversion Corp. and got a demo of the APC Capacity Manager, which won a Product of the year award in 2007. The tool is tied in with the company’s InfraStruXure rack, power and cooling platform and is able to calculate physical infrastructure capabilities as well as consumption of space and power to help users figure out how much data center capacity is available. Demo video below:

Stopping drive-by plug-ins
While we’re on the topic of knowing what’s in your data center, this really simple tool from the start up Agitan that locks down your power distribution units with plug shields. In this video, we talk to Agitan’s cofounder about the plastic power distribution unit (PDU) savers.

Rackable ICE Cube video tour
Now that Microsoft has signed on to building data centers out of trailers, the Rackable Ice Cube is going to get a lot more attention. Another Products of the Year award winner, the Ice Cube is a data center in a box, much like the Sun Blackbox. But unlike the Blackbox, I can actually fit inside this thing. Maybe if I bought a Blackbox, I’d lose a few pounds. The Ice Cube is roomier because Rackable uses its half-depth server form factor, leaving more room between the racks. You can see about 10 people stuffed into the Ice Cube in this video:

Raritan rolls out intelligent PDUs for power metering
Somerset, N.J.-based Raritan introduced a new power distribution unit, the Dominion PX. I met up with Raritan’s Henry Chan, and we talked about the new PDU. It’s super slick. Controlled remotely via a Web browser or command line interface, the Dominion PX meters, in real time, power at both the PDU level and outlet level and supports environmental sensors to monitor temperature and humidity at the rack. This is huge for data center managers trying to monitor energy use — the first step to managing energy consumption is measuring your usage.

Did you see anything extremely cool at AFCOM? Leave your feedback in the comments.

ORLANDO - One session at the conference for Share, a user group for mainframe and other large systems users, compared building a data center out with Intel-based Linux servers with a mainframe architecture that has virtual Linux servers. Keep in mind that this was at the Share conference, so the bias was clear: Scale up beats scale out. But the number-crunching exercise was still interesting examine in terms of hidden costs you might not expect from scale out.

First, the session was by Mark Post, a technical support engineer for Novell who does a lot of work around Linux on System z. He spoke about a specific project he was involved in with a previous employer, which he didn’t name. He also stressed that Novell was not involved with this project at all. That company did consulting for a client looking to build out an Intel-based Linux infrastructure. He then compared that with an estimated build-out for a z9 mainframe. Here’s the 3-year breakdown:

The only issue I might take with Post’s assessment is software. Post mainly looked at database and operating system licensing costs, but didn’t compare other third-party software costs; for example, systems management software from CA or BMC. One of mainframers’ biggest complaint is third-party software costs, which can often run them millions of dollars depending on what they have.

Still, even if you’re talking a couple million more on the mainframe side, it still shows a savings over the Lintel build-out. For a more complete breakdown of the figures, check out Post’s presentation.

ORLANDO - Earlier today Share held a conference session updating attendees on the status of the event here in Orlando and of the group overall.

First off, Share President Martin Timmerman reported a good turnout of 1,145 attendees at the winter show, adding that most of the anecdotal feedback was positive.

But are there too many sessions? The group reported there were 901 technical sessions at the meeting, with about 50 canceled sessions. What that has led to is about one-third of the sessions have fewer than 20 people in them. So for its next meeting in San Jose, the group plans to run about 100 fewer sessions to see how that works.

The mainframe and other large systems user group is also working on revamping its website. The first phase of the change, which will improve the customer-facing side of the site, is slated for completion in the beginning of June. Other portions, such as member and volunteer areas of the site, are scheduled to be completed by the end of September. Some possible new features of the site could include social networking, an online magazine or newsletter, online chatting, and product reviews.

ORLANDO — The award for Best Session Title here at the Share large systems user group conference goes to one called “‘Pimping’ Your FICON Ride: How Advanced Cisco Features Enhance Your SAN.” Here’s the full description (funny emphasis by me):

Join the FICON team at Cisco to discover how you can pimp your FICON ride. We’ll show you how we can non-disruptively supercharge your current MDS chassis to 8Gbps, integrate FICON VSANs to isolate workloads, enhance your cascaded links with FICON port channels, initiate QoS for workload prioritization, and allow you to securely extend your FICON links over optical, dark fiber or FCIP. All this performance is nothing without control, and we’ve got the integrated dashboard and plush leather recaro seating to ensure your FICON ride is ready for the autobahn!

There is nothing more illin’ in this world than some hot, fierce I/O throughput. You know what I’m talking about, fo shizzle. Wait, I don’t even know what I’m talking about. Word!

The Green Grid technical forum in San Francisco this week was conclusive proof that the green fluff cycle is full blown. Despite trotting out three eco-aware end users, the vendor consortium blew its chance to prove that it’s more than vendor hype to data center managers seeking meaty advice.

The presentation started with a slick video parade of talking heads from the various member companies, talking about getting down to business and working together to come up with solutions!

It was an apt metaphor for the organization’s fundamental problem:

The public face of The Green Grid is a PR dog-and-pony show and all of the information sharing goes on behind a membership wall. And the real dirty work goes on behind an even more exclusive members-only barrier.

John Tuccillo, director of the Green Grid (and representative of American Power Conversion Corp.) kicked the event off by congratulating the organization for having accomplished so much in its first year. Um, wait a minute. I seem to remember Bruce Shaw from AMD hopping up on the podium at the Uptime Institute Symposium in April 2006 to announce the launch… but I digress.

The point is, compared to user driven conferences I’ve attended, this was a pale imitator. Not to take anything away from people like Bill Tschudi from LBNL (a highlight of the day), who made great presentations and talked about new things; but primarily the speakers were preaching to the choir.

I recognized 90% of the people in the room. We don’t need to go over the fact that we have a problem. We all know about the virtues of hot-aisle/cold-aisle and server virtualization. Let’s break new ground here!

The tedium was maddening. You could see it on the attendees’ weary faces. How long have we been talking about LEED data centers? I’ve been watching it since 2005. How much has changed since then? Nothing. There has been no movement on this issue.

What’s happened with the Power Usage Effectivenes PUE metric? Have we refined it? Publicized how to accurately measure it? No. We renamed it and flipped the ratio to be represented as a percentage — another debate raging since early 2006 that has pretty much gone nowhere.

We could be past this stuff already! But with so many organizations and companies fighting over who owns “Green IT”, it has prevented widespread adoption, and has stalled new ideas. There have been at least four different names for the equation that represents data center building power divided by IT equipment power. There are five alternatives to LEED in the data center under development by different groups.

These efforts are stalled because entrenched vendors and organizations are fighting over their fiefdoms and there is no transparency, no public comment.

I spoke to Mark Monroe, Director of Sustainable Computing from Sun Microsystems, at the event about my concerns and he brought up some good points. He explained that the Green Grid needs to grow its membership to be effective, and it needs to hold some information back to gain new members. But there is an imbalance between superficiality and new thinking. The end user community should have a role in deciding how these standards are built, to understand the arguments different vendors are making and to have an input on what is adopted.

So if the Green Grid is a bunch of hype, then why does this even matter? Because these vendors have the biggest microphone and they have a chance to make a difference. Almost every company is building a new data center this year, and significant numbers of them are going green. It’s time to give people some direction — it is a captive and receptive audience.

Miles Kelly, vice president of strategy at the San Francisco-based hosting giant 365 Main (a Green Grid end user member) spoke for the masses of data center pros when he took the microphone at the end one of the sessions and asked the panel for some guidance. “Give me something I can take back to my operations team. What is your prescription for a company like ours?” he asked.

The panel looked at each other in silence before essentially giving a non-answer as Kelly walked back to his seat.

What is your experience with The Green Grid? Leave your comments below.

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.