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.

San Diego, Calif.-based Verari Systems has joined Sun Microsystems and Rackable Systems, Inc. in the data center mobilization trend with its new Verari FOREST containerized data center.

These mobile data center offerings address the need for space and low cost power. Companies without room for more servers can buy one of these containers for less than it would cost to build a brick and mortar data center, fill it with servers and storage, and plop it down in an area where electricity costs are low - like an abandoned coal mine in Japan.

Case in point, Verari’s FOREST container can house up to 1400 blade-based compute servers or nearly 12 petabytes of blade-based storage using Verari’s new BladeRack 2 X-Series platforms in the modular unit.

Sun’s containerized data center, project BlackBox, is in a standard metal shipping container — 20 feet long, eight feet wide and eight feet tall — and can house about 250 single unit rack servers. Introduced in March 2007, Rackable Systems Inc.’s Concentro is a 40 foot by 8 foot shipping container that houses up to 1,200 of Rackable Systems’ rack-mount DC powered servers and up to 3.5 petabytes of storage. The company came out with a denser mobile data center called ICE cube in October. IBM came out with one, the Scalable Modular Data Center in July 2007.

Who first invented the idea of a mobile data center? Probably Google, which patented the containerized data center in October, and which reportedly has been using them for its own purposes since long before Sun or anyone else did. Whether the patent will cause issues for other vendors has yet to be seen, as no infringement suits have been filed yet.

But for all this activity, mobile data centers aren’t exactly selling like hotcakes; Sun announced its first customer in June 2007, and Rackable hasn’t disclosed any, other than saying they have some.

Here are some nuggets from the Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas last week that weren’t enough for a full story but were interesting nonetheless.

• “The dominant life form on the planet will be Windows.” - John Enck, Gartner research VP

• “We’re asked less and less to make a business case for virtualization,” said Cirba co-founder and CTO Andrew Hillier during a product presentation. “It’s kind of a given right now.”

• An audience poll found that more than half — 54% — had implemented blades in production. Another 26% are researching or testing blades, while the remaining 20% aren’t doing anything with them.

• Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist, gave one of the keynotes on the second morning and showed plenty of cartoons. One of the best went as follows:

• Panel 1: The boss tells Dilbert and Asok the Intern: “Our CEO has voluntarily slashed his pay from six million per year to four. “
• Panel 2: The boss continues: “In a written statement he said he wants to ’share the pain.’”
• Panel 3: The boss: “Do you feel better now?” Asok the Intern: “I make my own underpants from sandwich bags.”

• Adams also announced that the keynote would be his last public speaking engagement. He suffers from a vocal cord disorder that makes it difficult for him to speak, and at times during the presentation it was tough to hear what he was saying.

• Award for best vendor name: Enigmatec. We’re not sure if it’s pronounced e-NIG-ma-tech or e-nig-MAT-ic, but either way, it’s amusing. We were going to do a video interviewing someone from the company and just tease them about the name, but we didn’t gather enough guts to do so.

And so it begins. I registered last night here at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas to supposedly beat the lines, even though I still had to wait about a half-hour to get my packet. Now it’s Tuesday morning and the conference has officially begun, with a welcome address preceding keynotes and sessions this afternoon. I’ll be here until Thursday and will check in on the blog now and again.

Gartner analyst John Phelps said there are 2,000 attendees at the show. Some immediate polling of the audience has taken place. Here are some of the results:

• Gartner asked what server infrastructure people were running and offered nine combinations (mainframe only, Unix and mainframe,  Windows and Linux, etc.). The plurality said they run a mishmash: 40% said they run mainframe, Unix, Linux and Windows servers. Coming in second with 25% was people who are running Unix, Linux and Windows servers. The lowest: Mainframe and Unix at 0%, the old goose egg.
• 80% are either in the process of a server consolidation project or have already completed one. Only 3% have no plans for server consolidation.

The keynote this morning is called “The Future of Infrastructure and Operations” by Thomas Bittman, a Gartner analyst. I’ll be working on a full story about that speech later today.

I recently wrote about the new mobile data centers from Sun Microsystems Inc. and Rackable Systems Inc., and mentioned that Google reportedly came up with the idea years ago.

As is par, Google didn’t respond to requests to confirm reports.

Well, Google originally filed for a patent in 2003 and finally secured a patent for the mobile data centers this week.

It isn’t surprising that forward thinking Google came up with the idea, if that is tuly the case.

Blogger Leila Thomas said, “I think this proves that Google was thinking ahead four years ago. They know more will go mobile. I would imagine they’re getting prepared for that transition as much as (possible), quietly building things for the platform.”

But what does this mean for Sun’s Project BlackBox and Rackable’s Concentro and the latest version, ICE Cube?

Sun and Rackable were quick to respond to me about Google’s patent, and both say thier mobile data center offerings do not infringe on that patent.

Sun’s spokesperson Michelle K. Parkinson said Google’s patent should not affect Project Blackbox because there are slight differences. For instance, Sun’s BlackBox does not require separate cooling systems.

“Sun respects the intellectual property rights of others, and expects the same in return. Sun has a strong patent portfolio that clearly establishes its rights to its Project Blackbox technology,” Parkinson said. “With respect to Google’s patent, it does not appear to be relevant to Sun’s Project Blackbox systems…Sun stands behind its commercialized technology with third party intellectual property indemnification protection provided under Sun’s sales contracts.”

Rackable Systems’ Spokesperson Colette LaForce sent me a statement saying the company became aware of the Google patent from recent media coverage.

“Rackable Systems takes its obligations not to infringe the
intellectual property rights of others seriously, and we believe we are in compliance with those obligations. We have counsel reviewing the matter for further analysis.”

I’m not holding my breath for a call back from Google.

By now, you may have seen the Bag of Swag video on YouTube — whereby intrepid Linux reporter Jack Loftus and I pillaged the vendor booths at LinuxWorld and the NGDC conferences for the best giveaways. Watch Loftus brave sleepy keynotes, vendor gimmicks and spokesmodels on our grueling quest for free stuff:

For full LinuxWorld and Next-Generation Data Center coverage, check out the SearchEnterpriseLinux.com special report that is being updated daily.

Rackable Systems, Inc. was given the 2007 “LinuxWorld.com Product Excellence Award” in the category of “Most Innovative Hardware Solution” for its modular data center product, Concentro at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in California this week.

Rackable’s Concentro addresses the need for increased data center space while reducing up-front costs and operational expenses accociated with building a brick and mortar data center. The self-contained, fully portable data-center-in-a-box is packed with servers, storage and highly efficient cooling.

Sun Microsystems has a similar product called Project Blackbox.

Housed in a secure, nondescript, weather-tight 40’ x 8’ shipping container, Concentro can hold up to 1200U of servers or storage systems and compute density levels of up to 9600 cores and storage capacity of up to 3.5 petabytes. Concentro’s unique cooling and DC power technology dramatically reduce cooling costs by as much as 80% over traditional data centers, the company reports.

The ability to deploy a Concentro container rapidly and in any location allows businesses to add redundancy and business continuity, allowing for easy hardware migration and an expedited disaster recovery process. The units can be situated away from the home data center site and remotely managed at the server, rack and container level using Rackable Systems’ Roamer remote management technology.

ORLANDO — Here at the Uptime Institute Symposium, attendees asked the engineers from IBM, HP, Intel and AMD if there was some sort of top secret, magic bullet technology that would completely change the trend toward ever increasingly power-hungry processors. Is there some sort of secret innovation — carbon nanotube materials, quantum computing, whatever — hiding in a lab somewhere that will make the energy problem go away? The response was a unanimous “NO”. Solid engineering on the existing technologies is going to be the wave of the future for at least the next ten years. The experts said that even if a company publicly announced a mind bending innovation, it would take 10 years to get it into production, develop it to the point where it actually surpasses existing technologies and finally to get people to trust the technology enough to rely on it. So don’t hold your breath.

RICHLAND, WASH.– Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is putting its shoulder to the wheel in the effort to reduce data center energy consumption. The Dept. of Energy’s high performance computing lab has launched a program to measure the effectiveness and possible energy savings that would come from liquid cooling in the data center. The lab will focus on a liquid cooling spray technology, developed by Liberty Lake, Wash.-based ISR, SprayCool.

PNNL will run the experiment on an eight rack system, a 14 teraflop peak, 9 sustained teraflop computer in a very small space — 800 square feet. The computer won’t just sit there — it will run codes, mainly computational fluid dynamics, measuring performance, temperature of the processors, overall room temperature.

According to Dr. Moe A. Khaleel, Director, Computational Sciences and Mathematics Division at PNNL, the lab will be able to conduct “what-if” experiments, like turning off the room’s air conditioning to see what happens to the room temperature and the temperature of the processor.

In addition to measuring the effectiveness of liquid cooling in high density environments, the study will also measure performance per watt. The facility is outfitted to meter the electrical input on the room.

“We’ll be able to see how much energy savings you can have if there are any, over air cooling. We’ll report on it nationally and will publish results month by month,” Khaleel said. “This is a national lab, we have to serve the national mission. Energy efficiency of data centers is one of the things we need to be doing. We believe the results will be positive, but we want to quantify things.”

PNNL’s first liquid cooling report will come out in June or July.

Next week I’m headed out to the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington. I’ll be crossing the snowy Cascades, into Eastern Oregon and finally crossing the Columbia (The data center Promised Land) into Washington. It’s about a 6 hour drive from Eugene, OR but it’s going to be worth it.

 I’m going to be meeting with scientists and IT staff to talk about high performance computing, energy efficiency in the data center, and the projects underway at PNNL in the healthcare and airline sector.