One Tuesday, April 29, at the Interop 2008 conference in Las Vegas, Mellanox Technologies Ltd. was granted the Best of Interop award in the Data Center and Storage category for its ConnectX EN 10 gigabit Ethernet (GbE) server and storage I/O adapter with Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based interconnect product supplier announced its ConnectX EN 10 GbE network interface card adapters for VMware- and Citrix XenServer-based virtual environments in February.

According to Mellanox, adapters maintain 9.6 Gbps throughput as the number of virtual machines in VMware ESX Server 3.5 scales up to 16 in multicore CPU environments. This improves server utilization because more VMs can be deployed per physical server while maintaining application I/O performance.

ConnectX EN is also the first adapter to support FCoE hardware offload and Priority Based Flow Control, both of which boost performance.

With support for PCI Express 2.0, ConnectX EN dual-port FCoE adapters are available today in silicon form for LOM (LAN on motherboard) applications and as PCI Express adapter cards that plug into server and storage systems with various media interconnect support including XFP, SFP+, CX4, and 10 GBase-T.

The finalists for the 2008 Best of Interop Awards were selected by InformationWeek’s panel of judges. Other finalists in the same category include Foundry Networks Inc.’s BigIron RX Module and Imation Corp.’s SSD PRO 7000.

Jack Loftus interviews Greg Schulz about what data center technologies he’s bullish on and which ones are hype.

MySQL AB and IBM announced a joint technology and reseller agreement this week to bring support for the MySQL open source database to the IBM System i business computing platform.The two companies will offer the MySQL Server for i5/OS, the flagship operating system for System i, and plan to deliver DB2 for i5/OS as a certified MySQL storage engine on the System i platform. This will allow System i customers to implement online and transactional MySQL applications while storing all data in a single, easy-to-manage DB2 database.

In addition, MySQL Enterprise subscriptions — a comprehensive offering of MySQL database software, services and support — will be made available to IBM clients worldwide through IBM’s reseller network and System i sales team. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

With the planned DB2 storage engine for MySQL, System i customers will be able to run MySQL applications while managing their DB2 for i5/OS databases. It will plug into the MySQL Server and be managed as any other storage engine within the database server, IBM reports.

The DB2 storage engine will provide superior storage management, transaction support, and database management for MySQL developers and DBAs — and enable sharing of data between MySQL and DB2 applications.

Northern California utility Pacific Gas & Electric announced an incentive program today for high-efficiency data storage hardware. The technology is called Massive Array of Idle Disks, or MAID, and it stores rarely-used data to hard disks that are normally turned off, saving energy compared to typical systems.

PG&E is offering a rebate on MAID systems manufactured by COPAN Systems of Longmont, Colorado. PG&E customers that are interested in pursuing the financial incentive need to apply prior to implementing projects. For more info on PG&E’s data center energy initiatives, check out our recent interview with PG&E’s Mark Bramfitt.