I noticed a common theme at the string of computing conferences I’ve attended in the past couple of months: The future of the data center is going to be cloud computing, and resistance is futile.

I heard this from VMware Inc.’s President and Chief Executive Officer Diane Greene during her keynote at the JP Morgan Technology Conference in Boston in May, and the point was driven into the ground during the Enterprise 2.0 Conference there in June. I heard these predictions repeated during the annual Red Hat Summit and the USENIX 08 conferences, also held in Red Sox Nation last month.

Major league players in the data center space like VMware Inc. are putting their efforts into cloud computing because of predictions that it will eventually be the mainstream way information is handled and software vendors are starting to introduce products to manage cloud computing environments.

David Patterson, a professor of computer science at U.C. Berkeley, said during his keynote speech at USENIX that cloud computing is part of the data center evolution already under way.

“In addition to the processor evolution [from single-core to dual- and now quad-core processors], on a larger scale, there are a number of changes happening in the data center; flash memory is replacing mechanical disks, we have software as a service, and utility computing [a.k.a. cloud computing] is being used to outsource the data center,” Patterson said.

The advantages of cloud computing are clear, he said.

“With cloud computing, you put $0 down for your own data center, and pay as you go, and there is no penalty for scale up, which happens instantly. It allows fast scale up with no dead or idle CPUs, and no provisioning is required,” Patterson said.

This is especially appealing to data centers that have maxed out their power resources, but need to increase their infrastructure.

Though cloud computing is considered an immature technology, it really isn’t. The chief architect of the Xen project, Ian Pratt, said during his session at USENIX, called Xen and the Art if Virtualization, that the folks at Cambridge University who started the XenoServer project with him back in 1999 were architecting it under the cloud computing concept.

Though their ideas about what the cloud would look like differ from what we see today, the concept was similar: Develop a public infrastructure for wide-area distributed computing that can be used by people across the world.

“We originally thought there would be data centers all over the world, and clients would be able to choose a location, perhaps close to another IP address they wanted to interact with,” Pratt said. “The other difference is, we thought the machines would be owned by many different merchants, and there would be a broker acting as a third party recommending the different vendors, and those brokers would take a fee.”

Instead, we have companies like Amazon.com, Google and Salesforce.com offering the complete cloud computing environments , but Pratt expects this to change.

“I think we will see cloud computing move in the direction where it will become more open instead of all of the hardware, software and networking being located at and owned by a Google or Amazon.”

Today, most cloud computing providers host x86-compatible applications on virtualized servers, and most support only the Linux OS, according to Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc. To keep costs low, many cloud providers use a Xen-based hypervisor. Charges for usage are usually based on CPU hours, gigabits consumed and gigabits per second transferred rather than on a monthly service fee.

Specifically, Amazon charges 10 cents per compute hour used and 15 cents per gigabyte of storage. According to Forrester, that translates into about $70 to $150 per month for a fully utilized Amazon server, versus the average $400 a month that it costs an enterprise to run a server.

The benefits aside, IT pros are apprehensive about taking their mission critical apps out of their secure data centers and putting them into something as translucent sounding as cloud computing. This fear was quite evident during the Enterprise 2.0 conference event called “An Evening in the Clouds.” A panel of IT pros sat and listed to Google, Amazon and Salesforce as they fluffed cloud computing, and then they voiced their many concerns.

Is it secure? Is it reliable? Does it perform better than my existing data center?

The answer from all the cloud computing providers was, of course, a resounding “yes.”

But not all applications are available in the cloud, so it isn’t for every company. The cloud computing environment also lacks government standards, which makes some users nervous.

“I wouldn’t suggest moving all of your apps over to the cloud today, but hopefully one day all will be right in the world,” said Jeff Keltner, the business development manager at Google Apps.

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.

During the USENIX ‘08 Annual Technical Conference in Boston this week I attended a session titled “Playing Fast and Loose with the Sysadmin Space-Time Continuum” led by a jokester named David Blank-Edelman, the director of technology at Northeastern University.

The interactive session was designed to help the sysadmins in attendance solve their most pressing data center challenges, and some creative solutions were thrown around.

But the best part of the 90 minute session had nothing to do with problem solving; it was the debauchery that Blank-Edelman coached attendees to employ in their data centers.

Blank-Edeleman warmed up the room of about 40 sysadmins with some critical bonus interface ideas, like how to get bird chirp sounds into server rooms. He directed attendees to the site Peep, which lets sysadmins monitor their networks with bird sounds instead of the traditional beeping.

“It is quite lovely, as long as there aren’t any issues, in which case the server rooms becomes a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s movie ‘The Birds,’” he said.

Blank-Edelman, who also authored the book “Perl for System Administration; Managing Multi-Platform Environments with Perl” also showed his session attendees how to have some fun with Proxies. He told the story of a fellow sysadmin, Peter Stevens, who got sick of his next door neighbors using his wifi, and instead of encrypting it, decided to have some fun. Stevens arranged it so that any unauthorized users would be sent through a web browser that flipped the user’s webpage images upside down.

But of course, the purpose of introducing these antics wasn’t to inspire mayhem in data centers across the country - well, maybe a little - but mostly, it was to get the wheels of creativity turning.

“Being in the upper echelon of sysadmin society, you have to be able to improvise, and to do that you have to talk to other creative sysadmins and think outside the box,” Blank-Edelman said.

For instance, a creative firewall idea involving port knocking, which is used to keep external traffic - and hackers - out of systems. In general, when data gets transmitted to closed ports, it is received by a monitoring daemon that only opens ports when the correct port sequence is sent.

Blank-Edelman suggested starting out with a firewall that does not include any ports at all. Clients then attempt to open a random set of ports –say, 3, 7, 9, 12 - and only the clients that knock on the right set of ports are let in, he said.

“It’s a cool idea. When have you heard of starting with no access at all? People have taken this idea in all different directions,” Blank-Edelman said.

There were plenty of these little tips and tricks mixed in with funny antics during the session, and after a morning of technical whitepapers, this afternoon session was a sigh of relief.

Network administrators who rely on traditional Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)-based network and systems management tools to monitor distributed network devices are at an inherent disadvantage when such in-band tools are used to keep tabs on remote network devices. That’s because by their very nature SNMP-based tools can’t detect problems unless the devices they monitor are readily available on the network. When remote devices aren’t available, the only remedy in an SNMP-based world is often to physically dispatch a network administrator to the remote site to identify the problem.

Into this remote management landscape steps Uplogix Inc., an Austin, Texas-based provider of remote management appliances. This week, Uplogix announced the release of Uplogix 430, an integrated monitoring appliance designed to manage IP-based network devices remotely. The product combines the access functionality of a console server, the monitoring and diagnostics of systems management tools and automation in a single integrated appliance.

Automating routine tasks remotely
According to Mark Piening, vice president of marketing at Uplogix, the 430, which has a starting price of $2,500, “addresses anywhere from 50% to 80% of the routine maintenance actions a network administrator takes.” The 430 utilizes the company’s Remote Management Operating System (RMOS), which enables automated detection and repair of network-related problems, such as configuration errors and telecommunications faults, and reduces support costs.

Piening said that Uplogix’s customers typically deploy the company’s products to reduce IT operating costs (by eliminating the need for in-person troubleshooting) and reduce capital expenses. Uplogix’s integrated remote management tools provide the same functionality found in server consoles, KVM tools and service processor management tools that are often deployed separately.

An integrated approach to remote management
Dennis Drogseth, vice president of IT research firm Enterprise Management Associates, said that Uplogix’s integrated offerings are unique in the marketplace. “Many network operations personnel in the data center are responsible for managing remote locations from a network perspective as well as actively configuring devices at a remote location,” he said. “Uplogix’s approach is to support network operations in the data center, and this separates the company from Avocent and Raritan.”

Avocent is a Huntsville, Ala.-based provider of appliances for infrastructure management. The company offers branch infrastructure management appliances and software for servers, routers, PCs and other devices such as point-of-sale terminals. Raritan, out of Somerset, N.J., provides remote office management infrastructure tools, including KVM-over-IP-switches, serial console management servers, power management products and centralized management products.

Drogseth added that Uplogix complements in-band network management tools from the likes of BMC, EMC and HP. “Uplogix provides added strength in terms of effecting change in network devices when connectivity is limited,” he said.

This morning, on the final day of the annual Red Hat Summit in Boston, Mass., Red Hat Product Manager, Mike Ferris, shared the Beta testing program of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing platform. Red Hat launched the service in November of 2007, and has been beta testing it, gauging customer interest and getting feedback on what type of services are needed. Prior to the conference, I talked to Ferris about the program and why Red Hat has partnered with Amazon to offer this service to their customers.

“When we looked at where our customers were today and where they needed to go as well as the converging aspects of virtualization and automation, we recognized that we needed to provide this service,” shared Ferris. “We asked how could we help customers go and leverage these technologies? We saw the evolution of virtualization and the availability of companies like Amazon to be able to provide compute capacity on demand. So, we partnered with Amazon to build out an enterprise support cloud for Linux.”

Red Hat has integrated the virtualization technology into Red Hat Linux 5.1, which makes it easy for the customers deploy the technology. The advantage to the cloud computing model is that users can get capacity on demand, for much less cost than the traditional hardware acquisition model. This savings and use in high-demand situations is something that many industry experts agree will make cloud computing an important extension of the data center of the future.

Ferris explained that Red Hat’s offering is “the same technology but available at an hourly basis in the cloud. A lot of this has absolutely been enabled by virtualization. It eliminates the need to spend money on capital for infrastructure to handle peak loads. Customers can leverage external clouds with same technology and the same APIs.”

So far, the feedback has been positive. Competitively priced at between $0.21/hour to $0.94/hour, the price has been considered fair by the market.

“We’ve seen interest from our customers during this beta period,” said Ferris. “A lot of core customers are leveraging the cloud infrastructure to run additional simulations and engineering analysis. Studios are looking at this for being able to render movies and televisions shows. We also see small companies that are looking to leverage low-cost infrastructure and get it up and running in minutes. Customers can dynamically scale their environments and do other business activities that they otherwise couldn’t have. With tightening budgets and a strong focus on efficiency, customers are looking at both cloud and traditional solutions.”

Further demonstrating their commitment to the cloud, on Wednesday the company announced that the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform is also now available on Amazon EC2 in beta. For more information on the Red Hat Summit, see a summary of TechTarget’s week-long event coverage.

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).

Data center power and cooling services companyAPC is offering a number of free online tools, called APC TradeOff Tools, that give IT pros a way to view how infrastructure changes effect costs and performance in the data center.

“The tools answer questions like, ‘what will the ROI be if I increase the water chiller temperatures?’ or ‘what do I need to do to hit my energy efficiency or carbon footprint target’?,” said Neil Rasmussen, senior vice president of innovation for APC.

The West Kingston, RI-based company’s new tools include the power efficiency calculator that allows IT managers to generate “what if” scenarios regarding virtualization, power sizing, efficiency, power density, and cooling decisions.

Another new tool is the Data Center Carbon Calculator, which allows users to input data about their infrastructure and see the impact any changes would have on data center efficiency, energy costs and carbon footprint.

“If a company makes a carbon efficiency pledge, they can use this tool to drill down into different ways to achieve that goal,” Rasmussen said.

The Data Center Capital Cost Calculator details the impact of physical infrastructure design changes on capital costs; the Virtualization Energy Cost Calculator shows the impact of server virtualization and data center design choices on energy and space savings; and the Data Center Power Sizing Calculator gives details about the impact of server and storage configurations on IT load capacity and required utility input power.

There is also the Data Center AC vs. DC Calculator, which compares the efficiency of each, and the Data Center InRow Containment Selector, which recommends cooling options based on the data center infrastructure.

All of the tools can be accessed here on APC’s website.

Last week, Paglo Labs Inc., a Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup announced the public beta of its open source software product called Paglo Crawler. The company bills the product as “the search engine for IT”; it is designed to provide inventory management, network management and software audits of IT environments.

Paglo collects data across the IT environment and indexes it; users can search for information by doing key word searches and view the returned information in charts and dashboards. “It’s like Google for IT,” Chris Waters, co-founder and CTO of Paglo said.

While Paglo claims to offer the first search engine for IT, the folks at Splunk – “The IT Search Company,” are sure to differ.

Waters says that Paglo’s business model – its product is available as a software-as-a-service – sets it apart from other infrastructure management tools. To use the software, IT administrators download it from Paglo’s website, set up a crawler on a PC or server, and the software will collect data throughout the environment. The IT data is stored on servers in Paglo’s data center that that is accessible via a secure web browser.

Another differentiator says Waters, is Paglo’s social networking feature. Through Paglo Share-its, IT administrators can make their searches, dashboards and alerts available to the Paglo community. “This is useful in the case of a security vulnerability,” said Waters where one IT admin can tap into the collective knowledge of a group to find the best way to solve a problem. “It’s social networking applied to enterprise IT,” he said.

Tony Moraros, an IT consultant who works with small-to-midsized businesses has been using Paglo for about five weeks. It’s extremely efficient for us to use it to monitor clients’ environments, do troubleshooting and project planning,” said Moraros, whose company, Tony the Computer Guy, is based in San Mateo, Calif.

Moraros looked at other tools, including Splunk, but concluded that they were more geared to enterprises based on both their cost and functionality. “I only wanted a tool that would allow me to search, was easy to implement and has a low upfront cost,” he said. “Splunk looked like a good tool, but I needed a pickup truck, not an 18-wheeler.”

Moraros says he uses Paglo in a variety of ways; for example, he searches for a particular virus based on a file name. “I can search the whole environment and find out which machines have that virus,” he said. “I don’t have to search every computer with a scan.”

Moraros also uses Paglo to help clients plan technology upgrades. He’ll search on CPU or memory capacity, for example, and tag those machines below certain thresholds. “I can be much more proactive in terms of planning,” he said.

Moraros can also be much more efficient when it comes to monitoring. “I do a lot of things remotely that I don’t have to be on site for,” he said. “I can have a look at ten machines with one search in seconds.”

Paglo is currently in beta and is free to download. According to Waters, pricing is yet to be determined.

Would you acquire an IT asset management system via SaaS? And is social networking with peers something that would be useful to monitor IT assets? Let us know.

As a managed hosting company, Contegix by necessity has to contend with every major operating system. But to run its own business, Contegix is an open source shop. “We run Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” said CEO Matthew Porter, “and we use Hyperic as the core of our management and monitoring systems.”

From its St. Louis data center, Contegix uses Hyperic’s open source HQ management tool to monitor its own applications, and customers can use the system to get their own metrics, even if “they run any operating system on the planet,” Porter said.

Initially, Porter balked at the prospect of installing Hyperic because he didn’t want to put an agent on every machine. However, Porter also wanted the ability to do in-depth monitoring of applications, and not just take stock of the network. The other tools that did both application-performance and network monitoring were SNMP-based, Porter said. “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with SNMP, but our network engineers would have to become experts in it,” Porter said. “We made a financial decision to go with Hyperic and install agents because it was expensive to train our engineers.”

Some customers with servers that were three-to-four years old needed more RAM to run agents, and Contegix provided them with the memory they needed. Contegix now collects 25,000 metrics per minute via Hyperic and provides its managed services customers with the ability to set their own thresholds and parameters.

The latest version of Opalis Software Inc.’s flagship IT process automation server software was released a couple weeks ago. Among the enhanced features of the Opalis Integration Server 5.5 is a customizable executive dashboard designed to give high-level IT and other managers the ability to drill into graphs and get at the service data behind them. “The idea is to add value at all levels of IT from administrators, operators and up to senior managers,” said Charles Crouchman, the chief technology officer at Opalis. The executive dashboard, he added, is designed to provide senior IT managers who are responsible for managing the effectiveness of service delivery with relevant data.

Executive dashboards for IT process automation? Sounds a lot like business intelligence for the IT operations set.

Actually, executive dashboards aren’t that new to IT process automation in particular and systems management in general, according to Rich Ptak, an analyst with Ptak, Noel & Associates. “Most infrastructure management solutions have some sort of dashboard — executive or otherwise — that ships with the product,” he said. “What is important is the engine underneath the dashboard.” In the case of Opalis, things like powerful supporting analytics, strong report-generation capabilities, and the ability to correlate and compare data make its executive dashboard stand out.

As Ptak sees it, the emphasis that Opalis places on executive dashboards is beneficial to IT managers, who have often been reluctant to proactively build tools that demonstrate what they do and how it affects the business. “For too long, the game was to collect as much data as possible and throw that data and analytic tools at the end user,” he said. “Today the vendors are taking more responsibility for helping IT and their customers to get real information in understandable formats.”