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.”

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.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. has updated its Solaris 10 operating system (OS) today, The Solaris 10 5/08 OS, which is now available for free download.

Larry Wake, product manager for Solaris, details the new features in a video blog. Some of the features include new hardware support for systems based on AMD, Intel and SPARC processors, and increased performance and power management features for existing systems. In addition, a new feature called CPU Capping lets users set a limit on CPU usage for better management of system resources.

The new Solaris 10 also includes the ability for Solaris Containers to support virtualized environments based on earlier versions the OS - Solaris 8 and 9. This allows users running a physical instance of Solaris 8 or 9 to move those instances to containers running on a Solaris 10 system, according to Sun.

The Solaris 8 OS was originally released in February 2000, superseded by Solaris 9 OS in May 2002, and the Solaris 10 OS was initially released in January 2005.

More details on the updated version of Solaris 10 are available on Sun’s blog.

In mid-April, Qlusters Inc., opted to drop its sponsorship of the openQRM project, an open source provisioning and monitoring tool. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based provider of data center management products and services handed over openQRM to the open source folks at SourceForge where the project will reportedly continue under the tutelage of project manager Matt Rechenburg. In a subsequent blog post, Matthew Aslett, an enterprise software analyst at the 451 Group speculates on the fate of Qlusters, wondering whether the OpenQRM announcement signals the demise of the “little four” group of open source systems management vendors.

Could GroundWork, Hyperic and Zenoss possibly be on the verge of quietly disengaging from the world of open source systems management?

The folks at GroundWork took enough exception to Aslett’s post to contact me and give me their perspective. “Going with one of the big four, or going with one of the open source vendors isn’t an either or choice,” said David Dennis, senior director of product marketing at GroundWork. In terms of systems management tools, “there are alternatives from smaller vendors that are displacing or complementing specific pieces of what the big vendors offer,” he said. “What we see is a melding of the offerings from smaller vendors with big vendors.”

Andi Mann, an analyst with the Enterprise Management Group has long been a proponent of an ecosystem of systems management providers, believing that no single vendor can provide all the capabilities required by most customers. And vendors both big and small seem to share this perspective if a few timely announcements are any indication.

Just this week, Netuitive Inc., a provider of performance management software announced integrations with systems management tool HP OpenView with the idea of enabling an end-to-end view into the health of business service management. And big four vendor CA has teamed up with process automation company Opalis Software in an OEM agreement designed to overlay a process automation layer on top of CA’s data center tools for change, control and configuration management.

So, notwithstanding what happens with Qlusters in the future, the systems management ecosystem seems to be evolving nicely.

AMD announced today that Dell Inc. is now offering five server platforms based on AMD’s quad-core Opteron processors. This news follows last week’s announcement that quad-core AMD Opteron processors are generally available, and brings the number of available global OEM platforms based on the new processors to 13.

Additionally, VMware Inc. has completed qualification of Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors for use in VMware ESX and ESXi hypervisor deployments.

This is important because the erratum that impacted earlier versions of quad-core AMD Opteron processors was particularly relevant to virtualization environments. This certification signifies that AMD’s processor as compatible with virtualization environments, an AMD spokesperson said.

Dell servers supporting Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors include the PowerEdge SC1435, 2970, M605 blade server and 6950 platforms, all two-socket systems, as well as the new PowerEdge T605 tower server.

For more information on the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors visit AMD’s website . Information on Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor pricing can be found at http://www.amd.com/pricing.

This week Nimsoft Inc., a Redwood City, Calif.-based provider of IT monitoring software upped the ante in its bid to compete with the big systems management vendors by acquiring Indicative Software, a maker of software for business service management, application performance management and infrastructure management.

Nimsoft CEO Gary Read says the deal should serve as notice to the likes of BMC, CA, HP and IBM. “Customers are not happy with the high price, long deployment times and professional services costs of the big four vendors,” Read said. “With this acquisition, we’ll offer tools that provide comprehensive monitoring.”

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Advanced Micro Device Inc. (AMD) announced that customers can get the quad-core AMD Opteron processors through its channel partners starting today.

AMD first introduced its quad-core Opteron processor, code-named Barcelona, back in September and stalled mass shipments due to an errata that was found. It was corrected and shipments have officially begun.

Compared to AMD’s dual-core processors, quad-core offers better performance, as well as virtualization and power-saving features. The AMD-V feature allows users to do live migrations of virtual machines between all Opteron processors, and future versions. Another cool feature is the Dual Dynamic Power Management with integrated power controller, which allows power to be distributed to the memory and the CPU at different levels, depending on what the application requires.

Ten AMD Validated Server Program platforms are shipping with the processors today, including the recently-launched HP ProLiant G5 platforms; the first of many quad-core Opteron-based systems expected to be available in the coming weeks from global OEMs and system builders.

Last year, a number of x86 operating system vendors announced they optimized their systems to work in concert with quad-core Opteron, including Microsoft, Novell Inc., Red Hat Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc., and VMware Inc.

The official shippment of these Opteron processors is big for AMD because the company’s arch nemesis, Intel Corp., has beaten AMD to the punch many times over in the past year and a half by introducing a number of quad-core Xeon processors, including low voltage versions and 45nm quad-core technology.

AMD debuted its 45nm processor platform at the CeBit electronics exhibition in Dresden, Germany, on March 4 and expects to ship those chips later this year. By shrinking from 65 nm to 45m, AMD can add coveted cache memory directly onto the chip.

A variety of AMD’s 65nm quad-core Optern platform options are available today from Tyan, Supermicro, and Uniwide.

More information and pricing can be found on AMD’s website.

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.

This blog post was written by Mark Schlack, vice president of editorial, TechTarget.

What kind of network works best for high-density virtual machine (VM) farms? Can you run OLTP databases on VMs? If you put your email server on a VM, what should you beware of?

It’s hard to find answers to those kinds of questions, and answers often start with “It depends.” But the questions are important, indeed critical, for some shops as they scale up. For that reason, we are launching an e-zine this week called Virtual Data Center.

If you’re looking for a deeper dive into some of the thornier questions about virtualization and the new data center being built around it, this is for you. Take the first issue: It features an article by a veteran integrator of Oracle and VMware that makes the case for putting production databases on virtual machines. The article gets into what you need to do to make that work. Similarly, a second article gets into creating a storage architecture for VM farms.

Our goal is to create, magazine-style articles that can go further than tips or blog posts in analyzing these issues. It’s free and will appear six times a year. Each issue will address an application area and a technology issue. The authors will be experts, frequently with direct hands-on experience.

We’ll also follow up articles with blog posts and survey research that’s part of each article. You can take our survey on virtual databases here as well as our survey on storage in virtual environments.