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.

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.

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.”

Nimsoft’s flagship product, the NimBUS platform, supplies a range of monitoring capabilities including server, database, service level management and application management across both physical and virtual infrastructures. Indicative’s product suite provides IT operations with monitoring capabilities for service delivery – taking stock of things such as real-time key performance indicators, transactions and end-user performance. When combined, Read says, the two companies’ products complement each other nicely to offer customers a range of monitoring tools.

From a strategic perspective, Read expects the deal will deliver ample growth opportunities. “We want to sign on more new customers faster,” he said. “At Nimsoft, we’ve been signing 150 to 200 new customers every year and we want to accelerate that momentum.” Many of those customers, Read asserts, will come at the expense of the big four vendors.

Of course it’s Read’s job to wax enthusiastically about the strategy behind Nimsoft’s acquisition, but what do the analysts think? While considerably more tempered in his opinion, David Williams, research vice president at Gartner, said Nimsoft’s acquisition of Indicative “is a very good move.”

“This acquisition will enable Nimsoft to move into the area of business service management – an area the company hasn’t been in before,” Williams said. “This will provide customers with much more contextual business service-based information.” For example, rather than just provide customers with how various components in the infrastructure are impacted during a problem, Nimsoft’s tools can provide insight into how the components are impacting a specific business service.

As for competing against the entrenched bigger vendors, Williams says that Nimsoft certainly has a shot. “Their products are cheaper, easy to implement and less complex to manage,” he said. “Nimsoft has been extremely effective at winning business in a highly competitive market space.”

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.

Intel Corp. introduced two low-voltage 45 nanometer (nm) quad-core Xeon processors today that run at 50 watts, or 12.5 watts per core, and frequencies up to 2.50 GigaHertz (GHz).

The Intel Xeon Processor L5400 Series is built on 45nm manufacturing and a transistor formula that, combined, boosts performance and reduces power consumption.

The Quad-Core Intel Xeon L5400 processors are as much as 25% faster and have a 50% larger cache size than Intel’s previous-generation low-voltage Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors introduced last March, while maintaining the 50-watt thermal envelope. The quad-core L5420 and L5410 processors run at 2.50 GHz and 2.33 GHz, respectively, and have 12 megabytes (MB) of on-die cache and dedicated 1333 MHz front side buses (FSB).

Vendors supporting the L5400 and L5210 series include Asus, Dell, Fujitsu, Fujitsu-Siemens, Gigabyte, HP, Hitachi, IBM, Microstar, NEC, Quanta, Rackable, Supermicro, Tyan and Verari.

Next quarter, Intel will also begin shipping a new dual-core low-voltage processor with a 40-watt rating and clock speed of 3 GHz, with a 6 MB cache size and a 1333 MHz FSB.

The Intel Quad-Core Xeon processor L5420 is $380 per 1,000 units and the Intel Quad-Core L5410 is priced at $320 per 1,000 units.