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.”

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.

This is pretty impressive; colocation provider 365 Main has been taking advantage of Pacific Gas & Electic Corp.’s (PG&E) power saving program and saved $54,000 in utility costs at its San Francisco data center in 2007.

In all, 365 Main saved 7,477 kWh in 2007 by curtailing power usage below its energy-consumption baseline.

How did they do it? The first step 365 Main takes is inviting their utility provider, PG&E, into their data center at the start of each year for an energy audit to find areas where efficiencies can be added, said Miles Kelly, VP of corporate strategy at 365 Main.

“For example, this year we expanded the areas that utilize motion controlled lighting in the data center and also reinsulated the condenser water lines for the buildings massive air conditioning system. We also reduce lighting levels in public areas during peak days,” Kelly said.

The data center host also adjusted their weekly and monthly generator test schedules to peak days, which reduces their utility consumption by about 8% during test periods. “This adjustment of the testing schedule allows us to reduce utility consumption without ever affecting the reliability or N+1 redundancy of our power system,” Kelly said.

PG&E has gotten a lot of attention this past year for its part in promoting power savings in data centers. Their Critical Peak Pricing (CPP) program encourages data centers to cut back power consumption by offering seasonal discounts to customers that reduce or shift their energy usage away from peak periods.

In addition to savings incentives, PG&E also works with companies like IBM to consolidate servers, reduce heat and cooling requirements in data centers.

And 365 Main has been pretty aggressive in the “green” data center effort as well, if not for the public relations benefits alone. Earlier this year, 365 Main promised to build all its future data centers in line withLEED certification, which is basically a nice label the U.S. Green Building Council gives to companies that make an effort to be environmentally responsible. The standard is said to be tough for power hungry data center to meet though, and is most commonly achieved in buildings with lots of office space.

There’s been tons of clamour from environmental interest groups warning data center managers that if steps aren’t taken to reduce consumption, power availability problems will continue to grow and costs will rise, and several vendors and industry organizations have developed online tools to measure data center efficiency and promote power savings.

One of the many tools is from West Kingston, R.I.-based American Power Conversion (APC), a power and cooling services company, which has a free Web-based tool that rates data center power efficiency.

So, come on people. Let’s save some power.

The twice-yearly TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers released November 12 is dominated by IBM in number of systems and performance.

The TOP500 list was released at SC07, the international conference on high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis, in Reno, Nevada.

The top spot is held by reigning world champion Blue Gene/L System. Pictured below, the system is a joint development of IBM and the Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and is installed at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. The system was upgraded recently and now achieves a Linpack benchmark performance of now 478.2 teraflops (TFlop/s) — or trillions of calculations per second.

Coming in at No. 2 is a brand-new installation of the same type of IBM system, albeit a newer version. It is a Blue Gene/P system installed in Germany at the Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ) and it achieved performance of 167.3 TFlop/s.

It’s not before No. 3 in the TOP500 list that you find a non-IBM system. That honor is reserved for the New Mexico Computing Applications Center (NMCAC), which has a Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) system built on the Altix ICE 8200 model that posted a speed of 126.9 TFlop/s.

In the latest list, IBM regained a solid lead in the total number of systems with 232 (46.4%) over Hewlett-Packard (HP) with 166 systems (33.2%).

I just saw this cool story about a project at Wachovia Bank’s data center. The company is working with two vendors and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte to create a 3-D map of the firm’s sprawling data center operations. The company is also working with Tideway Systems and Intepoint on the project.

Here’s what the report had to say about the project:

Wachovia is rendering 3-D models down to the level of individual servers in buildings, according to Jacob Hall, who heads the data center group at Wachovia (WB). Wachovia hopes the project will provide better visualization of IT assets and their power consumption. Curiously, the project doesn’t include instrumentation of the equipment for real-time monitoring, a key focus of many data center management products.

In a similar vein, Hewlett-Packard introduced a 3-D mapping tool for data centers this summer, called Thermal Zone Mapping, which generates a 3-D image of a data center, its hot spots and airflow.

Being a child of the 1980s, I think anything in 3-D is pretty rad - even if the technology doesn’t require the ever stylish red-and-blue-lensed cardboard shades.

A handful of vendors at the Data Center Decisions conference in Chicago gave quick, speed-dating style overviews of their latest and greatest technologies yesterday, including a new Active Power Management tool from Cassatt, 10 Gbit Ethernet (GBE) intelligent network interface cards (NICs) from NextXen, iSCSI SANs from Sanrad Inc. and backup tools from Vizioncore.

Sanrad Inc. CEO Dave DuPont discussed “better ways to build storage networking.” While Fibre Channel SAN is widely used and relied upon, an iSCSI implementation can be done using existing storage, Ethernet networks, and Sanrad’s iSCSI switch.

George Pradel, Vizioncore’s senior systems engineer, showed what the company’s flagship product vRanger Pro can do. vRanger Pro, which works with VMware virtualization products, does full-image backups while virtual machines are running. It includes a VSS driver that uses Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Copy Service for consistent images and P2V disaster recovery capabilities.

Agilysys discussed the future of the data center and challenges such as density, power and cooling costs. The company specializes in data center infrastructure.

CXtec ran through their fiber optic cable infrastructure expertise and how to reduce cabling by one third to increase cooling efficiencies with Microcore, a new fiber trunk design. Another storage solution vendor, SANpulse Technologies Inc. discussed its products that automate the SAN.

NextXen pitched users on the benefits of 10 GbE intelligent networking networking technology that keep up with today’s increased CPU utilization, requiring greater bandwidth.

Cassatt proposed an active approach to power management and described a product that intelligently powers servers on and off, either by time of day, demand (i.e., turn off when idle), in power emergencies, or as operational policies dictate.

Pretty cool stuff, even if some of it has been around for a while and was simply spotlighted by vendors at the show.

Get this; Dell was named number one in customer satisfaction for standards-based servers in the Technical Business Research (TBR) Q2 2007 Corporate IT Buying Behavior & Customer Satisfaction Study: x86-based Servers.

According to TBR, Dell’s overall weighted score improved 1.1% sequentially, while HP and IBM declined by 1.5% and 0.8%, respectively. Dell was the only systems provider to show an improvement in TBR’s latest study, with customer satisfaction scores increasing in eight of the nine attributes measured, including server management, phone support, delivery time, value and ease of doing business.

I wrote a story in March and when I spoke with Dell about their poor customer service, they recognized the problem and seemed to really want to change.

Dell is investing an incremental $150 million this year on its “customer experience” initiatives and quarterly results released by the company in November showed signs of improvement.

“Dell has been in business for 23 years, and there are lessons learned every day,” said Daniel Bounds, a senior product manager for Dell.

Dell increased the number of customer service agents in order to decrease average hold times from nine minutes to three minutes in the past year. The company also reduced call transfers by over 30% and has improved first contact resolution rates by 20%.

Despite this, there are still websites devoted soley to bashing Delland a simple Google search shows plenty of recent customer compliants.

It’s hard to overcome a negative reputation. For instance, my very first vehicle was a little red 1992 Hyundai Excel sedan. I could have run faster than that car accelerated up steep hills and it seemed to break down every other week. Hyundai later made an effort to repair its reputation of poor quality, and according to reports, they have.

The thing is, I’ll never give Hyundai the chance to show me how much they have improved because like many consumers, once I’ve been burned, I don’t put my hand back in the fire.

But, as I sit here typing on my work-issued Dell laptop, I hope Dell’s customer service is improving as much as they say it is.