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The Solaris 8 OS was originally released in February 2000, superseded by Solaris 9 OS in May 2002, and the Solaris 10 OS was initially released in January 2005.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

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.

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.

The people I speak with about virtualization projects always list the same reasons for going virtual; they don’t have enough space in their data center to add more physical servers, they can’t afford power and cooling bills, they want to consolidate physical machines, and they want to consolidate physical people.

That’s right; the majority of people I speak with - employers and employees alike - say nonchalantly that they deploy virtual machines to avoid deploying more IT staff. While this is great for corporations, it doesn’t sound so good for IT job seekers.

A few examples; I went to a VMware Inc. User Group meeting in Boston on March 27, and one user gave a presentation about the virtualization project he oversaw at the paper manufacturing company called SAPPi in Maine.

“One reason we wanted to virtualize is we needed to lower our IT headcount. We needed to get rid of high end support and just keep desktop support,” the systems engineer/presenter said.

Similarly, at the growing law firm Owen Bird Law Corp. in Vancouver, British Columbia, Stephen Bakerman, the sole IT staffer, went with Virtual Iron virtualization to avoid adding more physical servers and having to hire more staff to help him manage it all.

“The cost savings is probably $100,000, and the time savings for me are incredible. Once everything is virtualized, I can run everything from my desktop remotely from my office or at home. I don’t have to hire someone else, and I would have if we kept adding servers,” Bakerman said.

Another company called QualComm Inc virtualized 60% of its data center environment and saw a similar side effect. At the VMware Virtualization Seminar Series in Providence, RI Feb 26, VMware presented a case study of the wireless technology company showing how it started with 1,200 servers and consolidated down to 100 (12:1 ratio) physical servers, increasing data center space and cutting back on power and cooling. That’s great. And the cherry on top? They have not had to increase their IT staff at all in 2.5 years.

Sure, I get how cool virtualization is, and the benefits it brings from a savings and management stand-point, but is anyone else concerned those IT college kids who dream of days spent engineering systems won’t be able to find a job? or is anyone worried about those system administrators who might get consolidated from many to few along with their servers?

I’m interested in hearing from IT folks; is virtualization leading to a virtual job market?

Intel Corp. is consolidating 130 of its data centers worldwide to just eight global hubs to significantly reduce the company’s total data center footprint.

Intel has started the process and will execute it within eight years. This initiative will reduce costs, improve server and storage utilization, create higher density and more energy efficient data centers, Intel reports, and could result in $1.4 to $1.8 billion in savings.

The plan is being implemented by replacing older technology with new multi-core Intel Xeon processors (of course), and virtualization to create higher density, energy efficient data centers.

This Intel Data Center blog video interview with Brently Davis, manager of Intel’s data center efficiency initiative, contains a lot more detail on how Intel intends to accomplish this feat. For example, there are a lot of low-power processors on the market today, even though some data center managers don’t use them fully.

Intel calls this a Green data center initiative, which I suppose any power efficiency initiative is, by default.

Either way, it serves as a good example for other companies whose data centers are full of under-utilized servers acting as power sponges.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud(EC2), a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the “cloud,” went down Saturday and a bunch of customers lost their application data. We saw this info in Data Center Knowledge and thought it was interesting enough to post here.

Amazon EC2 is basically a virtual data center that allows developers to increase or decrease capacity — from one to even thousands of server instances simultaneously — within moments.

Using Xen Virtualization, each virtual machine is the “equivalent of a system with a 1.7Ghz x86 processor, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth.”

The incident understandably ticked off EC2 users who lost their data, but it doesn’t look like they have much recourse, since this service is still considered beta and lacks service level agreements.

The outage signals a serious need for backup.

One user, Reuven, posted a comment saying, “To be blunt, this scares the hell out of me. What kind of redundancy does the current EC2 API have to avoid this from happening again? Does EC2 practice what it preaches and use SQS or some other queue service?”
This incident is considered by Amazon as growing pains of EC2 service, which is about a year old now.

Not too long ago I wrote a blog about Sun’s CIO saying the days corporate owned and operated data centers will be a thing of the past by 2015.

But virtualization/ cloud computing issues like this do nothing to win the confidence of conservative data center managers who likely sigh a collective “I told you so” from the safety of their brick and mortar facilities full of physical machines and back up.

It appears virtualization has officially become mainstream.

More than 10,000 people packed into the Moscone Center in San Francisco for the VMware Inc. sponsored VMworld conference. There were 147 sponsors and exhibitors this year, compared to 7,000 attendees and 82 sponsors and exhibitors last year.

There were also over 250 sessions and 100 hands-on labs to participate in, so choosing which to attend and write about for SearchDataCenter.com and SearchServerVirtualization.com was a bit overwhelming. Lots of the sessions were vendor run, with a few analyst and customer panel sessions thrown in.

A ton of new product news came out of VMworld as well, including VMware ESX Server 3i; AMD announced the new “Barcelona” quad-core processor; Cisco announced the VFrame-VMware Infrastructure integration; HP announced the new “Shorty” blade system; NetApp announced integration with VMware Site Recovery Manager; and Stratus/NEC announced new fault-tolerant server support for VMware Infrastructure that will ship in Q1 2008.

On day one, the keynote addresses came from VMware’s President and CEO Diane Greene, as well as Intel and AMD reps.

On day two, John Chambers,Chairman & CEO of Cisco Systems, Inc., talked about how virtualization in the data center is leading to better ROI for CEO’s concerned about bottom lines, and less headaches for CIO’s.

SearchServerVirtualization.com also announced the winners of the first annual “Best of VMworld” contest.

The final keynotes were delivered by Mendel Rosenblum and Diane Greene.

All in all, I thought it was a really good conference – tons of attendees, tons of products to check out, and high energy throughout.