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.

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.

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.

 Trends in data center power was the topic at AFCOM New England Chapter’s meeting this week, and apparently it’s a subject that resonates with members—at least judging by the nearly 100 attendees who showed up. (As the New England chapter enters its third year, President Rocko Graziano, whose real job is manager of infrastructure operations and services at L.L. Bean, said this was the largest meeting yet). Two speakers gave the audience their take on the some emerging trends they see taking shape.

Rudy Kraus, CEO of Validus DC Systems, a provider of direct current (DC) power infrastructure for data centers and telecommunications facilities, naturally sees a bright future for data centers powered by DC rather than AC-based electricity. Kraus cited a number of statistics from the likes of the Uptime Institute and McKinsey outlining just how much power data centers can save by switching to more efficient DC power. If data centers in the United States converted only 10% of their capacity to DC power, that would eliminate $1 billion in electric bills. The co2 emissions for a 10 megawatt data center with 17,500 servers would drop from 99,776,400 pounds to 59,865,840 pounds. Kraus invited members of the audience to do their own comparison by visiting an online calculator offered by Intel that analyzes facility-level efficiency of AC and DC servers.

The other speaker, Brian Ouellette, of J.S. Fleming Associates, a provider of power and cooling systems, spoke about the five power trends heading to a data center near you. The top trend, that energy efficiency is gaining importance, is pretty self-evident. The other four trends centered on ways to make data centers more efficient: New ways to scale UPS architectures into adaptive models that can adjust to changing power requirements; two-stage power distribution that reduces restrictions to cooling air flow, among other benefits; increasing use of monitoring with tools such as smart power strips (that monitor in-rack power) and branch circuit monitoring (that monitor each PDU output circuit). Ouellette also pointed out that data centers don’t have to go high-tech in order to become more efficient. When Ouellette asked the audience whether they use blanking panels in their data centers, only five people raised their hands. “Blanking panels are a great way to get the air where you need it,” he said. “Otherwise, you’ll get cross-contamination of air from your hot aisle and cold aisle.”

Google seems to be everywhere. But where does the omnipresent company actually exist? This topic has gained a lot of attention lately from this Google Data Center FAQ to the subsequent map put together by the folks at Pingdom. But why is the location of the super-secret-yet-ubiquitous Google getting such a large amount of attention?

Google’s data centers have had a lot of attention around the country. In Oregon, initial secrecy surrounding the company’s development of The Dalles facility was an object of a lot of public discussion, which resulted in the facility earning the moniker of “Voldemort” (a reference to the fact that the Harry Potter series character is most commonly referred to as “He Who Must Not Be Named,” and that local officials couldn’t say the “G” word while the facility was under construction). But Google let up a bit and put on a more public face in 2007, including a site tour by local reporters from The Dalles Chronicle. Google had changed its tune on keeping the activities on site “super secret” after a public backlash concerning the 15-year tax break the company received from the State of Oregon, and power consumption concerns. Indeed, the energy consumption of the company’s data centers has attracted national media attention, beyond IT-focused outlets. As the company has grown in power over the past ten years, it has increasingly attracted attention, first with its quirky dot-com work environments and employees (including Google bean-bag chairs that grace the Googleplex), to controversy over acceptance of Chinese government restrictions over search-engine deployment.

But the company hasn’t turned to total transparency with all of their locations, and thus, members of the IT community still get excited when they can learn one more “secret” about where the company actually exists.

So the question that’s nagging me is, what can everyone else learn from Google’s experience? Secrecy is good for business, but up until what point? I come to TechTarget with a background in journalism and public affairs, so this question is not unfamiliar to me. Many companies rely on keeping their activities and intellectual property secured, it’s common in business. But, is Google being too extreme? Do their data center facility locations really need to be kept on the “down-low”? And why do datacenter insiders care?

I asked this question to Robert Cringley, of I, Cringley. And he gave me some interesting insight into the big-picture as it were.

“Google wants a peering relationship with every broadband ISP of substance,” explained Cringley. So, by having data centers located in proximity to ISPs, the ISPs and end-users benefit through high-speed connections at low cost. However, the self-serving part is that this relationship makes everyone more dependant on Google for everything (storage, search, carriage, etc.). “It’s all aimed at the ultimate replacement by Google of current audio and video distribution networks. Look 5-10 years out. That’s why geographic distribution is so important, because they really need to have a copy of the Google data set one hop from every broadband ISP.”

What do you think?

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.

MTechnology, a research firm that runs probabilistic risk assessment analyses of electric power sources, has released a study finding that flywheel-based uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems are more reliable than the more common battery-based UPS during short outages of 10 seconds or less.

The study was paid for by Active Power, a flywheel-based UPS company, so you can take the conclusions for what you think they’re worth. Martin Olsen, the product manager and development director at Active Power, said that they “made it very clear that (MTechnology) would be doing the study, and to make it as objective as possible. That’s what they do for a living.”

Flywheel-based UPS systems have gained some traction in data centers as an alternative or complement to battery-based UPS. Terremark, a large data center colocation company, just recently installed flywheels instead of batteries at a new campus in Virginia. How it works is the primary utility power gets the mechanical flywheel spinning. When the utility power cuts out, inertia keeps the flywheel spinning at thousands of rotations per minute. That rotation is harnessed into power that can support the data center for short periods of time until either the utility power returns or the switch is made to backup generators.

The MTechnology study compared a flywheel UPS to double-conversion battery UPS and found that the flywheel was almost seven times more reliable than the battery UPS during short outages (10 seconds or less). During longer outages, failure rates were about the same.

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.

After encountering each other on numerous customer engagements, Hyperic Inc., an open source systems management company, and The OpenNMS Group, an open source network management company, are officially forming a partnership. At the heart of the partnership is an agreement to provide integrated products and services. The first integration product will be released at the end of March.

According to Stacey Schneider, Hyperic’s senior director of marketing, the partnership is natural fit for both companies. “We were both talking to one of the country’s largest healthcare providers who wanted integration between our top-level systems and application management tools along with OpenNMS’ network administration tools,” she said. “We’ve run across each other often at customer sites and it made sense to formalize a partnership.

The first integration phase will meld together various alerts and allow customers to navigate between Hyperic’s HQ product and The OpenNMS Group’s OpenNMS platform. Next week, the two companies will lay out their roadmap for future integrations.

What might this partnership mean in day-to-day terms for data centers? Take a large distributed data center with lots of network traffic, Web servers and database servers. Any problems experienced by end users require IT operations personnel to access information about all aspects of the stack. OpenNMS can monitor the traffic network while Hyperic HQ can monitor application-level performance metrics such as CPU consumption.

The idea, said Schneider, is to give IT operations a more complete view of their environments so that they can get at the root of problems.

San Diego, Calif.-based Verari Systems has joined Sun Microsystems and Rackable Systems, Inc. in the data center mobilization trend with its new Verari FOREST containerized data center.

These mobile data center offerings address the need for space and low cost power. Companies without room for more servers can buy one of these containers for less than it would cost to build a brick and mortar data center, fill it with servers and storage, and plop it down in an area where electricity costs are low - like an abandoned coal mine in Japan.

Case in point, Verari’s FOREST container can house up to 1400 blade-based compute servers or nearly 12 petabytes of blade-based storage using Verari’s new BladeRack 2 X-Series platforms in the modular unit.

Sun’s containerized data center, project BlackBox, is in a standard metal shipping container — 20 feet long, eight feet wide and eight feet tall — and can house about 250 single unit rack servers. Introduced in March 2007, Rackable Systems Inc.’s Concentro is a 40 foot by 8 foot shipping container that houses up to 1,200 of Rackable Systems’ rack-mount DC powered servers and up to 3.5 petabytes of storage. The company came out with a denser mobile data center called ICE cube in October. IBM came out with one, the Scalable Modular Data Center in July 2007.

Who first invented the idea of a mobile data center? Probably Google, which patented the containerized data center in October, and which reportedly has been using them for its own purposes since long before Sun or anyone else did. Whether the patent will cause issues for other vendors has yet to be seen, as no infringement suits have been filed yet.

But for all this activity, mobile data centers aren’t exactly selling like hotcakes; Sun announced its first customer in June 2007, and Rackable hasn’t disclosed any, other than saying they have some.