The staff at SearchDataCenter.com recently split our blog Server Specs into three new blogs in order to narrow our focus on specific aspects of the data center industry:

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Please bookmark the new blogs. Server Specs will remain online in archive mode. Thanks for reading.

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.

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).

Three Hewlett-Packard user groups — Encompass, ITUG (International Tandem Users Group), and HP-Interex — are consolidating into one big one called Connect.

The groups announced their intention to merge earlier this year, and just recently the membership of all three voted to do so. The new merged group will have more than 50,000 participants and will be led by Nina Buik, who was the former president of Encompass. The launch of Connect will take place at the HP Technology Forum & Expo in Las Vegas next month.

At least one of the reasons for the merger is to have a larger voice.

“One of the issues that’s at the top of the minds for all of our members is advocacy,” Buik said in an interview earlier this year. “You tend to get heard a lot more when your numbers are greater. When you go to HP or your vendor partners, they’re going to listen.”

That’s not to say they haven’t been listening; Buik said HP and other vendors have thus far been supportive of the merger.

“It can be looked at from two standpoints,” said Scott Healy, the former president of ITUG. “It can provde greater value because HP really does want to know what users are thinking.”

Buik said that IT folks in the trenches can no longer hunker down in the confines of the data center; they will also need new, non-technical skills, which Connect aims to help them obtain. “IT people really have to know how to pitch ideas to high-level business people,” Buik said. It goes without saying that communications skills free of technical jargon are increasingly required, as are project management skills and the ability to make oneself more visible to an organization’s decision-makers.

Through local, regional and national meetings, one of Connect’s primary goals is to educate members in regard to the brave new world of IT. For Buik, one of her personal interests is to help members safeguard their careers by engaging in some “recession-proofing” practices. “Yes, you should have green IT and virtualization current in your skills,” Buik said. “But don’t emphasize your technology knowledge; instead show how your skills can help reduce costs.”

Buik added that she didn’t think there would be a lot of overlap between the three groups, saying that each catered to different sets of HP customers. The groups’ board members will also be able to learn and share from one another — Encompass, for example, has conducted some webinars, while ITUG has more experience running shows internationally. The combined group will look to increase its online presence and add forums so that HP users can log on and talk to each other about IT issues they’re dealing with.

Features Writer Megan Santosus contributed to this report.

The race to develop software that can take full advantage of parallel processing is heating up, according to a story by John Markoff in The New York Times. Top microchip companies, computer scientists and software vendors are aligning themselves in three different research efforts to create software that can run chips that pack more cores than are available today. While the various research initiatives take different approaches, they appear to share an underlying motivation:

All three efforts are in response to a growing awareness that the software industry is not ready for the coming availability of microprocessors with 8 or 16 or more cores, or processing units, on a single chip. Computer and chip makers are concerned that if software cannot use the new hardware efficiently, customers will have little reason to upgrade.

Is there a real and compelling need for parallel processing? Or is it primarily an issue of driving hardware upgrade cycles? Let us know what you think.

Many mainframers to this day continue to lambast former technology writer Stewart Alsop for saying in 1991 that the mainframe would be dead in the next five years. Most people know that IBM’s big iron is thriving today. But without Lou Gerstner, who knows whether Alsop’s prediction may have come true.

As Frank Hayes writes in his Computerworld column, Microsoft is now in need of a Lou Gerstner to save its organization. As you probably know, Gerstner was CEO of IBM from 1993 until 2002 and is credited with turning the company around. Part of the company’s plans before Gerstner got there was to split into so-called “Baby Blues,” and most people in the organization felt that the mainframe would be going away. Hayes writes:

When he got there, Gerstner found a company that literally didn’t believe in its own future. The mainframe business — the core of IBM — was collapsing. Other business units were busy trying to turn themselves into stand-alone companies that could be spun off. The big blue ship was sinking, and everyone wanted off.

What Gerstner did was hold the ship together, but he did it by changing the entire culture within IBM:

What mattered was this: Gerstner led IBM to change. He had to. He understood that IBM’s old way of doing business just wouldn’t work any longer. With a plummeting stock price and 100,000 laid off, change was the only option.

Microsoft, Hayes said, is now at that moment, teetering on the edge of obscurity. Why? Because the core of Microsoft is Windows, and Hayes says that Vista is so bad that it could break the customer lock-in that Microsoft has had over users for years.

Vista breaks applications. It breaks device drivers. It breaks the strongest reasons for customers to stay with Microsoft. It actually threatens to break Microsoft’s customer lock-in.

That’s the one change Microsoft can least afford. And it’s the change Microsoft is actually plunging headlong into.

Hayes writes that he hopes Microsoft can right its ship in the same way that Gerstner righted IBM’s and kept big iron alive, thereby turning Alsop into a goat that the mainframe community cherishes like a household pet.

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.