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.

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. 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.

Intel Corp.’s Senior Vice President and General Manager, Digital Enterprise Group, Pat Gelsinger previewed Intel’s upcoming processor technologies this week, including details of a six-core processor due out later this year.

Gelsinger also detailed Intel’s new Itanium processor, codenamed Tukwila, as well as Nehalem and Larrabee, a future processor slated to have eight cores.

I’ll interrupt the oohing and ahhing here to note that Sun Microsystems Inc. has had an eight-core processor, Niagara, since 2006 and came out with an updated version, Niagara 2, or UltraSPARC T2, in August of 2007 for commodity servers.

But back to Intel’s big news; Intel plans to release its first 6-core, 45nm processor, code named Dunnington, later this year. The processor will feature a single-die with six cores and will be socket-compatible with the Caneland platform. Intel’s first 45nm processor, announced in November 2007, was a quad-core.

Dunnington will support FlexMigration technology, which supports live virtual machine (VM) migration across both 65nm and 45nm high-k Intel Core microarchitecture-based servers, so users who invested in 65nm quad-core Xeon processors recently won’t lose their investment.

Tukwila, meanwhile, is Intel’s next Itanium processor. With four cores, 30MB total cache, Quickpath interconnects, a dual Integrated Memory Controller and Remote Access Service features, the silicon holds 2 billion transistors and is expected to hold more than double the performance potential than current Itanium processors.

As for Nehalem, future versions will have from two to eight cores, with Simultaneous Multi-threading, resulting in 4 to 16 thread capability. Nehalem also supports four times the memory bandwidth than Intel’s highest-performance Xeon processor-based systems of today, with up to 8 MB level-3 cache, 731 million transistors, and QuickPath interconnects up to 25.6GB per second, Intel reported.

Meanwhile, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Advanced Micro Device’s (AMD) 65nm quad-core Opteron processor, code-named Barcelona, will finally begin shipping in April after coming to a major standstill. The company told the world to expect shipments in September 2007, but discovered an errata and put off mass shipments of the processor.

AMD announced its plans for 45nm processors, code-named Shanghai, earlier this month and expects those quad-core processors to begin shipping later this year.

ORLANDO - One session at the conference for Share, a user group for mainframe and other large systems users, compared building a data center out with Intel-based Linux servers with a mainframe architecture that has virtual Linux servers. Keep in mind that this was at the Share conference, so the bias was clear: Scale up beats scale out. But the number-crunching exercise was still interesting examine in terms of hidden costs you might not expect from scale out.

First, the session was by Mark Post, a technical support engineer for Novell who does a lot of work around Linux on System z. He spoke about a specific project he was involved in with a previous employer, which he didn’t name. He also stressed that Novell was not involved with this project at all. That company did consulting for a client looking to build out an Intel-based Linux infrastructure. He then compared that with an estimated build-out for a z9 mainframe. Here’s the 3-year breakdown:

The only issue I might take with Post’s assessment is software. Post mainly looked at database and operating system licensing costs, but didn’t compare other third-party software costs; for example, systems management software from CA or BMC. One of mainframers’ biggest complaint is third-party software costs, which can often run them millions of dollars depending on what they have.

Still, even if you’re talking a couple million more on the mainframe side, it still shows a savings over the Lintel build-out. For a more complete breakdown of the figures, check out Post’s presentation.