Container Data Center

Next Generation Data Center/LinuxWorld 2008: Reporter’s Notebook

I expected this year’s joint LinuxWorld/Next Generation Data Center conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco Aug. 4-7 to be full of technology vendors, high-level technical sessions, product news and interesting characters.

As you can see (at right), my expectations were exceeded.

This year’s conference is packed, with three to four keynotes each day, a large array of tech vendors and numerous technical sessions, covering storage, security, networking, applications, facility infrastructure, and virtualization.

In the five sessions I attended today, which touched on all of the above, virtualization was a predominant topic of conversation in each.

For instance, Rajiv Ramaswami, the vice president and general manager of Cisco Systems Inc., (at left), gave a keynote this afternoon, “Data Center 3.0: How the Network Is Transforming the Data Center,” and explained that, eventually, everything in the data center will be virtualized, including networks.

In another session I attended on creating an efficient, profitable data center, hosted by the Rocky Mountain Institute, virtualization was listed again and again as a key way to reduce data center power consumption.

Cloud computing (aka distributed computing), which goes hand in hand with virtualization, was also a popular topic in the sessions I attended, including the kickoff keynote, “Stateless Computing: Scaling at Zero Marginal Cost above Capex,” by Jeffrey Birnbaum, the managing director and chief technology architect for Merrill Lynch.

In between sessions, I took a tour of Rackable Systems’ 40-foot containerized data center (at right), Ice Cube, which was one of the most popular attractions on the large show floor.

Ice Cube is packed with up to 22,400 Intel Xeon processing cores in Rackable’s own half-depth servers, has a 36-inch central isle to access servers and uses direct current, or DC, power and self-contained uninterruptible power supply, or UPS, technology.

Ice Cube can be configured with IBM BladeCenter servers as well.

Tomorrow I’ll check out a keynote session by Oracle CIO and Senior Vice President Mark Sunday on delivering business value with next-generation data centers and more sessions on green strategies for data centers, cloud computing and virtualization.

IBM BladeCenter servers now shipping in ICE Cube

Rackable Systems, Inc. entered into an agreement with IBM to offer IBM’s BladeCenter servers inside its ICE Cube modular data centers.

As part of this agreement, IBM BladeCenter will be the only blade server platform available for custom ICE Cubes. Prior to this agreement, Rackable’s containerized data centers only supported Rackable’s own server hardware.

IBM also started offering its own containerized data centers recently, as did Hewlett Packard with its version, called POD. Unlike most containerized data center offerings, HP is letting customers fill the POD with servers from any vendor - IBM, Dell, Sun Microsystems, or otherwise.

There are some other vendor neutral containerized data centers, like American Power Conversion (APC)’s InfraStruXure Express and Verari Systems Inc.’s Forest, though Verari does push customers to use its proprietary blade servers, a spokesperson said.

Effective today, Rackable’s ICE Cube modular data center will be outfitted with IBM BladeCenter T or HT systems, which are NEBS-3/ETSI-compliant, meaning they’re certified for use in telecommunications environments and carrier facilities.

The ICE Cube is available in 20 or 40 foot container sizes. BladeCenter-specific configurations of ICE Cube can reach densities up to 1,344 dual socket, Quad core Intel Xeon blades, or 672 quad socket, dual core AMD Opteron blades.