LinuxWorld

LinuxWorld/Next Generation Data Center postmortem

IDG World Expo, which organized the LinuxWorld and Next Generation Data Center Conference & Expo (NGDC) Aug. 4-7, 2008, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, announced the “successful completion of the show” and claimed that combined, the shows attracted nearly 10,000 participants.

An official audit of the actual number of attendees won’t be available until October 2008, but I doubt there were that many people there, and I’m not the only one. The buzz at the show this year was that there were far fewer attendees than in previous years. I also attended the VMworld 2007 show at the Moscone Center last September, and know what 10,000 people looks like at Moscone. This crowd was much thinner.

Not that having fewer than 10,000 attendees is a bad thing; some say it signals true success for Linux; the buzz about the operating system has fizzled out because it is mainstream. That might be, but I think our toilet of an economy might also be at play in potentially lower attendance.

As for the program, there were 200 combined educational sessions, tutorials and hands-on-labs among 17 tracks, including applications, mobile Linux, virtualization and advanced facilities management in the data center. We covered a handful of them, which can be found on our LinuxWorld/ NGDC roundup site.

The themes throughout the show were mobile Linux, power consumption and green technologies, and virtualization. Keynote presentations from executives at Merrill Lynch, McKesson, Cisco Systems Inc., IBM, Citrix Systems Inc. and Lucasfilm Ltd., explored many of these themes.

On the exhibit show floor were companies including Astaro Corp., Barracuda Networks, Copan Systems, Opengear, Canonical, Access, Oracle Corp., DataSynapse, Cisco, Fujitsu, Intel, Talend, Brocade, Ubucon, Bivio Networks, VMware, SugarCRM, Rackable Systems, Wind River and Dice.

New features included the Mobile Linux Conference, Software Central, Installfest for Schools, an open source voting demonstration, and the Golden Penguin Bowl.

The Golden Penguin Bowl was a contest between three geeks from Novell and SUSE against three nerds from Ubuntu who battled over who can answer the most obscure trivia regarding sci-fi, high-tech, Linux and all things geek.

The LinuxWorld.com Product Excellence Awards were announced on Tuesday, Aug. 5, and a complete list of winners can be found on the LinuxWorld and the Next Generation Data Center Conference sites.

All the keynote addresses from LinuxWorld and NGDC can be downloaded from the LinuxWorld website or the NGDC website.

Next year’s LinuxWorld Conference & Expo and Next Generation Data Center Conference & Expo are scheduled to take place Aug. 10-13, 2009, at the Moscone Center.

Data center efficiency advice dispensed at LinuxWorld/Next Generation Data Center

The fun at LinuxWorld/Next Generation Data Center in San Francisco just does not stop.

Today I attended the keynote address by Oracle Corp. CIO Mark Sunday and heard some pretty cool details about Oracle’s new mega data center, which the company is breaking ground on this month.

I also attended packed sessions on virtualization and cloud computing and ended the day at a panel discussion about creating a more efficient (i.e., green data center).

The panel discussion included major-industry players including Jack Pouchet, Director Energy Initiatives, Emerson Network Power; Michael Patterson, the senior thermal architect at Intel; John Pflueger, a technology strategist at Dell Inc.; Christian Belady, PE, the principal power and cooling architect at Microsoft; and Joe Prisco, a senior systems and technology group engineer at IBM Corp.

The panelists spent much of the hour-and-15 minute discussion arguing about the best technologies and methods for greening a data center, and I’m sure the 50 or so attendees extracted some useful information from the panelists’ back-and-forths.

Each panelist also offered up a tip on how to easily increase the efficiency in a data center, including the following:

• Belady suggested IT managers incentivize employees to measure server power efficiency and reward those who come up with ways to add efficiency in the data center; without incentives, greening data centers probably won’t get done.
  As a side note, Belady made an interesting comment (or threat) about the heat threshold of hardware; he said Microsoft has pushed hardware vendors to create equipment that can withstand up to 95 degree temperatures. “If they don’t, Microsoft won’t buy that vendor’s equipment at scale,” he said.
• Patterson suggested IT administrators raise their hot aisle temperatures to about 80 degrees Fahrenheit to reduce cooling costs, so long as the equipment can take that temperature.
• Prisco suggested that IT administrators check hot aisle temperatures using nothing more than their good old central nervous system.”Your hot aisle is supposed to be hot, and you can tell when heat is escaping into the cold aisle without instruments. Just feel it with your hands,” Prisco said.

  Then, of course, do something to contain the heat better.

There is more to be said about creating a power efficiency data center, which will be continued on SearchDataCenter.com.

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.

Next Generation Data Center and LinuxWorld conferences

The second annual Next Generation Data Center (NGDC)/ LinuxWorld Conference &Expo takes place Aug. 4-7 at Moscone Center North in San Francisco. SearchDataCenter.com and SearchEnterpriseLinux.com will be there to bring you news and information from some of the many technical sessions, keynotes and the show floor.

A few of the data center technical sessions we plan to cover include “Systems Thinking for a Radically Efficient and Profitable Data Center” by the Rocky Mountain Institute; and “Cloud Computing and the Data Center of the Future” by
Sam Charrington, the VP of product management and marketing at Appistry Inc.; and “Containers, Virtualization and Live Migration” given by Kir Kolyshkin, the project manager of the OpenVZ Project.

Some keynote addresses we plan to cover include “Stateless Computing - Scaling at Zero Marginal Cost above Capex” by Jeffrey Birnbaum, the managing director and chief technology architect at Merrill Lynch; “Data Center 3.0: How the Network is Transforming the Data Center” by Cisco Systems Inc. vice president and general manager Rajiv Ramaswami; and “Data Center of the Future: How the Delivery of Technology Will Change” by Citrix Systems Inc. CTO Simon Crosby.

Be sure to check in with us this week for these items and more.