server virtualization

HP’s energy efficiency crusade to control server, data center power

A few Hewlett Packard (HP) executives visited with me yesterday to discuss their Green data center mission - and surprisingly, they admit that it doesn’t always mean using HP hardware.

They started off our meeting with a discussion about new and existing server power control tools, which I’m not convinced many IT admins actually take advantage of.

HP’s new Dynamic Power Capping tool within Insight Power Manager lets IT set power caps on HP servers based on peak load trends to prevent over-provisioning of power. The cap can be set on single servers or on an entire chassis of blade servers, and can also be based on user-defined policies, according to HP’s VP of Enterprise Server and Storage Infrastructure Software Mark Linesch.

HP’s ProLiant servers shipped within the past few years already have the hardware for this feature baked into them, so ProLiant users need only do a firmware upgrade to add the Dynamic Power Capping feature, Linesch said.

“HP has invested a huge amount of money in green technology not just for the sake of being green. It has very practical implications that save companies significant amounts of money,” Linesch said.

Other companies offer power capping features on their servers as well, including IBM. IT can set a power cap for IBM servers and IBM BladeCenter systems via Active Energy Manager firmware, when the firmware supports capping.

These tools sound great, but I question whether or not power capping features are actually being used in data centers. I’d like to hear from users about this; power control features have existed on servers for many years, but does anyone use them? Is a tool like HP’s Dynamic Power Capping a viable option for virtualized servers?

HP’s execs also told me about their vendor-neutral data center efficiency consultancy services. Since HP’s acquisition of EYP Mission Critical Facilities Inc. a year ago this month, HP  has offered vendor agnostic consulting services to data centers to help them (for a fee) measure energy efficiency, without any pressure to use HP equipment, said Bill Kosik, energy and sustainability director of HP’s EYP Mission Critical Facilities group.

“That was actually part of the deal when we were acquired; we wanted to stay vendor neutral and we have been able to do that,” Kosik said.

So far, HP’s EYP group has performed consultancy work (including thermal mapping and energy analysis) for about 30 data centers that are either on the brink of a major power consumption dilemna or in a transition phase and need help planning, designing and developing their data center, Kosik said.

On November 3, HP announced new EYP services packaged in a tidy bundle, as vendors love to do, called HP Energy Efficiency Design and Analysis Services, which includes energy efficiency analysis and design services that help data centers meet compliance regulations like those from the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED).

And of course, HP isn’t the only company offering  data center efficiency software and services to data centers these days. The list is long, which is great for consumers.

Eight reasons data center managers should thank Wall Street

Earlier this week I spoke with Rob Gardos, the CEO of the New York-based IT automation company GridApp Systems, about his paper “Eight Reasons Data Center Managers should thank Wall Street for the Financial Meltdown.”

As a reporter, I am keenly aware that when it comes to spinning crap into silk, product vendors are pros. So I was pretty skeptical when I saw the title of his paper.

So I asked Gardos to explain why in the world data center managers should thank anyone for the economic cesspool in which they now exist.

For starters, companies have had to reduce their head count because of the economy, so they have half the IT staff to do the same amount of work, he said.

And this is good?

Well, no, but data centers can’t have servers failing left and right and unorganized systems when there are fewer people to manage the issues. “This meltdown has accelerated the path to something dramatically more efficient,” Gardos said. “People are coming up with a new paradigm and are finding ways to improve their systems, because they have to. People are looking at how to minimize costs and how to cut down on tasks that don’t add value to the organization.”

Now that it is time to tighten ship, Gardos said data centers are doing things that will result in long-term benefits:

1.  Reducing costs, energy consumption and waste. Businesses have to find ways to minimize energy costs in the data center, reduce overspending on compliance efforts and automate time-consuming tasks.

2. Core data center priorities. IT professionals have seen the true centrality of product and project performance to company competitiveness. The downturn is to thank for the newfound clarity and redefined priorities.

3. Frugality. Businesses are forced to check line items and cut frivolous spending. This nuisance is a blessing in disguise and will improve spending for years to come.
4. Innovation. IT decision makers and managers have put their heads together to improve efficiency, productivity and competitiveness. This trial-by-fire brainstorming cbreathe new life into companies.

5. Cultivating talent. This includes talent. There is a surplus of once untouchable and highly qualified IT professionals swimming around. IT managers can beef up their staff for less.

6. Green IT. Ideas for operational savings have actually provoked businesses to engage in greening techniques. Many companies will emerge with lowered costs and a greener data center.

7. Competitiveness. Businesses are learning to do more with less, and those habits will continue after the crisis and improve competitiveness in times of prosperity.

8. Long-term benefits. Things are tight now but will the downturn actually spur budget increases in the post-short term for projects that have been placed on the backburner? Lessons learned may actually induce additional spending on virtualization, automation and other cost-savings initiatives.

Of course, it should be noted here that GridApp provides data center automation equipment and would probably love to see data centers using its tools, but Gardos made an effort to remain vendor neutral during our discussion.

“It is clear that infrastructure management and automation will drive efficiency forward – -things like [IT automation software company] BladeLogic make a lot of sense when there are fewer employees to do the work,” Gardos said. “Companies have to change their processes to do more with fewer people, and get more value out of the people the company has.”

He made some good points , and I wonder how many companies now lay off employees only to find themselves buying expensive software to automate the tasks their staff once performed. Seems likely that the data center automation market could ultimately benefit from these hard economic times.

Data Center efficiency tips and tricks from Data Center Decisions

The overarching theme of the Data Center Decisions conference in Chicago last week was energy; how much data centers use, how much they pay for it, and how much they could be saving. 

The keynote addresses on both days of the conference, October 24 & 24, covered data center efficiency at length, with plenty of tips and resources to help data centers cut back on power consumption, though it appears that not many people are taking the necessary measures to reduce consumption. Because of this, government plans to step in and mandate power saving measures to prevent future climate change.

As awful as this sounds, government intervention is a necessary measure at this point, because facility spending has increased tremendously over the past two years with no end in sight, and with all of this additional compute capacity, the outlook for the environment is grim.

The energy required to power and cool a single server emits four tons of greenhouse gases, so by 2012, data centers worldwide will exceed greenhouse gas emissions of the airline industry, according to Ken Brill, President and Executive Director for the Uptime Institute, who gave a keynote address called “Revolutionizing Data Center Efficiency” on October 24 based on the McKinsey / Uptime Institute report.

So, why has data center power consumption spun out of control? In addition to the increasing demands from Web 2.0, 80% of today’s compute demand is performed on distributed systems with only 5% to 20% utilization rates, whereas before 1980, mainframes were used, and at much higher utilization rates, Brill said.

The way to reverse the trend sounds easy enough; use virtualization to consolidate systems and increase server utilization rates, and also kill comatose servers.

Simple as these steps sound, it can be difficult to do when you don’t keep track of servers to know their utilization rates, Brill said. In this case, implementing a formal de-commissioning program using ITIL to document, bill back and audit the systems is a first step. 

“If we want to become energy efficient we have to become better engineers,” Brill said.

Other measures that can make a major impact are correctly setting the cooling unit set point, shutting off humidification and de-humidification functions, implementing hot aisle/cold aisle containment, turning off unneeded cooling units, and if possible, increasing eco-friendly water side cooling, Brill said.

Data centers that are adding hardware should make an effort to buy efficient power supplies and hardware, which all the major vendors offer, and rightsize memory to avoid using excess power, Brill said

If your asking yourself who in IT has enough extra time to do all of these things, Brill had a suggestion for that, too; appoint an “Energy Czar” - someone who cares about the environment and wasting power - to make sure the data center facilities and operations are as efficient as possible.

Of course, the Energy Czar could also get a bonus here and there for lowering the company power bills, which most certainly will happen when even some of the above measures are implemented.

Companies can also use efficiency software tools or hire outside consultants to help increase energy efficiency, and there are plenty of choices today.

vCloud initiative: Enterprises moving to clouds

On Monday at VMWorld, a new cloud computing intiative was launched: vCloud. As James Urquhart pointed out at his blog, The Wisdom of Clouds, VMWorld is turning into a big cloud computing event.

Urquhart posits that the combination of big news signals entry into a new era for data centers:

The long and the short of it is that we have entered into a new era, in which data centers will no longer simply be collections of servers, but will actually be computing units in and of themselves–often made up of similar computing units (e.g. containers) in a sort of fractal arrangement. Virtualization is key to make this happen (though server virtualization itself is not technically absolutely necessary). So are powerful management tools, policy and workflow automation, data and compute load portability, and utility-type monitoring and metering systems.

Recently, I discussed the concept of a “hybrid” model of cloud computing with Steve Brodie, CMO of SkyTap, and Ian Knox, Director of Product Management at SkyTap. The company announced the launch of their API that allows the transfer of existing dynamic environments to the cloud. The main focus of the SkyTap API is to enhance software quality testing, and our colleagues at SearchSoftwareQuality.com discussed the implications of the announcement for that market (Virtual environments ease software development, testing) last week.

This week, SkyTap announced that they were joining the vCloud initiative, bringing their hybrid model into the mix. The company offers a different service than other cloud hosting providers, in that their API allows users to spin up their existing infrastructure into the cloud, rather than having to build applications within the cloud.

The company explained the advantages of this model in their VMWorld press release:

Using a ‘hybrid’ cloud computing model, organizations now have a way to rapidly realize the benefits of ‘cloud economics’. The hybrid approach provides a low-risk adoption path to cloud computing and can deliver outstanding ROI compared to dynamic environments that fluctuate dramatically and are expensive to administer. In a hybrid model, companies may run their production applications onsite while conducting all their development and testing in the cloud. This enables on-demand scaling of test environments as needed and eliminates the cost of underutilized hardware. This approach also allows organizations to benefit from the management and automation capabilities of a fully automated hosted virtual lab solution, leading to huge productivity increases.

Knox ran me through a quick demonstration of how the company’s Virtual Lab works, and I was pleasantly surprised with the relative ease with which a user could connect in a virtual classroom or testing environment. The virtual lab is essentially a pool or library of hosted virtualized infrastructure that allows organizations to scale up and down lab resources as needed. Sometimes I find that the cloud is confusing to the less spatially-oriented among us, but the company’s website has a great illustrative graphic that shows how it works:

The folks at SkyTap are quite optimistic, dare I say certain, that cloud computing is the future of IT.

“It’s kind of inevitable,” said Knox. “It’s going to happen. The huge capacity headache no longer has to be borne by every company out there. With companies experiencing high pain right now, solutions like this make it so easy to get going.”

Users who have taken advantage of this easy way out of the pain concur.

“The promise of cloud computing is enormous, but with most cloud services providers you need to buy into their way of doing things from the start,” said Peter Horadan, of Admit One Security. “Skytap, on the other hand, does virtualization the same way most IT teams are used to doing it. Teams can keep their same processes and skills and use Skytap Virtual Lab as an extension of their existing environment as needed.”

If you’re interested in what is going on at VMWorld, we have it covered.

Unisys updates server with six-core Intel Xeon, enhances services

Blue Bell, Pa.-based Unisys Corp. announced its new ES7000 Model 7600R Enterprise Server using Intel Xeon six-core processors (Dunnington), which Intel also announced today; along with new business assurance services and software in the Unisys Infrastructure Management Suite.

Unisys’ new ES7000 Model 7600R Enterprise Server is based on the new six-core Intel Xeon processor 7400 series. It has 16 sockets providing up to 96 processor cores. According to Unisys, the 7600R is designed for database and online transaction processing environments, large-scale consolidation and virtualization initiatives and business intelligence deployments with Microsoft SQL Server.

Model 7600R can support consolidation of 64 SQL Server databases into a single four-socket, six-core Xeon processor configuration – with 24 total processor cores – which Unisys claims is better than a commodity server farm of 64 dual-socket, single-core Xeon processor servers with 128 total processor cores, while using less disk and providing better response times.

The new server also supports VMware ESX Server and Microsoft Hyper-V, and supports dynamic partitioning so users can add more processor, memory and I/O resources on the fly without disrupting system operations. Unisys plans to introduce secure partitioning in the first half of 2009, which provides partitioning capabilities at the processor core level.

Prices for the ES7000 Model 7600R range from $26,430 to $135,000. Unisys will exhibit the ES7000 Model 7600R at VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas, Sept. 15-18.

Unisys business services
Unisys also announced new Business Assurance Services that help companies evaluate the cost and benefits of disaster recovery products, reduce the time it takes to deploy the best ones and reduce operational costs by improving resource utilization.

“We are vendor-agnostic and will implement whichever technology is best for the client. It could be a Unisys product, or it could be from another vendor,” said Jody Little, vice president of solutions and services at Unisys.

The Unisys Business Assurance Services, using discovery processes and tools developed with support from Unisys partner GlassHouse Technologies, include the following:

• Unisys Disaster Recovery Architecture Service, which provides a methodology to build application and data disaster recovery capabilities.
• Unisys Backup Modernization Service, which helps clients select new technologies and services to support backup environments at both core and remote sites.
• Unisys Data Protection for Backup Service, which helps clients improve backup and restore operations for business information, reducing costs by improving utilization of assets. Unisys experts also make vendor-independent recommendations and create a prioritized action plan

Unisys has also added new management software components to its Infrastructure Management Suite, which automates and orchestrates management of a real-time IT infrastructure. More information can be found on the Unisys website.

VMmark a server vendor leapfrog game

This week I wrote a follow up story on VMware Inc.’s virtualization performance benchmarking tool, VMmark, and found it is mainly used by vendors as a way to market their servers.

Server vendors run the VMmark test under a set of guidelines and submit results to VMware for posting. It is my suspicion that vendors play leapfrog with VMmark by looking at exsiting VMmark results and only submitting their performance results when theirs are as good or better.

For instance, IBM submitted a benchmark for its 16-core System x3850 M2
running VMware ESX v3.5, which trumped the other published as of March 2008. IBM then published a press release to brag about the results, but within a few months, Dell submitted results three PowerEdge systems sporting better virtual machine (VM) performance than IBM, and Hewlett Packard (HP) beat them all out with its ProLiant DL585 G5 server results published August 5.

HP also sent out an email to press this week boasting their top 32-core results, but didn’t mention one minor detail; they are the only vendor with results in the 32-core category so far. Sure, they are number one. They are the only one.

System Administrator Bob Plankers sums this game up nicely in his blog with a post called “Why VMmark Sucks.”  Here is what Plankers had to say:

“Having a standard benchmark to measure virtual machine performance is useful. Customers will swoon over hardware vendors’ published results. Virtualization companies will complain that the benchmark is unfair. Then they’ll all get silent, start rigging the tests, scrape and cheat and skew the numbers so that their machines look the greatest, their hypervisor is the fastest. Along the way it’ll stop being about sheer performance and become performance per dollar. Then CapEx vs. OpEx. Watt per tile. Heat per VM. Who knows, except everybody will be the best at something, according to their own marketing department.”

In addition, the benchmark is a real pain to set up and run, and the ‘free’ VMmark software requires other expensive software to work. According to VMware’s website,
VMmark requires  licenses for the following software packages;

• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Release 2 Enterprise Edition (32-bit)—thre 32-bit copies per tile (two for virtual machines and one for that tile’s client system), and one 64-bit copy per tile (for the Java server virtual machine)
• Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Enterprise Edition
• SPECjbb2005 Benchmark
• SPECweb2005 Benchmark

Plankers said he won’t be wasting any time or money running VMmark. “Instead, I’ll be in meetings explaining to folks why we are maxed out at 30 VMs per server when the vendor says they’ll run 50. Or why we chose VMware over Xen, when Xen claims 100 on the same hardware. I’ll have to remember the line from the FAQ that says “that VMmark is neither a capacity planning tool nor a sizing tool.”

Which begs the question: if it isn’t for use in sizing or capacity planning, exactly what is it good for?”

VMware says the benchmark is good for users who are making hardware purchasing decisions.

“The intention [of VMmark] is that customers can look at the results and make decisions based on what they see. It isn’t just about the fastest server; it’s about making system comparisons; between blades and rackmounts or a two-core or four-core system. Someone can see how much more performance they get from upgrading to four core processors, for instance,” said Jennifer Anderson, the senior director of research and development at VMware.

This makes sense, but as Plankers said, users should beware of benchmark manipulation by vendors and know that the results do not reflect the same workloads that users will run in their own data center environments.

Virtual machines per server: A viable metric for hardware selection?

When server vendors introduce new blade servers these days, they often mention virtualization in the same breath, often touting the number of virtual machines (VMs) their hardware can support. But those numbers are hardly the result of scientific method.

For instance, San Diego, Calif.-based Verari Systems recently announced that its VMware ESX 3.5-certified VB1257 for BladeRack 2 XL supports up to twice as many VMs as competitive offerings (16). After speaking with Verari, I asked the competition — Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and Dell — how many VMs their blades can hypothetically support, and was given some big numbers.

But are these server vendors asking the right question? According to Anne Skamarock, a research director at Focus Consulting, the answer is no. Although vendors boast about the number of VMs their hardware supports, “it really is a silly way to look at it,” she said.

“The number of VMs supported depends on the workload. For CPU-intensive workloads, memory will also be a significant factor in performance,” Skamarock said. ”I have spoken with customers who are running 30 VMs per 8-core system and expect to increase that to 50 VMs per system.”

Skamarock said Virtual Desktop Infrastructure adds another twist. “The rule of thumb is six to eight virtual desktops per core, but again, memory will be a big issue here depending on the OS.”

According to preliminary data from SearchDataCenter.com’s 2008 Purchasing Intentions Survey, 61% of the respondents run less than 10 VMs per server, though 33% run 10 to 25, and a mere 5% run more than 25 VMs on a server.

Vendors make big VM support claims

According to VMware Inc.’s website, server consolidation ratios commonly exceed 10 virtual machines per physical processor; so presumably, a blade server with two CPUs, like Verari’s VB1257, should be able to support at least 20 VMs.

Within HP’s ProLiant blade server line, the ProLiant BL460c/465c and BL680c/BL685c would be a good choice for a virtual server platform, primarily because they offer a large memory footprint, which means more than 16 VMs per blade in both cases, plus more network expansion and storage performance, HP spokesman Eric Krueger said.

“Keep in mind of course the number of VMs always vary – the number could be higher or lower depending on the needs the application/VM — but based on the rule of thumb … the BL460c can support up to 16 VMs and the BL680c up to 32,” Krueger said.

Sun Microsystems Inc. claims its Sun Blade servers pack two and three times that many VMs. The Sun Blade X6250, which has up to eight cores with Intel Xeon processors, 64 GB RAM, 110 Gbps I/O and 800GB of internal storage, supports 36 VMs; the Sun Blade X6450, with two or four dual-core or quad-core Intel Xeon processors and up to 96 GB of memory, can support up to 42 VMs and the Sun Blade X8450 with 16 cores per module and 128 GB Memory, supports up to 48 VMs, according to Sun.

Dell was hesitant to name a number of VMs that its PowerEdge blade servers can support, because the number is dependent on a number of factors, like workload, memory, I/O. A spokesperson did say that “Dell has blades that support up to 66 loaded VMs. This is based on VMware’s VMmark benchmark test,” a spokesperson said. “This is an area where we are doing quite a bit of work, so stay tuned.”

So I’m wondering: Are VM support numbers a consideration when buying server hardware, or is it too subjective? Let us know what you think.

Is ‘green IT’ really dead?

An article by Steve Denegri over at Serial Storage Wire, The Data Center’s Green Direction is a Dead End, asks some interesting questions about the “green” movement in IT, and has caused blogger Robin Harris to ask more questions about the severity of the issue.

Denegri makes a few comparisons between the storage industry and the auto industry that are a distraction, and misleading. If the storage industry fails to make greater moves toward energy efficiency, it could have dire consequences.

To get a glimpse of the future of storage, the automotive industry saw a major transition to energy-efficient products beginning in the late 1970s. Since that time, the automotive industry has seen its supplier-to-OEM ratio shrink by a factor of five. If your company is one of the many suppliers to OEMs in the storage industry, then you should recognize that this “green” trend, over the long term, bodes poorly for your company’s existence, and consequently, your personal livelihood. The cold, hard truth is that an ample supply of energy is necessary to grow any business over the long-term, and the storage industry is shying away from the harsh reality that a sufficient amount of energy is, unfortunately, not available to keep the industry growing.

While consolidation may happen to cut costs (we see it all the time in many industries), I don’t know if this is necessarily a result of the “green trend” as much as it is a result of the general economic growth model that exists in which companies are expected to be more and more profitable in subsequent years.

In a study by The Uptime Institute called The Invisible Crisis in the Data Center: The Economic Meltdown of Moore’s Law, a report which was published at roughly the same time as the aforementioned EPA study, the authors cite that the three-year cost of powering a server exceeds the purchase cost of the server beginning next year. Imagine buying a new car faced with the dilemma that the gas required over the first three years of ownership will exceed the cost of the vehicle. Now consider how the storage industry would respond to the problem: furnish the consumer with frequent refreshes of new models of vehicles that get more miles to the gallon. Chalk up yet another example of the storage industry furnishing its customers with products that they do not really want. The customer wants cheaper gas, not the financial burden of a new car every few years.

Sure, some customers want to be able to continue to use their old servers, but many are seeing the benefit of new technologies that provide more computing power at less energy cost. To say that the storage industry will be providing customers with products they don’t really want isn’t necessarily a legitimate statement. Customers can’t get cheaper energy, that’s not how the energy market works today – you pay the price that energy deregulation has helped create. Faced with the impending increase in energy costs cited in the Uptime study and the EPA report, companies are going to be looking for better technologies. Hybrid cars are the automotive industry’s response to higher prices at the pump; and, despite Denegri’s assertion that customers don’t really want a new car every few years, they seem to be selling pretty well (especially compared to the passé Hummer and SUV sales). As we know, these technologies don’t immediately advance to the most optimized version in one step. Instead, new versions come out and companies can choose to upgrade when they do, or hang on and wait until the next better version arrives on the scene.

However, data center computing has achieved its favorable reputation and widespread adoption thanks to its performance, not its energy efficiency. Said another way, the Indianapolis 500 isn’t won by the driver who can make the most laps on a single tank of gas. If, going forward, data center computing is hindered by the need to expand performance not unabated but rather at a predetermined rate of consumed electricity, then the industry simply can’t expand much further, it’s that simple.

While this seems true on the face of it, performance can increase at lower energy consumption levels. One example is the use of solid state drives (SSDs) and Flash memory. Fusion io’s ioMemory technology uses less than 1% of the power required by a traditional SAN. HP has integrated the technology into their c-Class server blades. And EMC and Sun have SSD products incorporated into their new servers.

In fact, what it seems that Denegri is actually advocating is a concerted effort by the IT industry to work to increase power supplies in order to decrease the cost of power in the United States. This is a tall order, as the EPA estimated in its report that the U.S. would have to build 10 additional power plants if data center energy consumption were to continue unabated.

Instead of elevating the rhetoric on the essential need to expand the capacity of the power grid, the storage industry is incomprehensibly embracing the energy efficiency paradigm, deploying marketing strategies that resemble those of the oil and gas industry. The websites of storage companies these days make mention of carbon footprints, green initiatives, and environmental stewardship, clearly having no idea that they are using buzz words that highlight the industry’s dire state. A recent press release from one OEM actually boasted of its efforts to generate electricity at its headquarters from burning its employees’ garbage! With this as the most suitable example, the world is deploying utterly ridiculous new strategies to generate electricity, none of which have any scale to them. Unfortunately, the storage industry is buying into this nonsense.

Necessity is the mother of invention. When energy was plentiful and cheap, people thought very little of their utilization of power. Instead of a luxury, it was deemed a necessity. But as energy costs rise, people respond by conserving. With the unintended consequences of energy production to the environment clearly visible, it does not seem to me to be “nonsense” to buy into the energy efficiency paradigm. If there are more efficient means of accomplishing the same tasks, why not embrace them?

Supply-side economists argue that increased demand causes an increase in supply, and thus growth in all sectors. However, it appears that energy industry deregulation has allowed a situation in which demand has increased while supply has not. This results in higher cost to energy consumers, and higher profits for energy producers. So, perhaps re-regulation of energy companies is what IT companies should be lobbying for? I cannot argue that cheaper energy costs wouldn’t be welcome (I know I was happy when the price of gas at my local station dropped from $4.43 to $4.05). But I’m not sure that storage companies have the wrong idea in embracing efficiency. In the long run, more efficient products will help decrease the potential costs. And regardless of how energy is produced, there will be an impact on the environment that could be reduced through efficiency. The way I see it, the more companies that jump on the efficiency bandwagon without significant detriment to performance, the better it is for everyone.

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.

Add PCI Express I/O connectivity without adding PCI Express

Recently, Tucson, Ariz.-based NextIO announced its ExpressConnect I/O virtualization product, which adds additional PCI Express (PCIe) I/O connectivity to any server in a data center.

“PCI Express is cost-effective, has a lot of bandwidth and a wide range of standard based I/O devices are available on PCIe, but usually there is only one [PCIe] device per server,” said Chris Pettey, the CTO and co-founder of NextIO. “With [ExpressConnect], you can have many PCIe devices for many servers.”

ExpressConnect works by virtualizing PCIe. It’s a 3U high box with slots into which you can plug I/O devices and is coupled with the N1400-PCM High-Speed Switch Module which enables blade servers to expand their PCIe signals outside the chassis. Doing so creates a pool of I/O resources that is separate from the server itself and can be accessed by any server.

Pettey compared ExpressConnect to Hewlett-Packard’s Virtual Connect, which virtualizes the connection between HP BladeSystem servers and a network but is proprietary to HP BladeSystem. “[ExpressConnect] can do everything HP Virtual Connect can do, only across many platforms and blades and racks. You can run any virtualization platform, any OS, and mix and match servers.”

Egenera’s Processing Area Network PAN Manager software also virtualizes I/O resources and is available on Egenera’s servers and Dell PowerEdge servers. Dell released its own version recently, called FlexAddress, for its PowerEdge M-series servers.

David G. Hill, a principal analyst at the Mesabi Group in Westwood, Mass, ranks NextIO’s product highly for data centers with high I/O throughput demands. “NextIO has the greatest impact in processing environments where the bottleneck is I/O performance, at a reasonable price,” Hill said. “The initial benefits are in I/O performance-demanding environments, such as high bandwidth, high-definition video processing, financial modeling and Web 2.0 data center virtualization.”

A few months ago, I spoke with NextI/O, then waited weeks and weeks for the company to come up with a user reference and some product pricing to no avail. In a case like this, I generally move product information from my My Documents folder to the Recycle Bin, but at face value it appears to be a pretty good technology, and Hill gave it high marks, so I (begrudgingly) decided to post this in case anyone is looking for such a technology.

Just don’t ask me what users think about ExpressConnect, because I don’t know that there are any. As for pricing, the company suggests contacting marketing@NextIO.com