General Computer News From zdnet.com

Building a Disaster-Proof Data Center With HP Serviceguard for Linux
HP has been delivering disaster tolerant solutions to its customers for more than 20 years and introduced one of the first solutions on Linux. HP is the best vendor able to deliver a total and complete solution that embraces the full range of server and storage solutions available in the marketplace today. HP is not limited to just servers storage, one server technology, or one storage technology. No matter how stringent the technology needs and preferences are, HP can design and deliver complete disaster tolerant solutions to meet the requirements. This paper describes HP disaster tolerant solutions implemented with HP Serviceguard for Linux.

Data Center Assessments: The First Step to Optimization
Data centers are large, important investments that, when properly designed, built, and operated, are an integral part of the business strategy driving the success of any enterprise. Yet the central focus of organizations is often the acquisition and deployment of the IT architecture equipment and systems with little thought given to the structure and space in which it is to be housed, serviced, and maintained. This invariably leads to facility infrastructure problems such as thermal "Hot spots", lack of UPS (uninterruptible power supply) rack power, lack of redundancy, system overloading and other issues that threaten or prevent the realization of the return on the investment in the IT systems.

Power Management of Datacenter Workloads Using Per-Core Power Gating
Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) is one of the most successful power management mechanisms provided by modern processors. Nevertheless, the efficacy of DVFS is limited by its dynamic range, ultimately fixed by the minimum voltage necessary to operate the transistors and the maximum voltage that can be thermally tolerated. Voltage scaling is also less applicable to multi-core environments running heterogeneous workloads. Since there is typically a common voltage plane shared across all cores, a lower supply voltage cannot be employed unless all cores are simultaneously ready to use it. Alternatively, multiple voltage planes can be implemented at additional cost and design complexity.

The Benefits of Datacenter Transformation With HP
HP's transformation solutions cut across every aspect of the datacenter. Customers can choose from a comprehensive set of hardware, software, and services that can be tailored to support a wide variety of projects. Whether customers are looking to get started laying out a datacenter strategy or are ready to build a new state-of-the-art datacenter, HP has a set of solutions that can support these initiatives. Because HP offers a complete suite of products and services and leverages a broad set of partnerships with other technology suppliers, customers can rely on a single supplier that can address and resolve a broad base of issues.

The Data Center of the Future: Adapting to 21st Century Customer-Driven Demands
With virtualization technologies becoming mainstream and adoption rates rising, traditional data centers have transformed into virtual data centers, where technologies are virtualized to provide business services. Although this trend will continue for a few more years, leading-edge companies are positioning themselves for the data center of the future. The data center of the future no longer focuses on technology only, but instead it concentrates on the services that need to be provided to the clients. In effect, the data center transforms into a services data center. The author describes the transformation from traditional, via virtual, to the services data center, with special emphasis on the business impact of this transformation.

Automating Datacenter Management: Consolidating Physical and Virtualized Infrastructures
The deployment of virtualization technology for datacenter consolidation, cost reduction, and improved agility continues to accelerate datacenter adoption, spanning server, and storage, application, and client environments. Increasingly, IT organizations are adopting heterogeneous hypervisor environments, increasing complexity and the need for management. Virtual computing teams, operations executives, datacenter managers, and server and storage teams face increasing pressure to gain the expected ROI from their virtualization investments. The need to manage change, configuration, performance, and capacity management in an automated fashion continues to grow. This paper examines the role of datacenter management solutions that automate cross-silo virtualization capabilities to lower virtualization TCO, increase infrastructure compliance, and deliver end-to-end service visibility across both physical and virtual infrastructures.

Native Fabric Connectivity for Today's SANs Center Fabric Technology
Brocade currently has three types of solutions to enable native connectivity: direct E_Port connect for both core and edge solutions, Fibre Channel Routing connectivity, and Access Gateway connectivity. Each of these solutions has a number of use cases and each has its own unique strengths. Brocade is further developing these native connectivity techniques and anticipates broadening its support for a wide range of configurations. Brocade also plans to offer additional connectivity options via new software and hardware releases over time.

Is It Possible Your Data Center Has Twice the Amount of Air Conditioning It Needs?
IT loads are still often sized to nameplate or by using some experience based fudge factor applied to the nameplate value. One should always use vendor calculator tools if they exist. It is not impossible to cut the load estimate in half by using these types of estimating tools. Vendors like Dell put a lot of effort into testing and maintaining the database for these tools. Even if one is accurate in his/her IT load estimation, proper CRAH sizing still might lead to a conclusion involving twice as many cooling units as is necessary.

Virtual SMB Data Center in a Box?
VMware makes it easy to assign system resources to a particular workload to ensure it has enough capacity to handle business needs. It can reassign resources to handle workload spikes, giving a particular application more processors or I/O on a temporary basis to cover higher usage - again, without human intervention or inconvenient reboots. This feature is most commonly use to take workload off of a system so it can be taken down for maintenance purposes, or to move applications that need more hardware resource to larger systems.

Automating the Virtual Datacenter
IT organizations are under significant pressure to create, deliver and maintain flexible IT services that enable the business to respond quickly to changing business conditions. This growing need to support business agility requires a more dynamic, automated datacenter infrastructure. The existing physical infrastructure is difficult to automate, mired in complex dependencies and manual tasks. VMware virtualization provides a reliable, flexible platform that makes it possible to leverage existing infrastructure while eliminating hardware dependencies and creating dynamic, standardized software containers that can be moved and changed on demand. By eliminating the dependencies on physical infrastructure, the once-elusive goal of automation and business agility becomes possible. This whitepaper discusses how customers can leverage VMware to achieve greater business agility.

Enabling Datacenter Automation With Virtualized Infrastructure
This paper analyzes the impact and opportunities that virtualization offers for human- and technology-based process workflows. As virtualization adoption increases across domains (e.g., server, storage, client, and application), the use of automation offers IT organizations an opportunity to reduce time to market, establish tighter business alignment, and improve IT service availability while lowering operational costs and improving staff utilization.

Implementing the Poughkeepsie Green Data Center: Showcasing a Dynamic Infrastructure
The IBM Design Center Data Center in Poughkeepsie, New York, was running out of cooling capacity and needed to address continuing IT growth requirements. Innovative change was required and transformation of this infrastructure was achieved through IBM's smarter planet and dynamic infrastructure vision. Energy efficiency for data centers has become an imperative area of focus as the price of energy increases and systems grow beyond the capacity of current facilities to supply their power and cooling needs. This paper discusses IT growth and energy efficiency for a case study about the IBM Design Center Data Center and its transformation to the Poughkeepsie Green Data Center.

Data Center Heat Recovery Helps Intel Create Green Facility
Intel has opened its first "Green" certified building: a new development center in Israel. The facility has six floors above ground, with an additional five floors below ground. It will include a high-density, air-cooled data center occupying approximately 10,000 square feet, with total power consumption up to 3.7 MegaWatts (MW) when operating at full capacity. Energy-efficient design helps buildings accumulate points towards certification under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System.

Accelerated Server Refresh Reduces Data Center Cost
Like most IT organizations, Intel IT faces the challenge of accommodating ever-increasing compute requirements within data center space, cooling, and power constraints. Most of the server resources support semiconductor design. As Intel processors have become more complex, design computing requirements have risen steadily, driving a rapid increase in the number of design computing servers from about 1,000 in 1996 to 68,000 in 2007.

Optimizing I/O Virtualization: Preparing the Datacenter for Next-Generation Applications
Rapid adoption of virtualization technology in the x86 server market is bringing a wider array of applications into the virtualized IT infrastructure. Driving this adoption is the need to fully utilize computers, manage those resources more efficiently, and reduce the number of server "Footprints" in the datacenter. All of this brings business benefits, such as reduced power/cooling requirements, reduced IT staff requirements, and greater IT flexibility. Computing tasks can be provisioned to available resources, as needed - and resources can be put to other uses, as business requirements change over time. The rate at which data can flow from one device to another - long referred to as I/O, for input/output - is fast becoming a bottleneck in this growing virtualized infrastructure.