Q: We purchased in the past 4 of the ERK-3520 cabinets and we would now like to purchase 6 of the WRK-37-27 cabinet frames. We would like to know if there are any rear 10-32 Tapped Rackrails in order to support a sliding 1U server where the sliding rail needs to be bolted at the front and rear. (Not supported in the ERK-3520 version).

Richard Francoeur

A: The ERK cabinets come standard with one set of tapped and threaded rack rails. Additional sets of rails are available for purchase as optional equipment, so the ERKs can be equipped with multiple sets of rails as the client’s option. The WRK, in contrast, comes with two sets of tapped and threaded rack rails, standard. So with no modification, the WRK will support a 1U server that needs to be four-point mounted.

Rackmount Ranger

Intel gave the first public demonstration on Tuesday of a new generation of computer processors that significantly increase performance without consuming more power.

The company’s chief executive, Paul S. Otellini, told developers at its semiannual technology conference that Intel expected to finish the new family of chips in the second half of 2008, in keeping with its promise of a new chip architecture every other year. The new family of chips, code-named Nehalem, will use as many as eight processing cores and will offer better graphics and memory-control processing.

Intel had been late to respond to technological challenges in energy efficiency and heat consumption, and it has spent the better part of two years racing to catch up with its smaller but feisty competitor, Advanced Micro Devices.

A year ago, Intel announced a painful corporate overhaul, including a round of cost-cutting that reduced the work force by 10 percent and trimmed $5 billion in expenses. Since then, the company has begun to regain lost market share, and last week raised its sales forecast for this quarter.

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Ten months ago, Intel Corp. shipped its first quad-core Xeon server proc­essors. Last week, chip nemesis Advanced Micro Devices Inc. finally answered back.

AMD took the first step in an effort to recapture its momentum in the server market by launching a quad-core version of its Opteron chip. Company officials hope the new device, which was code-named Barcelona, will have the same kind of business impact that the original Opterons did after being released into a world dominated by Intel’s 32-bit chips four years ago.

Opteron, the first x86 chip able to run both 32- and 64-bit applications, was an immediate hit with server vendors as well as businesses and high-performance computing users. Its arrival posed the biggest challenge yet to Intel’s dominance of the Windows server market.

But Intel has responded to that challenge — sending AMD’s share of the server chip market into retreat, according to research firm IDC.

In the second quarter of 2006, AMD-based systems accounted for 15.3% of x86 server shipments worldwide compared with 84.7% for machines with Intel chips, IDC said. But in the same quarter this year, AMD’s share slipped to 14% as measured by IDC, compared with 86% for Intel.

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The S&P 1500 Computer Storage & Peripherals subindustry index has seen an improvement in its rolling 12-month price performance over the past few weeks. Year to date through Sept. 7, the Computer Storage & Peripherals subindustry index gained 7.3%, vs. a 2.8% rise for the S&P Composite 1500 index, which consists of the large-cap S&P 500, MidCap 400, and SmallCap 600 indexes.

Take a look at the accompanying chart, which shows this subindustry index’s rolling 12-month price performance compared with that for the S&P 1500. Any point above 100 indicates sector outperformance vs. the S&P 1500 over the prior year, while points below 100 show sector under-performance. The red line is a rolling nine-month moving average, while the two green bands indicate one standard deviation above and below the index’s longer-term mean relative strength.

There are 13 companies in the S&P Computer Storage & Peripherals subindustry index. Seven have S&P STARS rankings, of which four have 4 STARS (buy) or 5 STARS (strong buy) designations: EMC (EMC; $19; 5 STARS), Network Appliance (NTAP; $27; 4 STARS), QLogic (QLGC; $13; 4 STARS), and Western Digital (WDC; $22; 4 STARS).

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Two longtime rivals in computing, IBM Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc., plan to cooperate on server technologies, a move that could put pressure on their joint competitor Hewlett-Packard Co.

Sun’s chief executive, Jonathan Schwartz, called it a “comprehensive relationship” that “represents a tectonic shift in the market landscape.”

The collaboration announced Thursday will enable Sun’s Solaris operating system to run on IBM servers. Among other things, that means customers that run Sun servers will be able to switch to Big Blue’s hardware without having to rewrite any programs.

At first this will be possible on IBM’s “x” series of servers, which also run Microsoft Corp.’s Windows or the open-source Linux system. But eventually IBM hopes to bring Solaris to the mainframe, the big multitasking machines that have been one of the company’s core profit centers for decades. (One of the biggest bashers of the mainframe as a supposed dinosaur used to be Sun’s former CEO, Scott McNealy.)

IBM has been expanding the kinds of programs that can run on mainframes, to encourage customers to consolidate multiple servers onto these bigger machines as a cost-saving move.

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With an estimated 60-70% of electrical consumption in large data centers being used to ONLY keeping the systems cool, in order to maintain performance, it’s no wonder that such a huge commitment to power usage has caused I.T. budget monitors to consider joining the “Green” movement.

The extremely air-conditioned computer farms known as data centers are the gas-guzzling jalopies of the technology world. Some require 40 or 50 times more power than comparably sized office space.

So with energy costs high and environmental friendliness making for good public relations, more tech companies are touting ways they are “greening” data centers, which serve up Web pages, swap Internet traffic, and process and store business information.

But it’s a lot easier to put out a news release than to build a data center with a significantly smaller environmental footprint. Even as efficiency improvements are reducing the energy gulped by many kinds of hardware, the industry’s overall electricity consumption could double from 2006 to 2011 as demand grows.

“It’s somewhat analogous to someone who decides to purchase an energy-efficient automobile and says, ‘Gee, I’m using 30% less gasoline with this, that means I can drive 30% more miles than I used to, and still do something for the environment,”‘ said Charles King, an analyst with Pund-IT Research. “It’s an interesting philosophical question.”

A new report from the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the easiest, least inexpensive changes to data center operations — involving tweaks to software, layout and air conditioning — could boost efficiency by 20%.

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IBM ratcheted the world of supercomputing up a few notches in June with the Blue Gene/P, a system nearly three times as fast as its predecessor at a cost of US$1.3 million per rack.

But in anticipation of the Blue Gene/P, IBM dropped the price of the Blue Gene/L, to about $800,000 late last year, prompting sales of the older supercomputer to more than double during the first half of this year compared to the second half of 2006, says Herb Schultz, IBM’s deep-computing marketing manager.

At its highest price, the Blue Gene/Lcost $1.3 million per rack, same as the P’s current price.

“It’s still a very viable platform,” Schultz says. Among universities, “we’ve had some really big sales.” He named Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY and the State University of New York at Stony Brook as two new L-model customers.

Another buyer was the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), which begun using a Blue Gene/L a month or two ago to design drugs that could treat clogged arteries, neurological diseases and certain types of cancer.

UAB conducts more than $225 million worth of research for the National Institutes of Health each year. But it was reluctant to splurge on a supercomputer until the recent price drop.

“We knew the L was a model near the end of its production, and we were able to secure a much better price on that than we would on the newer model,” says Richard Marchase, vice president for research and economic development at UAB. “For our purposes, the L had plenty of capacity.”

UAB tripled its computing power in computational biology and molecular simulations with the purchase. The supercomputer will shorten the years-long process of developing drugs targeted at specific protein structures, Marchase explains.

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Sun is aiming to wrest the world supercomputing crown from IBM’s Blue Gene courtesy of a US$59 million contract from the University of Texas for its Constellation design.

The design provides 21 million floating point operations per second, potentially reaching 2 petaflops. IBM already has a 3-petaflop version of its Blue Gene supercomputer, but Sun could potentially hit the number two spot.

Sun’s Constellation will be installed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, alongside other supercomputers, and is a Linux cluster system, to be known as Ranger. It will have 3,288 nodes, starting out with 26,304 processing cores, using AMD’s forthcoming Barcelona 4-core Opteron design, mounted on Sun blades. Ultimately there will be 1,302 Opterons providing 52,608 cores.

The initial memory will be 52.6TB with a final RAM capacity of 105TB. This will be backed up with 1.73PB of disk storage. The system components are connected by InfiniBand with a 3,456-port central switch designed by Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolstein. Its total bandwidth is 110TB/sec and it connects 1,152 cables with 12 connections per wire.

The benefit of a big switch is that inter-switch cables –needed if smaller switches were used — can be dispensed with, saving a lot of money as it’s cheaper to build one big switch than link several smaller switches. Six times fewer cables are needed, in fact. Sun also says that the processors get a standard latency for data access this way.

It will need 3 megawatts of power to run, and a standard rack holds 768 cores.

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Hewlett-Packard Co. is developing new storage hardware that will make it easier for administrators to assign the right amount of storage to different departments in an organization, the company said.

HP yesterday announced plans for new models in its midrange EVA series of disk storage arrays at its HP Technology Forum in Las Vegas. The EVA 4100, 6100 and 8100, due later this year, feature what HP calls Dynamic Capacity Management (DCM).

Typically, when a company buys new storage capacity, it apportions it to different programs or different business functions in the organization. That can lead to the false impression that the company has used up all its storage capacity. DCM allows the storage manager to assign capacity to various departments or functions as needed and allows the system to reduce capacity assigned to departments if they’re not using it up at the rate they thought they would, HP said.

This saves companies the cost of buying more storage capacity they may not need, according to Mark Gonzalez, vice president of enterprise server and storage sales at HP.

“Perhaps you don’t have to buy as much storage as you had to before, and because of that, you use less power, use less cooling and can delay your purchases,” Gonzalez said. “What’s the most expensive storage that you’ll buy? The storage that you have to buy today.”

Gonzalez said the EVAs may carry a list price in the $35,000 to $40,000 range.

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Circuit City will be the next in a long past and future line of companies seeking to reduce I.T. expenditures by outsourcing certain operations. Although big savings can be expected, what is to become of its internal Information Technology employees.

Circuit City Stores Inc. CIO Bill McCorey said last week that the company moved to outsource its IT operation to IBM last year to cut costs and allow internal staff to focus on better supporting workers in the company’s retail stores.

In a keynote address at the ERIeXchange retail show here last week, McCorey said the consumer electronics retailer is still in the process of transitioning its IT operation to IBM under the $775 million outsourcing pact announced in April. The company expects to shave IT costs by 15% over the life of the seven-year pact.

In his speech, McCorey said he had to convince corporate management of the long-term benefits of outsourcing. “You’ve got to have a real understanding at the top that IT investments are not short payback, but necessary investments, especially if you’re looking to grow the business,” he said.

He said that managers concluded that the outsourcing effort would allow the company to better align the IT operation with the company’s business needs. In the long run, he said, outsourcing the primary IT jobs to IBM would let the internal IT staff better focus on providing Circuit City associates working on the store floor with the “technology and tools to create the best experience for the customer.”

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