CIOs and senior IT executives lack the "green" to go green, even though they overwhelmingly believe that a more energy-efficient datacenter will become mission-critical, according to a recent survey.

Seventy-six percent of executives queried do not have a committed budget for a greening policy, even though 90 percent believe that greening their datacenters will be crucial to meeting their companies' business objectives in 2009, according to the survey conducted by Voltaire, a maker of server and storage switching and software products for grid computing.

[ Keep up on green IT trends with InfoWorld's Sustainable IT blog and Green Tech newsletter. ]

In addition, 57 percent said they believe going green will give their company a competitive advantage, the Voltaire study found.

Voltaire queried CIOs, CTOs, and senior IT executives who attended the 2008 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium. Voltaire says a Fortune 500 company with five datacenters worldwide and 3,000 servers per datacenter can save approximately $7.4 million per year.

The study also found that 43 percent of respondents will implement a green datacenter in the next two years, and that reducing power and cooling costs/requirements was ranked by 52 percent of the respondents as the most important benefit gained by going green in the datacenter.

The next most important benefit was helping the environment (37 percent), followed by increased utilization (32 percent), reducing real estate/space requirements (28 percent), and reducing/consolidating equipment needed (27 percent). Among the respondents who said that going green gives their companies a competitive advantage, 72 percent said it provides a more efficient and cost-effective infrastructure so that they can invest more in new technologies.

In response to the survey findings, Voltaire says it developed a "50-50-300 Pledge," which states that IT executives, working with the company to deploy a Voltaire InfiniBand-based unified fabric, can save 50 percent on power/cooling related to server interconnections and 50 percent on hardware allocation/usage, while delivering up to a 300 percent increase in application performance. Voltaire has also developed an efficiency calculator to help IT executives estimate their network energy and cost savings and justify the investment.

Unified fabrics provide networking services between InfiniBand, Fibre Channel storage-area networks, and Ethernet LANs over a single fabric with multiple virtual interfaces replacing actual physical adapters. By merging all three traffic types within a single switching chassis, IT executives can reduce power consumption by consolidating and virtualizing their datacenter interconnects, Voltaire says.

VMware said Wednesday that its product will run reliably with software from Microsoft.

VMware has certified its ESX hypervisor to work with Windows Server and other software from competitor Microsoft. The move also gives customers using ESX technical support from both companies to deploy VMware virtualization software on Microsoft infrastructure.

[ Keep up with the latest in virtualization news with David Marshall's Virtualization Report ]

ESX update 2 is the first hypervisor to be certified through the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program, introduced by Microsoft in November 2007, according to VMware.

The program enables vendors to test and validate virtualization software running on Windows Server 2008 and previous versions of the OS. It also enables Microsoft to offer cooperative technical support to customers running Windows Server on validated virtualization software other than Hyper-V, its own hypervisor.

VMware remains the leader in selling virtualization software, which allows multiple and different OSes to run on one piece of server hardware. According to IDC, VMware had 76.4 percent market share in 2007, followed by IBM with 9.8 percent.

However, competitors -- particularly Microsoft -- are hoping that won't be the case for long. Microsoft released Hyper-V earlier this year as a competitive offering to ESX and the hypervisor of choice for Windows Server. At the same time, Microsoft also realizes it must work with other virtualization vendors, which is why it introduced the validation program last year.

VMware has already been feeling the effects of competition from Microsoft and other vendors seeking to commoditize the technology on which VMware's business was built. In July, the company replaced its President and CEO Diane Greene with a former Microsoft executive, Paul Maritz. Her departure came as the company lowered its revenue forecast for fiscal 2007.

On Tuesday, VMware disclosed that its Executive Vice President of Research and Development Richard Sarwal was leaving for his previous employer, Oracle, after less than a year at VMware.

CIO.com has published several stories that examined the sometimes volatile, often misunderstood and never dull relationship between CIOs and application developers -- from "9 Reasons Why Application Developers Think Their CIO Is Clueless" to "8 Reasons Why a Developer Would NEVER Want To Be a CIO" to "Getting Clueful: 7 Things CIOs Should Know About Agile Development."

Those articles were presented solely from the programmer's viewpoint, however. We wanted to give the bosses -- CIOs and IT leaders who perhaps were irked by the "clueless" label -- a chance to respond. Because, certainly, developers can be out-of-touch too -- just in different ways.

[ Keep up with app dev issues and trends with InfoWorld's Fatal Exception and Strategic Developer blogs. ]

CIO.com asked IT leaders what they wish developers knew so that the programmers don't appear clueless to the rest of the organization. The bosses' responses, gathered from eight CIOs and IT managers and which have been anonymously condensed, show that many developers need to gain the bigger-picture view of their organizations to appreciate the challenges of those "clueless" CIOs.

"It turns out that the concepts of business strategy bear repeating," observes one IT director. "Developers get so heads-down in the minutiae of coding that they forget about the 40,000-foot view of the business."

1. Developers Don't Think PracticallyDevelopers often look for an elegant or slick solution to a problem, but they don't always look for the practical one. "I've had developers that will go to any lengths to write something instead of buying it, even if their hours cost more initially, plus upgrades and testing each and every time the data base or interfaces change," notes one CIO. "I rid myself of one of those [developers] recently."

This CIO retells a story: "I had to fire a developer who never had an error when his program compiled; he desk-checked [the application] so many times to assure himself (and it was a source of his pride) there were no errors. The compilers had error checking routines to do much of the same thing. His programs were elegant, but he got fired for scarcity of output. Others who used the compiler testing were completing 300 percent of his output, but he just couldn't give up his opinion of the correct way to do it."

2. Developers Still Don't See the End-User PerspectiveSolving business problems is more complex than everyone imagines, says one CIO. But to IT management, the business unit and the development team, these problems often appear quite easy to solve. "Getting your development team to truly see the world from the end-user perspective is important and much harder than you would think," notes the CIO. "The developers need to learn to quickly empathize with the end users' needs and issues-and attack the solution from that perspective."

Adds an IT director: "Personally, it is surprising to me that most of the developers that I work with still have no sense of the user experience. A development team can create an application that does everything from balance your checkbook to burning your toast, but if the user interface sucks, no one will use it-period. No amount of training or re-training will make users sign on to an application with a difficult UI. That simple concept seems to be a struggle for developers to understand."

Another CIO adds: "As a developer, I want to add as much functionality as rapidly as possible to keep users happy," says the CIO. "As a CIO I want the users to still be happy five years from now, which takes a bit more upfront planning."

3. Developers Can't Get Away from the "Wow" FactorDevelopers love the "cool" or "wow" factor of applications. CIOs seek stability and standardization. "It's more efficient to be on one platform than to spread your resources thin over many because you bring in the best new tool without retiring the legacy," says a CIO.

Another CIO points to the dire need to build applications for reliability and scalability. "Many business owners have a short attention span and limited patience. We need to engineer applications for rapid performance under maximum load," the CIO says. "An application with fewer features that is completely stable and fast is better than a full-featured application that is unreliable and slow."

"I'm less concerned about cool technology or wow factor," the CIO adds, "and am more concerned that the finished application supports the required business processes."

4. Developers Don't Think About ROI, TCO, and Other Business PrioritiesA CIO has to balance a whole panoply of choices and pressures, says a CIO. "Often the best way to do something is to make it cost effective-not cool. CIOs have to weigh risks and costs and potential benefits. Remember the 80/20 rule, think of return on investment and total cost of ownership issues and business priorities. The developers have a limited number of tasks to do and can pretty much concentrate on one item. Many have spent their career focusing on the development of simple working units, not running a business."

Another CIO says that "the CIO is not only responsible for getting the right technical solutions to the company but also ensuring that a number of additional objectives are met including TCO, positive relationships with the business units, the strategic use of the IT function and more. Getting this done may make the CIO look aloof or clueless-but without this leadership, IT will fail in the organization."

The IT director says that developers also lack a sense of how their work impacts the business and therefore the bottom line; or a broad knowledge of the business strategy. "These are fundamentals that need to be included in any in-house developer's career development plan," the IT director adds.

5. Developers Don't Get the Underlying IT Value PropositionThe CIO is trying to show the overall value of the IT function to the organization, notes one CIO (unless it is a software company, which is a different model). The executives that CIOs have as customers are trying to get an answer, perform some function and get their jobs done.

"IT to them is like electricity: they need it, but they don't appreciate it," says the CIO. "Having the'prima donna' developers' attitude that the organization exists to provide them with some intellectual stimulation is not what the executives want to hear or feel!"

Instead, some developers think it's all about their code. They fail to understand the mission of the business and "that they don't drive it, they support it," notes the IT manager. "Their work is often not mission critical or urgent."

6. Developers Don't Have (or Want) Corporate SkillsetsMost developers do not have the skills to become a CIO, observes one CIO. "I think a survey would show that 80 percent of the CIOs that came up through IT to be a CIO came through the operations side," says the CIO.

The skills required of a IT leader, the CIO contends, are not those of a developer: CIOs have to deal with uncertainty-not hard and fast coded rules; CIOs have to manage the economics of IT-not the technical "coolness" factor; CIOs have to live in a world of compromise-not the "one true answer."

"I think it is like the Mars and Venus gender discussions," notes the CIO. "What they see depends on where they stand, and they stand in completely different environments."

7. Developers Aren't Into "Group Think""When you get a technical team together to discuss issues and ideas for improvement you will hear what sounds like a consensus set of issues and solutions," observes a CIO. You need to probe deeper, the CIO says, because "each technical person is different and when asked individually you will find that they do not all share the group opinion, thus solving for the group's suggestions won't bring about all of the desired results."

Along similar lines, another CIO points out that "the lone genius developer" is a risk to the organization since his departure can put entire applications at risk. "Every application needs to be developed by a team and have thorough documentation so that it does not depend on any one person," the CIO adds.

8. Developers Don't Understand StaffingOne CIO says that developers think that profitable companies shouldn't have layoffs, which the CIO feels is clueless. "That's like saying as long as the flowers are growing, you shouldn't prune," the CIO says. "Efficient companies need prune back in areas they grow out of to preserve the strength of the overall company."

In addition, the CIO says that many developers think offshoring is un-American. The Hudson Institute Center forecasts that by 2014 the U.S. economy will need 9 million more degree holders than will be available, offers the CIO. " Offshoring IT helps CIOs to manage this gap," the CIO says.

BONUS: What CIOs Admit They Do WrongSeveral CIOs who read "9 Reasons Why Application Developers Think Their CIO Is Clueless" article admitted some fault in communication and relationship breakdowns that can occur. Notes one CIO, on why each side can appear clueless: "Failure of the organization to provide transparency between business units to help everyone understand each other's role in supporting the vision and mission."

Another CIO says the problem is that "Most organizations are structured to build barriers between the user community and the development community. This is especially the case when development is outsourced," notes the CIO. "Organizations place liaisons (or business consultants) as interfaces to the business. Developers are therefore at quite a distance from the business and risk losing touch with what's really important to drive the business."

CIO.com is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Spammers are abusing free Web services to make their spam links look more legitimate, according to e-mail security vendor MessageLabs.

One of the services, a photo-hosting site called ImageShack, lets people upload different types of photo formats, including Flash files, said Paul Wood, a senior analyst with MessageLabs.

[ Learn how to secure your systems with Roger Grimes' Security Adviser blog and newsletter, both from InfoWorld. ]

Flash files, which have the extension ".swf", can be used for animated graphics and can also be used to automatically redirect people to other Web sites. That feature can be abused.

The attack involving ImageShack works like this: Spammers upload a Flash file then copy the link for that file -- which comes from ImageShack's domain -- in a spam message. If the link is followed, the Flash file redirects the victim to a spam site, Wood said.

The technique offers an advantage for spammers. Antispam software will often scan links in e-mail and block those e-mails with suspicious-looking ones. But ImageShack's domain is considered to have a good reputation, so messages won't be blocked.

"If you start blocking on domain name only, you can incur a lot of collateral damage," Wood said.

Another more dangerous variation on this theme is a spam e-mail promoting a video. If the link is clicked, a Flash file redirects the victim to a site where a pop-up window immediately implores the user to download a codec supposedly needed to play the video file. Invariably, the file isn't a codec but some piece of malicious software.

Even if the spam link in the e-mail appears to be OK, there are many other ways to tell if a message is spam.

The header -- or batch of information that shows where an e-mail came from and the path it followed -- can be used to tell if it came from a domain that has been prone to abuse and subsequently blocked, Wood said.

Google's Picasa photo service and Yahoo's Flickr don't allow Flash files. But that hasn't exempted Picasa from abuse. Spammers use Picasa to host images, which are then incorporated into spam messages, Wood said.

Again, spammers are piggy backing on Google's good reputation. Images that are hosted on less reputable services or domains have a greater chance of being automatically blocked by security programs.

MessageLabs has also seen a similar type of abuse of Microsoft's Windows Live SkyDrive, which is an online file storage service, Wood said.

The scenario is almost the same: The link is connected with a file on SkyDrive, but then the link performs an HTML redirect to a dodgy site. SkyDrive also allows Flash files to be uploaded, offering another possible way to attack.

Microsoft is boosting integration of functional programming with its Visual Studio 2008 software development platform.

Improved integration is featured in a September Community Technology Preview of the F# language for the .Net platform. F# has been positioned as a language based on concepts of functional programming, in which computation is treated as the evaluation of mathematical functions. It also supports object-oriented programming.

"This release marks an important step along the path we laid out in October to integrate the F# language into Visual Studio and to continue innovating and evolving F#," said S. "Soma" Somasegar, senior vice president of the Microsoft Developer Division, in a blog entry this week.

?Functional programming has been viewed as valuable in domains such as the financial and scientific realms as well as technical computing. Microsoft has described F# as combining type safety, performance and scripting with advantages of running on a modern runtime, with intentions to make the language a "first-class citizen" on .Net.

Accessible here, the CTP features improvements to the F# language and libraries to make them simpler and more regular, Somasegar said. "Broadly improved" Visual Studio 2008 integration allows F# users to scale from scripting and explorative development to large-scale component and application design from within Visual Studio.

Also, Microsoft with the CTP is introducing a language feature called "Units of Measure," which extends F# inference and strong typing to floating point data.

Another Microsoft blogger, Don Syme, who has spearheaded development of F# in the Microsoft Research group, stressed added support for scripting in the language, compiler, and Visual Studio via the CTP. An improved project system, meanwhile, enables large-scale, tool-based software development with F#.

"One of the key things about F# is that it spans the spectrum from interactive, explorative scripting to component and large-scale software development," Syme said.

The new F# Language Services provides more reliable intellisense typing tips.

"Programming with F# can be enormously?fun and rewarding, as well as just plain productive. This is now more true than ever, and we hope you enjoy using F# as much as we do," Syme said.

Additionally, Microsoft has launched an F# Development Center on MSDN, providing resources for developers and links to F# user communities. F# has been a joint project of Microsoft's Developer Division and Microsoft Research.

A new study of more than 1,400 U.S. CIOs found that 11 percent plan to hire additional staff in the fourth quarter of this year, while 3 percent expect cuts.

The net 8 percent result fell short of the 10 percent projected last quarter, according to IT staffing firm Robert Half Technology, which has commissioned the studies on a quarterly basis since 1995.

[ Read the related feature, Where the hot IT jobs are going to be, and get sag advice on IT careers and management from Bob Lewis in InfoWorld's Advice Line blog and newsletter. ]

Help-desk and tech-support jobs are expected to grow the most. The top skill in demand is network administration, which was cited by 70 percent of respondents. Windows Server 2000 and 2003 administration and desktop support came next, both with 69 percent.

In a related finding, the need for additional customer support was the top driver behind hiring plans, cited by 25 percent of respondents. It edged out business growth, which garnered 23 percent. Installing or creating new applications drew 21 percent.

The results show that companies are focused on providing core services as weak economic conditions persist, Robert Half's executive director, Katherine Spencer Lee, said in a statement.

On a regional basis, the hiring picture is strongest in the Mid-Atlantic region, where 16 percent of respondents plan to add jobs and only 1 percent intend to make cuts.

In terms of verticals, CIOs in the transportation sector were the most bullish, with 17 percent reporting they will add jobs and 1 percent looking to reduce head count.

Networking company Buffalo Technology has finally launched its external SSD drives at prices that promise to steal a share of the portable market from old-world 2.5-inch hard drives.

The capacities of the new MicroStation drives are modest by the standards of a spinning drive -- 32GB, 64GB, and 100GB -- but there are other features to tempt buyers beyond the gigabytes.

[ Stay ahead of advances in hardware technology with InfoWorld's Ahead of the Curve blog and newsletter. ]

The first is perhaps size. Weighing around 60 grams, the aptly named drives are not much bigger than a credit card at 57 x 14 x 89 millimeter, a form factor that looks tiny next to the supplied wrap-around USB 2.0 connector and cable used to attach it to a PC.

The other advantages are ones inherent to the SSD (solid-state drive) concept, that of shock resistance and power consumption. As to performance, Buffalo claims up to 35GBps transfer rates if used with the company's proprietary TurboUSB drivers though it is likely that under real-world loads the actual rates achieved will be somewhat lower.

Street prices are quoted as being £98.25 ($172), excluding VAT, for the 32GB model, £195.31 for the 64GB model, and £292.38 for the top-end 100GB version, a premium compared to today's portable drives, but perhaps worth it for what is on offer. The drives also come with an encryption suite for added security.

The company has bided its time over this product, having trailed it many months ago in its home market of Japan. The new drives are identical to those on offer at that time, albeit with the new "Micro" drive branding.

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We have heard about the God gene and the gay gene -- though each has been met with significant skepticism. Now comes news of a gene that Swedish researchers are touting as a possible biological basis for why some guys won't settle down.

Credit a young researcher at Sweden's Karolinska Institute for discovering a link between a variation in the AVPR1A gene -- which has been linked to autism and how people interact socially -- and a propensity for men to skip out on women, or to have marital problems if they do tie the knot.

In a photograph on the Karolinska's website, the researcher, Hasse Walum, looks a little like rocker Kurt Cobain.

Walum did not report if he carries the tell-tale gene, although in a study of 552 sets of twins, all in relationships, Walum found that 40 percent of the men carried the Ramblin' Man variation of this gene.

The couples filled out questionnaires that asked questions such as:

Researchers then ran genetic screens of the subjects, discovering that a line of code at position 334 in the gene had a statistical correlation with the less committed men.

Women married to men who carry one or two copies of the suspect code were, on average, "less satisfied with their relationship" than were women married to men who didn't carry this code, Walum said.

This same gene has also been linked in a different study to dictatorial behavior, and the hormone, called vasopressin, made by this gene has been found to be plentiful in voles that mate for life.

But before women rush out to test their men for this genetic variation -- or we run DNA screens of John McCain and Barrack Obama to see if they have an autocratic bent hidden in their genes -- we need to realize that these tests are very preliminary statistical links. No one has physiologically linked this genetic variation to behavior in a relationship, or to Stalinistic behavior.

Walum is well aware of this, and pointed out that the effect of the genetic variation is "modest," and cannot be used to predict the future behavior of someone in a relationship.

A caveat that makes one wonder why researchers, institutes, and the media keep trotting out these preliminary associations between genes and profoundly important human behaviors like religion and relationship management in this way.

One reason is that they can be fun, like reading Tarot cards can be fun. These studies can also point scientists in a possible direction towards where to look for serious maladies such as autism, which is what Walum's work is focusing on.

"There are, of course, many reasons why a person might have relationship problems," Walum told the BBC.

Indeed, there are.

Storage server vendor 3PAR has built a key function for storage efficiency into a specialized chip, offloading that job from the main processors in a pair of server models it introduced on Tuesday.

The company's storage servers, originally introduced in 2002, are purpose-built for datacenters using virtualization and designed to reduce the amount of effort required to manage storage in those environments. This includes allocation of storage capacity for particular applications, said Craig Nunes, vice president of marketing at 3PAR.

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3PAR's storage servers are designed to save both storage space and IT managers' time by automatically allocating capacity across a disk array. They can either set aside a certain amount of storage for each application, as defined by the administrator, or allocate just the amount of space the application really needs.

The 3PAR Gen3 ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) can handle either task, as well as the migration between them. The chip is built into the company's new InServ T400 and T800 Storage Servers and is the first chip that can make that shift, according to 3PAR. Previously, the company's gear has done so with software. Handling such tasks in hardware typically makes them run faster.

However, customers will have to wait until the next version of the 3PAR InForm Operating System to tap into the ASIC's new capability, Nunes said. He declined to say when the new software would be available.

Like 3PAR's last ASIC, the new chip also includes 3PAR Fast RAID 5, a system for distributing data across multiple drives so it remains available in case of a failure. RAID 5 requires less overall space than RAID 1, which uses two complete copies of the data, but it runs more slowly. 3PAR's Fast RAID 5 speeds that up by putting it in hardware, Nunes said.

The T400 and T800 servers each are made up of several controllers, or blades, that communicate via a backplane in the server. The T400 can have between two and four controllers and the T800 can have as many as eight, Nunes said. In addition to the servers, 3PAR sells the disk arrays that go with them. The company builds its systems mostly from third-party components but designed the ASIC itself over the course of two or three years, he said.

3PAR's servers and storage arrays have helped Memphis financial services company Morgan Keegan make more efficient use of its storage capacity, according to Parker Mabry, vice president and manager of network systems engineering. His company uses two S400 servers, an earlier 3PAR product. With Morgan Keegan's previous storage systems, dividing up one array to serve two major applications such as Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server would have been difficult and made the drives work too hard, Mabry said. The S400s divide every drive in the array into units of 250MB that can be pooled and virtualized, which provides much more flexibility, he said.

Alibris, an online store for books and other media, changed its storage system to 3PAR in 2006, said CTO Michael Shaffer. The company has an IT staff of just four and was able to shift one member to new tasks from what was almost a full-time job managing storage, he said. Shaffer's team still assigns a certain amount of storage to each application, and 3PAR storage servers automatically distribute it across multiple disks, which allows for fast reading and writing of data, he said. Shaffer doesn't let the storage servers set the amount of capacity yet, but with the new chip, he probably could do so quickly and easily, he said. Then he could switch back if he didn't like it.

"Having the ability to change one's mind is a rare ability," Shaffer said.

The InServ T800 Storage server is priced starting at $175,000 for a base configuration with two controllers and 16 146GB drives. The T400 is priced from $130,000.