Notes from the Consultant’s Jungle

The challenge in using green energy alternatives such as wind or solar power in data centers is power density.   Data centers consume a lot of power with respect to their physical footprint, so they need very large solar arrays or large wind turbine farms to generate the necessary power for the facility.  Consequently, the amount [...]

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This year’s Cloud World conference was a mashup of three industry conferences-  Open Source World, Next Generation Data Center (NGDC), and Cloud World.  Even with the combining of three (formerly) major industry events, the attendance volume still only merited the West wing of the Moscone Center.
It’s easy to blame the low attendance on the economy, [...]

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I attended the 2009 IT Roadmap Conference in Atlanta,
Georgia this week and sat in on the presentation by
Johna Till Johnson of Nemertes Research, entitled
“Building a Resilient Dynamic Data Center.” The presentation
was a summary of hundreds of hours of discussions
with data center operators and enterprises with [...]

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Posted by Bob Landstrom
Enterprises have embraced the data center tier classification system developed by the Uptime Institute for evaluating their own data center facilities and those of potential colocation and hosting providers.
The subject of facility availability has matured over recent years.  The mind set has matured from recognition that existing IT facilities were a problem [...]

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The past two years have brought an explosion of activity in the area of data center facilities.  On the provider side, we can talk about services we expect from the Cloud.  The proliferation of XaaS, exponential growth of content for Web 2.0 services, and the interest in Cloud-based services by the Enterprise drives demand for [...]

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Morgan Stanley plans to power their new data center in Scotland with a new generation of turbine generators called the Transverse Horizontal Axis Water Turbine (THAWT).  The $400M data center will require 150MW of power.  It will be powered initially from the utility grid but later transitioned to power generated by the underwater turbines of [...]

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The data center consolidation and construction boom of the 21st century is well underway.  As we work with Clients, helping with planning, advice, and project management of these changes foundational to the future performance of their enterprise, we always encounter the discussion of facility Tier Level rating.
The Tier Level rating refers to an industry [...]

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We’ve discussed the topic of data center energy management in numerous posts, and we’ve talked about a Green Data Center Maturity Model.  If the topic of energy efficiency in the data center is of interest to you (and it should be) I’d like to recommend an excellent resource for you.
Cisco is conducting a webinar next [...]

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So many discussions with prospective Clients begin with the subject of data center tier ratings.  Many companies are struggling with data center facilities that no longer adequately serve their Business, and are seeking a path toward better scalability, availability, security, and lower cost of ownership.
In the mid-market segment, while there are exceptions to the [...]

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In April we predicted that this would be the break-out year for container data centers.  In July we posted more information about container data centers when we were working MEP cost models for container-based facilities.  The year is half over now, and though the “break-out” has yet to happen there have been some very notable [...]

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