Notes from the Consultant’s Jungle

We’ve written quite a bit in this forum about containerized data centers, and our hope that in addition to providing great utility in current high density data processing implementations, they would also pave the way for a more pragmatic, modular approach to building data center space.  We still feel that there are improvements to be [...]

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This week, I had the pleasure of touring a data center developed and operated by a provider that has sites in only two cities in the US so far.  I’m intentionally not mentioning the name of the provider, but would like to share some of the things they’re doing that impressed me.  I was impressed [...]

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The Tier Model for Mission Critical Facilities, created and governed by The Uptime Institute, is the most pervasively referenced data center tier model.  It is, however, not the only tier model for data center facilities, though it enjoys the majority of mind-share in this regard.  We have written about The Uptime Institute’s data center tier [...]

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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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