Notes from the Consultant’s Jungle

As I’ve watched the momentum of the Cloud, it’s caused me to reflect upon earlier discussions about data center physical security.  It’s long been my opinion that physical security will soon emerge (or re-emerge) as a top issue in data center planning, since businesses and consumers alike are increasingly reliant on the data and transaction [...]

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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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Many firms have gone looking for core/shell property with the intent of renovating these structures for use as a data center.  These projects are very capital intensive, and in many cases the benefits of having the existing structure are almost nil when viewed in the context of the broader project plan and budget.  However, many [...]

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The Smart Grid concept is getting a boost from the Obama administration in the form of (with matching of private sector funds) approximately $8B capital investment over the next three years.  The United States Department of Energy is making a number of Smart Grid publications widely available, and the funding attracted by Smart Grid is [...]

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When launching a new data center build project, where the data center will be located is a fundamental issue. There are many factors in deciding where the data center will be, but all of these factors can arguably be consolidated into two issues- Risk and Cost.
We mention risk in terms of Risk Management. [...]

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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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Regular readers of this blog will know that we are strong advocates of container data centers as a step toward modular data center design and as a facility component for extremely dense data processing.  Earlier posts talked about 2008 as a breakout year for containers (it wasn’t) and containers used as facility components in cargo [...]

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Data
Center consolidation and Data Center outsourcing are
top of mind for many CIO’s these days. Many companies
have ‘90s vintage IT facilities that not only do not
have the availability to align with the Business’ operating
model but also are struggling to keep up with the power
and cooling demands of contemporary computing systems.
The deployment of multi-core processors and blade-based
systems [...]

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