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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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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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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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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In the Data Center World keynote address in Orlando, Florida today, four distinguished panelists shared the results of Data Center Institute (DCI) research on the impact of the economic downturn on the data center.  This research was conducted over a number of months through surveys of enterprise data centers across the AFCOM membership.
There are four [...]

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As a bit of background and at the risk of stating the obvious, let’s quickly review some basics about energy efficiency and the Data Center.  It has been estimated that on average, electricity costs account for over 40% of data center operational expenses.  In 2006, American data centers consumed more electricity than all the televisions [...]

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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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I promised an update on the progress of the ship-based data center concept floated (yes a pun) by International Data Security (IDS).  A recent post on Silverback’s blog explains that the first launch (perhaps a pun) is now delayed until Q3 of 2008, and gives a few more details.
IDS continues to see the ship-based data [...]

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In these times of economic stagnation, IT leaders’ attention turns to cost savings.  Indeed in times like these, the CFO is likely exerting strong authority and demanding budget concessions from departments across the enterprise.
Many companies are aggressively consolidating data centers as one way to address this demand.  There are a number of significant cost savings [...]

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