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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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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Posted by:  Bob Landstrom
The latest issue of CIO Insight has results from their annuals survey of top ten priorities of CIOs.  The online presentation can be found here.  Looking over this year’s top ten list left me with a few notable observations.

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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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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 a recent interview with CIO Insight, Kenneth Brill of the Uptime Institute posits that the growth of demand for data processing is likely to cause enterprises to repeat data center construction projects every four to eight years. What?! Do it again?

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I’ve written before about how the various aspects of our lives drive us to use multiple online personas, and that this is a shortcoming of social networking sites today. What I’m referring to here is that we all wear multiple “skins,” and to represent these personas online one needs separate profiles on separate social networking [...]

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We’ve become fairly comfortable with the structure of our IT organizations, but new trends in technology product development are increasingly challenging these traditional models.
In the traditional (i.e., over the past 10 years or so) IT organization we have roughly aligned the organizational chart with a logical stack corresponding to our data processing footprint. We [...]

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Over the past year, the European Commission has been sponsoring the development of a Data Center Code of Conduct to address the increasing energy consumption, environmental, economic and supply security concerns of the data center community.  If you’d like to read it for yourself, it can be found here.
This is an interesting endeavor, especially with [...]

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