Notes from the Consultant’s Jungle

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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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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For our final post of 2008, we reflect on the year past. In many ways, it’s a year we’d all like to quickly forget and hopefully all our conditions will change to make that so. As these things go, 2008 was also a year of changes in many regards.

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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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Earlier this year we talked about 2008 being a breakout year for container data centers.  We’ve also discussed new developments and new product introductions by the container vendors as well as a number of established and emerging use cases.  It would appear though that the launch of container sales has yet to get underway.  In [...]

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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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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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‘Tis true me hardies, the day o’ big data centers on the seven seas be upon us all. So cast off yer land lubberin’ server farms an’ hoist the main sail. We’re settin’ these servers afloat ‘fore ye feel the bite of me floggin’ whip. Arrr.
Well, we’ve talked about data centers in [...]

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In earlier posts and conversations, I’ve mentioned my interest in container data centers and the opportunities they bring for certain types of implementations and use cases.  As a big fan of agility in IT in order to meet the dynamic demands of the Business, containers can be a valuable weapon in the arsenal.
In my conversations [...]

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Momentum is a powerful force, and momentum coupled with synergies cannot be denied.
Today IBM is announcing their entry into the Container Data Center space. Starting with their newly released iDataPlex high density server product, and riding the wake of Microsoft’s widely publicized embracing of Data Center Containers, the recipe was there for a product combining [...]

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