Articles from Kenneth G. Brill

1. Why Data Centers Aren't Energy Hogs Explore Forbes.com (Oct 21 2009) Emissions Moving ''bits'' instead of ''atoms'' is more energy efficient. London city government will soon begin publishing energy consumption by street address. CIOs will be unflatteringly featured on this list because London is filled with the data centers of major financial institutions, and these data centers can consume up to 35% of the entire enterprise energy. This conspicuous consumption is likely to prompt picketing by environmental activists and negative news stories. If other cities and countries emulate London in shaming large energy users, CIOs may find themselves regularly spotlighted on the nightly news. (Read Full Article)

   Comment Mentions:   Carnegie Mellon University   Ken Brill   Uptime Institute

2. Location, Location, Location Explore Forbes.com (Sep 23 2009) Construction Despite very expensive location studies by consultants, early in my career I learned that data centers were inevitably located near the CIO's home. This trend, however, will place companies at a severe disadvantage as costs continue to rise. Tremendous advances in remote hardware reporting technology now mean that management (and the CIO) no longer needs to physically reside in or near the data center. In fact, well-run data centers are "lights out," meaning that literally no one is in the computer room much of the time. (Read Full Article)

   Comment Mentions:   Yahoo   Ken Brill   Uptime Institute

3. The CIO And CFO Disconnect Explore Forbes.com (Aug 26 2009) Cloud Computing , Servers How to get both executives on the same page. The common language of business is money. However, CIOs often talk in terms of technology while CFOs talk in terms of cash. No wonder organizational conflict is growing as IT spends ever increasing amounts of money on data center construction. McKinsey's Will Forrest and I have identified IT's need for dramatically increased financial analytical capability in our Revolutionizing Data Center Efficiency Report. What we found is that forensic accounting is often required to capture IT's true data center costs, which are often spread out across the enterprise. The following table is the result of capturing all data center facility costs and converting these costs to a per server basis. The table's results are counter to common assumptions! (Read Full Article)

   Comment Mentions:   Uptime Institute

4. Defending The Data Center Explore Forbes.com (Aug 12 2009) Construction What CIOs should do to prevent or mitigate cyber attacks on data centers. Selected, simultaneous attacks on multiple data centers could paralyze the national and global economy. Recognizing this, the Obama administration is seeking a national cyber security czar to prevent or mitigate these problems. Cyber attacks are asymmetrical, meaning they can be carried out anonymously by individuals, small groups or nations with relatively little investment. Defending against them is extremely costly. Over the last 10 years, attacks have transitioned from hackers intent on demonstrating their programming competence to organized groups with political or economic motives. The recent denial of service attacks on Twitter, YouTube and others illustrate that terrorism is something IT executives now need to consider. (Read Full Article)

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5. Avoiding Data Center Disasters Explore Forbes.com (Jul 29 2009) Construction , Carbon Tax Steps you can take so you don't have to implement your disaster recovery plan. Disaster recovery plans for data are a necessary and fiscally prudent fact of life, but they are also costly and problematic. Most IT professionals privately acknowledge that despite rigorous testing, they have only marginal confidence that their plan will work in a timely way during a real emergency. How can this be? In a real emergency, the IT function must be physically moved to a new geographic location. This means that applications must be put onto new hardware, risking configuration and compatibility problems. (Read Full Article)

   Comment Mentions:   Ken Brill   Uptime Institute

6. What CIOs Should Know About Carbon Taxes Explore Forbes.com (Jul 15 2009) Cap and Trade , Carbon Tax Proposed legislation will increase IT operating budgets. Carbon tax legislation currently before the U.S. Congress will significantly increase the cost of energy and spur major conservation efforts to wean our country off oil. And similar legislation is occurring around the world. Chief information officers should be paying attention because data centers are the single largest and most concentrated consumer of energy for most non-manufacturing businesses. Any increases in the cost of electricity will directly impact information technology's operational expenses budget. This makes U.S. carbon cap and trade, or similar legislation anywhere in the world, as important to CIOs with global responsibilities, especially during a time when there is no new money to cover significant energy cost increases. (Read Full Article)

   Comment Mentions:   Uptime Institute

7. Wanted: IT Energy Czars Explore Forbes.com (Jun 17 2009) Emissions , Cloud Computing , Servers Companies need them to help reduce operating and capital expenses. Do you have an IT energy czar? If you don't, you should. This is a relatively new job function and often one without sufficient horsepower to make serious business impact. That's unfortunate for the bottom line because energy savings directly translate into reduced spending on new data centers or capacity expansions, which have dominated at least half of IT's CapEx spending over the last few years. The Uptime Institute's research indicates that fewer than 8% of IT organizations have someone specifically accountable for reducing energy consumption. Another 44% have someone assigned to manage energy use, but without goals and clout. The percentage of czars has doubled within the last two years as management has learned the full extent of IT energy consumption on outgoing capital expenditure cash flow and the enterprise's bottom line. Where to ... (Read Full Article)

   Comment Mentions:   Uptime Institute

8. Shaving Millions Off Data Center Costs Explore Forbes.com (Jun 3 2009) Servers Cutting server power consumption is "green" both ecologically and financially because the greenest data center is the one you don't build. That way you don't need to expend more energy, you don't need more people to operate it and you can save a bundle for the corporate bottom line. Several years ago one of our Site Uptime Network members took my message about radically cutting data center energy consumption to heart and created competition among multiple server manufacturers. What our members found was that they could pay the same initial price and get the same or better IT performance features while saving 50 watts in energy consumption per server. Fifty watts may not seem like much, but for a company buying 10,000 servers annually over four years, the lifecycle savings, including facility total cost of ownership in the product selection process, amounted to almost $10 million ... (Read Full Article)

   Comment Mentions:   Uptime Institute   Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

9. Tipping Point For Data Centers Explore Forbes.com (May 20 2009) Emissions , Cloud Computing , Servers The continuing rise in the amount of electricity consumed by data centers is challenging our nation's grid capacity and infrastructure. We have reached a tipping point. Data-center energy use is now a very noticeable fraction of total supply available. When you count everything from mammoth data centers down to server closets, data-center electricity usage in the U.S. has doubled to 2% of total supply since 2000. And the numbers just keep getting worse. Data-center electricity use is growing at about 12% per year, which means we need to add about 1,000 megawatts of electricity-production capacity annually. That means two large 500-megawatt power plants, each of which costs $1 billion to $2 billion to build. This is money we could be spending on productive information technology equipment, rather than building fuel-fired plants that will emit massive amounts of carbon over their lifetime. (Read Full Article)

   Comment Mentions:   Uptime Institute

10. Planning For Blackouts Explore Forbes.com (May 6 2009) It's been six years since the last large-scale power failure, which affected much of the northeast for up to a week. In the aftermath of such outages, the media frequently reports a disturbing frequency of engine generator plant failures. So, what should you be doing now to avoid problems this summer when the power grid will see peak demand, increasing the likelihood of an outage? Article Controls EMAIL PRINT REPRINT NEWSLETTER COMMENTS SHARE YAHOO! BUZZ In my experience, engine generators fail either immediately, in the first 24 hours of use, or around 100 hours of use. Immediate failures have to do with the inability to start because of battery failures, fuel failures, a failure to assume the load and incorrectly wired pumps and fans. Rectifying battery and fuel failures is pretty obvious, but how do you clean battery posts, fill the batteries with water and charge them if there ... (Read Full Article)

    Comment Mentions:   Uptime Institute

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