Using Sandy as the impetus, review your disaster plans. It's a good time to start the dialog with your business partners to understand what is important to them and what IT components make it happen. It's a good idea to update and diversify your approach to recovering from a disaster .
With the Nemertes' benchmark report is nearly complete, a key finding of the report indicates that centralized management is the way most people are handling their infrastructure and this centralization is closely related to the success of the IT department. This article shares insight on this...
As data center managers our role is to manage, protect, service and support the ever expanding information gathering and processing needs of the enterprise. Information used to come to us through computing infrastructure where data was input by data entry and customer service staff. Now data...
Most data center managers are chartered with creating a rate card in a catalog of services to assist users who are planning their budgets and increasing their knowledge of what future expansion will cost them. Co-mingling technologies has made it difficult to give the true cost of a fully...
Big Data (BD) is popular on all the social networks, forums and electronic media. As much as it is being discussed, I still think there is room to clarify what BD is all about and what we, as owners of infrastructure, need to be doing in preparation.
As a data center manager, the deeper your knowledge of what is happening in your environment, the better you can provide and show value to your organization. Every year, Nemertes interviews hundreds of enterprise representatives asking, among other things, about the technologies in which they are investing, and how successful those investments are. I had the good fortune of interviewing quite a few companies regarding their data center plans and performance.
You made the decision to move your data center operation to a colocation site through a rigorous build-versus-buy analysis. Pat yourself on the back and take a moment to reflect on the hard work and diligence that led to acclamation of your decision by the executive team. Now the fun starts. Choosing a colocation site!
The first step along the way is developing your decision criteria. Although all data centers have a lot in common, you will have unique criteria that must be matched to the colocation site. There are obvious criteria associated with the physical space, geographic location, power, network access and physical security. Then there are some not so obvious criteria to consider putting on your list.
Over the years, I’ve developed a short list that I use to help differentiate colocation providers. I call them my “outside of the box” criteria because they are items that ...
In our last update we talked about Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). The calculation measures how effective your data center is in using the input power. This ratio of power available to power used will yield a factor greater than 1. The larger the number the less efficient your utilization is. As technologists our first reaction is it to look at what we control – servers, network and storage. Part of any strategic architecture discussion you have with your partners and vendors needs to include the operating efficiency of their product. Our world is becoming dense. Virtualization and the normal progression of processing power is driving more function into a tighter space. Efficiencies are gained in space at the cost of kilowatts per square foot.
We are all trying to make our data centers green. It’s part of being a good corporate citizen as well as being a good citizen of the earth. When you look at those places in the corporate infrastructure that eat up the most energy, the data center usually fall close to the top of the list for the IT department. So executives or clients are asking you what you are doing to spend less on energy. Your data center Power Usage Efficiency (PUE) provides insights into your efficiency efforts.
Build or Buy? The real answer is elusive. Finding what is right for your enterprise is about understanding risk. A data center has a very specialized design. The build vs. buy decision isn’t about KW or cost per square foot. Sorry, I know a lot of dialog in this space goes right to looking for the one technical decision that will lead to a choice. If you think of a data center as a function that includes services such as power distribution, HVAC, electrical systems, network, cabling, flooring, fire suppression, racking, compute/storage hardware and backup systems, then you begin to see it is a system that is more complex than the sum of its parts.
We’ve all had to face it. At some time the data center you rely on will run out of something – space, power, tolerance. When that happens we are faced with the daunting task of a data center migration. If you talk to data center managers this is a time of pure terror and frustration. The network guys all have a reason why they can’t unplug anything. The end users have change window freezes and new application deployments that you can’t alter. The team running that CMDB service you paid a fair penny for seem to have forgotten a lot of information. It just goes on. Oh, and—you have to manage this while keeping your budget flat. Sometimes it’s best to step back and take a look at the good and the bad. Perspective is always a good thing. I propose that there are five really ...