In 2012, CIOs and IT teams in enterprises worldwide leveraged cloud computing architectures,while they designed their data centers to best manage the explosive amount of structured and unstructured data. In the next year, Red Hat envisions even more significant movement in the data center -- in...
The United States has an aging and unreliable power infrastructure, writes Lisa Rhodes of Verne Global. Data center operators are looking at the best geographical locations that offer clean, reliable power, and plenty of it.
DCIM’s Big Data is data about any asset, application, process, or workflow that impacts the performance of the physical ecosystem and its ability to serve the ever-changing needs of the business, writes Gary Bunyan of iTRACS Corporation.
A common theme in the world of data backup is the confusion of business continuity with disaster recovery. When it comes to protecting your data, it’s important to understand that these are two different concepts. The misunderstanding of the terms could result in organizations being left at a significant risk due to inadequate planning.
As water conservation in the data center becomes more important, there are cooling technologies that are proven to reduce the consumption of water, as well as ways to seek alternative sources of water for data center cooling, writes Ron Voukun of Gray Construction.
Exascalar defines supercomputing leadership through a combination of Top500 (performance) and Green500 (efficiency) data to understand both evolution and revolution in supercomputing architecture and scale. Winston Saunders of Intel looks at the latest information on efficiency and performance in...
A virtual private suite is a physically and logically private cloud, whose hardware is owned and managed by the cloud provider, and leased to a single customer. This is a trend that has been developing in 2012 and expected to grow in 2013, writes Mike Maughan of FuseApp and C7 Data Centers.
Virtualization and cloud have been through the hype cycle, and, moving forward, we’re finally going to see the full potential for more scalable, reliable and cost-efficient IT services. But, with Big Data and Bring-Your-Own-Device complicating things, IT has a serious task ahead to keep things...
Another year’s end, and we’re in the midst of another holiday season. Besides anticipating time off, family celebrations, and gift giving, every IT professional should be anticipating—and planning for—the challenges relating to data center energy management in 2013.
It’s that time of year when analysts, technology bloggers and journalists all look to the next 12 months, and report their predictions.Alan Priestley, of Intel Cloud Builders, gives the cloud prediction game a go.
Choosing the right cabling and cable management system is one of the most important aspects of data center design. Reliability, in combination with extreme density, should guide your choice of products, writes Ian Timmins of Optical Cable Corporation.
The majority of data center downtime was related to inadequate investments in a high-availability infrastructure. In fact, more than half of data center professionals polled agreed the majority of downtime events could have been prevented, writes Peter Panfil of Emerson Network Power.
Despite efforts to predict these weather events more accurately, these extreme weather conditions continue to occur at Mother Nature's whim, and seemingly with more frequency. Larry Lang, of Quorum, takes a look at evolving technologies in the disaster recovery sector.
An Uptime Institute study also found that up to 70 percent of data center energy use is for cooling and air handling, so increasing cooling efficiency is vital to reducing costs. Start with the low-hanging fruit.
Data Center Maturity Model, developed by The Green Grid, is gaining industry acceptance as a broad-based tool for the assessment of data center system health as well as providing a systematic approach to evaluating roadmap options, writes Winston Saunders of Intel.
In building modular data centers, there is no one answer because every project is different. However, there are four factors to consider when determining whether or not your project should be built off-site, writes Stephen Madaffari of Data Centers Delivered.
Power and cooling continue to strain even the most modern data centers. Industry analysts estimate that data centers consume ~1.5 percent of the total available energy supply worldwide. And this percentage is going up. In addition to dealing with the rising costs and the limits of the local utility companies to meet their needs, data center managers face other pressures for curbing energy consumption.
As Newton’s Third Law holds, every action has an equal but opposite reaction. The law suggests data center executives ought to ponder the potential reaction of yesterday’s on-site power systems to today’s demand for quick response and reliable operation. The equal but opposite reaction in this case is an increased chance of downtime.
Now that cloud computing is officially in the mainstream, we’re seeing a growing interest in data center energy consumption. Since electronic components are constantly becoming smaller and more powerful, data centers must now deal with the heat generated by having thousands of high-power processors tightly packed into a small space. And because cloud computing is based on virtualization, the overall utilization of this hardware is much higher than it would be in a “one box, one application” data center environment.
Unlike the seasonal disasters that strike “tornado alley” or the U.S. Gulf Coast, in earthquake country, it’s always earthquake season. Earthquakes have no preferred time of day, tidal stage, or (as yet) predictable indicator. We can, however, estimate their probabilities. In Northern California, for instance, there is a 63% chance of a magnitude 6.7 earthquake occurring in the next 30 years, a 67% chance in Southern California, and a 99.7% chance in California as a whole. U.S. earthquake risk is not limited to California.
