Articles from Welcome to IT Jungle

In New York City today, when the weather was just starting to get a little muggy but the air conditioning was cranking so high in the Helen Mills Theater that you could just about hang sides of beef on the stage, IBM announced a new initiative, dubbed Project Big Green, under which it will sell technology and services to help the world's data centers consume less power as they support expanding IT workloads. While IBM as well as other server and storage array makers have been conscious of power and cooling issues surrounding IT gear since there were data centers, the issue has come to a head in recent years as dense X64 servers and myriad pieces of networking equipment have stormed the data centers of the world and taken over. When blade servers entered the market seven years ago, they were the straw that broke the air conditioner ... (Read Full Article)

I have nothing against a chief financial officer. Being CFO is a tough position with a lot of pressures that can easily be misunderstood. That being said, it is the money people who generally stand in the way of engineers and technologists and the spending required to accomplish great things with IT. It is a common problem we all have--dealing with accounting, the CFO, or other non-IT management. Of course, our running joke is the CFO thinks of technology as a $499 PC they can pick up at Staples or OfficeMax. CFOs don't understand why $29 billion is collectively used to power and cool IT infrastructure; 50 cents for every dollar spent annually on servers. They do understand the "space crunch" that IT manifests at $2,400 a server and $40,000 a rack at $1,000 a square foot. They see the money going out the door. Then ... (Read Full Article)