Lifeline Data Centers » Data Center Efficiency

GigamOM – Forget Ethernet, researchers want data centers to go wireless

Doug Theis — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 15:51:48 +0000

You know those cabling contests that try to get systems administrators to show off their racks? If this article from the MIT Technology Review is right, those may become a distant memory as researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara, Intel and IBM have shown how they can send data between servers without those pesky cables using 60 GHz wireless and bouncing those radio signals off the ceiling.

That means rapid data transfers up of to 500 Gigabits per second (current Ethernet cables in data centers are generally 1, 10 or maybe 40 gigabits per second) and less mess with physical cables. Of course, every switch at the top of a rack would have to get a radio card slotted into it, and there’s also the matter of putting reflective panels on the ceiling for the wireless signals to bounce off of. The top of the servers would also need some kind of signal-absorbing surface so the signals don’t continually bounce around the data center. From the article:

To maximize the bandwidth and reduce interference between signals, it needs to be focused into narrow beams that require a direct line of sight between endpoints. “Any obstacle larger than 2.5 millimeters can block the signal,” she says.

More of the GigaOM article from Stacey Higginbotham

Rich Miller – Top 10 Data Center Trends of 2011

Doug Theis — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 12:56:19 +0000

What were the major trends in the data center industry during 2011? We’ve identified 10 trends that had a significant impact on the sector. Here’s our list:

1. The Cloud = Business for the Data Center Industry

About once a week I still see goofy headlines asserting that cloud computing is bad news for data centers. The reality, which became crystal clear in 2011, is that the growth of cloud computing means big business for the data center industry. Virtual servers don’t magically float in the clouds. They all live in physical servers, inside data centers. Cloud technologies have driven demand for more efficient data center space that can support higher-density computing workloads. That trend manifests itself in many ways – a hardware refresh, or a data center retrofit, or outsourcing to a cloud specialist, or leasing colocation space or wholesale data center suites. Cloud growth at Rackspace means more leasing for DuPont Fabros, international expansion for Salesforce.com means more business for NTT, and Twitter’s need for impoved latency and redundancy means business for QTS. Not to mention that the data center providers who were most aggressive about moving into enterprise cloud, Terremark and Savvis, were both acquired this year. On virtually all fronts, 2011 was the year in which cloud computing moved from discussion to dollars, and the data center industry was a major beneficiary.

2. Modularity Goes Mainstream

Another technology that saw adoption shift gears was the modular data center. The trend was solidified by a steady stream of announcements of new projects and new customers – something that had been conspicuously absent during the first few years of containerized offerings. It wasn’t just the number of modules, either.

More of the Data Center Knowledge article from Rich Miller

SOAWorld: Efficient Data Center Transformation

Doug Theis — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 14:26:04 +0000

You don’t need to go very far in IT nowadays to find people who are diligently working to do more with less, even as they’re working to transform and modernize their environments.

One way to keep the interest high — and those operating and investment budgets in place — is to show fast results, and then use that to prime the pump for even more improvement — and even more funding — with perhaps even growing budgets.

The latest BriefingsDirect discussion then explores how to build quick data center project wins, by leveraging project tracking and scorecards, as well as by developing a common roadmap for both facilities and IT infrastructure.

We’ll hear from a panel of HP experts on some of their most effective methods for fostering consolidation and standardization across critical IT tasks and management. This is the second in a series of podcast on data center transformation (DCT) best practices and is presented in conjunction with a complementary video series.

More of the SOA World article from Dana Gardner

Mark Davidson – PUE is DEAD: The Case for Performance Per Watt

Doug Theis — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:32:32 +0000

Mark Davidson, Sustainability Officer for JouleX, an innovator in enterprise energy management systems for data centers, distributed office environments and facilities.

Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) has been called “The Holy Grail” of data center energy metrics so often that we actually found it impossible to find out who coined the term. As time, technology and sustainability efforts evolve, the PUE metric is no longer the stopping point for energy efficiency measurement, but it has become just one more piece in the larger picture.

What does PUE do? It measures how much of the energy entering a data center facility is used to power the computing devices within, versus the amount used for cooling and overhead of the facility. That’s it.

More of the Data Center Knowledge article from Mark Davidson

Network World: Test Aims to Disprove Data Center Dogma

Doug Theis — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 10:12:38 +0000

A Trinity Health IT engineer keeps systems that reside in a generator shed running, despite fluctuating temperatures and dusty conditions.

Since January, David Filas, a data center engineer at Trinity Health, has been running decommissioned servers, networking gear and storage systems in a simple generator shed on the grounds of the healthcare provider’s headquarters in Novi, Mich.

Filas hopes that by January 2012, this project will have convinced his colleagues that IT equipment isn’t as fragile as they think it is .

So far, the equipment has stayed up and running, enduring Michigan’s wide seasonal variations in temperature and humidity levels, Filas said at the Afcom data center conference in Orlando last month.

More of the Network World article from Patrick Thibodeau

Computerworld: Extending the life of your data center

Doug Theis — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 12:40:41 +0000

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the 1,200-square-foot data center at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering — that means the facility has been operating three years longer than CIO and vice president of operations Joanne Kossuth had originally planned. Now, even though the school needs a facility with more capacity and better connectivity, Kossuth has been forced to back-burner the issue because of the iffy economic times.

“Demand has certainly increased over the years, pushing the data center to its limits, but the recession has tabled revamp discussions,” she says.

Like many of her peers, including leaders at Citigroup and Marriott International, Kossuth has had to get creative to eke more out of servers, storage and the facility itself. To do so, she’s had to re-examine the life cycle of data and applications, storage array layouts, rack architectures, server utilization, orphaned devices and more.

More of the Computerworld article from Sandra Gittlen

Baseline: Planning Your Data Center Strategy

Doug Theis — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 12:12:13 +0000

Enterprises looking to revamp their strategies around data center optimization and utilization face the initial decision of whether to build from scratch or to retool their existing systems.

Creating a new data center from scratch allows an organization to plan for the greatest amount of customization. However, the significant investment in time, construction, hardware and support is prohibitive for many enterprises. Reconfiguring an existing data center is efficient and cost-effective, but it cannot always fully address an enterprise’s requirements.

More of the Baseline article from Adam Wallace

Kevin Normandeau: Data Center Design Remains a Key Area of Interest

Doug Theis — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 10:12:08 +0000

Data Center Knowledge recently conducted its 2011 survey of enterprise class data center operators and found that data center design is still the top area of interest. The survey has be conducted in each of the last four years, and in 2010 data center design moved to the top of the list and remains a key topic of interest for 2011.

Having the proper design infrastructure eases the challenges associated with operations and scalability. Data center operators are charged with simultaneously saving money and making their facilities more sustainable to comply with corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies. Design is the key tool that can incorporate both objectives and deliver results.

Power and cooling has moved up the list from number three to the second position on the list. Power is often the number one cost to operate the data center so it’s no surprise this is an area of strong interest. Cooling projects are often the easiest way for data center operators to realize short-term savings in optimizing their data centers, so decision makers are keenly focused on identifying the best cooling solutions.

More of the Data Center Knowledge article from Kevin Normandeau

SearchDataCenter – State of the Data Center: 2011

Doug Theis — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 10:16:36 +0000

The State of the Data Center: 2011 report series outlines trends in server and software purchasing, data center infrastructure and more. For findings and analysis on data center spending and technology adoption trends, see the contents of this special report below.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. State of server technology and operating systems
II. State of virtualization and cloud computing
III. State of data center facilities
IV. State of systems management and data center services
V. Survey background and demographics

An overview
In early 2011, SearchDataCenter.com released the Data Center Decisions 2011 survey to gauge trends and understand the factors that influence data center evolution in today’s enterprise. We received more than 1,000 responses from IT professionals spanning numerous roles within the enterprise. In this special report series, we analyze what this data means and take a look at how many of the numbers compare to our 2010 findings. These articles examine several facets of data center design and management to identify interesting trends and surprising revelations about the state of IT operations across many industries.

Article 1: State of server technology and operating systems
After years of economic uncertainty, many companies appear ready to begin spending more on data center hardware. However, the continued emphasis on tight budgets has IT professionals taking a closer look at the hardware they integrate into their data centers. In the first article of this series, we examine what type of server technology IT professionals are choosing for their environments and what factors have influenced IT professionals’ choice of server vendors, including expanded coverage of integrated infrastructures in the data center. The composition of operating system (OS) deployments are also changing in the enterprise, so we’ll look closely at the major OS versions for everyday and mission-critical systems.

More of the SearchDataCenter report

Gizmodo: US Government Shutting Down 40% of Its Data Centers

Doug Theis — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 18:46:47 +0000

From our friend Roger Bishop at WTHR:

Kwame Opam —US Government Shutting Down 40% of Its Data CentersContinuing with their spring (summer?) cleaning, the government has elected to shut down 800 of their vast collection of 2,000 data centers across the country over the next four years. Officials expect the pruning to save us billions.

Currently, the US spends $80 billion on information technology to run its numerous services and websites, making it the biggest buyer of IT in the world. But, in a bid to make the computing more efficient, many of these services will be consolidating and moving into the cloud. Sharing the computing load by performing tasks remotely and in tandem saves both processing power and money, saving $5 billion a year. And closing down the data centers, apart from it being better on the environment, will save $3 billion a year in energy costs.

And we’re already ahead of schedule, on track to close down 373 center by 2012.

More of the Gizmodo article from Kwame Opam

Lifeline Data Centers » Data Center Efficiency

GigamOM – Forget Ethernet, researchers want data centers to go wireless

More Posts

Rich Miller – Top 10 Data Center Trends of 2011

More Posts

SOAWorld: Efficient Data Center Transformation

More Posts

Mark Davidson – PUE is DEAD: The Case for Performance Per Watt

More Posts

Network World: Test Aims to Disprove Data Center Dogma

More Posts

Computerworld: Extending the life of your data center

More Posts

Baseline: Planning Your Data Center Strategy

More Posts

Kevin Normandeau: Data Center Design Remains a Key Area of Interest

More Posts

SearchDataCenter – State of the Data Center: 2011

More Posts

Gizmodo: US Government Shutting Down 40% of Its Data Centers

More Posts