Insufficient management tools mean staff spend too much time managing servers

The IDC survey of 300 large European businesses found that one in four organisations were managing their servers and storage manually, leading to much higher costs compared with organisations that used some tools.

Only 14% of organisations had a fully integrated management framework. The research found that only 30% of companies saw datacentre operational cost as a priority, with 25% concerned specifically about software licence costs.

Nathaniel Martinez, programme director in IDC’s Systems and Infrastructure group, said, “Datacentre managers are much more concerned with finding suppliers that can address the security and availability problems they are experiencing than with ensuring that their datacentre meets the requirements of their business.

More of the Computer Weekly article from Cliff Saran

Google’s top energy executive has offered some simple steps for making data centers more energy-efficient, including raising the thermostat to 80 degrees Fahrenheit — or 27 degrees Celsius — to cut down on cooling costs.

Data center staff at some companies walk around in jackets because the buildings are kept so cold, said Bill Weihl, Google’s “green energy czar,” at the GreenNet conference in San Francisco on Thursday. “In our facilities, the data center guys are often wearing shorts and t-shirts,” he said.

The tips he offered have been batted around at data center conferences for a few years, but it’s likely that many companies still aren’t making use of them — especially to the degree Google does at its own tightly-run facilities.

By taking fairly basic steps, most data centers could lower their PUE to 1.5, Weihl said, compared to an industry average of 2.0 or more. PUE, or Power Usage Effectiveness, measures the total energy consumed by a data center against how much actually reaches the IT equipment.

More of the Network World article from James Niccolai

Sometimes saving millions of dollars in a data center design is as simple as figuring out a way to use less copper. That’s how it worked for Australian data center colocation company Polaris.

Mike Andrea, director of the strategic directions group at the company, explained at AFCOM’s Data Center World show in Nashville last week how his company saved about $30 million in copper costs when building its new 65,000-square-foot facility.

more of the SearchDataCenter article from Mark Fontechhio

More than a third of large corporate data center users in North America plan to expand their footprint in 2010, and many are expanding because they have run out of power, not space. Those were the key findings in survey data released Wednesday by Digital Realty Trust.

The survey of senior decision makers with responsibility for their companies’ data center strategies was conducted by Campos Research & Analysis for Digital Realty. Among the key findings:

* 83 percent of respondents are planning data center expansions in the next 12 to 24 months;
* 36 percent of respondents have definite plans to make those expansions during 2010;
* 73 percent of respondents plan to add two or more facilities as part of their data center expansions;

more of the Data Center Knowledge article from Rich Miller

Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and other large IT providers insist that data center customers want to deal with fewer, bigger vendors for more of their IT needs. But many IT pros say this “one throat to choke” mantra is self-serving at best and often demonstrably false.

Their response could be summed up this way: “Well, of course HP wants to sell me my servers, my switches, my routers, my storage. But why would I want to source all that from HP, if its storage and networking gear is not up to snuff? Cisco Systems is now, famously, in the server market, but why would I want to trust my data center to a newbie server provider? I want the best server, the best router, the best storage and they come from different vendors.”

In fact, most IT pros say that the mere presence of multiple vendors in their shops ensures that they get better pricing and service from each.

The more throats the better for IT support, pricing
“I have found that to keep a vendor honest and hungry for your business, you should have some competition on-site,” said an IT manager at a large New England medical center.

more of the SearchDataCenter article from Barbara Darrow

Enterprise data center construction has slowed to a crawl in the recession, but there is one spot that’s growing brighter every day. That’s because most companies aren’t building their own data-center space, but they are leasing it in ever-increasing numbers.

In turn, businesses like Digital Realty Trust — which offers move-in ready, enterprise-scale data center facilities that include security and rack-ready raised floor space with redundant power, cooling and network infrastructure — find they can’t get new space online fast enough to meet demand. These firms, sometimes called wholesale data center facility operators, typically cater to large enterprise customers and high-tech firms that need large amounts of floor space.

For its part, Digital Realty Trust has begun focusing more on the enterprise data center market by offering custom data center design, construction and management services. Some enterprises are also working through co-location providers, which provide smaller, caged space in a shared facility and offer less flexibility on the design.

The increased demand for leased data center real estate is being driven by reluctance on the part of IT, and on their executive management, to make the capital investments needed to buy and build the infrastructure for themselves.

more of the ComputerWorld article from Robert L. Mitchell

ROEL Construction implemented Virtualization and storage solutions that improved data center operations and would scale to meet its future needs, while providing the eco-friendly and cost-saving benefits of reduced power and energy consumption.

When ROEL Construction needed a new cost- and energy-efficient solution that would centralize storage and be eco-friendly, the company opted for a virtual data center. Kevin Fitzpatrick, ROEL’s IT director, discusses the challenges, choices made and results of these efforts.

As a 90-year-old family-owned company operating in today’s roller-coaster business world, ROEL Construction strives to maintain its ideals and founding beliefs, which center on integrity, quality and trust. With more than 250 employees in five locations, including our headquarters in San Diego, we operate more than 25 job sites. Just fixing things that go awry in the normal course of business—a mistakenly deleted business-critical file or a server that is down—could take a whole week if we reacted to events as they happened.

Finding a way to proactively design our IT infrastructure to support the business, intercept problems before they occur and keep our company ahead of foreseeable IT challenges has been the key to making technology a driver of our success. One example is our effort to create efficiencies in our data center.

more of the Baseline article from Kevin Fitzpatrick

Part of the irresistible appeal of the term “cloud computing” is the imagery of computing power as light and floating. For most CIOs, nothing is so immovable as the data center.

The whopper data center bets they must make still pivot around brick and mortar. Here are a few companies that made very different decisions to meet their data center needs in the past year–insource, sell, and build.

For additional insight into data center strategy, see also Bob Evans’ Global CIO column, “Data Centers Behaving Boldly: Meet Tech’s New Rock Stars”)

Insource A Data Center

Whitney National Bank decided to insource a data center, under the leadership of Scott Erlichman, senior VP of technology infrastructure for the regional bank. The bank’s 3-year lease was up on co-location space it used for disaster recovery, and the bank found rates had risen 50% or more since 2006, because demand for such space is high. At the same time, the bank already was planning some construction at a site it owned in Alabama, in order to do some back-end work such as check processing. That made insourcing an intriguing option.

more of the Information Week article from Chris Murphy

The FBI on Tuesday defended its raids on at least two data centers in Texas, in which agents carted out equipment and disrupted service to hundreds of businesses.

The raids were part of an investigation prompted by complaints from AT&T and Verizon about unpaid bills allegedly owed by some data center customers, according to court records. One data center owner charges that the telecoms are using the FBI to collect debts that should be resolved in civil court. But on Tuesday, an FBI spokesman disputed that charge.

“We wouldn’t be looking at it if it was a civil matter,” says Mark White, spokesman for the FBI’s Dallas office. “And a judge wouldn’t sign a federal search warrant if there wasn’t probable cause to believe that a fraud took place and that the equipment we asked to seize had evidence pertaining to the criminal violation.”

In interviews with Threat Level, companies affected by the raids say they’ve lost millions of dollars in equipment and business after the FBI hauled off gear belonging to phone and VoIP providers, a credit card processing company and other businesses that housed equipment at the centers. Nobody has been charged in the FBI’s investigation.

According to the owner of one co-location facility, Crydon Technology, which was raided on March 12, FBI agents seized about 220 servers belonging to him and his customers, as well as routers, switches, cabinets for storing servers and even power strips. Authorities also raided his home, where they seized eight iPods, some belonging to his three children, five XBoxes, a PlayStation3 system and a Wii gaming console, among other equipment. Agents also seized about $200,000 from the owner’s business accounts, $1,000 from his teenage daughter’s account and more than $10,000 in a personal bank account belonging to the elderly mother of his former comptroller.

more of the Wired article

What is your cost of downtime? If it is high, you may be able to control those costs by employing outsource data center facilities.

Data center facilities downtime events (power, cooling, physical security, and fire suppression) are some of the most common sources of critical downtime in your business. Would a change in your data center facilities improve your data center uptime?

If downtime is expensive to your business, do you require high, tier IV data center uptime levels of 99.995%? Reminder: 99.995% uptime is 36 minutes of downtime per year or less. Very few companies can build affordable data center space at this level of uptime.

Sound CIO strategy must include uptime objectives. For high uptime requirements in large enteprise data centers, most CIOs look to manage:
Uptime service levels
Ongoing power costs
Incremental growth and change

The best outsource data center facilities can offer high levels of uptime, contractually based service levels, incremental bill as-used power costs, and flexible private space. Some even offer multiple carriers in a carrier neutral environment, with no monthly cross-connect fees. Outsource data center costs at the midwest colocation provider Lifeline Data Centers is often less expensive than in-house data center build outs, with a higher levels of data center uptime.