Cloud computing does not suit all companies or applications, but it should be a key part of any organisation’s outsourcing strategy, says Forrester Research.

Businesses are faced with a set of choices for providing services, and success means making the right choices, James Staten, principal analyst at Forrester, told Computer Weekly.

“This is not a black and white issue of in-house versus the cloud,” he will tell attendees of the co-located Forrester EMEA 2010 Security Forum and Infrastructure & Operations Forum in London on 11-12 March.

Right sourcing means choosing the most appropriate model to optimise operations for each company and each application according to regulatory and business demands, he said.

Cloud services may not necessarily be more cost or operationally efficient than providing the same service in-house or outsourcing to a traditional application hosting provider, said Staten. “Cloud-based services may in fact be more expensive if the business does not have good network access from all sites or operates under a complex set of regulations.”

more of the ComputerWeekly article from Warwick Ashford

Enterprises today have so much to think about when designing their overall data center strategies. It’s critical that a holistic approach be taken when laying out a data center design. The challenge for many CIOs and their IT organizations today is working with their partner to determine the best approach. First, what to do with the existing infrastructure in place?

With virtualization, many organizations rid themselves of physical servers, despite the significant dollar investment, and went to virtualization. Although many continue to do virtualization in a more phased approach, the understanding was that long-term, virtualization not only provided organizations with cost savings, but also better performance, agility, and flexibility, to name a few benefits. The point is, virtualization was not just about the cost savings, but about the value adds that it brought to the overall IT environment and ultimately, the business.

Similar challenges are being faced today. While enterprises are making the move to deploying cloud computing models in their data centers and leveraging external public clouds, it becomes difficult to determine what to keep and what to let go, particularly in terms of physical infrastructure.

True, driving cost out of IT is the goal, but what about the investment already made? It comes down to the old “rip and replace” story that has plagued so many emerging technologies in the past. Should an organization really consider getting rid of its infrastructure? What happens to all that investment made? Worse, what happens to the IT talent that managed it? It has always been a taboo for any IT executive to even consider this option.

more of the CIO.com article from Vanessa Alvarez

Reliability is becoming the most important commodity in the data center. Most of your customers would agree that reliable access to your computer systems is more important that application features.

IT staff are good at supporting applications. They are usually talented at designing reliability into your most important business software: application, server and connection redundancy, along with data replication and fail-over procedures. How good is your staff manage the facilities side of reliability?

The lion’s share of outages are related to data center downtime. Power, cooling, security, fire suppression and building failures account for the majority of outages in the enterprise data center.

Large and small companies alike are investigating alternatives to the in-house data center. Some consider outsource data center facilities for high data center uptime (high reliability). 99.995% uptime (27 minutes of downtime per year or less) is the level expected of tier IV data centers. Many CIOs feel that their most mission critical applications require mission critical facilities with 99.995% uptime.

Selecting outsource data center facilities can be tricky. Also known as colocation facilities, these outsourced data centers come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Some focus on IT services. A few focus on providing high-tech real estate with flexible options, so that savvy IT organizations can grow and change without barriers.

Wholesale colocation facilities like Lifeline Data Centers in Indianapolis, Indiana

• Affordable colocation
• 99.995% uptime
• Hardened data center facilities
• Low data center power costs
• Pay as you grow rack and power pricing
• Fifteen telecom carriers in a carrier-neutral data center
• No monthly cross-connect fees
• SAS70 data center compliance
• Data center compliance: HIPAA, FDA, NIST and TIA 942 compliant data centers

Need more reliability? Use wholesale colocation facilities. Leverage decades of experience at Lifeline Data Centers, 317.423.2591.

Does data center uptime equal your company’s reputation?

The reliability of your most important computer systems affects the way that you interact with customers and vendors. If your customer-facing systems are not reliable, you run the risk of losing revenues, profits and customers.

If your internal computer systems are not reliable, your employees have a harder time selling, making products, or delivering services. If your customer service systems are down, you’re risking your reputation, and the loss of customers.

How reliable do your systems need to be? The computer industry has a few different metrics for uptime (reliability). 4 1/2 9s of uptime (99.995% uptime) = 28 minutes of downtime per year or less. This is the expected level of downtime for tier IV data centers, the highest uptime tier.

But building and operating an enterprise data center with this level of reliability is expensive. It takes millions of dollars of capital, along with FTEs and ongoing maintenance costs. How does an IT department deliver data center reliability without spending all the profits?

Smart IT departments consider outsource data center facilities as an alternative to building their own. Often times, these companies use the outsource data center as the primary data center, because high uptime and high reliability are most important for a company’s primary computer systems.

Wholesale colocation facilities and wholesale computer rooms like Lifeline Data Centers provide a low-cost alternative to building out a high-reliability data center. And other benefits like data center certifications and data center compliance come along with the package, reducing the burden of compliance for the company.

How important is reliability to your mission critical computer systems? Is your company’s reputation on the line? Call Lifeline Data Centers at 317.423.2591 to learn how your company can improve data center uptime and control long-term costs.

What sort of data center redundancy do you have? This question is really two questions:

Do you protect your critical data in multiple data center facilities?
Do the data centers you use deliver a “two of everything” approach to HVAC and power?

You probably only care about data center redundancy if you need high reliability in your key computer systems. High reliability is important if data center downtime is costly to your company. Avoiding data center downtime is usually the driver for data center redundancy. Typical requirements are at least 99.995% uptime, which is 28 minutes of downtime per year or less. 99.995% uptime is the expectation for a Tier IV data center.

Do you protect your critical data in multiple data center facilities? Companies use multiple data center facilities to prevent downtime associated with the loss of a single data center. This used to mean a primary site that did all the work and a secondary site that could take over if the primary site failed. But newer technologies like virtualization, load balancing and storage replication are allowing clients to instead spread the computing power across multiple sites. This approach can deliver more value from a second (often outsourced) data center.

Do the data centers you use deliver a “two of everything” approach to HVAC and power? Most of the data center ratings systems are concerned with:
Data center power redundancy – two or more utility feeds, generators, UPS systems and outlets to each rack.
Cooling redundancy – multiple air conditioning systems
Multiple telecom entrances
And even multiple entrances to the property.
This “two of everything” approach minimizes downtime associated with both failure and the need for maintenance.
Redundancies are required for the tier IV data center rating, and the TIA-942 compliant data center rating.

Data center redundancy is critical if you require high uptime for your systems. Looking for a highly redundant outsource data center solution? Call Lifeline Data Centers at 317.423.2591

What are the real costs of operating your enterprise data center? The electrical power needed to maintain an enterprise data center continues to increase.  Yet in small businesses, the cost of the data center’s electrical power is rarely assigned to the IT department.    Decision makers in the finance and IT departments should consider this hidden cost when evaluating new projects. 

For a small business in Indianapolis with:

• one rack of server equipment
• 2 UPS systems
• router
• firewall
• 2 switches
• 30 workstations
• 10 printers

electrical usage is roughly 9 KW/hr. Cooling is another 18 KW/hr for a total of $1167 per month. Approximately $525 per month is for the servers and communications equipment.

Compare this pricing to an outsource data center: $850 per rack per month plus the cost of a telecommuncations circuit. Affordable colocation is a reality. By using an outsourcer’s hardened data center, your are protecting your systems from critical downtime. If the provider offers tier IV data center facilities, you’ll also be improving uptime via redundant power and cooling systems.

The idea of using a Midwest colocation provider may be the right choice for your business. Outsource data center facilities offer the advantage of large data center facilities at affordable prices for small business. Looking for a provider? Give Lifeline Data Centers a call at 317.4523.2591.

Just because server differentiation increasingly comes from factors outside the processor doesn’t mean those differences are insignificant. Consider the impressive power and cooling smarts that server vendors are bringing to bear.

Companies face a major challenge reining in the costs of running servers and air conditioning to keep them within thermal specs, because as data centers grow, so do electricity bills. It can cost $25 million to add a megawatt of capacity to a data center, according to industry estimates.

The upshot is that server vendors are integrating power-control technology deep within their boxes. “We’ve built into BladeSystem the ability to throttle pretty much every resource,” says Gary Thome, chief architect of HP’s infrastructure software and blades group, referring to the company’s best-selling blade server line. “We can throttle CPUs, voltage-regulator modules, memory, fans, power supplies, all the way down to trying to keep the power consumed as low as possible at any given time.”

These management smarts extend beyond each server to the chassis as a whole. “We have the ability to put power supplies into low-power mode, and then shed power onto other supplies while still maintaining redundancy,” Thome says. This lets the power suppliers that are running do so at high efficiency, but it goes beyond that. “We have variable-speed fans. Plus, the fans are set up in a zone, so if one part of the chassis is running hot, those fans will run faster, and on another part of the chassis, the fans will run slower.”

more of the Information Week article from Alexander Wolfe

Earlier this week, I had a chance to sit with Alex Yoder and James McDermott of Webtrends. Alex and James were in town visiting from their corporate headquarters in Portland, Oregon. It was their first visit to Indianapolis.

What did I learn? Webtrends is delivering real value to savvy companies who want to directly influence demand for their products and services. Clients use Webtrends to develop a deep understanding via multiple dimensions of data on their prospects and customers. Their sales and marketing organizations take that data and use it to tune their products, services and messaging. They use Webtrends to track impact on revenues and profitability. Doug Karr calls this an “accelerator pedal” for their marketing machine.

Webtrends delivers their products as software licensing or software-as-a-service (SaaS). They know that delivering SaaS can increase complexity and drive up costs. So Webtrends “eats their own dog food” in order to measure different dimensions of customer behaviors. Webtrends makes decisions on how to generate new revenue, keep existing clients happy, and protect their profitability based on the data from their own product.

Like Webtends, Lifeline Data Centers helps companies generate new revenue, keep their clients happy, and protect profitability. For example, Consona Corporation uses Lifeline to seamlessly grow and change their data center. Lifeline’s flexible offerings help Consona acquire and assimilate new companies to increase revenue. Lifeline’s 99.995% uptime helps Consona meet services levels to keep clients happy. And Consona take advantage of Lifeline’s incremental data center pricing model to control costs and pay as they grow.

Many of Lifeline Data Centers’ clients are SaaS providers. I’m looking forward to telling my clients about Webtrends and the good that they’re doing for clients.

With a state-of-the-art data center recently opened in Georgia, PricewaterhouseCoopers is on the prowl for a few good people. The challenge looms just about as large as the 80,000-square-foot building housing the IT infrastructure.

PwC is looking for IT professionals to fill vacancies on its network operations, security and facilities staffs, for example. Some positions are suitable for those with just a bit of experience while others require a much richer IT background, says Rick Ancona, deputy U.S. CIO and CTO at PwC, a professional services firm with U.S. headquarters in New York.

“The problem is, not that many people out there right now are versed in the data center of today,” he says.

By “data center of today,” Ancona means a highly automated, dense and virtualized IT infrastructure that relies on the most advanced electrical and mechanical components for ultra power efficiency.

The modern data center demands that IT professionals understand multiple disciplines as well as the facilities infrastructure — and that’s one of the big issues giving rise to the hiring difficulties.

more of the CIO.com article from Beth Schultz

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