Notes from the Consultant's Jungle

We are conducting a poll to gauge Business’ perception of data center tier ratings, here in late 2011. Why are we doing this?  Well, we are seeing that perceptions about shopping for data centers with tier level as a requirement are changing.  We are seeing that, now that the community has had time to think [...]

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We are conducting a market survey of data centers in India.  This is driven by an increase in interest we are seeing from customers seeking colocation and hosting services in the country of India. If you share an interest in the results of our research, or if you are a commercial colocation or data center [...]

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For another point of view on the topic of “flat data center networks” we share the following discussion with Nic Ilyadis of Broadcom.  Nic does a great job of explaining the motivation for this development, and the scenarios under which it’s a good fit, as well as advice toward building the data center network as [...]

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For the past year or so, pundits in the industry have prophesied about the coming of the “flattened data center network.”  What exactly are we talking about here when we say “flattened network?” There are a number of drivers that favor moving away from the common three and four-tier data center networks with Layer 2 [...]

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Tomorrow will be the second DataCenter Dynamics (DCD) conference to be held in Atlanta, Georgia.  The title for this year’s event is “Designing for Demand,” and addresses changes in the data center marketplace in terms of the impact that “the cloud” is having on the vision of the mission critical facility. On the agenda are [...]

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Data Center Dynamics is always a great reading on the pulse of the industry, and the December, 2010 conference in Richardson Texas set the sounding board for contemporary developments in modularity and efficiency in data centers.  The following are thoughts and reflections on the discussions held during the conference. Data Center Design:  From Traditional to [...]

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I’ve just returned from a meeting in Washington, DC in which we were assessing training material for certification on the new BICSI data center design best practices.   Along with the fact that I’ve been approached lately with a number of site security assessment requests, it was interesting to review the guidance on data center [...]

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Many of the engagements that we work involve producing the initial conceptual layout for construction of a data center.  As a certified design consultant, we draw upon best practices reflected in the BICSI-002 standard, TIA-942, et. al.  Even when the raw space with which we’re working is a nice big rectangle, this job can be [...]

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We are working on a book about one of our favorite topics: Data center tier models, availability, and the alignment of business with availability requirements.  We plan to cover the models that enjoy the most mind-share, as well as models that are not talked about nearly as much, but yet are very relevant to the [...]

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We’ve written quite a bit in this forum about containerized data centers, and our hope that in addition to providing great utility in current high density data processing implementations, they would also pave the way for a more pragmatic, modular approach to building data center space.¬† We still feel that there are improvements to be [...]

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