Notes from the Consultant's Jungle

I was having a drink with an old friend of mine, who is a very prominent and globally sought after risk management professional, and we got around to talking about Disaster Recovery Planning Software.  I asked him, “have you ever found one of those that you like?”  His response was not positive. Quite often, I [...]

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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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As a part of the enterprise IT assessment process, and as a component for articulating the rationale for elevation of IT service capabilities to achieve alignment of IT with the strategic goals of the business, a description of the current level of IT maturity is a beneficial measure. ISACA is a global provider of information, [...]

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A quick perusal of a typical contemporary IT project portfolio will show a strong representation of projects dependent upon, or directly related to the data center.  Changes in the growth and scale of data processing, applications, content storage, data communications, risk, compliance, and maturity of IT governance are all in some way connected to the [...]

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As I’ve watched the momentum of the Cloud, it’s caused me to reflect upon earlier discussions about data center physical security.  It’s long been my opinion that physical security will soon emerge (or re-emerge) as a top issue in data center planning, since businesses and consumers alike are increasingly reliant on the data and transaction [...]

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Well, now I know why I’ve never come out on top whenever I buy one of Jim Cramer’s recomendations. In a recent (10/22/2009) Mad Money piece on CNBC, Jim Cramer used the Equinix acquisition of Switch and Data to make the point that data centers are obsolete.¬† In his diatribe about why anyone with Equinix [...]

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I attended the 2009 IT Roadmap Conference in Atlanta, Georgia this week and sat in on the presentation by Johna Till Johnson of Nemertes Research, entitled “Building a Resilient Dynamic Data Center.” The presentation was a summary of hundreds of hours of discussions with data center operators and enterprises with data centers. The information was [...]

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Posted by Bob Landstrom Enterprises have embraced the data center tier classification system developed by the Uptime Institute for evaluating their own data center facilities and those of potential colocation and hosting providers. The subject of facility availability has matured over recent years.  The mind set has matured from recognition that existing IT facilities were [...]

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Data Center consolidation and Data Center outsourcing are top of mind for many CIO’s these days. Many companies have ’90s vintage IT facilities that not only do not have the availability to align with the Business‚Äô operating model but also are struggling to keep up with the power and cooling demands of contemporary computing systems. [...]

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The past two years have brought an explosion of activity in the area of data center facilities.  On the provider side, we can talk about services we expect from the Cloud.  The proliferation of XaaS, exponential growth of content for Web 2.0 services, and the interest in Cloud-based services by the Enterprise drives demand for [...]

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