Notes from the Consultant's Jungle

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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Morgan Stanley plans to power their new data center in Scotland with a new generation of turbine generators called the Transverse Horizontal Axis Water Turbine (THAWT).  The $400M data center will require 150MW of power.  It will be powered initially from the utility grid but later transitioned to power generated by the underwater turbines of [...]

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  In the Data Center World keynote address in Orlando, Florida today, four distinguished panelists shared the results of Data Center Institute (DCI) research on the impact of the economic downturn on the data center.  This research was conducted over a number of months through surveys of enterprise data centers across the AFCOM membership. There [...]

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As a bit of background and at the risk of stating the obvious, let’s quickly review some basics about energy efficiency and the Data Center.  It has been estimated that on average, electricity costs account for over 40% of data center operational expenses.  In 2006, American data centers consumed more electricity than all the televisions [...]

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Earlier this year we talked about 2008 being a breakout year for container data centers.¬† We’ve also discussed new developments and new product introductions by the container vendors as well as a number of established and emerging use cases.¬† It would appear though that the launch of container sales has yet to get underway.¬† In [...]

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We’ve discussed the topic of data center energy management in numerous posts, and we’ve talked about a Green Data Center Maturity Model.¬† If the topic of energy efficiency in the data center is of interest to you (and it should be) I’d like to recommend an excellent resource for you. Cisco is conducting a webinar [...]

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So many discussions with prospective Clients begin with the subject of data center tier ratings.  Many companies are struggling with data center facilities that no longer adequately serve their Business, and are seeking a path toward better scalability, availability, security, and lower cost of ownership. In the mid-market segment, while there are exceptions to the [...]

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I promised an update on the progress of the ship-based data center concept floated (yes a pun) by International Data Security (IDS).¬† A recent post on Silverback’s blog explains that the first launch (perhaps a pun) is now delayed until Q3 of 2008, and gives a few more details. IDS continues to see the ship-based [...]

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In these times of economic stagnation, IT leaders’ attention turns to cost savings.   Indeed in times like these, the CFO is likely exerting strong authority and demanding budget concessions from departments across the enterprise. Many companies are aggressively consolidating data centers as one way to address this demand.   There are a number of [...]

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