Notes from the Consultant's Jungle

This year’s Cloud World conference was a mashup of three industry conferences-¬† Open Source World, Next Generation Data Center (NGDC), and Cloud World.¬† Even with the combining of three (formerly) major industry events, the attendance volume still only merited the West wing of the Moscone Center. It’s easy to blame the low attendance on the [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

Regular readers of this blog will know that we are strong advocates of container data centers as a step toward modular data center design and as a facility component for extremely dense data processing.¬† Earlier posts talked about 2008 as a breakout year for containers (it wasn’t) and containers used as facility components in cargo [...]

[Read more →]

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. [...]

[Read more →]

Microsoft Windows running on a mainframe?¬† Could this be the greatest abomination since the Labradoodle (before you Labradoodle owners out there skewer me, I’m sorry but the Labrador Retriever is such a wonderful dog and to corrupt this fine breed with Poodle blood is a bane to me)? Anyway, this week’s Network World magazine carries [...]

[Read more →]

For our final post of 2008, we reflect on the year past. In many ways, it’s a year we’d all like to quickly forget and hopefully all our conditions will change to make that so. As these things go, 2008 was also a year of changes in many regards.

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

  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 [...]

[Read more →]