The Hot Aisle Logo
Fresh Thinking on IT Operations for 100,000 Industry Executives
feature photo

Technology Predictions for 2012

Around this time, I usually pull together a ten point list of predictions for the coming year. I am interested in the Data Center (around power, cooling, reliability and economics), IT Security (particularly Database and Mobile), Big Data and Storage (Particularly Solid State). So what’s different this year from prior years? Strengthening fundamental drivers are likely to [...]
Share


| December 22nd, 2011 | Continued
feature photo

Cloud adoption is moving much faster in small businesses than in corporates

Globally the annual mid-market (companies with fewer than 1000 staff) spend for IT hardware, software and services exceeds $250B acording to Andy Monshaw, IBM’s General Manager for Mid-Market.  Andy lives and breathes mid-market, he personally leads as many as 15 end user and IBM partner round tables a month, spending his time listening to customer problems and getting intimately [...]
Share


| December 14th, 2011 | Continued
feature photo

Data Protection Strategies

Last night a few friends (IT Operations Geeks like me) and I had a great “Brains Trust” event at the OXO Tower in London. The topic was a continuation of the last Hot Aisle blog entry Why do we try to solve backup when restore is the problem?  Apart from the food, view and wine [...]
Share


| December 9th, 2011 | Continued

Running IT as a Business

Throughout my 20 plus year career in IT consulting, I have noticed that the most successful businesses often have something in common – they run their IT like a business and they treat IT like a key part of the business, and not like an add-on function.  I have been in Qatar for only just [...]
Share


| May 16th, 2010 | Continued
feature photo

Your brand is not what YOU say it is, it’s what YOUR CUSTOMERS say it is.

I have spent the last 12 months working with some of the smartest and best funded marketing people on the planet, I have been working with the the really big, household name, IT Infrastructure vendors. I learned lots, lots about marketing, lots about honest analysis and lots about human nature. I learned that marketing isn’t [...]
Share


| April 9th, 2010 | Continued

About this Site

Steve O’Donnell is actively involved as an advisor and director in a number of Data Centre, Smart Grid and Sustainability businesses, including Iceotope, and Greenbang. Prior to this he was CEO at MEEZA, a major data centre and cloud services company based in Doha Qatar. Prior to MEEZA Steve was Managing Director EMEA and Senior Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). Prior to ESG Steve ran IT Infrastructure Internationally for FDC, He was Global Head of Data Centres at BT running the largest data centre estate and the biggest IT Operation in Europe. He has a worldwide reputation as a thought leader in Green IT having won six industry awards for his 21st Century Data Centre vision and design.
Recently published
Published by on Tuesday 22nd November 2011, 14:31 | 2 comments | Related | Filed Under
I have been thinking about data storage and protection recently and how our behaviour is driving massive growth in cost and complexity.  The issue seems to eminate from the fact that we focus on solving backup when the real problem is restoring data: We need to be able to deal with data corruption and incorrectly [...]
Share
Continue Reading
Published by on Monday 10th October 2011, 14:43 | 0 comments | Related | Filed Under
Dear Colleague, I thought that you might be interested in a networking event being run in London in parallel with IP Expo on the 19th and 20th of October 2011. http://theexecevent.com/steve-odonnell-keynote-speaker/ What is ExecEvent? ExecEvent is a highly successful global event run by Greg Duplessie, brother of Steve Duplessie of ESG fame. The ExecEvent is [...]
Share
Continue Reading
Published by on Saturday 3rd September 2011, 00:28 | 0 comments | Related | Filed Under
Google has the most amazingly clear terms of service for their cloud products.  The terms are take it or leave it, no promises, no commitments and no come-back. I love the statement that there is no warrant that the quality of services will meet your expectations. It’s a gem.   Thanks to Harqs Singh for [...]
Share
Continue Reading
Published by on Wednesday 7th July 2010, 15:47 | 2 comments | Related | Filed Under
Yesterday Chris Leahy (my Technical Facilities Manager) and I were agonising over why we had low plenum pressure in our Data Center and why we were seeing symptoms of hot air trapped in the roof void. We looked at all the normal stuff: Leaks in the plenum space Badly sealed floor Cable access holes improperly [...]
Share
Continue Reading
Published by on Wednesday 23rd June 2010, 09:10 | 1 comment | Related | Filed Under
Worldwide, there has been a lot of focus in recent years on reducing the environmental impact of Data Centers. Green always comes at a cost, but once it is viewed as a long-term investment rather than as a quick return on investment (ROI), it can be a viable cost cutting option. Data center investments are [...]
Share
Continue Reading
Published by on Monday 12th April 2010, 19:22 | 4 comments | Related | Filed Under
I don’t normally plug press releases straight from vendors but today I received an email from Emily Wood at Google with a message that I agree 100% with. Cooling data centers is not just about refrigeration – there are lots of options – many of which we have written about here on The Hot Aisle [...]
Share
Continue Reading
Published by on Wednesday 31st March 2010, 11:30 | 7 comments | Related | Filed Under
The problem with computing is everyone wants to make it uniform – fit it into a neat box, categorise it as ‘all the same’, make it autonomic, self-managing and move on. In fact, IT is anything but uniform, so these simplistic approaches fall at the first hurdle. Smart CIOs understand applications need to be treated [...]
Share
Continue Reading
Published by on Tuesday 30th March 2010, 18:59 | 7 comments | Related | Filed Under
I wanted to share with you my latest news.  A little over a year ago Steve Duplessie and I created ESG EMEA to help reach out and serve new European clients as well as provide local support for many of our ESG US based relationships.  We have been immensely successful in building this business, working [...]
Share
Continue Reading
Published by on Friday 12th March 2010, 20:45 | 4 comments | Related | Filed Under
There are a lot of them around, Data Centres. A few of them are designed and operated very well and deliver great Power Usage Efficiency. Some could do a bit better, perhaps an airside economiser or two, or some hot or cold aisle containment, or maybe some DC power. Some are just a nightmare and [...]
Share
Continue Reading
Published by on Friday 5th March 2010, 20:51 | 4 comments | Related | Filed Under
Cloudera struck lucky in getting a $5M A-round away just before the markets shut down in response to the collapse of the global financial system. Backed by Accel Partners and more recently Greylock Partners they are making a bet that Hadoop with a smart scale out approach to managing large amounts of data is a [...]
Share
Continue Reading
Published by on Wednesday 3rd March 2010, 15:26 | 1 comment | Related | Filed Under
Recently I spoke to David Emery a friend and colleague from my time at Coopers & Lybrand. He is now working on a major social media initiative for a global mobile telco. I was interested in David’s perspective as he has been working on a set of solutions to process log files at enormous scale. [...]
Share
Continue Reading
Published by on Tuesday 23rd February 2010, 22:05 | 3 comments | Related | Filed Under
A while back I met Kathrin Winkler, Chief Sustainability Officer at EMC. She was delivering a briefing about EMC’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities to a group of industry analysts. Most CSR briefings are as dull as ditchwater and devoid of anything remotely innovative or challenging. CSR is for some just going through the motions [...]
Share
Continue Reading
Published by on Monday 22nd February 2010, 19:46 | 3 comments | Related | Filed Under
Data Centre design is an evolutionary process and we can see the first signs of significant change in the latest sites. Co-generation, liquid cooling, cloud computing, high density are all likely to feature in the 2020 Data Centre. How are you placed with your existing Data Centre investments to take advantage of these changes? Will [...]
Share
Continue Reading
Published by on Wednesday 17th February 2010, 21:47 | 6 comments | Related | Filed Under
Most people who read this won’t have a clue what a Hollerith punched card is. I only just caught the end of the era at University where I learned to program in FORTRAN coding one punched card at a time.  Once the stack of cards was complete, I delivered it to the computer operator for [...]
Share
Continue Reading
Published by on Sunday 31st January 2010, 21:17 | 2 comments | Related | Filed Under
If you have been following the storage business for a while, you will have noticed a few changes: Introduction of Flash Memory components as Solid State Disks Serial ATA (SATA) disks becoming popular and growing in capacity (2TB soon) There are lots of other disk technologies around like Fibre Channel and SAS but SSD and [...]
Share
Continue Reading
Published by on Monday 25th January 2010, 15:12 | 2 comments | Related | Filed Under
My old CIO at BT, Al-noor Ramji had a most delightful and endearing way of describing just how unimportant and disconnected IT Infrastructure is from reality by describing us as “The toilet cleaner’s toilet cleaners”. Like other successful CIOs Al-noor had the ability to cut through the noise and explain things as they are. In [...]
Share
Continue Reading
Published by on Monday 25th January 2010, 11:30 | 1 comment | Related | Filed Under
Both Seagate and Western Digital announced Q2 results last week perhaps signalling a return of confidence in the disk drive channel. Component manufacturers in the enterprise IT channel are an interesting bellwether of market confidence as orders need to be placed in advance of shipments of finished goods. There is a significant delay in revenue [...]
Share
Continue Reading
Published by on Thursday 14th January 2010, 15:58 | 3 comments | Related | Filed Under
Around this time, analysts at ESG pull together a ten point list of predictions for the coming year. One of my areas of coverage and of expertise is in the Data Center around power, cooling, reliability and economics. So what’s different this year from prior years? Strengthening fundamental drivers will likely make 2010 materially different [...]
Share
Continue Reading
Published by on Wednesday 13th January 2010, 21:50 | 4 comments | Related | Filed Under
Today Microsoft and HP announced an expanded partnership in order to deliver fully integrated application to hardware stacks. It’s a brilliant move, absolutely stunningly smart and spot on for HP. I wrote about Oracle VM and the fully integrated stack that Larry Ellison has been promoting to his customers. Superficially it might seem like a [...]
Share
Continue Reading
Published by on Wednesday 13th January 2010, 14:30 | 6 comments | Related | Filed Under
Back in 2008, Steve O’Donnell wrote an article here on The Hot Aisle explaining one of the challenges he set his team during his time at BT, the difficult task of getting Asset Management right. To summarise, Steve kicked off an audit of the whole estate, and where owners couldn’t be found for kit on the [...]
Share
Continue Reading
« Previous Entries