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Fresh Thinking on IT Operations for 100,000 Industry Executives
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How long before the US national power grid fails again?

It’s a pretty good question given the perilous state of the US power distribution network, the ever increasing load and the ever increasing dependance (around the world) for US based IT and network systems. My friend Professor Massound Amin (the global authority on what is wrong and how to fix it) is running a free webinar [...]

Steve O'Donnell | June 7th, 2009 | Continued
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IBM claim that water cooled servers are the future of IT at scale

I am old enough to remember the 1960’s when IBM Mainframes used de-ionized water delivered by micro-bore pipes to cool the CPUs. (In fact I remember a spillage during a mainframe move that resulted in every single auto spares shop in south east England being raided for deionized water). In a recent statement IBM claim that direct [...]

Steve O'Donnell | June 3rd, 2009 | Continued
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Why legacy thinking costs performance, reliability and cash

I spend a lot of time thinking about data centers and how to make them better, more efficient, more reliable, higher performance , easier to maintain and cheaper to run. Lots of very smart and experienced people have been doing the same for many years and whilst there is no single, agreed best practice, model [...]

Steve O'Donnell | June 2nd, 2009 | Continued

I’ve just seen the future of Virtualization for SMEs

Cloud computing changes things, it makes administration and management of an X.86 environment easier and more automated. But until now the real goodies of VMWare’s product set, VMotion and VSphere have been limited to the small number of organizations that can afford to install a SAN. You see shared storage is a necessity in VMWare’s [...]

Steve O'Donnell | June 1st, 2009 | Continued
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Teenage mindset in the Data Centre

I always enjoy reading posts on my friend and colleague Steve Duplessie’s blog. Todays is exceptional. Steve has the rarest of talents, the ability to cut through the noise and get straight to the real issue. That’s why Enterprise Strategy Group is the best analyst firm in the world and has a client list that [...]

Steve O'Donnell | May 30th, 2009 | Continued

About this Site

Steve O'Donnell is Managing Director EMEA and Senior Analyst at ESG. He has 30 years experience running IT Operations for the largest global companies. Before joining ESG he was SVP IT Infrastructure at First Data the credit card processing business. Prior to this he was Global Head of Data Centres at BT running the largest data centre estate 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 Steve O'Donnell on Thursday 4th June 2009, 16:34 | Comments | Related | Filed Under
Fujitsu just announced a new blade server system using a custom designed motherboard optimized for the form factor of the chassis so that they have been able to fit 18 blades with two CPUs each into a compact 10U package. This contrasts with the rather weak Cisco design that manages to fit all of 6 [...] Continue Reading
Published by Steve O'Donnell on Monday 1st June 2009, 10:34 | Comments | Related | Filed Under
There are some pretty big movements happening right now resulting from the Cisco announcement of California - Unified Computing System (UCS) – their networked server offering. Politically this has partially alienated HP and IBM, who have big Server businesses and also buy a ton of Cisco equipment. So we are seeing a polarization of network [...] Continue Reading
Published by Steve O'Donnell on Thursday 28th May 2009, 17:40 | Comments | Related | Filed Under
For some time I have been working on and thinking about a Data Center Efficiency Maturity Model to help us poor operational folks work out just how well or badly we are doing on a scale of one to five. I have also been doing some thinking about a Continuous Migration Architecture (CMA) that recognizes [...] Continue Reading
Published by Steve O'Donnell on Saturday 23rd May 2009, 00:42 | Comments | Related | Filed Under
If that sounds like a description of your heritage then you might be able to help and get an all expenses paid trip out to California as well. Nick Glasgow is 28 and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area,  he has Leukemia (AML).  He quickly needs a bone marrow transplant from a compatible donor, otherwise he dies. Here is the [...] Continue Reading
Published by Steve O'Donnell on Wednesday 20th May 2009, 23:16 | Comments | Related | Filed Under
I have just spent the last few days at EMC World in Orlando (Florida) getting wet hearing the cloud and virtualization story unfold. We saw lots of clouds in the skies over Orlando as we endured a pretty constant downpour from Sunday when I arrived. There is no doubt that virtualization is warming up with lots [...] Continue Reading
Published by Steve O'Donnell on Wednesday 20th May 2009, 22:42 | Comments | Related | Filed Under
The storage wars are hotting up with EMC the clear leader in block oriented product and with a huge portfolio of software that places them as the seventh biggest software company on the planet. NetApp hold onto the leadership position in the Network Attached Storage (NAS) market with a technically advanced set of products. Why [...] Continue Reading
Published by Steve O'Donnell on Monday 18th May 2009, 16:49 | Comments | Related | Filed Under
This week I am at EMC World in Orlando picking up a sense that cloud is the message, private cloud, public cloud, storage cloud, compute cloud. It’s a strong message that resonates with the CIO and the business as it holds the promise of computing on demand and maybe even the utility computing that we [...] Continue Reading
Published by Steve O'Donnell on Saturday 16th May 2009, 18:01 | Comments | Related | Filed Under
I met with Phillip Petersen of Adinfa at a Green Data Center (what an oxymoron) event recently and he briefed me on the progress he had been making with his product - InSite that does real time power monitoring for Data Centers. He told me that they had really started to get some traction, real life big [...] Continue Reading
Published by Steve O'Donnell on Monday 11th May 2009, 16:40 | Comments | Related | Filed Under
Just had a very nice lunch at Boisdales in London’s finance district, with my old friend and ex BT colleague Chris Brandon now Technical Director at Xsigo.  Chris took me through what Xsigo do and why they think they have something to say. You will remember a few weeks back the Cisco California announcements and the [...] Continue Reading
Published by Steve O'Donnell on Friday 1st May 2009, 00:11 | Comments | Related | Filed Under
The BBC reports that the UK government has launched an £11m ($16m) five-year research programme into ocean acidification. Researchers say seas are becoming more acidic as a result of CO2 from human activities being absorbed by seawater, which alters the oceans’ chemistry. Ministers say acidification of the oceans will be one of the major environmental concerns of [...] Continue Reading
Published by Steve O'Donnell on Thursday 30th April 2009, 18:00 | Comments | Related | Filed Under
Long time disk manufacturer Fujitsu have pulled out of the disk business, selling their design and manufacturing facilities to Toshiba. Toshiba and Fujitsu have concluded a definitive agreement on the transfer of Fujitsu’s hard disk drive (HDD) business to Toshiba.  Under the terms of the acquisition agreement, Toshiba will acquire Fujitsu’s HDD design, development, manufacturing, sales [...] Continue Reading
Published by Steve O'Donnell on Monday 27th April 2009, 22:59 | Comments | Related | Filed Under
You may remember that The Hot Aisle covered the Elean Data Center in earlier articles about A green Data Center design and Absorption Chillers. The Elean Data Center, near Cambridge, has won a prestigious award from the United States Government after being recognised by the US Department of Energy and the Uptime Institute as Europe’s leading [...] Continue Reading
Published by Steve O'Donnell on Monday 27th April 2009, 18:44 | Comments | Related | Filed Under
Reports have surfaced that Tandberg Data is bankrupt, which are not really true. Tandberg Data ASA and Tandberg Storage ASA has filed for bankruptcy, but its subsidiaries around the world will continue day-to-day operations, including Tandberg Data Corporation in the US. The company will continue to manufacture product, and in fact, has a product launch [...] Continue Reading
Published by Steve O'Donnell on Thursday 23rd April 2009, 22:50 | Comments | Related | Filed Under
We are all trying to fix the unfixable in the Data Centre. How do we get more cooling capacity from sites we built a decade ago for low power density applications? One of the biggest problems is that everyone is trying to work against a basic law of physics; hot air rises, and cold air falls. [...] Continue Reading
Published by Steve O'Donnell on Thursday 23rd April 2009, 22:17 | Comments | Related | Filed Under
I admit to being really torn on this issue. I despise theft and copyright infringement but I also hate big brother, strong arm tactics that restrict me from doing stuff that is useful and legal. I use VMWare on my Mac to run other operating systems apart from the native OS X. I run a licensed copy [...] Continue Reading
Published by Steve O'Donnell on Wednesday 22nd April 2009, 11:01 | Comments | Related | Filed Under
Milford, MA –- April 22, 2009 – Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), a market-leading information technology research, analysis, and strategy firm, today announced the addition of Steve O’Donnell as Managing Director for ESG’s European operations. Steve will lead the growth of ESG in Europe as well as the global IT operations practice for the company. O’Donnell is a [...] Continue Reading
Published by Steve O'Donnell on Tuesday 21st April 2009, 03:30 | Comments | Related | Filed Under
Yesterday, Oracle announced its intent to acquire Sun Microsystems for $7.4B.  While it is very clear Oracle wants to roll up and control the database software market, Oracle executives also stated their intent to invest in the server (Solaris) and storage businesses with the latter be an “expanding market for us over the years to [...] Continue Reading
Published by Steve O'Donnell on Thursday 16th April 2009, 21:53 | Comments | Related | Filed Under
I was delighted to hear today that my friends, David Wright (CEO) and David Driggers (CTO) at Verari Systems have been recognized for their great work on driving Data Center energy efficiency. For some time it has been apparent that the modular, containerized data center holds huge promise: Ability to deploy new capacity extremely rapidly Ability to deploy [...] Continue Reading
Published by Steve O'Donnell on Sunday 12th April 2009, 12:04 | Comments | Related | Filed Under
According to Reuters, France’s parliament rejected a bill on Thursday that proposed disconnecting Internet users if they download music or films illegally, with the ruling UMP party failing to turn out in force to approve the law. Backed by President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government, the legislation was meant to quell the flow of free songs and films [...] Continue Reading
Published by Steve O'Donnell on Saturday 11th April 2009, 11:40 | Comments | Related | Filed Under
According to Reuters; the founders of Web telephone service Skype, currently owned by eBay Inc, are interested in bidding for the company they sold some four years ago, according to a media report.   Co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis have contacted several private equity firms in order to make a bid for the company, the New [...] Continue Reading
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