Archive for May, 2008
I just moved The Hot Aisle onto the Mosso Hosting Cloud and away from the Virtualized, Red Hat Linux and MySQL environment it was born on. The Hot Aisle was getting a bit too big to be crowded into the corner of the single server we borrowed from Ewan MacLeod’s SMSTextNews blog (thanks Ewan) and so we [...]
Continue ReadingZinc whiskers, although a catastrophic problem, are not new (they were discovered in 1948 by Bell Labs). They grow on many zinc coated components and structures commonly used in Data Centers. Zinc coating is used to slow the rusting of steel components. There are two types of zinc coating, Hot Dipped Galvanized (HDG) or electroplated. Only one [...]
Continue ReadingHere is the acid test - our customers often know that there is a service problem before we do. When that happens, as far as our customers are concerned, we suck, we are incompetent and they are smarter than us. Our IT Operations team may be publishing loads of great Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that show improvements [...]
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Leading publication to work with Steve O’Donnell, Green IT guru and SVP IT Infrastructure & Operations at First Data International, the world’s largest provider of merchant processing services, and formerly head of BT’s global data centre business.
Data Centre Solutions (DCS), the only pan-European magazine focusing on the seven critical areas of data centre management – applications, [...]
Simultaneously the most powerful aspect of and the biggest problem with IT Systems are that they are flexible by design. They are so flexible that that many of our people want to show how smart they are by being helpful and adding value. Unfortunately, being helpful is one of these things that inevitably leads to unintended [...]
Continue ReadingFloor loading is a badly understood issue in Data Centers. Not just in the place where the equipment eventually ends up but also en-route from the loading bay to the final resting place.
OK, so lets start looking at the problem. Most data centers have a raised floor made of specialist tiles held up on struts and a [...]
Continue ReadingPracticing the art of Management By Wandering Around (MBWA), has been my habit ever since reading In Search of Excellence in the early 80’s, when two McKinsey Consultants Tom Peters and Robert Waterman Jr. publicized this highly effective management technique they uncovered at Hewlett-Packard.
The basic principle is that command and control management is ineffective. Managers who rely on [...]
A key management principle is that you can’t manage what you can’t measure. So if we want to manage the energy efficiency of our data center estate, then we had better be in a position to baseline where we are today so that we can identify the value of the changes that we implement.
The problem [...]
You might think that your data center is under the spotlight, constantly monitored, secure and well designed but what if I told you that typically the second most common cause of catastrophic failures (after electrical) in your Data Center are water leaks?
Water can come from three main sources:
Leaks inside the Data Center from refrigeration equipment [...]
Continue ReadingWay, way back in the stone age (whilst I was a student) I worked in the Edinburgh University Computer Labs keeping all of the hardware going. I had got a report of a DEC PDP 9 (drop me a mail if you know what one of these is) that kept restarting every few days all [...]
Continue ReadingTerminal 5 is Cool For the record I used the new terminal 5 at Heathrow last week on my way to Los Angeles, and it was a pleasure. Compared to old Heathrow it was open, clean, organized and totally functional. I actually enjoyed the experience. Rosemarie loved the shops, there are lots to choose from. [...]
Continue ReadingWe all worry about failures in our data centers, some types of failure more than others. Losing a server is bad, losing a storage array extremely bad! How then might we categorize a full power failure in a data centre? Catastrophic certainly, even careless perhaps?
I can hear the questions already:
How could I have a full [...]
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