Archive for June, 2008
Not before time, the Home Gateway Initiative (HGI) has announced that it will be working towards a set of specifications that will outline energy saving solutions for home Internet gateways. Because home based broadband equipment is switched on 24 x 7 x 365, even a small power draw will have a significant total life energy [...]
Continue ReadingI just read a neat article in Infoworld about Data Center energy efficiency, conspicuously the article does not talk about carbon footprint or greenhouse gasses, not once, it talks about the cost of energy and how stupid it is to waste money. It talks about using human ingenuity to solve the problem and for once it [...]
Continue ReadingOn Monday the 23rd June, Dr. James E. Hansen, a physicist of the Columbia University Earth Institute, testified to Congress about global warming, 20 years after his June 23, 1988 testimony, which alerted the public that global warming was under way. He states that there are striking similarities between then and now, but one big difference. Read [...]
Continue ReadingJon Pyke of Cordys has the boundless enthusiasm of a man in his twenties combined with over 30 years of experience at the sharp end of Business Process Management and software development. A rare blend and one I am sure is fueled by his appetite for double expresso, “extra strong please, don’t tell the wife, I am [...]
Continue ReadingOne of the things that prompted me to write about CHP and Biomass was an email I received from a colleague, Howard Pheby of 5 nines. Howard, and his partner Paul Foskett, are announcing their plans to build a new data center complex co-located with a Biomass Plant just up the road from my home [...]
Continue ReadingAs we have been discussing CHP and Biomass Power Stations recently, I though that it might be interesting to explore this subject in more detail. I live in East Anglia in England, a largely agricultural area that is leading the way in Biomass electricity production, so this is a matter of local interest for me. [...]
Continue ReadingRackspace Hosting, have begun installing equipment in their new Slough data centre, which they claim will be powered by renewable energy sources.
The data center is located in Slough close to a Scottish and Southern Energy combined heat and power (CHP) plant with potential generating capacity of 101MW. The CHP plant is the UK’s largest dedicated biomass [...]
Continue ReadingMaybe I am being naive but working in a private equity backed business makes me wonder about the effect of quarterly reporting on capital markets. Living and dying by sales forecasts, revenues and margins quarter by quarter and always considering what the market will think before deploying capital is debilitating for a board of directors. Lets look [...]
Continue ReadingIf, like most of us, you use a diesel generator as a backup power source during electrical outages, you need to understand something about Data Center engines and how to keep them running sweetly, starting automatically and reliably. It is horribly career limiting to spend your shareholders money on some equipment that you only need once every [...]
Continue ReadingAt last the trade press is waking up to the fact that IT is an enormous consumer of power and that making CIOs responsible for the electricity bills is the right thing to do.
My colleague Duncan Scott CIO at DTZ Holdings was interviewed for an Article in Computing - IT departments threatened with rising energy bills [...]
The Wall Street Journal writes that LinkedIn Corp., a business-networking Web site, has received a $53 million infusion from blue-chip venture capitalists that values the company at $1 billion.
Continue ReadingI just read an article in the New York Times that made me smile….
“For years, they toiled in relative obscurity in the engine rooms of the digital economy, amid the racks of servers and storage devices that power everything from online videos to corporate e-mail systems. Their mission was to keep the computing power plants [...]
According to a new online study from Reuters, evaluating the characteristics of 25,000 American adults, avid technology consumers tended to score highly in personality traits such as leadership, dynamism and assertiveness — but low in modesty.
Perhaps this helps to explain why technologists seem to think that every business (and world politics) problem has a technology solution, [...]
The way that most organizations run and manage their IT Operations is unscientific and somewhat random. This leads to overstaffing, poor performance, uncertain customer experience and unpredictability of delivery. It is worth comparing the way that IT Operations is organized with the older, more scientific and mature manufacturing industry.
The Industrial Revolution started in England in earnest around 1780 or so with machine based [...]
I don’t know if you noticed the Poll feature in the top right hand corner of The Hot Aisle? Well for the last few weeks I have been asking The Hot Aisle readership to share a few key pieces of information. The results are in and they make seriously interesting reading:
From the 2008 IT Budget Survey here [...]
Met up with a really nice chap for a Starbucks today, Dan Ilett who is a journalist (for the Financial Times) and a friend of Ewan MacLeod who runs SMS Text News.
Dan runs a great blog called Greenbang. Greenbang is all about green issues, not just green IT issues. Dan wanted to get some information [...]
Average retailer wastes over £1million per annum on excess energy usage in data centres
On average, top UK retailers are overspending by £1.25 million a year on the power needed to run their data centres which can equate to 50 per cent of total data centre costs and 10 per cent of their total energy bills. [...]
You may be very surprised to see that McKinsey believe that Data Center costs are 25% of all IT costs. Many CIOs will find it difficult to reconcile this view with their own budgets. There are a two key reasons why this is a difficult and badly understood process.
Within many organizations many of the data center [...]
Continue ReadingLarge Corporations innovate badly if left to their own devices. The attributes that make large corporates able to operate at scale effectively, mitigate against innovation. Too much bureaucracy, too many rules, and a culture of fitting in with the team make innovative action a rare event in a typical corporate. So how do companies like Cisco, [...]
Continue ReadingI have just been exchanging emails with my good friend and colleague, Will Forest. Will runs the Data Center Consulting Practice for top drawer strategy consultants, McKinsey & Company. I engaged Will, and we worked together on delivering BT’s Data Center Strategy. Will and his team brought a great deal of experience and clarity of [...]
Continue ReadingI have had a great interchange from a subscriber to The Hot Aisle:- Darek Wichniewicz of ATM SA in Warsaw, Poland. Darek is looking for some real technical advice on building a new Data Center facility of 2000 - 3000 square meters utilizing fresh air cooling. Like many Data Center operators Darek is concerned about being [...]
Continue ReadingA week ago I wrote a glowing report of the technology behind the Mosso Hosting Cloud and how it was high capacity and fault tolerant. Well, I had a MySQL database outage today causing The Hot Aisle to go off the air for a few minutes.
Very poor show, lets see what Mosso and Rackspace have [...]
I clearly remember as a wet-behind-the-ears youth complaining bitterly to my old boss, David Williams, that I was too busy and could never manage to complete everything that needed to be done. He laughed, collected a piece of that old fashioned green line-printer paper and sat down. He said:
“This is the most important lesson that you will [...]