Archive for July, 2008
The Hot Aisle always likes Business Process Management (BPM) as it helps our business colleagues to standardize and automate business processes that we can then provide automation technology to support.
One of the best BPM companies, Cordys is holding an event on November 11-12, 2008 at Vanenburg Castle, Putten, Netherlands
The Object Management Group (OMG) today announced [...]
Cuil, a technology company pioneering a new approach to search, unveils its innovative search offering, which combines the biggest Web index with content-based relevance methods, results organized by ideas, and complete user privacy. Cuil (www.Cuil.com) has indexed 120 billion Web pages, three times more than Google they claim.
Cuil (pronounced COOL) provides organized and relevant results [...]
The photograph shows what happens when cable management is left to chance. The weight of the cables will put strain on the connections resulting in unexpected failures. Almost certainly the mess will grow and the jumble of cables will spill out of the rack door causing a trip hazard.
Yeugh!
This picture comes from Craig Black and shows the most artistic cable management setup I have ever seen. Incredibly tidy and neat.
Craig comments that
“The horizontal stuff is Leviton and the vertical is Panduit. It all came together really well — we wanted to make it look neat and it ended up that way.”
This is an essential piece of equipment in a data center. A device designed to lift and hold servers and other rack mounted equipment ready to install into their home rack.
Without one of these (or something similar), it is just a matter of time before you drop a server and injure yourself or a colleague. [...]
I just picked up a really neat article from Eric Siebert - When Not to Treat VMs like Physical Servers. The basis of the article is common sense really (but common sense is often left at home by us in IT), mostly we can treat Virtual Machines just like Physical Machines but there are a [...]
Continue ReadingA photograph from the BT Rochdale Data Center showing how the transparent curtains are attached to the roof. These curtains are used to separate the Hot Aisle from the Cold Aisle in order to drive up cooling capacity and efficiency. There are a number of articles about using Curtains to drive energy efficiency on The [...]
Continue ReadingI bet that you came up with a big number? Some people I ask sit down and scratch their head and then start listing all of the products and services their companies offer. After a while most folks just give up, overwhelmed by the scale of the simple question I have asked. Try it for [...]
Continue ReadingMy colleague Christian Dalle Nogare lent me a book (embarrassingly many) months ago, The Toyota Way by Professor Jeffrey K. Liker and it has taken the extreme of lying by a pool in the Dominican Republic to get me to the point of reading it.
Like many educated and experienced business managers, I had thought that I [...]
We asked The Hot Aisle readers to tell us what they were doing with Storage Virtualization. Interestingly only just over one third of our readers have no plans for Storage Virtualization.
An interesting market opportunity?
A neat photograph of a set of gas cylinders containing Inergen that are used as part of a data center fire suppression system.
Recently I had an unplanned gas discharge at one of my data centers in the north of England. $140,000 of lost gas and a real pain.
Lesson learnt is don’t allow trucks to park [...]
This is an interesting photograph of a commercially available APC Hot Aisle containment system. With adequate cold air to our raised floor, this rack module can house high density equipment.
Continue ReadingONStor Inc., recently announced the launch of their new Cougar 6000 series NAS gateway and claim:
“Cougar’s advanced multi-core storage network processors are built into a highly available “cluster-in-a-box” design offering 18 cores per filer. This delivers high throughput, smallest footprint per rack unit, excellent power and cooling efficiency, and low cost per terabyte. This enables enterprises to process more data [...]
VESDA Air-sampling Smoke Detectors work by:
Continually drawing air into a pipe network attached to a detector unit.
Passing the air through a dual stage filter to remove dirt
Sending the clean air to a laser detection chamber for smoke detection.
Measuring the light scatter caused by any smoke
Processing the detector signal and presenting the smoke level graphically
Communicating the [...]
I have been thinking about why virtualization is now mature in lots of IT Infrastructure technologies…
Servers (VMWare, Parallels, Mainframe VM, Solaris Domains, AIX LPARS etc..)
Networks (Virtual Private Networks VPNs are endemic)
Firewalls
Desktops (VDI)
…but it just hasn’t got to mainstream in enterprise storage.
I think that I have worked it out. Enterprise storage is (almost) the last vestige of proprietary [...]
HVAC Economizers (sometimes known as air-side Economizers) are useful for data centers which are located in regions of the world where the outdoor temperature is lower than the desired data center temperature (for at least some of the day or year) and the outdoor humidity is mild. Economizers save energy by cooling buildings with outside [...]
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This picture is from a BT Data Center in Holland, just outside Amsterdam.
There are quite significant airflow benefits to keeping power and data cables overhead and out of the plenum space under the floor. Underfloor pressures can be maximized and airflow design can be maintained.
If we can avoid lifting floor tiles when installing network and [...]
We buy too much software from software vendors because we don’t have processes and tools in place to ensure we only buy what we need.
What we need is what we use not what we install.
A fair software licensing agreement would allow us to pay for software that our employees need to do their jobs. Software companies have defined this [...]
Dry coolers are used in many air cooled refrigeration systems. In case of low outdoor temperatures, outdoor air can be applied for cooling applications. In dry coolers, large fans create a forced airflow along air-to-water heat exchangers. Subsequently, the water circuit can be used for cooling of data centers, office buildings and industrial processes.
Dry coolers play an important role in [...]
Nearly three quarters of polled The Hot Aisle readers plan to purchase colocation data center capacity in the next six months.
Continue ReadingWhen I saw the most inspirational leader of modern times on the cover page of Time Magazine (July 2008) sharing his Secrets of Leadership, even though Nelson Mandela is 90 years old and retired last century in 1999, I had to pick it up and spend the €4.20.
I bought Time, not because I expected a great insight [...]
So we have a sub prime credit crisis that looks like it might turn into a global recession. IT is expensive and highly visible as well as often seen as non core. If you don’t get your budgets cut this year then you are very lucky and very unusual. I thought that you might like [...]
Continue ReadingThis is a picture of the corridor around the I.Net Data Center in Milan showing much of the M&E equipment that is normally housed within the data center hall located outside.
So what are the benefits? Equipment can be maintained, filters changed etc.. without entering the raised floor area. Any heat load from the equipment is [...]