Archive for the ‘Articles’ Category
Saturday, July 5th, 2008
Milan has a high (and rising) water table and the city authorities encourage the use of groundwater for cooling. They want to keep the water level in check to protect subway lines and utilities. Groundwater is pumped through a heat exchanger for condenser water and then dumped to ...
Posted in Articles, Cooling, Green IT | No Comments »
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008
The Hot Aisle reader, Mark Hatton of Trapdoor dropped me a mail a few days ago about a company based in Las Vegas called Switch Communications and the CEO, Rob Roy was making a lot of claims about how good their proposed new data center was. You can read the ...
Posted in Articles, Cooling, Green IT | No Comments »
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008
I first heard this phrase from my good friend and sometime mentor, Danny McNulty, when we worked together at Cable & Wireless. You may have heard of the book What They Don't Teach You At Harvard Business School by Mark H McCormack, well, just like McCormack, Danny is full of tried ...
Posted in Articles, IT Leadership, IT Operations | 3 Comments »
Monday, June 30th, 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 ...
Posted in Articles, Green IT | No Comments »
Monday, June 30th, 2008
I 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 ...
Posted in Articles, Cooling, Green IT | No Comments »
Friday, June 27th, 2008
Jon 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 ...
Posted in Articles, IT Leadership, Moves & Migration | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008
One 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 ...
Posted in Articles, Cooling, Electrical Systems, Green IT, Mechanical, Reliability & Availability | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008
As 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 ...
Posted in Articles, Cooling, Electrical Systems, Green IT | No Comments »
Monday, June 23rd, 2008
If, 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 ...
Posted in Articles, Electrical Systems, Mechanical, Reliability & Availability | No Comments »
Thursday, June 19th, 2008
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) ...
Posted in Articles, IT Leadership, Opinion | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
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 ...
Posted in Articles, IT Leadership, IT Operations | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, June 17th, 2008
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 ...
Posted in Articles | 2 Comments »
Monday, June 16th, 2008
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 ...
Posted in Articles, Green IT, News | No Comments »
Monday, June 16th, 2008
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 ...
Posted in Articles | No Comments »
Friday, June 13th, 2008
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 ...
Posted in Articles, Green IT, IT Leadership, IT Operations | No Comments »
Thursday, June 12th, 2008
Large 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 ...
Posted in Articles, IT Leadership | No Comments »
Saturday, June 7th, 2008
I 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 ...
Posted in Articles, Cooling, Electrical Systems, Green IT, IT Leadership | No Comments »
Friday, June 6th, 2008
I 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 ...
Posted in Articles, Cooling, Green IT, Mechanical, Reliability & Availability | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008
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 ...
Posted in Articles, IT Leadership | 4 Comments »
Monday, June 2nd, 2008
I got around to reading a back copy of the Harvard Business Review and an article caught my eye again. Innovation Killers - How financial tools destroy your capacity to do new things. I skim read it back in January this year and made a mental note to spend a ...
Posted in Articles, IT Leadership | 1 Comment »
Thursday, May 29th, 2008
Zinc 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 ...
Posted in Articles, Contamination | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, May 27th, 2008
Here 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 ...
Posted in Articles, IT Operations | 6 Comments »
Friday, May 23rd, 2008
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 ...
Posted in Articles, IT Leadership | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008
Floor 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 ...
Posted in Articles, Mechanical | 2 Comments »
Saturday, May 17th, 2008
Practicing 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 ...
Posted in Articles, IT Leadership | 1 Comment »
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