All Posts Tagged With: "Data Center"
Throughout my 20 plus year career in IT consulting, I have noticed that the most successful businesses often have something in common – they run their IT like a business and they treat IT like a key part of the business, and not like an add-on function. I have been in Qatar for only just [...]
I wanted to share with you my latest news. A little over a year ago Steve Duplessie and I created ESG EMEA to help reach out and serve new European clients as well as provide local support for many of our ESG US based relationships. We have been immensely successful in building this business, working [...]
There are a lot of them around, Data Centres. A few of them are designed and operated very well and deliver great Power Usage Efficiency. Some could do a bit better, perhaps an airside economiser or two, or some hot or cold aisle containment, or maybe some DC power. Some are just a nightmare and [...]
A while back I met Kathrin Winkler, Chief Sustainability Officer at EMC. She was delivering a briefing about EMC’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities to a group of industry analysts. Most CSR briefings are as dull as ditchwater and devoid of anything remotely innovative or challenging. CSR is for some just going through the motions [...]
If you have been following the storage business for a while, you will have noticed a few changes:
Introduction of Flash Memory components as Solid State Disks
Serial ATA (SATA) disks becoming popular and growing in capacity (2TB soon)
There are lots of other disk technologies around like Fibre Channel and SAS but SSD and SATA are getting [...]
Both Seagate and Western Digital announced Q2 results last week perhaps signalling a return of confidence in the disk drive channel. Component manufacturers in the enterprise IT channel are an interesting bellwether of market confidence as orders need to be placed in advance of shipments of finished goods. There is a significant delay in revenue [...]
Around this time, analysts at ESG pull together a ten point list of predictions for the coming year. One of my areas of coverage and of expertise is in the Data Center around power, cooling, reliability and economics. So what’s different this year from prior years?
Strengthening fundamental drivers will likely make 2010 materially different from [...]
Back in 2008, Steve O’Donnell wrote an article here on The Hot Aisle explaining one of the challenges he set his team during his time at BT, the difficult task of getting Asset Management right.
To summarise, Steve kicked off an audit of the whole estate, and where owners couldn’t be found for kit on the floor, [...]
Here is a video from my friend Professor Masood Amin @Massoud_Amin who is the world authority on Smart Grid. If we want to save the planet from global warming, prevent terrorists shutting down our economy and prevent catastrophic failure of our power distribution systems. This is the template of what we need to do and [...]
For years I have been a prolific photographer of Data Centres all over the world. I have hundreds of images, some brilliant, some out of focus and under-exposed, (I am a data centre guy, not a professional photographer). I thought that I might publish some of the better ones with a bit of narrative about [...]
I attended a very interesting dinner event recently at The Boxwood Cafe in London hosted by Andrew Barnes from Neverfail. The objective was to have a discussion about Disaster Recovery and the implications for IT and business. It was a very well attended event with some great input from the CIO and IT Director attendees. Sarah [...]
Last week I met with my friend Steve Sole of Nubis who wanted to tell me about the work they have been doing in data centers around improving energy efficiency. Nubis make demountable Aisle Containment systems – they don’t care if it is Hot or Cold Aisle – the objective is to stop the air [...]
There is cloud and then there is cloud. Cloud with take it or leave it service levels or cloud with service availability that supports the UK’s emergency services (911, 999, 112). I know about this life or death service level because a few years back I actually ran the BT IT operational department that supported the [...]
Recently The Hot Aisle conducted an online survey asking the question -
“How do you currently choose where to place equipment in your data centre?”
As usual we got a very large response to the survey with 5,580 respondants.
The results are in and it shows quite clearly that equipment placement is (to say the least) unsophisticated. A [...]
NGD and BT announced this week that BT has agreed to take 380 racks at NGD Europe, Next Generation Data Limited’s newly-launched 75,000 square metres facility near Newport in Gwent. Rollout began in August and will be ready for customer use by February 2010.
This is one of the first large Data Center deals in the [...]
Computacenter has acquired the assets and customer base of Thesaurus Computer Services (TCS). The sale was agreed last Friday 27th November 2009. The deal was completed for a nominal amount and Computacenter management claim that the acquisition will not have a material financial impact on the company.
TCS has been the the mainframe services business since [...]
Today I had a really interesting conversation with my friend and colleague Richard Davis, CEO of Elastichosts a small (but perfectly formed) Cloud Computing company. Richard and I first met when he was a Business Technology consultant at McKinsey & Co and I was his client at BT. We worked together on a major project [...]
…that cooling data centres using refrigeration is madder than a box of frogs.
Maybe he could have suggested, fresh air cooling or the new Iceotope liquid cooling solution and kept his job whilst avoiding the toxic blob.
Iceotope Unveils First Modular Liquid-Immersion Cooled Blade Server
Supercomputing 2009, Portland Oregon; 17th November 2009: Iceotope (www.iceotope.com) today launched its new liquid-cooled server technology. The system is believed to be the first to use modular “liquid immersion” of the server components and is able to reduce data centre cooling costs by 93%, saving hundreds of thousands [...]
Greenwash or Greenbacks? – an eWEEK Europe Webinar
What is the real motivation behind the Green Data Centre movement? Saving the planet… or saving money? …or keeping one step ahead of possible regulations, and saving yourself from a world of legal trouble?
Readers of the Hot Aisle will already know that moves to more efficient data centres [...]
I recently chaired a very interesting panel debate and discussion Hosted By BLADE Network Technologies in London.
The panel was made up of:
Harkeeret (Harqs) Singh, Global Head Data Centre Energy Optimisation, Thomson Reuters
Finlay MacLeod, VP IT Infrastructure, EMEA, First Data Corp
Charles Ferland, VP of EMEA, BLADE Network Technologies
Brian Peterson, VP International Operations, Emulex
Tikiri Wanduragala, EMEA xSeries [...]
Next week, Iceotope will announce that it has developed, patented and manufactured an extreme IT equipment cooling solution. The solution tackles the problems of cooling servers in data centres all the way from the actual source of the heat – at the processor and memory component level – to its final destination – outside air by [...]
Next Generation Data have started to fill up their massive 180MVA data centre site at Newport Gwent and are celebrating with a new website.
NGD 1 is offering large scale space only contracts and managed service options for the small to medium business. The massive site has a space allocation of 75,000 SQ metres arranged over [...]
From the coal or oil delivered to the power station all the way through to the energy that drives our business applications the efficiency story is woeful.
