All Posts Tagged With: "Data Center"
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 [...]
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.
Google Docs now has a batch export facility for their documents created by the Data Liberation Front, a Google team setup to help customers leave. “Imagine you want to move out of your apartment. When you ask your landlord about the terms of your previous lease, he says that you are free to leave at [...]
I visited IP Expo at Earls Court today and had a look around and concluded that everyone is on message about the cloud. If vendor push gets a technology going then cloud is moving at the speed of light. I mostly went to interview VirtualGeek, Chad Sakac VP, VMware Technology Alliance at EMC who was [...]
Anyone following the news will have seen that Verari and Cisco are working closely together on developing the highest density UCS deployment so far. My friend Dan Gatti at Verari just sent over the latest photograph from the Verari manufacturing plant. A FOREST Data Center Scale container full of UCS and Nexus. This really demonstrates [...]
I posed the question about why readers of the hot aisle were running more than one hypervisor. An earlier poll had shown that 44% of respondants behave in a non-intuitive way and run two or more hypervisors. Early results are in – with a poll size of 1021 1141 readers and discounting those who only [...]
I recently had a conversation with Mark Anzani, IBM’s CTO for System z, the mainframe platform. Regular readers will know that cooling technology is a favourite subject here on the hot aisle and I was keen to get an answer to how IBM plan to cool their next range of machines, the z11 series. IBM [...]
I met up with my old friend Martin Williams yesterday; he is CEO of a startup company called ATOV. Apparently AtoV means Anarchy to Visualisation, which is exactly what they do. Some firms have limited instrumentation to monitor their IT systems, some firms even have a Command Centre or Bridge Operations to react to outages [...]
This week we have had two announcements about extreme (and I mean extreme) high performance storage arrays that follow the same basic approach. What they have in common is that they both use solid state (Flash) memory with a twist. Oracle announces the Exadata Storage Server v2 their new Sun built OLTP Database machine and [...]
The Exadata uses Flash, lots of Flash and it uses Infiniband, not Fiber Channel, Ethernet or FCoE. Exadata uses PCI Flash memory modules not Solid State Disks. Actually it is not a general purpose storage controller and it doesn’t support non Oracle Database workload. It is designed from the outset to host Oracle Databases and [...]
I just picked up a neat blog post by Martin Glassborow (@storagebod) discussing a double disk failure in a RAID 5 array which (apparently) caused lost data. RAID is Redundant Array of Independent Disks and the number refers to the type of protection offered. RAID 5 means that there is an extra disks in the [...]
Sometimes the IT business and technology in general gets it right by looking back into history for sensible solutions to intractable problems. By combining modern engineering with old designs we get something extremely smart. To provide stay up power whilst our engines get up to speed we can now use flywheel technology to store kinetic [...]
I received a very thought provoking article about the relative merits of FCoE and Fibre Channel storage networks from Christian Illmer, Senior Director Application and Solution Management Enterprise, ADVA Optical Networking – 8G FC versus FCoE – distinguishing myth from reality. I publish the article here in it’s entirety and add a bit of analysis [...]
Here is a photograph of my ESG colleague Taya Wyss and Cesar Orosco from NetApp in Sunnyvale standing in a smart cold aisle containment system. This is an aftermarket fitting in a relatively old data centre but nevertheless a useful improvement to cooling efficiency. The photograph shows cabinets facing front to front so that the [...]
I am giving the Cloud Summit Keynote at Virtualization World (co-located with SNW Europe in Frankfurt on the 27th and 28th October), my subject will be a familiar theme to readers of the hot aisle – The Data Center of the Future – M&E plant to Cloud. I am also chairing a couple of panels, [...]
Containerized data center provides flexibility to balance capital expenditures and operating expenses while rapidly meeting needs for incremental, scalable capacity delivering Total Value of Ownership Verari Systems, a premier developer of data center scale blade-based computing and storage platforms with the highest density, availability, and energy efficiency in the market, today announced that Qualcomm selected [...]
I am on the West Coast of the US this week visiting with NetApp in Sunnyvale again. On this trip I had the opportunity to visit a couple of NetApp’s internal data centers (B11 and the impressive B2 sites) with Cesar Orosco, NetApp on NetApp IT Architect. Cesar is charged with using NetApp technology in [...]
Some time ago I wrote an article called How do I know if my Data Center is about to fall over. This has proved to be very popular because it talks about risk, the risk that our investments in highly resilient data centers can be worth nothing if we fail to operate them properly. By [...]
Have you been noticing how unimportant hardware has become? Having the biggest. fastest, most reliable piece of equipment in the data center doesn’t cut it anymore. A few weeks back I was talking to Dave Hitz, one of the founders of NetApp and author of How to Castrate a Bull. He explained the phenomena really [...]
I am doing some work on understanding the size of the market for Data Center Scale systems. Sytems like SGI (Rackable) Ice Cube, Verari’s FOREST, HP’s POD, Sun’s Container and AST-Global’s dual container solution. Talking around the market my sense is that although the unit value is quite high ($4-$6M per container) the volumes are [...]
This week CleanAnalysis – the research and analyst arm of my friend, Dan Ilet’s Greenbang (www.cleananalysis.com) – will be officially launched. CleanAnalysis be looking at all sorts of cleantech products and markets with an aim to telling the public and private sector about what will really have an impact on their sustainability, marketing and bottom [...]
Over the last few months I have been thinking about data centers, how we power and cool them and what we put in them. I’ve been looking at what the very largest consumers of IT infrastructure do with their data centers compared to industry norms. The first take away is that almost none of them conform [...]
It’s a pretty good question given the perilous state of the US power distribution network, the ever increasing load and the ever increasing dependance (around the world) for US based IT and network systems. My friend Professor Massoud Amin (the global authority on what is wrong and how to fix it) is running a free [...]
I am old enough to remember the 1960′s when IBM Mainframes used de-ionized water delivered by micro-bore pipes to cool the CPUs. (In fact I remember a spillage during a mainframe move that resulted in every single auto spares shop in south east England being raided for deionized water). In a recent statement IBM claim that [...]
I spend a lot of time thinking about data centers and how to make them better, more efficient, more reliable, higher performance , easier to maintain and cheaper to run. Lots of very smart and experienced people have been doing the same for many years and whilst there is no single, agreed best practice, model [...]
