All Posts Tagged With: "IT Operations"

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 [...]

Data Centre design is an evolutionary process and we can see the first signs of significant change in the latest sites. Co-generation, liquid cooling, cloud computing, high density are all likely to feature in the 2020 Data Centre. How are you placed with your existing Data Centre investments to take advantage of these changes? Will [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 use [...]

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 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 myself [...]

My friend and colleague Steve Duplessie over at Steve’s IT Rants just recently wrote about Enterprise customers consolidating vendors.  At ESG we have been conducting a Spending Intentions Survey for years and one of the recent outputs is that 34% of enterprise IT operations have a stated corporate objective to “reduce the number of vendors we [...]

Milford, MA –- April 22, 2009 – Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), a market-leading information technology research, analysis, and strategy firm, today announced the addition of Steve O’Donnell as Managing Director for ESG’s European operations.
Steve will lead the growth of ESG in Europe as well as the global IT operations practice for the company.
O’Donnell is a [...]

One of the strangest things about IT people is that they often miss the obvious until it is explained to them (sometimes with the aid of a hammer). We are all so used to following the rules and doing what everyone else does. This particularly applies to IT Operations, also known as the Command Centre [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 and tested management techniques and [...]