All Posts Tagged With: "Service Protection"
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 [...]
Most people who read this won’t have a clue what a Hollerith punched card is. I only just caught the end of the era at University where I learned to program in FORTRAN coding one punched card at a time. Once the stack of cards was complete, I delivered it to the computer operator for [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Everyone I speak to in the industry agrees that IT components are getting harder to integrate. It’s not a new issue, this complexity, it’s just got harder and harder over the years to make sense of how everything should plug together. So when I speak to friends in the industry who are faced with delivering [...]
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.
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 hot [...]
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 in [...]
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 group [...]
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 [...]
For some time I have been saying that a real IT shop would be ill advised to attempt consolidation to a single hypervisior. Why?
My sense is that we have two types of workload, the mission critical, drives the business applications and services that cannot fail. These are the Fedex Logistics platform, the eBay portal, the [...]
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 webinar [...]
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 [...]
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 (HDG) or electroplated. Only one [...]
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 Indicators (KPIs) that show improvements [...]
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 things that inevitably leads to unintended [...]
We all worry about failures in our data centers, some types of failure more than others. Losing a server is bad, losing a storage array extremely bad! How then might we categorize a full power failure in a data centre? Catastrophic certainly, even careless perhaps?
I can hear the questions already:
How could I have a full [...]
The consequences of data center failure can be pretty catastrophic for your business, so unsurprisingly, you will have very high expectations about availability and reliability. Unfortunately for many of us, our expectations will not be met by reality. Very often the system that is our data center facility is significantly less reliable than we might [...]
The thing about data centers is just how much power they use. This one in Cardiff, Wales uses about 20MW of power and has huge strings of batteries storing power to drive the UPS units. The batteries are kept in dedicated battery rooms that are air conditioned to keep the cells cool and maintain a [...]
DC Power in Data Centres
The discussions amongst Data Centre specialist about the relative benefits of AC and DC are by far the most heated. In my opinion these are mainly driven by the technology that the protagonists are most comfortable with. The 20th Century Data Centre guys are all into AC, it is [...]
