Just a quick post today before the weekend, and this one is based on something the Green Data Center Blog posted earlier today.



John Cleese may be getting old, and I have seen him doing promotion for more than one tech company (so he is not the most independent of minds, so to speak). But in all honesty, the man is still a legend. The following clip is about creativity,… Continue

Big scare going around: more and more authorities are mandating biofuel for use in data center backup generators. While this is great in theory, it is less so in practice, as this article at Techtarget.



To illustrate what is going on, let me tell you about my own experience with my car. I am driving a 1999 Toyota Diesel, which is the fuel the Dutch government hates the most… Continue

Yesterday was a bad blue monday for customers of Microsoft's hosted business software in North America. A network failure disconnected them from their business productivity suites and hosted mail servers for over two hourse. To make matters worse, it happened at the start of the working day, when people actually DO read their mail and start planning the rest of the week.



"The outage was caused by a network issue that is now fully resolved, and service has… Continue

I would be the worst data center manager in the world. The reason is very simple: I am very disorganised, and that is probably one of the worst traits to have when you are trying to run an IT facility. As I write this, paperwork is scattered all over my desk, there are countless of browser windows opened at the same time, and the cabling of my one desktop computer reminds me of the plate of spaghetti I ate today, If that is problematic for me, how hard would it be to organise a data… Continue

Nail, head, hammer, perfect strike? Or failing to hit the broad side of a barn? I just quickly wanted to point out to this article on the site of Data Center Journal. As the call for data center efficiency grows louder by more and more stakeholders (and even non-stakeholders), so does the call for regulation.



The American… Continue

The acquisition of McAfee by Intel is unquestionably one of the biggest takeovers of this year. Potentially, this is going to rock the IT world as much as, say Oracle-Sun did last year. With a sum of almost 7.7 billion dollar, it is a large buy even for a giant like Intel. And it shows Intel means business, as the price reflects a 62 percent premium on the share price of the day the deal was made.



Why? Obviously,… Continue

Brocade has opened a new facility near their San Jose headquarters, reports DatacenterDynamics. And yes, it is all about drinking one's own poison.



The vendor consolidated three R&D facilities into the new 5,000 sq ft data center, reducing physical footprint of its research labs by 30 percent… Continue

Everybody here should know the concept of perpetual motion. Also, I can assume that it is known that this concept is purely hypothetical. That's too bad, because otherwise we might have had the perfect solution for data centers at hand: the perpetual motion of heat-to-electricity for servers, that again generate the heat.



Applied Methodologies Inc.… Continue

...and will probably enter an era of cold consolidation, as giant Dell has bought 3PAR. That means this space is now almost exclusively taken up by the big boys: HP, IBM, and Hitachi Data Systems (which, admittedly, is the odd one out). Still, it is yet another sign that the entire data center will be consolidated to a couple of large vendors, where the only way for them to survive is by being gobbled up by one of the IT… Continue

While we have been discussing the merits and flaws of PUE, another computational model is making great strides in the data center sphere: Computational Fluid Dynamic, or CFD. However, the whole concept is totally different.



Because where PUE focuses on bringing a straightforward, easy to use calculation on data center efficiency, the core value of CFD is accurate tracking of the air flow. In cooling, air flow is (of course) vital and probably one of the most difficult things to… Continue

Quick post today. Case studies are one way for writers to make a living, and I speak out of expierence that it is actually quite a challenge. Recently, containerised data centers are in, and Techtarget published a short case of Purdue that are implementing the HP POD. Now, this case study is a bit broader than the usual paid-for article, so it is an ok read if your planning to dabble with… Continue

We all know APC (they like to add: 'By Schneider Electric', but that makes it a bit convoluted if you ask me...) as one of the big vendors of power supplies, cooling systems and what not. Together with Emerson, they are also one of the loudest when it comes to PR.



But among those less interesting announcements, you sometimes see one that makes you sit up for a while. This one from last week did that to me, actually:… Continue