Hiring the right data center manager is critical for customer acquisition and retention. Thorough candidate interviews with several members of your management team are indispensible. Also, making sure you have two to three positive industry references will improve your chances of getting the best candidate for this important customer-facing position. Here are seven areas to consider when hiring a data center manager.…

Data center operators face many and constant issues requiring persistent attention, great solutions, and necessary relationships to facilitate those solutions.

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Data centers are undergoing a tremendous evolution in an effort to improve infrastructure efficiency, flexibility and cost-effectiveness, as well as to streamline cloud computing  and high performance computing (HPC) services. Key trends include I/O consolidation, server virtualization, integration of higher speed Ethernet, and convergence of Internet storage and HPC traffic over a unified Ethernet network.



Testing next-generation data center switches, servers, CNAs (…

I have been in the IT Service Industry for 25 years and I am still surprised on how many articles I have read regarding Independent Service Organizations / TPM’s that continue to only emphasize saving clients 30-60% on hardware service contracts for IBM, Dell, EMC, Cisco, HP, etc.



This type of selling and marketing was pretty effective 10 years ago due to the extreme costs the manufactures were charging for service. Typical scenarios from a service company would be to obtain a…

I have been in the IT Service Industry for 25 years and I am still surprised on how many articles I have read regarding Independent Service Organizations / TPM’s that continue to only emphasize saving clients 30-60% on hardware service contracts for IBM, Dell, EMC, Cisco, HP, etc.



This type of selling and marketing was pretty effective 10 years ago due to the extreme costs the manufactures were charging for service. Typical scenarios from a service company would be to obtain a…

Application-layer DDoS attacks have quickly become the most significant threat to availability of Internet Data Center and Cloud-based services. Application-layer attacks are low bandwidth, difficult to detect and target both end customers and network operators’ own ancillary supporting services, such as HTTP web services, domain name system (DNS), etc.

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The new Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) protocol standard has the goal of allowing an evolutionary approach to 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE)-based I/O consolidation in the data center by preserving all Fibre Channel (FC) SAN constructs – maintaining the latency, security, and traffic management attributes of FC, while preserving investments in FC tools, training, and SAN infrastructure. FCoE enables the transport of FC storage traffic over a new lossless Ethernet medium, Data Center…

Data center infrastructure management is not just useful, it’s imperative. If you share my point of view that an IT network is analogous to a neural network, it’s easy to understand just how critical it is to maintaining business continuity. The data center is the cortex of the business, delivering critical applications, data, security and a host of other important business functions. When the infrastructure is working as designed, a business can run smoothly. However, when the…

While managing a data center operation has always been a complex proposition, over the past several years we have seen a real shift in the operational dynamic. Unprecedented growth in data processing requirements and evolving IT hardware technologies along with updated environmental criteria are forcing organizations to rethink their data center strategy. Rapidly increasing capital, operational, and energy expense are driving the industry to create the metrics necessary to quantify, and…