Chris MacKinnon's Blog (149)

The Cloud, the Data Center, and Application Management

When it comes to application performance, data center managers don't usually dig too deeply. They are embroiled in the day-to-day requirements of managing the infrastructure that sits beneath the applications. Yet when users start complaining about slow response times or application errors, the IT managers who oversee those applications come knocking at the data center door with questions. How is the network/storage/servers affecting my system? Data center managers don't always have those…

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Added by Chris MacKinnon on June 7, 2011 at 14:04 — No Comments

Think Servers Haven't Changed Much?

Servers haven’t changed much in recent years. This may be a common misperception, but it’s a huge misperception.

 

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Added by Chris MacKinnon on June 3, 2011 at 13:14 — No Comments

Seven Points to Consider For Hiring A Data Center Manager

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.…

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Added by Chris MacKinnon on May 31, 2011 at 13:53 — No Comments

Solving Day-to-Day Data Center Issues

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

 

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Added by Chris MacKinnon on May 25, 2011 at 20:20 — No Comments

Testing Your Data Center's Components & Services

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 (…

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Added by Chris MacKinnon on May 24, 2011 at 12:02 — No Comments

Prescription Before Diagnosis

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…

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Added by Chris MacKinnon on May 23, 2011 at 16:33 — No Comments

Prescription Before Diagnosis

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…

Continue

Added by Chris MacKinnon on May 23, 2011 at 16:32 — No Comments

Securing the Data Center: Application-layer DDoS Attacks

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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Added by Chris MacKinnon on May 19, 2011 at 17:50 — No Comments

FCoE: Allowing an Evolutionary Approach to 10 Gigabit Ethernet

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…

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Added by Chris MacKinnon on May 17, 2011 at 21:14 — No Comments

Data Center Infrastructure Management: Not Just Useful, It’s Imperative

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…

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Added by Chris MacKinnon on May 16, 2011 at 15:00 — No Comments

Environmental Monitoring: Rethink Your Data Center Strategy

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…

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Added by Chris MacKinnon on May 6, 2011 at 12:38 — No Comments

Never Underestimate Choosing a Server Based on the Right Processor

As today’s IT environments encounter increasing demands for more efficiency, driven by a need to reduce power while simultaneously increasing application performance, server technology has needed to adapt dynamically.

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Added by Chris MacKinnon on May 4, 2011 at 15:17 — No Comments

PDUs in the Enterprise: How Data Centers and IT Managers Can Benefit From Them

PDUs are required for every rack to deliver multiple outlet power ports. Every Rack in a data center must have PDU devices. The number of outlets is based on the number of servers and switches and similar devices installed in each rack. Typically this is 16-24 devices, so the most common PDU sizing is 24 outlet ports. The topic of interest recently regarding these power distribution devices is the level of intelligence required for each given customer. Some customers treat these as…

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Added by Chris MacKinnon on April 29, 2011 at 14:47 — No Comments

Protecting Your Data From Breach Attempts and Unauthorized Access

Data is constantly at risk from hackers that launch advanced, automated, and large scale attacks as well as from malicious and privileged insiders that may abuse their access for economic or personal gain. Data Security has also become subject to intense regulatory scrutiny – so much so that any viable Data Security solution must be able to address the requirements imposed by auditors and regulators. Organizations need to protect data which lives on file servers and databases, and is…

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Added by Chris MacKinnon on April 28, 2011 at 15:12 — No Comments

Network Performance and Security Monitoring Not Only Helpful--it's Required

Network performance and security monitoring is not only helpful, it is required in today’s enterprise data centers to provide reliability and performance of today’s complex applications. Data center and IT managers should be focusing on efficient delivery of applications, and network performance and security are two big areas that affect overall application reliability and performance. While most enterprises are monitoring their data center ingress and egress, and possibly some critical…

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Added by Chris MacKinnon on April 27, 2011 at 11:39 — No Comments

Securing the Data Center: Application-layer DDoS Attacks

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.

 

More Here

Added by Chris MacKinnon on April 26, 2011 at 11:42 — No Comments

Backup Tape Replacement Cycle or Policy: Tips

When implementing removable disk backup to replace a legacy tape backup system the best advice we have is to not over complicate things. Remember, removable disk backup is in essence the same as backing up to tape. You are just using larger, faster and more reliable backup media. If you use a GFS rotation with tape, you can do the same with disk. If you use Backup Exec with tape, you can use it with disk.

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Added by Chris MacKinnon on April 21, 2011 at 18:23 — No Comments

The Greatest Benefit of FCoE: Server I/O Consolidation

FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) is a storage networking protocol that supports Fibre Channel natively over Ethernet. FCoE allows Fibre Channel frames to run alongside traditional Internet Protocol (IP) traffic, because it encapsulates the frames into Ethernet frames. 



With Fibre Channel over Ethernet, Fibre Channel becomes another network protocol running on Ethernet, alongside traditional IP traffic. This means Fibre Channel over Ethernet runs alongside IP traffic on Ethernet,…

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Added by Chris MacKinnon on April 20, 2011 at 17:25 — No Comments

What's Your Data Center Strategy? Build or Retrofit?

Aging data centers are forcing many organizations into a corner. Many are running out of space, have insufficient power or operate in environmental conditions that threaten business continuity. 



Clients considering their data center strategy might be unsure whether to retrofit their existing data centers or to build new from the ground-up. The decision to build or retrofit is not a simple choice and will have major financial and operational repercussions.

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Added by Chris MacKinnon on April 19, 2011 at 17:31 — No Comments

Data Center Budgets Are Not The Problem - It's Often The Budget Process

Many IT budgets focus on the near-term CapEx and the twelve month OpEx. This often creates a budget where new business initiatives are vetted but past business strategies are not revisited through a needs analysis, so they become a part of the ongoing OpEx. But then IT leaders are held accountable for the long-term costs associated with past business strategies.



Here is a simple example to illustrate the challenge introduced by the process:

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Added by Chris MacKinnon on April 18, 2011 at 15:14 — No Comments

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