Category Archive for : ‘Efficiency’

Has the location for your data center facility been properly vetted?  There are many considerations, and they have evolved considerably since many existing data centers were constructed and put into production.

Basic Data Center Location Requirements

First, from TIA-924-A-2012 (these are very basic requirements; they must be satisfied before any discussion of Tier 3 or higher takes place):

If cooling equipment, generators, fuel tanks, or access provider equipment is situated outside the customer space, then this equipment should be adequately secured.  In the Midwest, this also means sustaining a 120 MPH wind load.
The

It’s been a couple years since research revealed a startling discovery: Across the board, in various industries, more data centers were sitting comatose than realized. The study, which was conducted by Stanford University and Anthesis, found that about 30 percent of servers were what they described as “comatose” — not providing computing services for at least six months.

That study confirmed what the research firm Gartner had earlier indicated — about 80 percent of IT budgets are spent to simply “keep the lights on” and only 20 percent to create new business

As climate change advances as a top concern globally, IT experts are pressed to discover more innovative ways to minimize the data centers’ impact on natural resources. The cooling process, which makes up 40 percent of the power consumed by data centers, is getting some of the most intense scrutiny.

According to the Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey, office buildings with data centers use a significantly larger amount of energy than office buildings without them — primarily because of factors like cooling, electricity, and computing demands. Also, since data centers work

Many organizations aren’t implementing cybersecurity measures enough to protect them against future risks — a trend that could cause as many as 60 percent of them to suffer major service failures by 2020.

That was among the findings in recent research conducted by the research firm Gartner. The special report points to the increasing transition to digital business along with the shift to external services outside of the IT department’s control. Those are areas that could potentially lead to cybersecurity risks, according to Gartner.

Cybersecurity will become increasingly critical as a result

There’s no question the demand for IT is increasing, spurred by a digital revolution that includes Internet of Thing devices and Big Data. And it’s a challenge for companies to identify ways to implement renewable energy initiatives to offset the power used by data centers.

According to the results of an AFCOM State of the Data Center survey, 70 percent of IT specialists reported that their companies’ power density had increased during the previous three years, with 26 percent of them describing it as a significant hike.

As a result, these companies

Climate change is among the trends projected to impact the data center industry within the next 5 years, according to forecasts by researchers. And the growing acceptance of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices will continue to shape the future of data centers.

Research firm Gartner predicted that 90 percent of large data centers will respond to widespread environmental and socioeconomic trends by revising their strategies.

Based on research by Gartner and other industry experts, the following are changes that will force IT professionals to adapt through innovation:

Demand for increased security. While

In my last post, we discussed the latest habit of non-IT departments in organizations large and small: hatching rogue IT operations on the cloud, taking your company’s data for a spin in the Wild, Wild Web — unpatched, unprotected, and nearly undetectable.

To recap, this trend involves departments buying IT services online through vendors like Amazon Web Services, Google Services, Microsoft Azure and others, setting up off-the-books IT operations outside of your organization’s boundaries.

These departments have come to rely on these services to conduct business. Shutting them off is not an

“The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, or FedRAMP, is a government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services.”—FedRamp website

That sounds positive, but getting approved for the FedRAMP certification is far tougher than most cloud providers anticipated. In fact, few organizations are truly capable of making it through the process. As shared by an article in GCN:

“Of more than 80 cloud providers who have applied to go through the FedRAMP certification, more than half are not yet ready to

Data center managers welcomed news that the ASHRAE, which sets requirements for energy-efficient building designs, has released updates to its data center efficiency standard, recognizing that they are different than other buildings.

Since 1975, the data center industry has been measured by the “Energy Standard for Buildings Except Low-Rise Residential Buildings” or ANSI/ASHRAE/IES Standard 90.1. The update, which is called the “Energy Standard for Data Centers” or Standard 90.4-2016, provides a performance-based solution. Rather than identify a prescriptive approach, the new standard provides the levels of performance the data centers need

Anyone in the data center industry understands the importance of uptime. Recent statistics show that it costs us, on average, $7,900 each minute that we experience a data center outage — an essential reason to minimize the incidents that cause downtime.

While there’s already pressure for IT professionals and data center managers to maintain a high rate of uptime, the demand will be even more intense in the 2020s. The expectation will be for 100 percent uptime, as internet connectivity — especially with the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT)