Category Archive for : ‘Reliability’

With a data center outage recently delaying more than 2,000 Delta flights, the vulnerabilities of legacy computing systems became clear, according to various experts commenting on the extensive grounding of the airline’s fleet.

In a Fast Company.com article, Airfarewatchdog President George Hobica said, “The airlines are dealing with a hodgepodge of equipment that’s been cobbled together over the years.” In some cases, the equipment is more than 20 years old, he said. Another problem, he pointed out, is that, unlike other companies, airlines can’t afford to shut completely down for maintenance.

With

With companies increasingly shifting to the cloud for their data center needs, the focus on cloud security policies has been getting more attention — especially with cyberattacks intensifying. While the majority of companies using the cloud have security policies, an alarming number do not, according to a Cloud Security Alliance report.

Out of the companies surveyed, 25.5 percent said they did not have a cloud security policy. And 6.4 percent weren’t sure if their companies had such a policy.

In another recent study, this one by the Ponemon Institute, about 50 percent of

There seems to be no end in sight for the demand of data — all driven by American’s extensive use of media, including apps, YouTube videos and social media platforms. And industries of all types are driving increased demand for data centers as part of their efforts to gather consumer insights.

Those are among the reasons that JLL is predicting that the demand for the data center industry in North America will double within five years — by 2021. The acceleration of cloud adoption is also behind that growth.

The JLL report

Earlier this year, we exhibited at Data Center World in Las Vegas and presented on Reliability-Centered Maintenance and participated on a panel on Managing the Risky Data Center. Our co-owner and in-house compliance expert, Rich Banta, was asked back to the fall event in New Orleans to participate in an important panel with some other great speakers, including:

Bob Hall, Texas Senator
Michael Caruso, Independent Consultant for ETS – Lindgren
Jim LeBlanc, Owner of Contingency Planning Consultants, LLC

The session is called, Important Legislations Affecting Today’s Data Center, with a focus on

With the continual drive to minimize costs and energy usage of data centers, Google recently gave us a hint of what could prove to be the future of data center cooling. Artificial intelligence.

The industry already has been effectively reducing energy consumption with innovative technology like evaporative air, cool aisle/hot aisle containment and chilled water systems to replace traditional cooling systems. And those innovations appear to becoming more mainstream.

However, DeepMind, which has primarily been recognized for using artificial intelligence to win games against humans, has shown that it can successfully address

With data center cooling equipment accounting for 40 percent of the electricity consumed by facilities, it’s understandable that high expectations are being set for innovations that will increase their efficiency.

According to a recent study, the data center cooling market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 19.1 percent from 2016 to 2020. Innovations in this area have contributed to a less accelerated rate of growth in energy consumption.

Here are some of the innovative areas that have been contributing to energy-efficient operations:

1. Use of fresh air. Some data centers have

Recent cyberattacks once again demonstrated that they can happen to any company at any time. Shortly before a British teenager was identified as one of the culprits of a cyber attack on Florida-based SeaWorld, two educational institutions, a state health agency, and a grocery store chain in California all announced being victims of data breaches.

In the California cyber attacks, the health records and personal information of more than 1,000 patients were compromised — leading the Palm Beach County Health Department to urge those people to take measures to obtain free

As data center operators continuously analyze ways to reduce energy usage while cutting costs, they have often relied on insights from The Green Grid to understand data center cooling performance.

That’s why many IT managers were interested in the consortium’s release of the Performance Indicator (PI), a new real-time multi-metric view that delivers a more comprehensive way to understand data center cooling performance. Up until recently, data center operators have used the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric, also released by the Green Grid.

The Green Grid noted that there had been feedback

Concerns about data centers demanding a larger share of energy have been unfounded, as a new report shows that innovations in the industry have led to a promising stabilization in energy usage.

Although the United States is seeing an increasing number of data centers, they are more energy-efficient than models of the past, according to the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. As a result, their collective energy consumption has grown less than previously anticipated.

Based on the study’s results, data centers consumed about 70 billion kWh in 2014 — about

Just as recently as two to three years ago, environmentalists and industry leaders were expressing grave concerns that the demand for data centers would lead to a significant rise in energy consumption. There was reason for concern. With the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) to run businesses and households and the demand for Big Data to provide businesses with critical insights, the accelerated growth of data centers was inevitable.

However, recent studies are showing that those fears are unfounded as data centers have taken on the challenge to implement