Category Archive for : ‘CIO Strategy’

When managing an outdated data center, there are improvements that may be out of the budget for your company. Keeping up with technology, equipment and servers are some of the most expensive updates you can make within your own facility. Other expenses, such as remodeling the actual building and keeping up-to-date with security, can add to the already tight budget. Justifying these improvements may be an issue for upper management, so here are three ways, according to Robert McFarlane from Shen Milsom & Wilke LLC, to extend the life of your data

When managing an outdated data center, there are improvements that may be out of the budget for your company. Keeping up with technology, equipment and servers alone are some of the most expensive updates you can make within your own facility. Other expenses such as remodeling the actual building and keeping up-to-date with security efforts will add to the already enormous expense. Justifying these improvements may be an issue for upper management, so here are three ways, identified by Robert McFarlane from Shen Milsom & Wilke LLC, you can extend the life of

Data center cooling is one of the major challenges faced by data center managers because high temperatures and excess heat can severely effect its lifespan and performance. As organizations keep adding blade servers to equip their performance, data centers are demanding more electricity and producing high heat. Sometimes the heat exceedes 30kW – 50 kW/server rack. Increased cooling and electricity demands are adding up to cooling costs and hampering productivity of data centers, and organizations are seriously investing in cooling and heat management solutions for efficient heat and equipment management.

As

Managing IT can be complicated, and picking the right solution for your business can be a lengthy process and decision. The good news is that there are a variety of options that can be tailored for your business; the bad news is that a lot of different companies will try to sway you in the direction that will make them the most money.

Instead of telling you which IT model is best for you business, let’s take a look at each model definition objectively:

Cloud computing: Commonly known as SaaS, IaaS or

Throughout the data center industry, there are varying levels of uptime specifications and ratings which indicate how much of the time the data center is expected to be fully operational. For data centers, Uptime Institute Tiers, TIA-942 Ratings, and BICSI Availability Classes are used to measure uptime, with a range of Tier/Rating/Class 1 – 4. As a data center that places importance on quality, compliance and efficiency, Lifeline Data Centers is proud to say that our power delivery and mechanical systems are designed, built, and operated in conformity with the

Having the best equipment and most innovative technology doesn’t mean anything without a strong IT team. Motivated and talented team members will help your company achieve new goals and identify new opportunities, and they can directly affect uptime and compliance in the data center. Without a properly trained and focused IT staff, your data center could be in trouble. Here are 5 ways to improve IT team structure to drive compliance and uptime in your data center.

Instead of having a hierarchy in the workspace, offer open collaboration. This will influence IT workers to

As an organization, you probably have faced the challenge of whether or not you should house your data center internally or externally. It can be a hard decision, especially if you’re in a regulated industry such as healthcare or finance, which requires an even higher level of compliance and protection. While most people think that housing their data center internally means that they can protect their data better or resolve issues quicker, that isn’t necessarily true.

In fact, there are a lot of myths surrounding housing your internal data center, and

While the goal is to have 99.995% uptime, running a data center means planning for disaster and requires a recovery plan in the event something catastrophic, whether digital or natural, happens. Two of the most common occurrences a data center may experience is a facility becoming too hot or too cold, which will affect operations. Both of these situations can cause damage to supporting hardware and they each require different techniques to remedy the situation. What most people don’t think about is that different types of disasters call for different staffing requirements.

Recovery in

Before outsourcing your data center to the first provider you meet, there are some things you need to do and consider. We’ve developed a checklist for choosing the right data center, which is outlined below:

Outline the type of collocation provider you are searching for and what you would like the partnership to look like.
Set an adequate budget and have service level agreement guidelines ready. Many providers will already have an agreement that is focused on their business goals, rather than your data center goals. When taking the next steps in

For any data center, whether internal or external, the goal should be as close to zero downtime as possible. Not only does downtime in your data center affect your staff or clients, but it hurts the corporation as well. The cost of downtime can cause your business to spiral into debt or even close it’s doors. To avoid this threat and improve your data center uptime, you also need to understand the cost associated with potential outages.

According to the Ponemon Institute, the average cost of data center downtime across industries was