The end of the data center (newsletter)

08/07/07

This is the last edition of this newsletter, and I wanted to revisit the major themes that have dominated it for the last couple of years. Although we ranged far and wide, to be sure, we wove our growing tapestry around a few central threads.

Human factors critical to data center management

07/31/07

We have spoken at length in this forum about the challenges of managing data centers, both as technological ecosystems and as physical entities, in the face of explosive growth in storage and computational demands, heat generation, and power consumption. But does it have to be like that? Does the data center have to experience change of this sort? If not, what are the factors you can change to help avoid the changes, rather than simply coping with them better?

Upgrade burden has shifted to data centers

07/24/07

There are four ways IT departments can respond to escalating upgrade requirements for their servers.

Data center Vistas

07/17/07

In recent conversations with CIOs and IT directors, I have asked many people about their organizations' plans regarding Microsoft's Windows Vista. A few were ready for it and deploying it, and a few more had vague plans to move to it but no tight timeline. Most, though, had neither plan nor timeline for moving to Vista on their corporate PCs; they are pretty happy (or at least comfortable) with XP and see no big upside and lots of downside to making a mass migration.

Managing through the underbrush

07/10/07

In an earlier column we discussed the many networks overlaying a data center - one was the management network, which we defined mainly in terms of “out-of-band” (OOB) access. This is an area where there has been continued progress.

Legacy systems can be a liability

07/03/07

If non-mainframe legacy systems are likely to go away quickly, it might not mean much that there are a few lurking in the data centers. But what if there is no plan in place for their replacement?

New data center metrics that matter

06/26/07

What will be the most appropriate measurement of efficiency in the data center of the future?

Dammed spots

06/19/07

Land went fast in parts of the Pacific Northwest a short time back. Big companies like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft bought territory near abundant sources of hydroelectric power in the hope of both guaranteeing, and controlling the cost of, electrical power for their data centers. The fact that this is a region not prone to large-scale natural disasters like hurricanes is a bonus. Presumably, on other continents and in other parts of North America, other companies are making similar acquisitions for similar reasons.

Nesting dolls of archived data

06/12/07

How to preserve content in a useful fashion is a problem that intrigues many in library and academic IT. If you are storing a copy of some presentation to the Board related to the decision to, say, open a medical school, how do you preserve that material for posterity?

Power is information

06/05/07

An earlier newsletter explored the idea of a cabling plant that was just smart enough to describe itself, to human eyes via LCD panels, or to other IT systems via a standardized information feed.

Cultivating a slimmer image

05/29/07

In "Clap for Tinkerbell!" we discussed how PXE booting (pulling a bootable image across the network at server startup) might provide unprecedented levels of responsiveness in systems deployment and redeployment, with significant concomitant benefits in business continuity and server security (through rapid patch propagation). One synergistic technique that can be used in conjunction with pixie booting is server image management - manipulation of operating systems images to improve security and shrink server-image footprints.

Load balancing for dollars

05/22/07

In Nemertes' New Data Center research, enterprise data center managers identified power consumption and heat dissipation as top challenges.

Divide data centers and conquer

05/15/07

In discussions with Nemertes Research, some IT executives have mentioned that they are building storage services centers - separate, storage-only data centers. And, while myriad issues arise when you contemplate the complete physical separation of storage and compute data centers, there are obvious benefits to the idea, and so it merits broader consideration.

The PAUSE that is refreshing storage centers

05/08/07

To arrive at the DCoE – the Data Center over Ethernet – we need to find ways to make Ethernet behave like the non-Ethernet networks we deploy in our data centers: the fiber channel storage-area network and the high-performance compute network, whether InfiniBand, Myrinet or something else. The SAN represents the larger challenge in the sense that SANs are now nearly ubiquitous, in ways HPC fabrics are not.

The 'data center network' is a myth

05/01/07

There's no such thing as a "data center network." In truth, there are several networks in the data center that interact with and overlap each other.

Time to take storage virtualization to the next level

04/24/07

As storage and other key data center technologies continue to become more abstract - more virtualized - IT can and should expect to get more out of their systems. IT should expect CPU utilization to increase. IT should expect disk utilization to increase.

Virtualize the horse

04/17/07

A somewhat apocryphal account on the 'Net describes how the design of the Space Shuttle is in part dependent on the typical dimensions of a horse’s hind end.

Storage capacity problem is often really about performance

04/10/07

Many of the IT folk I speak with talk about their storage problems - or, really, their storage problem, because nearly every one brings up the same problem: capacity. They are struggling to keep up with the rate of storage growth.

Cheap chills: Inexpensive ways to cool your data center

04/03/07

Data center cooling is one of the top challenges facing companies. In our recent research benchmark “The New Data Center 2006,” 57% of participants said cooling was their top data center challenges.

'Careful Notes and Antiquated Notions'

03/27/07

In a rapidly virtualizing data center environment, what do we need to label and how do we meaningfully label things? If you are running a data center, you know that you still must label the physical objects, but how you do it will have to change with the changing face of data center operations.

Digital thermite

03/20/07

Most of the current furor over leaks of proprietary data has centered on cases of lost or misplaced laptops or backup tapes. A few years ago, with less mainstream media attention, there was a similar round of stories about data leaks. Most of them centered on careless end-of-life management for desktops and servers.

Clap for Tinkerbell!

03/13/07

In the emerging landscape of dynamically allocated data center resources, there are two methods for re-provisioning a server dynamically: hard-drive provisioning and PXE provisioning.

Perspectives that guide data center operations

03/06/07

More important than any given technology in the data center are the perspectives guiding data center operations. Technical capabilities and functional requirements alone do not determine the architecture or operations of the data center. Instead, the organizational perceptions of what IT is and of the importance of the data moving through IT’s domains set the overall tone for what is required of systems architecture, deployment and operation.

Power-hungry computing

02/27/07

One of the most striking changes in data centers has been the increase in power consumption over the past three to five years.

Let sleeping logs lie? Bad idea!

02/20/07

There’s good news and bad news about data center security, according to Nemertes’ just-published “New Data Center” benchmark.

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