Technology Topics | Data Center - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• Power and Cooling in the Age of the 'Hypescale' Data Center

  With Intelligent Foundation, Emerson Power claims it delivers a more efficient, reliable, scalable and secure data center.

• 6 IT Strategies to Stay Ahead of Data Center Trends

  Automation, virtualization, cloud computing -- these technology trends are transforming the data center and enabling companies to lower costs, increase flexibility and improve reliability. However, these shifts require IT, and their outsourcing providers, to rethink traditional strategies.

• CIOs in the Public Sector Face Roadblocks to Data Center Consolidation

  Amid a White House directive to scale back underused data centers, an effort that will take years to complete, federal CIOs begin to tackle the challenges involved. Among those challenges are incomplete inventories and cost concerns.

• HP consumerises IT infrastructure management platform

  HP unveils its HP OneView infrastructure management platform, which boasts a Facebook-inspired interface and automation designed to radically simplify management of data center processes.

• IT Service Management Tools Help Airline Fix Glitches Faster

  Mapping technologies to key business processes helps IT group prioritize fixes when problems occur.

• Facebook-Led Open Compute Project Tackles Network Switches

  Speaking at Interop today, Open Compute Project Chairman and President Frank Frankovsky announces plans for a new open source project to develop a specification and a reference box for an open, OS-agnostic switch.

• The trouble with coding across the clouds: Part 1

  Most cloud applications have development (or at least scripting) capabilities that allow for deep customization plus some level of database access and computational capabilities. But even the best of the cloud applications must put in limiters for their platform/development environments: an app isn't a general purpose run-time or generic object container. For example, the development language must be made safe for a multi-tenant deployment, and must be well-behaved so that user code can't take down the virtual machine, database, or overall application. Further, some kinds of language constructs must be limited to prevent resource hogging and deadlocks. (Indeed, if you think about the billion lines of user code that Salesforce.com has running in their cloud, keeping quick responsiveness and good uptime stats is a non-trivial task.)

• Avoid 3 Cloud app development sand-traps

  Somebody once said that cloud apps are just like enterprise software, only more so. OK, nobody ever said that. Actually, most everyone says they're much easier and faster than traditional software projects. And done right, cloud projects can be. Because done right, they are smaller, simpler, and more separable than tightly-coupled software projects were.

• Five questions to help recenter IT design on the business

  You might think that technology supports your business, but you're wrong: Technology has become your business. The 21st century reality is that you don't have a business without technology; it has become as integral to the way your business operates as are people, finances, suppliers, business partners, and all the rest. That means it's too risky to build your business and only then look to put supporting digital technology underneath. Instead, business and technology must be designed and built together, as a unified whole - there are simply too many design tradeoffs between the physical and digital aspects of your business to risk doing it any other way. The new mindset is that "your business is embodied in your technology," and this calls for a new approach to business technology architecture and strategy.

• Wisconsin blizzard vs. data center: How Marquette won

  Marquette University's IT department deployed unified communications tools to improve collaboration among faculty and staff - IT staff collaboration wasn't the priority. But as it turned out, Microsoft's Lync suite of voice, videoconferencing and instant messaging tools proved to be IT's life raft during a snowstorm-related data center calamity.

• 10 ways IT can prepare for an industrial revolution

  Established IT systems and operations are quickly becoming impractical and obsolete as technology complexities grow, combined with the realities of post-recession economics. To successfully respond to these changing forces, infrastructure and operations professionals must take action, by using the disruptive economic events of the recession to their advantage. How? By "industrializing" the infrastructure and operations department, following the lessons of other business movements that have industrialized processes to achieve more efficient business outcomes and sustainable competitive advantage. This means enhancing and innovating standard systems, services, automation tools, and other time-saving processes that will allow for increased productivity.

• Transforming IT to show cost of services: Five best practices

  Recently, we brought together 60 CIOs and IT leaders from the Fortune 1000 for our bi-annual "CIO Technology Business Management Council" meeting. The purpose of this event was to provide participants with an opportunity to learn from their peers about how to transform their IT organization into a services oriented organization and run "IT like a business."

• Do you need a cloud CRM platform or cloud CRM product

  The snappy answer is, you need both. Large enterprises with diverse needs fundamentally need a complete CRM application with a versatile toolkit and solid platform. But not everyone is a large enterprise, and even in the enterprise there may be good reasons to have separate CRM instances - for example, in Corporate Development or HR.

• VMware's private cloud computing vision

  VMware wants people to be able to access enterprise applications with the same ease and flexibility they enjoy from Facebook and Gmail. That is, on any device, without a thought about where the service originated.

• Forrester: Ways to cut data centre energy costs

  As the global economy is recovers, pent-up business demand for new apps and market initiatives is driving server investments. Forrester finds that 25 per cent of organizations expect server spend to grow by five per cent to 10 per cent, and six per cent expect it to grow by 10 per cent or more. And to reduce operating and capital costs, improve disaster recovery, and accelerate time-to-market for new apps, organizations are turning to server virtualization.