The Data Center Journal » The Daily Buzz

The Shift In Data Center Design

Rakesh Dogra — Wed, 16 May 2012 13:51:53 +0000

The data center industry is seeing a huge shift in the way data center infrastructure procurement and design is taking place. Conventionally, software and hardware purchases were conducted in “bulk” and today, more and more companies are shifting over to buying pre- packaged bundles and PODS. This is the hallmark of a trend that is changing towards modular data center designs. Of course, the modular designs are based on reference architectures that have been certified and vendor tested as well.

These modular data centers contain all the software and hardware needed to run the various apps. Names like EMC, HP, IBM and NetApp. Between all the solutions provided by these companies, the major requirements of the IT department like recovery, replication, provisioning and protection are all met.

Reference architectures are becoming the more popular choice in comparison to building data center infrastructure right from the get go. Companies are even outsourcing infrastructure to the cloud.

OpenFlow And Indiana University

Rakesh Dogra — Wed, 16 May 2012 10:46:46 +0000

The practical deployment of SDN and OpenFlow protocol have been elucidated in great detail by Matt Davey, the chief network architect of Indiana University. He spoke about using the same at the Interop conference in Las Vegas. Davey has been able to enhance the management of provision of service to the 120,000 users. OpenFlow did start off as a research project in Stanford University but today, according to Davey, it has gone beyond this scope.
The University campus has establishments like medical labs, hotels, hospitals and so on. even as far as back as 2 decades, a majority of these users from these establishments have been following the policy of BYOD.

SDN enables Davey to manage these dissimilar networks. The University has 2 big data centers which enable the delivery of a degree of control of networks to the departments and at the same time having a converged infrastructure as well. Apps like intrusion prevention systems are also used by the university.

Leighton Wins Deal for Data Centers In NSW

Rakesh Dogra — Tue, 15 May 2012 17:11:08 +0000

The NSW government has awarded a contract to Leighton Contractors for a project of data center consolidation. The project will result in the consolidation of 130 data centers and also create several hundred jobs in the next few years. Leighton has managed to beat competition from the likes of Digital Realty and Macquarie Capital which had teamed up for bidding for this project. Metronode, a unit of Leighton will be in charge of the project which will deliver the data centers in Silverwater and Unanderra. It will build the two Tier 3 data centers by end of 2013.

According to the NSW government, the move will create around 250 jobs across both these data centers. The exact financial information on this contract are not available just yet but speculation is that it should be one of Australia’s bigger projects since the government spends upwards of $2 billion every year on IT infrastructure.

Schneider Electric’s Data Center Facility Module

Rakesh Dogra — Tue, 15 May 2012 14:11:15 +0000

Schneider Electric has made its presence felt at the 2012 Uptime Institute Symposium with its Data Center Facility Module. The company is a global presence in the field of energy management. With its focus on Digital Infrastructure Convergence, Schneider Electric is showcasing a prefab 500KW Facility Power Module as a component of its Modular Data Center Campus. The product comes in response to customer demand for faster deployment at lower costs and high reliability as far as big data centers go.

The Module can provide conditioned power to the IT areas and can be combined with a facility cooling module and IT room to constitute a data center. They have a very short deployment time and have been tested for performance.

The products can deliver a capital expenditure savings between 10 and 20% and operational expenditure savings from 20 to 35%. Large scale modularity is becoming an important means to achieve energy efficiency as well.

The company will also have a demo of its StruxureWare for data centers.

Reducing Data Center Energy Consumption

Rakesh Dogra — Mon, 14 May 2012 15:26:46 +0000

According to Sufian Dweik, Regional Manager at Brocade Communications, there are a few things that a data center manager can do to reduce the cost of operating a data center especially in terms of energy consumption. These aspects become important when one considers the fact that energy costs are some of the highest components of operating expenses. Green storage techniques and best practices can help meet twin goals of reducing energy consumption and high availability of apps and data.

Fabric design, storage virtualization, file system virtualization, data compression, data deduplication, resizable volumes and thin provisioning are 7 such green techniques. Fabric design links servers and storage systems efficiently. Storage virtualization helps in managing multiple storage systems as a single logical pool.

File system virtualization helps in managing remote file data. Data compression and data dedupe help with simplifying fabric design and reducing storage requirements respectively. Variable volumes reduce disk storage footprint. Thin provisioning helps eliminate under use of resources.

Read More About Data Center Energy Consumption

Microsoft And Carbon Neutrality

Rakesh Dogra — Mon, 14 May 2012 13:50:53 +0000

Microsoft has merited immense credit for its announcement of going carbon neutral. Just a few days ago, the COO of the company, Kevin Turner stated that Microsoft will not only account for but also compensate for the amount of greenhouse gases it produces. This accountability will start from July 2013 and has been based on definite plans and accounting premises. By making it a carbon accounting exercise, Microsoft has not limited it to a marketing or a general corporate social responsibility exercise. Carbon accounting has been seeing interest from a few companies and things like software to monitor carbon emissions and forecasting measures have made their presence felt.

While concrete measures for reducing carbon emissions is essential in today’s world, carbon accounting has yet to make its mark in a big way. A few government schemes for carbon accountability have come and gone and therefore, the announcement from Microsoft is indeed a different approach.

VMware’s Take On The Future Of The Data Center

Rakesh Dogra — Sat, 12 May 2012 15:04:47 +0000

According to Steve Herrod, the CTO of VMware, software defined data centers are the future of the industry. He goes on to elucidate that data center resources will not only be virtualized but also governed by a unified console.The term ‘software defined data center’ is being used to denote the vision that VMware has for the data center of the future. The virtualization administration and management console will function as the point for deployment and capacity management of applications. This has been extended to include the management of physical resources and systems as well.

Software defined networking has been a game changer for many data centers today and the same principle is being extended to aspects like storage and computing as well. HP has announced its support for OpenFlow networking protocol for it brings in greater flexibility in place of the spanning tree protocol.

The time is nigh for specialized software to replace specialized hardware.

Terremark Enhances Data Center Capacity In Brazil

Rakesh Dogra — Fri, 11 May 2012 13:23:03 +0000

Terremark is continuing its investment strategy as far as Latin American markets goes. This market is showing signs of remarkable growth and for the company it makes sense to expand capacity in its Sao Paulo data center. The Network Access Point do Brasil will, after completion, be a cloud enabled facility with 70,000 square feet of raised data center floor space and will also hold 150,000 servers in an ecosystem which is secure, redundant and connected.

The expansion comes in response to customer demand for more services and support and in fact this is the second expansion for the company. Terremark is pursuing a strategy for enabling its 50 data centers all over the world in delivering advanced IT solutions.

In Latin America alone, the expansion of its NAP do Brasil and NAP of Americas Colombia data center facilities, has enabled Terremark to offer more than 90,000 square feet of raised data center floor space. The Sao Paulo facility is the most internet exchange point in Latin America.

Data Center Waste Management System

Rakesh Dogra — Thu, 10 May 2012 14:02:27 +0000

The data center does create a lot of garbage or waste products. From paper to many other products, the data center has to deal with the recycling or safe disposal of trash. Paper printouts, servers and so on are all part of the data center waste management system. The waste management system gets more complex depending on the product that needs to be disposed off. Security of information remains a critical concern for most data center managers.

Confidential information can be retrieved from dumpster diving and going through the discarded material from a data center can yield plenty of information to the trained eye. Paper normally gets recycled and excess IT equipment goes on to online auction sites or even bought as scrap by other vendors.

Shredding the paper is a good idea before giving it up for recycling. For hardware, polices and operating procedures like being zeroed out is an essential step to be taken before they can be given to scrap dealers.

Read More About Data Center Waste Management

The Growth In Software Defined Networking

Rakesh Dogra — Thu, 10 May 2012 13:14:19 +0000

According to IDC, software defined networking or SDN is all set to grow to a $2 billion market by the year 2016. In 2013, this market is sett o touch a figure of $2 billion. This information came at the Interop Las Vegas conference. According to the IDC group vice president, Lee Doyle, network management has thus far been the forte of networking professionals and the command line interface or CLI people. Today, the topics of concern are SDN and OpenFlow. As far as the past ten or so years go, SDN has been the most dynamic development in networking.

SDN helps in abstracting the network and also makes it significantly simpler to manage. From traditional network vendors like Cisco and startups like Big Switch, the SDN space is seeing a lot of products and development. There are also names like Dell, HP and IBM in this space as well.

IDC also states that the cloud market is set to grow too. In fact cloud will drive the growth of data center as well.