Buy, Build or Both? Evaluating Your New Data Center

by Mike Rinaldi on 10/24/12 10:42 AM

What is your preference?

Colocation facilities have long promised organizations the opportunity to buy data center capacity as OpEx, without investing CapEx in a new physical infrastructure. But integrated infrastructure solutions now offer a third option, by enabling organizations to buy efficient, intelligent infrastructures without paying for a lengthy and expensive physical build.

Join Emerson Network Power to discover key financial and technology considerations that will help guide your decision to invest in hosted, traditional or integrated infrastructure solutions. Participants will also see how Smart Solutions from Emerson Network Power offer OpEx savings of 27 percent and CapEx savings of 10 percent or more over a traditional design approach, while providing a level of ownership and control unmatched by outsourced services.

Presenters:  Stephen Blakemore, Solutions Sales Manager and John Bearg, Director

Register now.

October 24, 2012
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm Eastern

Emerson SmartAisle

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Topics: Emerson Network Power, data center infrastructure, reduce cost, data center design, private cloud, data center infrastructure management, robust data center, energy, cloud strategy

Data Centers to Play Football with the United States Congress

by Mike Rinaldi on 10/11/12 3:50 PM

The fallout from the Sunday September 23rd NY Times front page article entitled “Power, Pollution and the Internet” which was purported as an “investigative reporting” piece has begun to spread.   In my last blog, I jokingly remarked that “the general public would go out and tweet and post Facebook tirades on their newest iPhones”.  Well it has clearly moved beyond that.

Only a few days later on Sept 27, Ranking Committee Members of the US House of Representatives Henry A. Waxman, Member Bobby L. Rush and Anna G. Eshoo sent letters to the US Department of Energy (DOE) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), “to request an update on efforts to improve energy efficiency in data centers across the county”.  

This was posted as an open letter to the US EPA and DOE in effect demanding an explanation of how and why they could allow the apparently flagrant energy and environmental disaster equivalent of the Exxon Valdez oil spill happen, while these two major government agencies ignored the travesty. The letter specifically cited the NY Times article as the cause for their concerns and the motivating force behind the letter. Perhaps by triggering the open letter from members of Congress, the NY Times may feel they have brought “justice” to the ostensibly polluting, wasteful world of the Data Center Industry,  in the same vein as the Washington Post’s breaking open of the Watergate scandal.  

I agree that there are many "older" data centers that are less efficient than the newest designs.  There is no question that there is always room for improvement in almost any system or process and the data center is no exception.  However, the NY Times article did not provide both sides of the issue, perhaps because that would have made it less controversial.

Published on 8th October 2012 by Julius Neudorfer, Data Center Dynamics

> Read more

 

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Topics: data center infrastructure, reduce cost, Data Center, data center design, data center energy, data center infrastructure management, Containment, electrical distribution, reduce downtime

The Data Center Infrastructure Challenge

by Mike Rinaldi on 8/1/12 10:45 AM

[Data Center Journal]

To support the increasing demands of the enterprise, data centers have become denser and more complex. Unfortunately, data center managers often must rely on fragmented, historical data to manage this complexity. One specific consequence of the lack of real-time visibility across data center systems is significant inefficiencies in the allocation of physical resources, including power, cooling and space. With the added challenges of increasing energy costs and stricter regulatory requirements, these inefficiencies are hindering overall growth and have become an industry-wide problem.

data center

The problem is that the tools used to provide access and control of IT systems are different from those used to monitor the physical facilities infrastructure, and in the past the two sets of tools have not been able to “talk” to one another. This situation has required organizations to purchase multiple products for KVM, service processor management, power monitoring and sensor control.

What has been missing is true, real-time data center infrastructure management (DCIM).

> Read full article here

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Topics: Emerson Network Power, data center infrastructure, reduce cost, Data Center, Green IT, data center energy, data center infrastructure management, robust data center

Twitter: Data center problems caused outage

by Mike Rinaldi on 7/27/12 3:42 PM

By CASSANDRA VINOGRAD, The Associated Press   

LONDON (AP) — Twitter blamed systems failures — not a crush of traffic around the Olympic games — for an outage on Thursday that saw people around the world experience problems accessing the micro blogging site for more than an hour.

The San Francisco-based company said the outage was caused by a "noteworthy" double failure in its data centers. When one system fails, a parallel one is meant to take over, but two systems coincidentally stopped working at around the same time, Twitter said.

"I wish I could say that today's outage could be explained by the Olympics or even a cascading bug," Mazen Rawashdeh, VP of engineering, said in a statement apologizing to users. "Instead, it was due to this infrastructural double-whammy."

He apologized for giving its users "zilch" instead of the service, saying the company is "investing aggressively" in its systems to avoid a repeat situation.

 Read more now" target="_blank">>  Read more now

 

Is your data center prepared for an outage?

 

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Topics: data center infrastructure, reduce cost, Data Center, data center design, data center energy, robust data center, reduce downtime, data center outages

Why Test Your Circuit Breakers? Because They Fail

by Mike Rinaldi on 6/21/12 1:53 PM

Amazon Traces Cloud Outage To Faulty Breaker

Improperly configured breaker opened and brought down portion of cloud

[Data Center Dynamics]
 

Amazon Web Services has released details about the root cause of the outage of one of its public-cloud’s availability zones that started in the evening on 14 June and lasted until next morning, US Pacific time.

In a note posted on the cloud’s status dashboard, the company said the outage was caused by a cable fault in the power distribution system of the electric utility that served the data center hosting the US-East-1 region of the cloud in northern Virginia.

The entire facility was switched over to back-up generator power, but one of the generators overheated and powered off because of a defective cooling fan. The virtual-machine instances and virtual-storage volumes that were powered by this generator were transferred to a secondary back-up power system, provided by a separate power-distribution circuit that has its own backup generator capacity.

But, one of the breakers on this backup circuit was configured incorrectly and opened as soon as the load was transferred to the circuit. The breaker was set up to open at too low a power threshold.

“After this circuit breaker opened … the affected instances and volumes were left without primary, back-up, or secondary back-up power,” Amazon’s note read.

> Read the full article" target="_blank"> >> Read the full article

circuit breaker testing
A survey by Hartford Insurance Company found that air circuit breakers represent 19.5% of electrical power system failures.  Test results on circuit breakers by NETA (InterNational Electrical Testing Association) firms show over a 15% failure rate.  Defective circuit breakers can allow extensive damage, personal injury, or make an outage more widespread when a fault occurs.  They can also trip when they shouldn’t, causing expensive downtime.

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Topics: data center infrastructure, reduce cost, Data Center, data center design, cloud computing, data center infrastructure management, robust data center, electrical distribution, reduce downtime, data center outages, cloud strategy

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