Blogs

YouTube probably isn’t the first place you’d think to look for information about new data center designs. But Allstate is proud enough of a recently opened data center that it made a video about the facility and posted it on YouTube. The video covers some of the green measures adopted by...

When it comes to saving energy in the data center, the HVAC system receives the lion's share of the attention. And rightly so. But that doesn't mean the other aspects of the data center don't offer energy saving opportunities, said Munther Salim at NFM&T during a Tuesday session on data...

Data centers are expensive. Not only are they energy hogs, but they’re a serious drain on real estate budgets as well. For that reason, many companies have begun moving data centers offshore to cut costs. Google also has a plan for offshoring its data centers - quite literally. The company recently...

A recent article in the New York Times highlighted the difficulties of finding facility staff for data centers. The day after it came out, I spoke with Philip Meyers, executive director of infrastructure for Morgan Stanley, about the challenges of data center staffing. It's already a difficult matter...

Who, exactly, is managing all these data centers? This question hit me as I read article after article about the expansion of data centers in response to organizations' growing reliance on Internet computing. Data centers use vast amounts of energy to run the servers they house. But they also use...

I got a surprise reading about results from a new survey conducted by the Uptime Institute . According to the survey , communications between IT and facilities are good or excellent in 57 percent of the companies that responded. In 59 percent of companies, communication was formal, structured and active...

If you’re a facility executive responsible for data centers, the following undoubtedly makes immediate sense. As servers, storage devices and other IT gear get smaller and more powerful, they generate more heat. That translates into greater cooling load in the same space, which in turn means more...

Suppose you manage a data center that uses the underfloor plenum for cooling. Then imagine that the raised floor extends to the outside walls of the building. And now picture a gigantic hole in the wall that lets two-thirds of the chilled air escape. Unthinkable? Certainly. But a new group argues that...

In an ever-increasingly technology dependent world, data centers are big business. Companies and organizations around the world — and not just Internet-based companies — count on reliable data centers to keep business operations up and running. What happened on Tuesday, July 24 in San Francisco...