Blogs

Last year, the State of California conducted a series of data center cooling efficiency projects that yielded dramatic and impressive results. Join us to hear how these data centers were modernized with new wireless control technology to slash cooling energy use. Two data center specialists will reveal...

Throughout the month of March, Paul Mihm, executive vice president of Rubicon Professional Services, will be checking in on this forum to answer your data center-related questions. Please post them below.

My trip to the Alcatel-Lucent facility in Plano was great. Alcatel showed us great hospitality (not to mention feeding us pretty good too) and the performance of their new modular cooling solution was just as advertised. The most powerful comment I can make about it is this one, it was hot in Plano that...

I am scheduled to visit the Alcatel-Lucent facility in Plano . Texas next week to take a first hand look at their new modular server rack cooling system. Your first question is probably "Alacatel-Lucent makes a cooling system?!?" This longtime staple of the IT world and particularily the telecom...

In my work with companies on their infrastructure, one thing stands out to me in almost every conversation; most companies have not looked at their particular cost of IT downtime. What does down time cost YOU? You know it costs something, right? Unfortunately most companies don’t really take a...

Here are a few quick thoughts about some strategies to lower your carbon footprint and save energy dollars: Monitoring,Benchmarking and Data Center Metrics - This is probably the most important part of any energy saving strategy. You cannot fix what you don't know about or understand. Here's...

The use of hot aisle/cold aisle configurations had been around for several years and the physics of it make sense - put the cold air in the front where the equipment breathes and put all the hot air in a separate aisle - but in this traditional design in a high-density data center, up to 40% of the cool...

I am couching this discussion in terms of Mission-Critical Infrastructure but this really applies to several different disciplines especially IT. First let's define and qualify each of these items. Remote Access is the ability to access a piece of equipment from a remote location. A remote location...

Read an interesting article in today's Chicago Tribune profiling Microsoft Corp.'s $500 million, 707,000-square-foot data center in suburban Chicago. The article touts the rather nondescript facility - at least from the outside - as a one-stop shop for the digital needs of government agencies...

In this recent article in "the Register" Intel is floating the concept of data centers being too cool and thus wasting power. See http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/31/data_centers_run_too_cool/ . I believe that several things need to be researched before we make a mass exodus to 80 degree...

This is a very good article from Search Data Center that highlights ASHRAE standards. http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid80_gci1366676_mem1,00.html

Having spent many years around server rooms and telephone offices , the magnitude of the systems that support information technology doesn't surprise me. What does occasionally give me a start is that all of these diverse processes have "a guy" attached to them who is the sole master of...