The future of data centre cooling
As Westpac Bank recently discovered, keeping a data centre running smoothly can be complicated if you don’t look at alternative cooling methods for when the air conditioning fails.
As Westpac Bank recently discovered, keeping a data centre running smoothly can be complicated if you don’t look at alternative cooling methods for when the air conditioning fails.
Sydney-based Verb IT is the first company in the Asia Pacific region to provision an HP Performance Optimised Datacentre (POD) next-generation data centre in a shipping container. The new Verb DC site where the POD is located is a standard industrial warehouse in Wyong on the NSW Central Coast (one hour north of Sydney). Verb DC is schedueld to go live in September after a 14-week project, including the POD delivery time. In what is being painted as a big win for the Central Coast IT industry, the new POD will provide computing services to local businesses and the world.
As Hurricane Ike bore down on Houston one Friday last September, the Continental Airlines' flight operations center, located on the 14th floor of a glass-sided downtown high rise, suddenly went dark. For the airline's pilots and flight crews, however, business proceeded as usual.
With energy costs rising and data centers at the core of IT strategy for many companies, cooling the growing number of computers jammed into data centers is an issue that has taken center stage.
Computerworld gets an exclusive behind the scenes look inside Internode's Adelaide data centre with network guru Mark Newton
Just off the North Sea coast in the United Kingdom, Hewlett-Packard Co.'s <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9085019">EDS unit</a> has built a data center that largely relies on cold sea air to keep servers chilled and -- by doing so -- cut the center's cooling power needs in half.
When Cisco celebrated the fifth anniversary of its New England Development Center last year - a ceremony attended by Massachusetts Congresswoman Niki Tsongas and a representative from Gov. Deval Patrick’s office - the company was quietly preparing to move several jobs from there and other locations to contractors in India and elsewhere, mostly in the company's Network Management Technology Group (NMTG).
The enterprise data center of the future will be a highly flexible and adaptable organism, responding quickly to changing needs because of technologies like virtualization, a modular building approach, and an operating system that treats distributed resources as a single computing pool.
A year in which the economics of the travel and hotel industries are so bad that business analysts keep making comparisons to the months immediately following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York is not generally the time most IT people would be comfortable putting together a disaster recovery plan for the first time. Most would be in their offices, sweating over spreadsheets, looking for ways to trim spending a bit more, or push a project to drive down operational costs.
Visa is looking for a few good people to run its next-generation data centers.