Is downtime more frequent, or more visible?

Are leading Internet sites reliable enough? The New York Times examines web downtime today in a front-page story, which focuses on users' growing reliance upon web services. "Now the Web is an irreplaceable part of daily life, and Internet companies have plans to make us even more dependent on it," writes Brad Stone. "The problem is that this ideal requires Web services to be available around the clock - and even the Internet's biggest companies sometimes have trouble making that happen."

Data Center Knowledge Article

Top disaster recovery budget wasters

In these days of extremely tight budgets and ever-increasing energy and transportation costs, who would waste money? You have to look at your spending from various angles to see where you may have wasted dollars. For example, refusing to spend money on technologies that can reduce your disaster recovery (DR) deployment and testing costs actually wastes money. This is the first of the top DR budget wasters discussed in this tip. Not virtualizing your data center: Virtualization can save you money in DR maintenance and testing. I have talked to many customers who have leveraged virtualization to build DR solutions, even with applications that are not readily consolidated. In other words, they have implemented a 1:1 consolidation ratio just to gain the benefits of virtualization's mobility to simplify DR.

Serverspecs article

What does downtime cost your company?

Our client's most basic needs always come back to risk mitigation and/or uptime. What does downtime cost your business?

Is it lost sales?

Is it cash flow? Many companies cannot bill without their systems.

Does downtime prevent you from making your products or delivering your services?

Does downtime cost you credibility with your clients?

How many of you do background checks on your IT employees?

The Washington Post has an excellent article today regarding the City of San Francisco/Terry Childs debacle. Its findings appear to confirm suspicions regarding both Mr. Childs' true intentions as well as the City's outright ineptitude.

First, the findings on Mr. Childs, straight from the Post:
Terry Childs, 43, was arrested July 13 at his suburban home, where police found $10,000 in cash, diagrams of the city-county computer network, a co-worker's access card, a loaded 9mm magazine and several loose .45-caliber rounds. Under the user name Maggot617, he hijacked the system and refused to turn over passwords for the network, which superiors belatedly discovered only he controlled

ComputerWorld Article

Raised Floor versus Solid Floor

There is an emerging trend away from raised floor in many large scale data centers. The cost of build out and maintenance for raised floor is driving many organizations to a solid floor data center environment.
Most data center equipment is now cooled from front to back, so cooling from the bottom is no longer needed. A number of different hot spot management techniques can be employed to solve the problem of density related heat.
What's your opinion of raised floor? We'd love to hear about it.