Monday, January 5, 2009

The Lifeline Data Centers Blog has moved

Thanks for your interest in the Lifeline Data Centers Blog. We have moved to:

http://blog.lifelinedatacenters.com

Catch us there for news, views and information about data centers, cloud computing, and IT strategy.

Experian drills backup water supply to cool data center

Experian takes an unorthodox approach to providing redundant chilled water for their data centers.

Three summers ago, a 76-inch main line that feeds water from Lake Lavon to 29 cities and towns in Texas broke. That was a disaster for credit services giant Experian, which relied on city water to supply the chillers that cool its McKinney data center.

"We lost all city utility as far as water pressure," said Russ Burlew, the data center facility manager. "It took three and a half days to repair that line, and we were without water. We had vendors come in with water trucks and pumps to keep our tower full."

Search Data Center article

Saturday, January 3, 2009

Will There be Thousands of Cloud Providers?

As Internet titans Amazon, Microsoft and Google build enormous data centers to support their cloud computing operations, there’s been much discussion about what the cloud will look like. Will cloud computing be dominated by a handful of companies with the resources to build massive server farms?

Gartner laid out a very different vision in this morning’s keynote at the Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas. Gartner VP Thomas Bittman predicted that cloud computing will eventually support thousands of specialized providers, creating the need for a cottage industry of specialists to assemble client solutions from a smorgasbord of cloud offerings.

Data Center Knowledge article

Friday, January 2, 2009

More CIOs consider IT managed services to deal with new technologies

Technological change, the technology investment cycle and difficult economies are the ingredients for this "perfect storm" that Forrester believes is driving more managed services.

Fueled by a global economic recession and rapidly evolving technologies, the market for IT managed services is poised to explode during the next 24 to 30 months, according to a new report from Forrester Research Inc.

Companies perennially express interest in using managed services providers to tend and mitigate the risks associated with technology decisions. But the reality is that only 10% of companies buy managed services and another 30% express interest, according to the Cambridge, Mass.-based firm. The percentages are higher for certain segments of IT. Enterprises use managed service providers for telecom. Small and medium-sized businesses turn to managed services for security and storage.

SearchCIO article

Thursday, January 1, 2009

GoGrid response to cloud computing hype article

After a Michael Sheehan of GoGrid and I had a brief exchange on Twitter regarding Chuck Goolsbee's article on Cloud Computing hype, Michael wrote the following post in response to the article.

Well, I thought that I could get away with no more articles in 2008. I guess that I was mistaken. I just read a good article by Chuck Goolsbee on SearchDataCenter.com titled: “Don’t buy cloud computing hype: Business model will evaporate” and I figured that I would put in my 2 cents on some of the items mentioned within.

Goolsbee takes a very pragmatic approach to “slicing through” traditional datacenter hosting (using Occam’s razor to boot), so that he could evaluate each and every aspect of what is contained in a physical environment. To summarize (and I’m paraphrasing, hopefully accurately), he mentions:

GoGrid blog post