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The Lifeline Data Centers blog has moved to http://www.lifelinedatacenters.com.

We still cover subjects like midwest data center, data center compliance, outsource data center and disaster recovery centers.

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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

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

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

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

Don't buy cloud computing hype: Business model will evaporate

Compelling devil's advocate view of cloud computing. Author's definition of cloud computing: data center on-demand.

From what you read and hear of the buzz surrounding cloud computing, it sounds like a model that will just steamroller over the whole data center industry and make everything we've built over the past two decades obsolete. It will allow IT to scale without effort, at minimal cost! It is an on-demand data center with zero capital outlay! It slices, dices and juliennes! But even in the best-case scenario it seems like it can only really solve a small subset of the industry's needs. In the worst case it will be a punch line for lame jokes a few years from now, much like other over-hyped buzzwords from the past.

Search Data Center article

Survey: Data Center Budgets Will Stay Pretty Much the Same in 2009

Of course, you only care if it's YOUR budget.

AFCOM survey indicates that nearly two-thirds of managers of large data centers will maintain or increase their budgets in 2009, despite the deepening recession. The remaining one-third will lose about 15 percent of their budgets, with much of the reduction involving travel and training expenses.

A noted data center industry association reported Dec. 23 in a survey of IT managers that nearly two-thirds will see their IT budgets stay the same or even increase in 2009, and that the remaining one-third will lose only about 15 percent of their budgets.

eWeek article

Economic meltdown to change telecom landscape, report says

The tech industry that includes the telecom and the enterprise networking sectors has gone through some hard times in the last 20 years, but the author of a new economic forecast for the technology industry says he's never seen anything like this.

The title says it all. In Surviving a Tech Market Nuclear Winter: A Planners Handbook to Tech Success in Today's Challenging Financial Times, industry analyst and consultant Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corporation, says "it's hard to see how we could have a worse juxtaposition of planning activity and economic events." But Nolle also believes that if companies take the right actions in a bad market, they can come out of this economic crunch stronger than when they went into it.

Search Telecom article

10 Predictions for the Future of SAAS and On-Demand

Here's a compelling set of predictions on some of the business ramifications of software as a service.

oSAAS, or cloud computing, on-demand applications or whatever you want to call it, is increasingly important in the enterprise. One software-as-a-service company, Innotas, provides an on-demand Project Portfolio Management package specifically designed for IT organizations. Customers include Forbes, Hamilton Beach and Simon & Schuster, as well as financial services, health care, retail, technology, telecommunications and energy organizations. Innotas CTO, founder and SAAS evangelist Demian Entrekin shares with eWEEK his thoughts on what lies ahead for SAAS as it continues to grow into a major marketing, sales and administration tool for enterprise business.

eWeek article

Google: Raise Your Data Center Temperature

The following article speaks of a growing trend of raising temperature set points in large scale data centers. Lifeline Data Centers believes this is a viable option assuming that hot air removal is well-managed.

The biggest players in the data center industry are raising the thermostats in their data centers, with some saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in energy costs in the process.

The latest company to focus attention on temperature in the data center is Google. “The guidance we give to data center operators is to raise the thermostat,” said Erik Teetzel, an Energy Program Manager at Google. “Many data centers operate at 70 degrees or below. We’d recommend looking at going to 80 degrees.”

Data Center Knowledge article

Carrier diversity as important as the costs of power

Finally, an article that addresses how important telecom connectivity is to data center site selection.

For data center managers looking for the best place to locate a data center, the price of power has been at the forefront of the discussion. Mega corporations are building data centers near dams to access three-cent per kWh utility rates, but fiber diversity is a growing concern, and is probably number two or three on the site selection criteria.

The Department of Homeland Security advises companies to seek diversity (i.e. multiple vendors) amongst fiber carriers, but the carriers don’t share maps — it’s part of their competitive advantage. And a lot of times, multiple carriers are in the same trench, which won’t provide resiliency in the event of a cable cut.

Serverspecs article

The great paradigm shift of cloud computing is not self-service...

This is the best article on real cloud benefits I have read this year.

There has been significant discussion over the short life of the term "cloud computing" about how little it differs from concepts like managed hosting and ASPs. And there is some truth to these observations; if you really look closely, what are the key differences between EC2 and a more traditional managed hosting provider? Some would say multi-tenancy, self-service and pay-per-use (including billing and elastic capacity). With specific regard to EC2, I would tend to agree.

(I would also hasten to point out that Amazon provides some very PaaS-like services in conjunction with EC2, such as Simple Queuing Service (SQS) and SimpleDB.)

CNet article

Shifting IT business models in time of economic crisis

Adopting flexilbility as a key IT strategy gives CIOs like Peter Whatnell the ability to shift in changing market conditions.

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Peter Whatnell, CIO of Sunoco Inc., prepared three budgets for next
year. The first scenario lays out what IT would have proposed had the financial crash not occurred. The second is the plan if his budget stays flat. And the third? What a 20% reduction in budget would look like.

"In each case, we have said, 'This is what we deliver, this is what you would get for it, this is the consequence for stopping or reducing, and this is how much money you would save.' So, we're trying to be anticipatory with that," Whatnell said, in an interview with SearchCIO.com at the SIMposium 08 conference in Orlando this week.

Search CIO article

360 degree virtual tour of Lifeline Data Centers Eastgate phase I

Lifeline has just posted a 360 degree virtual tour of our first 30,000 square feet of space. This picture was taken in early November. We'll be updating it periodically until the opening in February 2009!

Eastgate virtual tour

Debating IT's True Value

Interesting article on valuing internal IT against the wide availability of outsourced IT services. Should in-house staff worry?

The rise of IT services offers a unique opportunity for IT shops to measure their true value. But not everyone agrees.

One of the few bright spots in these tough times has been the market for IT services. Amidst all the gloomy headlines—the talent shortage, the economic and financial crises, layoffs and lowered forecasts from the tech industry, rising unemployment in the broader economy—IT services employment has gone up.

CIO Insight Article

Outsourcing deals being re-evaluated in weak economy

IT outsourcing remains steady at most large companies, but the weak dollar and service issues are causing some CIOs to reconsider their decisions. And that's not all -- loss of flexibility and control can also be factors.

In a tough economic environment, flexibility definitely becomes more important. Executing change orders, modifying manufacturing orders or altering marketing pitches delivered during telephone contacts are all more difficult when the work is outsourced. "You don't have the luxury of saying, 'Come on team, let's go!'" explained David Rutchik, managing partner at Pace Harmon, a Washington, D.C., consultancy that specializes in outsourcing issues.

SearchCIO article

The problem for web hosting is that everybody wants a free lunch

It can’t be easy to be a web hosting company. On the Internet everybody wants a free lunch (or at least a very cheap one). And this of course includes hosting.

To prove this point, we looked at search data from Google and found something quite interesting for the term “web hosting” (using Google’s excellent Insights for Search tool).

Royal Pingdom article

IT Management Slideshow: Top CIO Priorities for 2009

As expected, cost-cutting goals have expanded, but it’s not the whole ballgame in 2009. Here’s what more than 220 IT executives listed as their top priorities in business, management and technology priorities.

CIO Insight article

Data centers, corn and cows in the Midwest

Every year, I am amazed that this survey omits a critical category; access to telecommunications carriers. Without access to multiple, varying tiers of bandwidth and transport, how can this be a meaningful survey?

More than just corn is popping up in Des Moines. There are also data centers.

Google and Microsoft have both built data centers in Iowa, and apparently for good reason. According to a Boyd Company data center location study, the Midwest is one of the best places to build a new facility -- if you can.

"If a company is looking for a project, if you look at the cost of land, insulation from natural disaster, electric power rates, ability to hire skilled labor – the Midwest has all of that," said John Boyd, president of the Princeton, N.J.-based company.

Search Data Center article