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

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

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

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.

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Cloud computing not the answer for every business

Cloud computing not the answer for every business

This article hits the nail on the head regarding what works in a cloud environment.

Companies like Amazon and Google have been touting cloud computing as the future of IT, but customers need to ask questions before doing their computing "in the cloud."

Cloud computing refers to the practice of running business software applications on someone else’s network. Instead of buying its own servers and running software on them, a company contracts with a third party vendor that provides them with the computer processing capacity they need at the vendor’s data center. The computing capacity is available as needed, much the way electricity is provided by a utility.

Suite101.com article

With economic downturn, Dell, HP cut U.S. server prices

Nice opportunity to get in on some immediate deals.

In a response to the U.S. recession, IT hardware vendors like Hewlett-Packard Co. and Dell Inc. have responded by reducing hardware prices. Conversely, Europe and other markets have begun to see server prices increase because of currency exchange fluctuations.

Take, for instance, Dell; the company recently reduced its U.S. hardware prices almost across the board, according to Mason Reay, the vice president of Dell marketing operations. And during the last quarter, by cutting prices, Dell has exceeded earnings expectations .

SearchDataCenter article

A CIO Perspective on Change Management

The discipline of change management is as old as computers themselves. Yet the advent of the personal computer and its bottom-up acceptance and growth in the enterprise put many disciplines like change management on the back burner. Many of us have paid the price for this lack of discipline. This article talks about the business side of change management.

The BTM Institute interviews Robert Keefe, CIO of Mueller Water Products and member of the Society for Information Management (SIM) to get some perspective on effectively handling technology-related change management and organizational change management.

Managing change often ranks among the top 10 concerns of the 3,600 senior technology professionals who belong to the Society for Information Management (SIM). Robert Keefe, the president of SIM International, says that although change management ranked seventh in SIM's 2007 survey, the percentage difference between each ranking was very close.

Baseline article