Raised Floor in the Data Center – obsolete?
November 22, 2010 by Caleb Tennis · Leave a Comment
The folks at Data Center Dynamics have a great post around the discussion of usage of raised floors in the data center going forward. The article basically says that raised floors have served their useful life, and are not needed moving forward. In fact, the cooling requirements and ever changing needs of the data center make raised floors a poor option for new construction data centers.
Of course, this debate has been happening now for a number of years. In 2007, Chuck Goolsbee was talking about the same thing in a TechTarget post – there are a number of great discussion comments in that post as well.
The debate will probably Read more
Understanding data center downtime
November 18, 2010 by Caleb Tennis · Leave a Comment
Downtime is one of the biggest challenges IT departments face in maintaining business critical services. Downtime can result from electrical outages, overheating due to overworked cooling systems, or acts outside of anyone’s control (force majeure).
Part of the value proposition of carrier neutral data centers, like Data Cave, is to significantly reduce downtime. This is done by providing redundancy in all critical aspects of the facility.
- Redundant electrical paths to every key piece of equipment
- Redundant air conditioning and chilled water plants
- Redundant fiber optic connections to carrier hotels
Of course, downtime can Read more
The EPO button: a vulnerable spot in the data center
November 15, 2010 by Caleb Tennis · 2 Comments
When we started the design of Data Cave, one major concern was the EPO, or Emergency Power Off, button locations throughout the facility. In traditional open floor plan colo models, all of the critical power and cooling equipment sits intermixed throughout the data center floor. The electric code requires emergency power off buttons to be located in certain places so as to kill off this equipment in case of fire or other electrical issue.
The problem with this is, Read more
OpenStack, a game changer for the cloud?
November 11, 2010 by Caleb Tennis · 3 Comments
When the OpenStack framework was announced a few months ago, a lot of opinion was spread regarding its mission and viability. Until that point, cloud software had, for the most part, been proprietary closed-source options available only as a service. While open-source options, like Eucalyptus, were already available to provide software to build your own cloud – the OpenStack project was more of a holistic project – initiated by Rackspace – as a community project to rally around build-your-own-cloud.
Initially there seemed to be Read more
Disaster Recovery or Business Continuity – what is what?
November 8, 2010 by Caleb Tennis · 2 Comments
Mr. Dejan Kosutic takes a very pragmatic look at the difference between Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity. His short article is great, and it helps really get your head around the terms.
From the article:
…business continuity Read more
Cloud vs. Colocation
November 4, 2010 by Caleb Tennis · Leave a Comment
Data Center Knowledge has an interesting piece comparing the cost of the cloud vs. traditional colo model. An interesting exerpt:
…which finds that an equivalent workload would cost $118,248 at Amazon and $70,079 in a colocation facility.
Now, there are always Read more
CIO.com overview of data center definitions
November 1, 2010 by Caleb Tennis · Leave a Comment
While it’s been up for a while, CIO has a great article in place explaining a lot of the fundamental terms about data centers. Much of the information there is applicable to Data Cave and gives great understanding just all of what goes into planning and operating a data center.
For example, the definition of site selection:
A site suitability analysis should be conducted prior to Read more