"Never in my career did I dream that the supply chains for cleaning supplies would be absolutely critical to our operations,” Digital Realty’s head of procurement Brent Shinall told us in a July DCD keynote speech about the changes the Covid-19 pandemic has brought about within his company and the data center industry. How big [...]
The COVID-19 outbreak has catalyzed operational changes for data centres, as it has across almost every industry. Keeping on-site IT support to a minimum is now a greater priority, as physical distancing continues to be required. That leaves data centres more reliant on remote management and monitoring of IT infrastructure while seeking ways to automate [...]
Data centre administrators have a long to-do list when it comes to infrastructure monitoring. From server and equipment monitoring -- and in some cases, mainframe monitoring -- it's a practice that's often difficult to juggle, especially if you work in a large data centre. But monitoring is an essential task. By obtaining the data you [...]
Over-provisioning, viewed in data centre design and management as something between a best practice and a necessary evil, has been built into the industry’s collective psyche because of its core mission to maintain uptime, at all costs. If a data centre team spends more than it really has to, it needs to improve efficiency, but [...]
A data centre, its servers, storage and networking, and the peripheral equipment needed for their operation all add up to a management challenge. Not only is their use and maintenance expensive, but it is also too often inefficient and difficult. Data centre asset management is an area where many enterprises could make significant improvements, especially [...]
High availability in the data centre refers to systems and components that are continuously operational for a long time. It typically means the systems have been thoroughly tested, are regularly maintained and have redundant components installed to ensure continuous operation. How does a data centre ensure reliable power? What level of redundancy is necessary for [...]
The impact of data centres on corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies is being hidden by the lack of clear energy efficiency definitions. According to global IT and data centre consortium The Green Grid's "EMEA Research on Data Centre Energy and Resource Efficiency", 43% of companies do not define energy efficiency objectives, casting doubts over both [...]
A joint survey undertaken by Intel and Dell has found that almost half of IT managers have little or no idea about what is happening under the hoods of their data centre's, since they have not adopted any data centre infrastructure management (DCIM) products. At the same time 75 percent of respondents who have deployed [...]
Whether it’s to check emails with our morning coffee, book a hotel room or run a global organization, everyone relies on the Internet, and its effective operation is now a crucial aspect of businesses around the world. With over three billion people online, the amount of data being generated is expanding exponentially, creating a huge [...]
While developers and IT operations professionals have been excited about the concept of DevOps, data centre operators, the people who run the infrastructure for the teams upstream, haven’t generally been involved in the conversation. Jack Story, distinguished technologist at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, thinks that is a mistake. And people make that mistake because there is a [...]
