IT Services » Data Centres

Earth Hour on election night: Cast a vote for power

In a chance case of progress versus sustainability, the NSW Electoral Commission will be in the middle of counting electronic votes on the evening of March 26 when everyone else will switch their power off for Earth Hour.

By Rodney Gedda | 17 March, 2011 12:37

Tags: earth hour, energy, government, green IT, NSW Electoral Commission, NSW State Government, power

Turning service management green - Part 2

Is it a bird? Is it a plane?..No! – it’s service management! ITIL Version 3 may not explicitly talk about sustainability but at every stage of the service lifecycle there is implicit guidance that can assist organisations in addressing the environmental challenges of its operations.

By Karen Ferris | 09 March, 2011 14:27

Tags: eco-ITSM, green IT, ITIL, Macanta Consulting, service management

NBN or not, regional IT must move ahead

Yesterday I was invited to attend the opening of the first HP POD container data centre in the Asia Pacific region. It was located in the regional NSW town of Wyong and, most interestingly, the advanced data centre project will be servicing customers from next month – all without an NBN.

By Rodney Gedda | 20 August, 2010 16:04

Tags: central coast, data centres, HP POD, NBN, regional IT, Verb IT

Ellison hypes Oracle's data warehouse appliance

The high-end data warehousing wars are fast upon us. Vendors are launching ever more scalable DW solutions. And they're delivering them with more aggressive -- and slippery -- performance claims.

By James Kobielus | 08 October, 2008 09:57

Tags: HP, larry ellison, oracle

IT admins should also think green

"Plug data leaks" and "Embrace Web 2.0" are among the pieces of practical wisdom shared this week by InfoWorld's Dan Tynan in an article titled "Seven things IT should be doing (but isn't)." It's a sound list, to be sure, but I believe there's an important omission. For the sake of your company's bottom line, its legislative peace of mind, its CSR (corporate social responsibility) standing, end-user morale, and yes, the planet as well, No. 8 on the list should be "Think green."

Six tips for safely choosing an IT asset disposal partner

The prospect of disposing of old IT equipment -- PCs, servers, storage gear, and the like -- may very well fill your heart with dread. After all, you're putting a lot of faith in a third party that the machines will be thoroughly wiped of confidential information, resold for a fair price, and, when applicable, properly disassembled, recycled, and disposed of. If your partners' practices end up being sloppy -- or downright criminal -- you could find yourself in regulatory and PR hell as confidential data protected by HIPAA or SarBox ends up in the wrong hands or 500 of your PCs end up in a landfill or river somewhere.

Building a new data center? Think WAN

Practically every company I talk with is consolidating data centers, constructing new ones, or both. These aren't the old "glass house" models of the 1980s and 1990s: They're next-generation designs with racks of blade servers, virtualized clusters and storage-area networks.

Green IT: Whose project is it?

Who should be responsible for your company's energy initiatives? Your organization may be grappling with the answer to that question. Controlling IT energy consumption has become a high priority for many companies as a way to lower costs, maintain business operations, and reduce their impact on the environment. It can be a rather daunting challenge, given that so many areas of a company's IT infrastructure -- from the desktop to the datacenter -- contribute to power usage, not to mention that various departments have vested and sometimes conflicting interests in those operations (for instance, users want might want more computing power -- but another department has to pay for it).

The million-dollar datacenter question: Tier II, or not Tier II?

Imagine, if you will, that you're planning a brand-new datacenter. Ah, the excitement! The anticipation! But oh, the costs ... Yes, they're going to be high, but at least you're now in an enviable position: You can determine your realistic anticipated needs for your new datacenter, which in turn will help you calculate how expensive it will be to construct -- as well as to power and operate after it's complete.

Green IT numbers don't lie

Stark statistics shed light on the needs driving green computing

SynapSense employs wireless sensors to monitor and map datacenter health

Measure, measure, measure: It's one of the pieces of advice repeatedly doled out to companies looking to make their datacenters more energy-efficient. Without question, it's a sound suggestion; if you don't know where you're starting from, how do you know where you should go or whether you've made any progress?

Data warehouse 2.0

Analytic databases are the principal engines driving business intelligence, delivering operational data into reports, dashboards and ad-hoc queries.

No easy green strategy for storage

I find it ironic that Seagate chose Earth Day to celebrate the shipment of its billionth disk drive. After all, increased drive dependency in the datacenter is fast transforming into an unsustainable energy demand.

Harnessing datacenter heat for savings

The heat that pours out of your datacenter machinery represents a hefty chunk of your monthly utility bills. After all, were it not for that heat waste, you wouldn't be pouring dollars into running that pricey cooling equipment to ensure your valuable hardware doesn't get fried.

Cloud computing begins to emerge from the haze

I hate technology buzzwords. And when I hear one, my impulse is to bat it away like an annoying mosquito. But before you do the same about one of this year's hot buzzwords -- cloud computing -- give it a little more thought.