White Papers: Data Centre

A study conducted by Verizon RISK Team with cooperation from the Australian Federal Police, Dutch National High Tech Crime Unit, Irish Reporting & Information Security Service, Police Central e-Crime Unit and United States Secret Service. This year our DBIR includes more incidents, derived from more contributors, and represents a broader and more diverse geographical scope. The number of compromised records across these incidents skyrocketed back up to 174 million after reaching an all-time low (or high, depending on your point of view) in last year’s report of four million. In fact, 2011 boasts the second-highest data loss total since we started keeping track in 2004. Read this report.

The data center has gone through several major evolutionary changes over the past several decades, and each change has been defined by major shifts in computing. The shift to a virtual data center will be the single biggest transition in the history of computing. This transition will reshape all the major data center tiers: applications, storage, servers and the network. This paper examines the drivers of this transition, provides real-world case studies and includes data centre fabric best practices.

Over the past decade the trend in infrastructure design has been towards scale-out architectures based on the x86 processor, where many machines are clustered together in order to create a virtual mainframe. In this paper we set out to challenge this approach and to demonstrate that modern mainframe technology represents a viable scale-up alternative to the current vogue for racks filled with blades, looking in parti cular at the way organisations can benefit in terms of improved agility, increased reliability and cost savings by consolidating Oracle databases onto IBM’s zEnterprise and Enterprise Linux Servers (ELS).

Cloud-based computing represents a powerful new option for managing enterprise content, offering increased flexibility, efficiency, and reduced cost for IT infrastructure, data storage, and applications. However, for a variety of business and technical reasons, most organisations will take a phased approach to adopting cloud-based services, which will require them to continue to maintain their on-premises SharePoint environments during the transition. This white paper, written by Chris Beckett from SharePoint Bits, discusses some of the benefits and risks of hybrid SharePoint deployments, and presents governance considerations that are essential for ensuring a successful migration.

This paper describes the principles of the new, commercially available data centre architecture that can be implemented today to dramatically improve the electrical efficiency of data centres.