Uptime Institute today published new research Developing a Digital Infrastructure Roadmap for Data Center Virtualization. This publication provides cost modeling for various approaches to server virtualization.
The modeling is based on the business requirements of an actual client and utilizes actual IT hardware profiles and typical growth scenarios. This publication provides meaningful analysis and commentary for any company considering virtualization as a means to manage their IT infrastructure and associated data center facility.
Download is free for members. Sign up today.
Uptime Institute Digital Infrastructure Services Consultant Amy Spellmann lays out the argument that cloud computing providers can be more energy efficient than in-house data centers. In this video, Spellmann lays out the technologies and operations strategies that allow public cloud providers to avoid energy waste plaguing other data center operators.
Spellmann will present on this topic at Uptime Symposium, May 9-12 in Santa Clara, Calif. Register today.
SearchDataCenter.com just ran an article featuring its Data Center Advisory board, featuring data center thought leaders and advice from the trenches about setting aside time for strategic planning.
From Uptime Institute’s contribution to the article: So many managers are locked into the day-to-day firefighting; they never get out of the reactionary mode to plan ahead. The consequences can be dire. I wouldn’t want to be the manager who has to go to the executive team to explain why a data center ran out of capacity sooner than expected. But even if you’re not at risk of running out of capacity — just the day-to-day waste that comes from not aligning data center and business needs can really eat at your company’s bottom line.
Is your organization at risk of running out of data center capacity? Are you considering moving compute loads to the cloud, increasing virtualization investments, evaluating colocation options or planning a new data center? Are you responsible to deliver this message and formulate a strategic plan? These aren’t the kinds of projects you can handle if you don’t make time for formal strategic planning across all of the silos in the organization, from server and storage management to the facilities team.
Uptime Institute Professional Services started engaging clients recently to sit these different parties down in the same room to create a Digital Infrastructure Roadmap, which is a way to optimize your IT cap-ex and op-ex investment with input from all of the stakeholders in the data center.
Sign up for a free Uptime Symposium Expo only pass.
Pass includes instant access to the Exposition Hall – no waiting in line onsite. See exhibits and demos from the leading solutions providers in the industry.
Admission to Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon Technology Innovation Presentation sessions.
Access to Tuesday afternoon keynote presentations by:
– Chris Malone, Thermal Technologies Architect, Google
– George Slessman, Chief Executive Officer, i/o
– Ron Noblett, Vice President, Datacenter Infrastructure and Storage, HP
Admission to the Tuesday evening reception (6:00-7:30 pm)
***Sales executives from vendor companies that are not Underwriters are not allowed in the Exposition Hall ***
Computer World’s Patrick Thibodeau wrote an excellent article on the recent Amazon Web Services outage and quoted Uptime Institute’s Ken Brill.
Ken Brill, founder of the Uptime Institute, which researches data center issues, points to Japan’s Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. For 40 years, there were no problems at the plant. Then an earthquake and tsunami that hit in March disabled the facility with catastrophic consequences.
Brill expects that a post-mortem on the nuclear plant will show at least 10 things that c
ould have been done to help avoid that failure and reduce the magnitude of damage and would have made it easier or faster to recover from.
The Amazon post-mortem will likely show something similar, said Brill.
Despite the redundancies and backups built into the Amazon cloud, “you hit a combination of events for which the backups don’t work,” he said.
Users see the promise of cloud technology as a way to reduce costs and be greener, but “that [also] means concentrating processing in fewer, bigger places,” said Brill. Thus, when something goes wrong, “it has a bigger impact.”
Meanwhile, the promise of reliable cloud uptime is putting protection advocates — the IT people who champion more internal reliability and safeguards — at a disadvantage, he added. “There will always be an advocate for how it can be done cheaper, [but] if you haven’t had a failure for five years — who is the advocate for reliability?
“My prediction is that in the years ahead, we will see more failures than we have been seeing, because people have forgotten what we had to do to get to where we are,” Brill added.
For more info on this topic, attend Ken’s presentation at Uptime Symposium — Creating and Managing High Reliability Organization.
As technology becomes more pervasive, as globalization and standardization occurs, as the speed of change increases, and as cost cutting invisibly reduces safety margins, the world is apparently experienced an increasing frequency and an increasing impact of man-made disasters. This session will explore how equipment, people, local workplace factors, organizational culture, and latent conditions all interact to produce avoidable failures. Recent nuclear plant meltdowns in Japan will be used to illustrate how latent conditions can lie safely dormant for many years and then can unexpectedly combine with “normal” defense breeches to cause catastrophe beyond imagination. Research has now shown that many common solutions to “human error” may actually dysfunctional producing fewer, but much bigger disasters. Forty-five hundred Abnormal Incident Reports (AIRs) collected by the Uptime Institute over 16 years will be used to illustrate how these ideas apply to data center malfunctions.
Uptime Institute is now regularly publishing online videos: profiling data center leaders, commenting on new tools and metrics and showcasing data center operational excellence in its Network membership. 
