8 Apr 2013 | Design & Facilities Management
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When decision-makers contemplate data-centre projects involving tens or even hundreds of millions of pounds, they must have an absolutely reliable way of assessing how their installation will perform. For large organisations depending on high volume online transactions, the highest possible data processing availability becomes the dominating requirement. Such organisations typically aspire to an availability of 99.999%, often referred to as ‘Five-Nines'. Other applications, with less critical loads, trade off between availability, capital costs and operating costs to best match their business priorities.
Authored by Mike Elms, Technical Services Manager for Uninterruptible Power Supplies Limited, a Kohler company.
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21 Jan 2013 | Design & Facilities Management
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As the network needs of businesses continue to evolve – with the increased use of personal devices and the operational cost benefits offered by migrating IT infrastructures to the cloud – there are clear advantages for enterprises to adopt an open multi-vendor, ecosystem approach to enhance the running of their corporate networks. Johan Ragmo, Business Development Director, CNE for Network Infrastructure at Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise explains three key advantages of deploying an open multi-vendor data centre.
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29 Oct 2012 | Design & Facilities Management
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Factors driving interest in factory-terminated cabling systems add up to greater sustainability, lower cost of ownership, writes, Benoit Chevarie, Product Line Manager for Belden.
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1 Oct 2012 | Design & Facilities Management
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With energy costs rising, building owners and managers are searching for ways to improve energy efficiency, reduce costs and improve their carbon footprint. One area of the enterprise key to that effort is the data center—the IT system's central nerve center. By Denis Blouin, program manager for data centers with Belden.
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10 Sep 2012 | Design & Facilities Management
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When decision-makers contemplate data-centre projects involving tens or even hundreds of millions of pounds, they must have an absolutely reliable way of assessing how their installation will perform. For large organisations depending on high volume online transactions, the highest possible data processing availability becomes the dominating requirement. Such organisations typically aspire to an availability of 99.999%, often referred to as ‘Five-Nines'. Other applications, with less critical loads, trade off between availability, capital costs and operating costs to best match their business priorities. By Mike Elms, Technical Services Manager for Uninterruptible Power Supplies Limited, a Kohler company.
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3 Sep 2012 | Design & Facilities Management
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What do Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Google have in common...? They are all building bigger and "better" data centres to meet burgeoning server and storage requirements. Rapid growth in networking and data center equipment purchases reflects business' seemingly insatiable demand for more data and processing capacity. Data centre managers are at the sharp end of this rising demand and they are under more pressure than ever before. In fact, by 2010 networking equipment purchases in Europe grew at a compound rate of 3.2% annually. Analysts predict that the pace of market growth will increase to 5.4%, reaching approximately $69.8 billion by 2015 . As the scale and number of technologies increase, data centre managers need to find better ways to manage enterprise assets. This means reengineering operating processes, consolidating management information and surfacing actionable data from management systems, otherwise, managers will waste precious time, money and effort finding their way through the volume of information, alerts, workflows and management tasks that a modern data centre needs.
By Dr Ben Eshay, CTO at Ritte Technologies.
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20 Aug 2012 | Design & Facilities Management
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Despite the many benefits delivered by server virtualisation, the technology also brings with it certain pitfalls that data centre managers need to manage carefully. One of the biggest challenges resulting from server virtualisation is the surge in the number of cables associated with increased levels of I/O. In this article, Steve Knodl, Director of Product Management at I/O consolidation specialists NextIO, gives tips for data centre managers on how to they can make the most of server virtualisation to ensure the agility of their business, and not let cables take over their lives.
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16 Jul 2012 | Design & Facilities Management
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Every second that something continues to burn, the greater the cost in repair and recovery. Chris Downing, UK extinguishing product manager for the Siemens Building Technologies division, looks at why data centre operators need to ensure their fire detection and extinguishing systems are suited to their specific environment to be at their most reliable, responsive and effective.
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2 Jul 2012 | Design & Facilities Management
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As data centre energy costs continue to increase and consume ever greater proportions of the IT budget, organisations are exploring a growing raft of power efficient technologies and innovative designs in order to control costs and meet CRC targets. But virtualisation and cold air cooling alone are not going to solve the data centre power issue long term.
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7 May 2012 | Design & Facilities Management
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Most people are aware that a UPS is a system that provides battery backup in the event of a mains failure. However UPSs protect sensitive onsite equipment from many other externally-generated electrical disturbance types as well. Authored by Matt Henley, technical services manager for Uninterruptible Power Supplies Limited, a Kohler company, this article looks at why today's critical loads are vulnerable, the type of electrical disturbances that threaten them and how UPS systems can offer protection.
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9 Apr 2012 | Design & Facilities Management
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Emerson Network Power has released a list of 10 common surprises for data centre and IT managers and offered tips on how to be prepared for them. The list, released at AFCOM Data Centre World Spring, includes information on a surprising cause of data centre downtime, what data centre managers might not know about that next server refresh, and the growing trend sneaking up on virtually every IT manager.
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5 Mar 2012 | Design & Facilities Management
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The fierce competition for a share of the market, combined with the prevalence of new media channels, means that there is a heavy technological demand on today's media and broadcast industry. As all commercial sectors are witnessing prolific change with regard to data consumption and consumer appetite, Will Pitt, Head of Media Sales at Geo Networks (Geo), explains how the changes have accelerated specifically in the media and broadcast environment.
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13 Feb 2012 | Design & Facilities Management
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Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) systems are fundamental to any data centre. Their key role is to maintain a secure electrical supply if the mains fails or exceeds acceptable limits. Here, Mike Elms, technical sales manager for Uninterruptible Power Supplies Limited, a Kohler company, explains how to maximise your investment and reduce your costs.
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6 Feb 2012 | Design & Facilities Management
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A UPS must warn all ICT equipment it supports of any power failure, to allow the possibility of an orderly shutdown. UPS communications capability also brings other benefits, including management of multiple UPS installations and delivery of data for preventative maintenance and fault diagnostic applications. Authored by Matt Henley, Technical Service Manager for Uninterruptible Power Supplies, a Kohler company, this article looks at how UPSs can communicate alarm and status information locally or transfer it onto an enterprise network for distribution through and beyond the operator's organization.
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16 Jan 2012 | Design & Facilities Management
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Are the UK's largest companies bearing the brunt of misguided carbon reduction policies? When town centres and office buildings still blaze with light at 2am, why are businesses being asked to invest in unproven strategies for reducing carbon consumption?
CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme targets are nothing more than a distraction. Of course organisations should be looking at key areas of energy consumption, such as the data centre. But the emphasis should be on understanding costs, operational performance and risk. Investing in data centre monitoring tools is a good strategy but not simply to meet random carbon targets. Data Centre Managers should be using these tools to identify the servers in a data centre that are redundant; to automatically and remotely switch equipment into sleep mode at weekends; or to eliminate expensive downtime through equipment failure.
As Mark King, Director of data centre innovator, 2bm explains, a shift in focus is required: organisations need to exploit real time data centre monitoring to improve operational efficiency, reduce energy consumption and minimise the risk of downtime to reduce costs - CRC compliance will be achieved by default.
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9 Jan 2012 | Design & Facilities Management
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With more than 500 customers and thousands of users across 90 countries, Aspect Enterprise Solutions is a global provider of web-based commodity trading, risk management and data management applications. Its Software as a Service (SaaS)- based tools allow commodities trading organisations in the oil & gas, metals, agriculture and other industries, such as Chevron, BP and Noble, to manage the financial risks of trading resources. The company's array of solutions help organisations with real-time pricing and analytics, while ensuring they are making the right business decisions that won't cost them profit.
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