Entries by Kevin Heslin

Mark Thiele from Switch examines the options in today’s data center industry

In this series, three of the industry’s most well-recognized and innovative leaders describe the problems facing enterprise IT organizations today. In this part, Switch’s Mark Thiele suggests that service offerings often don’t fit customer’s long-term needs. Customers in the data center market have a wide range of options. They can choose to do something internally, […]

Improving Performance in Ever-Changing Mission-Critical IT Infrastructures

CenturyLink incorporates lessons learned and best practices for high reliability and energy efficiency. By Alan Lachapelle CenturyLink Technology Solutions and its antecedents (Exodus, Cable and Wireless, Qwest, and Savvis) have a long tradition of building mission critical data centers. With the advent of its Internet Data Centers in the mid-1990s, Exodus broke new ground by […]

Operational Upgrade Helps Fuel Oil Exploration Surveyor

Petroleum Geo-Services increases its capabilities using innovative data center design By Rob Elder and Mike Turff Petroleum Geo-Services (PGS) is a leading oil exploration surveyor that helps oil companies find offshore oil and gas reserves. Its range of seismic and electromagnetic services, data acquisition, processing, reservoir analysis/interpretation, and multi-client library data all require PGS to […]

Digital Realty Deploys Comprehensive DCIM Solution

Examining the scope of the challenge By David Schirmacher Digital Realty’s 127 properties cover around 24 million square feet of mission-critical data center space in over 30 markets across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia, and it continues to grow and expand its data center footprint. As senior VP of operations, it’s my job to […]

Thinking Ahead Can Prevent the Mid-Life Energy Crisis in Data Centers

Turning back the clock at Barclays Americas’ data centers By Jan van Halem and Frances Cabrera Barclays is a major global financial services provider engaged in personal banking, credit cards, corporate and investment banking, and wealth and investment management with an extensive international presence in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Barclays has two major […]

Close Coupled Cooling and Reliability

Achieving Concurrently Maintainable and Fault Tolerant cooling using various close coupled cooling technologies By Matt Mescall Early mainframe computers were cooled by water at the chip level. Then, as computing moved to the distributed server model, air replaced water. Typically, data centers included perimeter computer room air condition (CRAC) units to supply cold air to […]

Annual Data Center Industry Survey 2014

The fourth annual Uptime Institute Data Center Industry Survey provides an overview of global industry trends by surveying 1,000 data center operators and IT practitioners. Uptime Institute collected responses via email February through April 2014 and presented preliminary results in May 2014 at the 9th Uptime Institute Symposium: Empowering the Data Center Professional. To immediately […]

2014 Data Center Industry Survey

The fourth annual Uptime Institute Data Center Industry Survey provides an overview of global industry trends by surveying 1,000 data center operators and IT practitioners. Uptime Institute collected responses via email February through April 2014 and presented preliminary results in May 2014 at the 9th Uptime Institute Symposium: Empowering the Data Center Professional. This document […]

Data Center Cooling: CRAC/CRAH redundancy, capacity, and selection metrics

Striking the appropriate balance between cost and reliability is a business decision that requires metrics By Dr. Hussein Shehata This paper focuses on cooling limitations of down-flow computer room air conditioners/air handlers (CRACs/CRAHs) with dedicated heat extraction solutions in high-density data center cooling applications. The paper also explains how higher redundancy can increase total cost […]

Cogeneration powers South Africa’s first Tier III Certified data center

MTN’s new facility makes use of Kyoto Wheel By Olu Soluade, Robin Sloan, Willem Weber, and Philip Young MTN’s new data center in Centurion, Johannesburg, South Africa, includes a 500-square-meter (m2) space to support MTN’s existing Pretoria Switch. MTN provides cellular telecommunications services, hosted data space, and operations offices via a network of regional switches. […]