 Usually data center and IT news coming out of Virginia is pretty positive - construction, jobs, that kind of thing. This past week, though, a major outage in a facility used by the state to house servers for government services has crippled important agencies like the Department of Motor Vehicles, and the situation doesn’t look like it’s improving too quickly.
It’s getting a little grim, in fact, with the governor now requiring that an inquiry be made and an outside agency determine whether the contractor whose facility suffered the outage owes the state for damages. Apparently Northrop Grumman, the agency in question, has gotten a lot of negative attention from its government customers in the years they’ve been working together - the dangers of what according to BusinessWeek is a $2.4 billion contract lasting ten years. Oh, commitment.
The worst of the problems actually caused by the outage seem to be that people can’t get their driver’s licenses renewed or get any tax stuff done. The state is giving anyone in a situation like that leeway due to the exceptional circumstances, and refraining from fining people who are affected, but the length and breadth of the outage is still an issue, especially given the fraught history of the relationship between the Virginia Information Technologies Agency and Northrop Grumman. Hopefully this will inspire a reassessment of their practices.
Elizabeth English
photo by taberandrew under flickr creative commons license
The Register makes a very good (and pretty funny) point about Dell’s recent reinvention.  With all their recent acquisitions here in the general San Francisco Bay Area, Dell is developing a decidedly West Coast flair.
Between buying Scalent, Ocarina Networks, and KACE, all Bay Area/Silicon Valley-based companies, it looks like Dell is definitely making progress towards a new conception of data centers.
One of the most admirable things about Dell right now is devotion to an open system in which all kinds of third-party components can be used with Dell’s systems. They also have a respect for legacy technologies which is looking pretty innovative at this point when most companies are all in favor of expending a lot of capital on brand-new equipment, which they feel will theoretically save in the long run. Terms like "hippies" and "free love" are coming up, and with good reason.
Earlier this week Ben Linder, CEO of Scalent, offered a lot of insight into all this at a San Francisco publicity event, and talked about how Dell is letting Scalent stick to its former principles and respecting its differences in approach to the data center management software which is their focus. Check out the full story at The Register.
This inclusive, flexible approach seems like exactly the right thing to do in some ways, and I look forward to seeing how it all plays out. Abandoning the simplicity of more modular or containerized approaches in favor of the practicality of integration is an interesting rejection of current trends, and in years to come we’ll see how it all goes.
Elizabeth English
photo by Travis_Simon under flickr creative commons license
First of all, its nickname is Merlin. Second, it’s supposed to be the greenest data center extant. These factors place CapGemini’s newest venture high on the list of coolest data centers as well as greenest.
 So, say the industry average PUE is about 2.5 - Merlin’s is just 1.08. The Reuters news article doesn’t go into as much detail as one could wish about how exactly this exemplary PUE is sustained, but it does discuss the cooling technique which is a part of it all, and more information is available at ZDNet.
The data center was built in a recycled facility, a warehouse in Swindon in the Southwest of England, and is very adjustable in size. CapGemini is using a self-contained modular system which is scalable to their changing needs.
Their cooling is quite innovative and uses five stages to cool air in an extremely energy-efficient process. A combination of filters, water, fans, and outside air work together to keep the data center at a reasonable temperature while maintaining high standards of environmental friendliness.
Merlin is the face of the modern data center - in a recycled space, with cutting-edge environmentally-conscious technology, high flexibility, and a cool name. Cementing its position as the greenest data center out there, the UK’s Environment Agency is the first customer Merlin is hosting.
Elizabeth English
 Apparently simply slowing down IT equipment in the data center solves the problem of the equipment overheating in all this summer heat.
Outages at universities can be especially catastrophic since some research projects that their facilities are working on may require continuous processing, and an outage can completely reset the whole affair.
Cooling in these facilities is pretty reliable, but in the intensive summer heat many data centers are at risk, especially as global warming heats things up.
The technique Purdue specialists have developed to take care of the extra strain on their systems means the equipment will operate at a less than perfect rate, but won’t completely crash. It involves using normal power saving features but also limiting the energy and cooling everything requires to function. It’s an adjustable system so as soon as the threat to cooling continuity is resolved, everything can go back to normal.
See the article at Campus Technology to learn more about why Patrick Finnegan, a campus sys-admin, is being hailed as a data center hero.
Elizabeth English
photo by agius under flickr creative commons license
Interestingly, Viridity Software, based in Massachusetts, reckons it can provide a more  affordable solution to data center energy management than the typical use of sensors. The startup has raised $8 million in funding to market this software-based management system they’ve developed.
The software would cost just $500 per rack to implement, and would provide important information about server performance and power usage, so data center operators can sort out which servers are using more energy than they ought to be and which are being under-used. This information can then, of course, be used to adjust settings to maximize power efficiency. The software, called EnergyCenter, also provides direction on how best to lay out equipment in the physical space of the data center.
The software is more affordable than the more typical strategy of using wireless sensors and although it may not provide every detail that those wireless sensors would it has its strong points.
Check out the article at Earth2Tech for more on this new energy management solution.
Elizabeth English
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