Cloud Computing, it's all about the "ilities"

Hi, Craig Vosburgh here. Starting today, I'll be one of the authors contributing to the Cassatt Data Center Dialog blog. Given my role here at Cassatt as Chief Engineer, my posts will be on the technical side of things, with an emphasis on real-world implications, with the occasional peek into how we do what we do. Well with the intro out of the way, on to today's posting...In my 20+ years of

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Killing comatose servers: OK, but how?

One of the best sources of data center energy efficiency guidance available today is the Uptime Institute. Not only do they run some really focused, useful events on the topic, but their fearless leader, Ken Brill, is very visible and very direct with his recommendations. His recent article in Forbes took on one of those dirty little secrets in IT: there are a lot of servers in your data center

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Marking green IT's progress: 'it's been slow going'

Two things got me thinking about the state of green IT today. First, with word "leaking" out about President-elect Obama's choice for energy secretary, I started wondering what sort of, um, change might be ahead in how the government will try to shape the energy footprint of data centers. From the energy-efficient data center work we've been involved with over the past 18 months, I'm hoping any

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'Real-time infrastructure': where do you start?

I saw a lot of coverage last week on Tom Bittman's keynote at the Gartner Data Center Conference in Vegas about how IT infrastructure is going to evolve (summary: it's looking very cloud-like). Only a few of the articles (like Derrick Harris' blog) picked up some of the angles Donna Scott presented the next day to another packed room -- more of an "OK, I'm interested, now how do I get started?"

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If David Letterman worked for Gartner

If David Letterman worked for Gartner, Wednesday's "Top 10 Disruptive Technologies Affecting the Data Center" keynote from Carl Claunch would probably have been a bit more like engineer/humorist Don McMillan's routine at the Gartner Data Center Conference. Carl's Top 10 list certainly would have been funnier mashed-up with McMillan's good-natured attack on death-by-PowerPoint. But maybe that

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What this recession means for your data center operations

Apparently the recession isn't deterring too many people from talking about how to improve data center operations. Attendance here at Gartner's 27th annual Data Center Conference is supposedly down only 10% since last December's conference (when, some experts now say, this whole nasty recession actually began). At least, that's the official word on conference attendance. At least one of our

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From Gartner's Data Center Conf: Tom Bittman says the future looks a lot like a private cloud

Here's an amusing tidbit that gives you some indication what Gartner's Tom Bittman thinks the future holds for IT infrastructure and operations: he had so many "cloud" images in his keynote PowerPoint presentation here in Vegas on Tuesday that he actually had to go out and take photos of clouds himself. He needed to have enough distinctly different images that simply using clip art was getting

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Forrester-Cassatt webcast poll: enterprises not cloudy -- yet

There are lots of great resources out there if you're interested in cloud computing (no, really?). Some are a little more caught up in the hype, some less so. The trick is distinguishing between the two. We dug up some interesting stats in our recent webcast with Forrester Research that we thought were worth highlighting and adding to the conversation, hopefully tending toward the "less hype/more

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