ITEC

Will a server consolidation project that cuts total servers by 50% through virtualization cut operating costs by that much? Not even close. That's just one of the data center energy efficiency tips that hit the cutting room floor as my feature story, Data center density hits the wall, launched this week.

Here are four more to consider:

Consolidation through virtualization: A 15% solution.

Consolidating servers using virtualization reduces the total number of physical servers and saves energy, but not by as much as you might think. Why? One reason is that the more fully configured replacement servers tend to use more energy than those they replace. So what should you expect to see in energy savings from a server consolidation project? Ben Stewart, vice president of engineering at hosted service provider Terremark, sees a lot of them at the company's colocation data centers. On average, he says, "You get about a 15% power savings by doing the reduction in space."

High density servers? Spread 'em, Danno.

Going to a higher server density may get you better performance per square foot, but it doesn't always pay off when you look at the big picture.

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Technology leaders face increased challenges. Don shares insights on how effective technology leaders manage incoming information. 

Get Everything Off Your Mind  

A popular expression claims that "all words ever spoken by human beings" could be stored in approximately 5 exabytes of data.  Today, the global monthly internet traffic is estimated to be 21 exabytes.  In case you were wondering, an exabyte equals one trillion gigabytes.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exabyte.  By 2020, there will be three billion people using the internet which will be 1/2 the world's population.  

Technology leaders, and many other leaders, are dealing with increasing levels of complexity and rapidly growing amounts of information. 

How do technology leaders effectively master increasing levels of complexity, and stay ahead of the curve?  Capture Everything!  The only way to deal with this level of complexity is to focus on it, and the only way to do that is to capture what has our attention.  Our minds are phenomenal with respect to the amount of information they can process.  Imagine the potential if we could give our minds the opportunity to process and focus as opposed to remember.  There was a study done several years ago by American psychologist George Miller who concluded that humans can hold about seven things in our short term memory.  Anything more than that and we start to forget.

For this reason, it is critical to get those items off our mind, and into a system that has the following characteristics:

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Israel bans the Apple iPad, confiscates it on sight

If you are one of the more than 500,000 people with your hands on an iPad and traveling to Israel, well...don't bring it there. 

Citing the iPad's non-compliance with European wireless standards, the Israel Communications Ministry has apparently instructed Israeli customs to confiscate any Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPad that enters the country. The short answer: The FCC allows Wi-Fi devices to broadcast at higher power levels than allowable with European standards, which Israel adheres to.

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Strategies To Keep Assets Running Strong

For organizations looking to save money, delaying the procurement of new assets can be a logical step. But it can be a tricky balance to squeeze as much life as possible out of existing assets without hazarding downtime. Here are some tips for boosting life expectancy without putting the enterprise at risk.

Focus On Power & Cooling

There’s always plenty of discussion about power and cooling issues in the IT industry, and for good reason. Tweaking these areas can bring enormous boosts in energy efficiency and also prolong the life of IT assets. Concentrating on power and cooling—especially as high-density equipment is integrated into a center more often—can keep IT assets not only rolling longer, but also working harder.

One aspect of power and cooling that’s often overlooked is integrated coordination among seemingly minor data center items, notes Peter Sacco, president of PTS Data Center Solutions (www.ptsdcs.com). He says that many data center managers don’t coordinate lighting, fire suppression, equipment placement, cable pathways, and air distribution, and that can create a bad design scenario. Focusing on how cooling and airflow affect the entire center can cause less strain on specific IT assets and prolong the life of that equipment as a result.

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Thursday, June 17, 2010 2:00 PM ET

Pre-register now for this informative session!

Having inventory control issues? Looking for better efficiency in your warehouse operations?

With IT departments expected to do more with less resources, many companies are turning to the software as a service (SaaS) model as a means for purchasing enterprise software applications. Learn best practices for implementing warehouse management software on a cloud computing platform. Join this free webinar and learn about the 6 advantages a hosted WMS can provide for your warehouse or distribution center.

The benefits of a SaaS Warehouse Management System include:

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Data Center Staffing Trends
Post-Recession IT Shops Are Learning To Do More With Fewer Employees

 

Key Points

• IT department hiring budgets largely remain frozen due to doubts about whether the economy will see sustained growth in the future.

• Enterprises might be tempted to demand more out of IT staffers, but pushing employees too far can backfire.

• IT professionals can find opportunities to widen their skills and to mentor colleagues as enterprises seek to rely on in-house talent for new projects instead of hiring additional employees or third-party consultants.

 

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In a desperate search for solutions to IT's organizational problems, I turn to Bob Lewis, InfoWorld's IT management guru

 

In most companies, IT remains far less effective than it could be. And guess what? The main barriers to success are almost never technological. They're human -- how people organize themselves and how they relate (or fail to relate) to each other.

So where are we in the long-running soap opera of IT and its relationship to the business? To answer that question, I could think of no better person to ask than Bob Lewis, who has been writing about this topic for InfoWorld since (I believe) the disco era. His Advice Line blog, the "Dear Abby" of InfoWorld, remains one of our most popular items. And he has written several insightful books on IT management, his most recent being "Keep the Joint Running: A Manifesto for 21st Century Information Technology."

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Three Critical Things Technology Leaders Can Do Now to Get More Stuff Done. 

Register Now! for this FREE Webinar to learn these critical skills.
April 27, 2010 12:00-1:00 PM EDT.

Join Don Khouri as he shares with you some concepts and methods to track and categorize what has your attention which facilitates your progress effortlessly.
 
Space is Limited.  Reserve your spot now!
This one hour will put you on the path to change your life.
Due to the interest in this topic, this webinar will fill up quickly, so don't hesitate to register now!.  This will ensure your space is reserved, and you will receive the webinar information.

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Enterprises must wait until April 27 for final bits, consumers until June

Computerworld - Subscribers to Microsoft Corp.'s developer and IT professional services are first in line to get Office 2010, which will be released to MSDN and TechNet on Thursday, the company has confirmed.
MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) and TechNet subscribers can download the production versions of Office 2010 starting April 22, five days before volume license customers with Software Assurance will be able to obtain the new application suite.

Last Friday, Microsoft announced that Office 2010 had reached the RTM, or release to manufacturing, milestone, meaning that the company had declared the code completed and was set to ship it to computer makers and media duplicators.

Office 2010 will hit U.S. retail in June; Microsoft has not yet set a specific on-sale date. Users can now place pre-order three editions -- Home and Student 2010, Home and Business 2010, and Professional 2010 -- at the company's online store, as well at some third-party outlets, including Amazon.com.

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Executable end-around doesn't require a vulnerability to hijack PCs

Adobe and Foxit Software are investigating attacks based on a new tactic that embeds attack code in rigged PDF documents, the two companies said today.

Only Foxit has promised to address the problem, however.

Earlier this week, Belgium security researcher Didier Stevens, known for his work on PDF bugs, showed how he used a feature in both Adobe Reader and Foxit Reader to run executable code on a Windows PC from a malformed PDF . Steven's technique doesn't require an underlying vulnerability in either program to hijack the machine; all attackers need to do is dupe users into opening PDF documents.

That kind of social engineering-based attack is nothing new, but until now hackers needed an exploit of an unpatched software vulnerability to pull off a successful attack delivered via PDFs.

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