Martin Veitch http://www.cio.co.uk/
In 2009, the biggest trend will be to postpone new stuff
At this time of year, journalists love to compose lists to fill demand for content that can be rolled out at some point in the media dog days over the festive period, even if the writers themselves have disappeared off on holiday. Nothing wrong with that, so here is ours, but in the form of an antidote, suggesting some things that *won’t* happen next year.
5. Broad deployment of business intelligence tools. Lots of people think that BI tools will be deployed on more desktops so end-users can better understand trends -- and, naturally, BI vendors are keen to expand from their executive customer base. But BI is advanced software for advanced people and giving full-scale analysis tools to the troops is a bit like providing a Howitzer to get rid of a mouse – silly and really quite dangerous too. Making the tools cheap and more usable is just marketing department window dressing.
4. Going green. It’s a myth that IT has gone green. Most CIOs care acutely about getting more value from their investments and part of the remit is to cut costs wherever possible, including electricity consumption. Saving the planet is just a bonus.
3. Sorting out ERP strategies. There will be a time for many companies to make sense of the ragbag of enterprise applications they have assembled or inherited. But with SAP and Oracle still making sense of the applications they have put together through acquisitions, it won’t be 2009.
2. Offshoring booms. Some people think that going into recession means it’s time to offshore anything that moves. Maybe there will be a spike somewhere but it won’t come from financial services, the travel sector or other hard-hit verticals that will seek to lie low in 2009 rather than drive projects, no matter their perception of offshore value.
1. Desktop refresh cycles. Windows Vista was an OS too far for Microsoft and PCs bought even five years ago still have plenty of CPU, RAM and disk headroom in most cases. Conclusion: the PC refresh cycle can wait another year.
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CIO News View: Top 5 IT Things That Won’t Happen In 2009 Despite Being On Predictions Lists
Data centre builders head for Scotland
By John E. Dunn, Techworld
Better known for its proximity to stunning highland scenery, Inverness is to host a new data centre built to exploit an equally valuable asset - renewable energy.
The result of a £20 million ($29.8 million) collaboration between Alchemy Plus and Microsoft, the 20,000 square feet facility in the town's Harbour development area is designed to go beyond housing the usual utility computing hardware found in any other rival's data centre.
According to Alchemy Plus, waste heat extracted from the centre, due to be opened in 2010, will be transferred to neighbouring parts of Inverness to warm properties using an unspecified method. It is not clear that this heat will be cheaper than other sources, but it will be able to claim to be 'greener'.
The company has also made a general commitment to use the locality's growing stock of renewable wind and water energy to power, or part-power, the centre, further reducing its official carbon footprint.
"This development could not be better timed. Demand for premium data centre space continues to far outstrip available supply, and the current economic downturn is driving a rapid shift towards "Cloud" based services," said Alchemy Plus's chairman, Peter Swanson.
Not coincidentally, Scotland is being touted for two other data centres based on the same theme of 'green' energy, the first of which is a massive 250,000 square foot centre proposed for Lockerbie in the borders of Scotland. To be built and run by 'Built by Lockerbie Data Centres', the project would create one of the largest data centres in the world, and again it will pipe waste heat to a nearby housing scheme.
Meanwhile, Atlantis Resources Corporation has proposed building one by the Pentland Firth and designed to exploit wave turbine energy capable of supplying 40 percent of the centre's needs.
Alchemy implied that the chilly climate of Inverness, situated in the north of Scotland, will somehow reduce the centre's cooling requirements, though this looks a bit far-fetched. Without turning the whole building into a sophisticated heat exchanger, it's hard to see how a few degrees in average temperature will make any noticeable difference compared to putting the centre in, say Edinburgh or Birmingham.
More likely, it is just cheaper to build data centres away from expensive urban areas further south, and cheaper possibly to staff and run them too. Towns in the highlands of Scotland are eager for new jobs and perhaps the centres will attract as-yet unspecified tax concessions too.
All three of these centres have yet to receive planning permission, so it's early to suggest Scotland might be about to become a new boom country for the cloud computing world. But it would sure beat sheep farming.
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Data centre managers explore energy efficiency
Remedies for electricity price hikes.
By James Niccolai, IDG News Service.
Putting data centres on decommissioned ships and reusing hot water from cooling systems to fill the town swimming pool were among the ideas floated at last week's Data Center Energy Summit.
Data centre operators came together to compare notes about the best ways to tackle rising energy consumption at their facilities. Ideas ranged from the exotic to the more down to earth, like improving air-flow management and using outside air in colder climates to cool equipment.
After a brief lull a few years ago, a new wave of data centre construction and expansion is under way, stretching the power and cooling capacities of existing facilities and putting pressure on utilities' electrical grids, speakers said.
Subodh Bapat, vice president for energy efficiency at Sun Microsystems, described a perfect storm of factors that are forcing data centres to become more power efficient.
The electricity consumed by microprocessors is increasing by 16 percent per year as they become more powerful, he said, which contributes to a 14 percent increase in the power consumed by each new generation of servers. At the same time, energy prices in the US have increased by about 12 percent on average for the past three years and are expected to keep climbing.
That's forcing some data centres to consider unusual solutions. One large health-care centre is looking at reusing hot water expelled by its cooling systems to do its laundry, Bapat said. A hosting company in the north-east of the US is freezing water overnight, when the cost of electricity is cheaper, and then blowing air over the ice during the day to provide cold air for cooling systems.
Another company hopes to put portable data centres on ships docked at port, giving it "the biggest heat sync in the world [the ocean] to get rid of waste heat," Bapat said.
Most people at the summit here were looking for more down-to-earth solutions. They were offered by several large data centers who discussed results from pilot tests designed to help show the real-world savings offered by from various energy-saving techniques.
One of the most effective is better air-flow management, so that cold air pumped in to cool equipment doesn't mix with hot exhaust air coming out, said Bill Tschudi of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Many data centres use alternating hot and cold aisles to keep warm and cold air separate, but that method is only partially effective because the air mixes in the spaces above the aisles, Tschudi said.
Oracle tested "hot-aisle containment" at one data centre in Texas, which involves building an enclosure around server racks so that the hot exhaust can be siphoned off. Cooling systems account for as much as half the energy consumed by some data centres, said Mukesh Khattar, who heads Oracle's energy efforts.
The hot-aisle containment allowed Oracle to reduce the fan speed in its cooling system by 75 percent, which reduced the fan's power consumption by 40 percent, Khattar said. It installed a variable frequency drive to control the fan and got payback for the investment in nine months, he said.
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PTC = Paid To Click
Pengalaman mengenai mencari duit di internet adalah mengenal Paid To Click. Memang pertama kali merasakan agak pahit. Pahitnya adalah menunggu waktu yang sangat lama.
PTC yang baik adalah:
1. Bux.to
2. vipbux.com
3. 7bux.net
4. taketheglobe.com
5. foxcash.net
6. isabelmarco.com
7. dailyclicks.biz
8. clixmx.com
9. bux.bg
10. world-clix
Semuanya penulis lakukan sampai sekitar 4 bulan. Semua itu memang menghasilkan dan ditransfer melalui paypall atau alertpay.
Semuanya memang butuh waktu jika dilakukan pencairan atau cash out.
Ada yang memakan 60 hari kerja. Untuk member premium dilakukan 30 hari kerja.
Selamat mencoba, uang gratis di internet.
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Sun's green datacentre strategy - have none
Get rid of the lot.
By Chris Mellor, Techworld
We've all heard of the fab-less computer company: now here is the datacentre-less computer company; Sun in this instance. Sun intends to operate without a single datacentre by 2015.
That's the somewhat incredible vision described, in a sign of the times, in a blog post by Brian Cinque, who is a datacentre architect at Sun Microsystems. Given the sensational nature of Cinque's ideas we have checked, insofar as we could, his credentials over the weekend and, yes, he does indeed seem to be a datacentre architect at Sun.
Sun's IT CTO, John Dutra confirmed the vision although not the 2015 goal, in a Forbes interview. Dutra said that Sun will eliminate five of its eight datacentres by 2013 with the remaining three going sometime after that. Yes, Sun does indeed intend to operate entirely on a software-as-a-service (SAAS) model.
The answer to datacentre green house gas (GHG) emissions, ever-increasing electricity prices, and datacentre operating burdens is to do away with them. Stop treating a datacentre as an in-house DIY activity and rent computing power over the grid, having applications run 'in the cloud'.
Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch, a book on utility computing published earlier this year, which says that exactly this shift in IT is happening, said: "This is a very real sign of the shift from the private data center to the public grid for computing. It means that Sun expects the utility computing grid will be mature enough by 2015 to handle any type of software that the company runs."
Cinque's Vision
By 2013 Sun will cut in half the total power needed by is datacentres today through a consolidation exercise, moving from eight to just three centres. He writes: "SunIT will move in an evolutionary manor from several generations of infrastructure, both technology and processes, to a model that is far more efficient with enabling factors like technology and IT Governance-like processes. As SunIT reduces datacentres due to higher utilisation functionality, there will be a point proven by metrics, that SunIT can only become so efficient. At that point SunIT must progress from a service-oriented architecture to more of a software as a service."
Why do this?
- Reduced IT costs thanks to a major reduction in datacentre space, power, and cooling requirements.
- Reduced IT costs and decreased time to implement projects thanks to a reduction in operations complexity for the datacentre staff.
- Compliance with Datacentre audit finding.
- A foundation for sourcing components.
- A transition to an “evolutionary change” infrastructure management style.
- Alignment with application, security, business systems, and agent architectures.
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