Hot Topics
Here's where we discuss new storage ideas and best practices. Check back often to keep up with the latest industry changes.
Current Hot Topics
- Four Metrics Define Datacenter "Greenness"
- Physical Security in Mission-Critial Facilities
- 10 Ways to Protect Your Datacenter
- Preventing the Top Six Causes of Datacenter Fires and Equipment Failures
More Hot Topics
- AXCESS RFID as Mandatory Protection for Laptops
- Essential Cooling System Requirements
- Energy-Efficient Datacenters
- How to Select KVM-switches to Assist with HIPAA Compliance
- Disaster Recovery Site Improves Thermal Security
- The Role of Management in Assuring IT Infrastructure Uptime
- Ten Steps to Solving Cooling Problems Caused by High-Density Server Deployment
- Watts and Volt-Amps: Powerful Confusion
- Calculating Total Power Requirements for Datacenters
- The Myth of Firewalls
- Can You Trust "Used" Media Tape?
- A Checklist for Moving Your Datacenter
- What To Do About Zinc Whiskers
Current Hot Topics
Four Metrics Define Datacenter "Greenness"
Everyone seems to be going green these days, and with good reason. The potential benefits include saving thousands of dollars in energy costs, fostering goodwill among investors and consumers, enhancing company sustainability and making a positive contribution to the environment — what business wouldn't want to enjoy such benefits? Unfortunately, conflicts of interest and disorganization can scuttle an environmental initiative before it even has a chance to go into effect.
These challenges come to a head in the area of a company where green initiatives can have the largest positive impact: the Datacenter, operators seek to save power to reduce costs (whereas policy-makers seek to decrease energy consumption.) These goals all too often put the two parties at cross-purposes. To make matters worse, the lack of either close supervision or a clear hierarchy ensures that nothing gets done on either end. Luckily, both of these challenges can be overcome by using the Uptime Institute's four key metrics — IT systems design and architecture, IT hardware asset utilization, IT hardware efficiency and site physical infrastructure overhead — to determine your Datacenter's relative environmental level and delegate responsibility over the optimization of each area. Learn more »
Physical Security in Mission-Critical Facilities
People: A Risk to Be Managed
When Datacenter security is mentioned, the first thing likely to come to mind is protection from sabotage, espionage or data theft. While the need is obvious for protection against intruders and the intentional harm they could cause, the hazards from ordinary activity of personnel working in the Datacenter present a greater day-to-day risk in most facilities.
People are essential to the operation of a Datacenter, yet studies consistently show that people are directly responsible for 60% of Datacenter downtime through accidents and mistakes — improper procedures, mislabeled equipment, things dropped or spilled, mistyped commands, and other unforeseen mishaps both large and small. Because human error is an unavoidable consequence of human presence, a critical element of risk management is minimizing and controlling personnel access to facilities, even when concern about malicious activity is slight. Learn more »
Download the white paper PDF | 339 kb
10 Ways to Protect Your Datacenter
If you think the risk of a massive weather disaster like Hurricane Katrina is slight, you’re right. Only 3% of data-loss incidents are caused by site disasters. Computer viruses only account for 7% of data loss incidents. Most destruction at Datacenters actually comes from much more mundane causes: software error (14%), human error (32 %) and hardware failure (44 %), frequently triggered by power problems, such as power failure, power surges, brownouts, line noise, high voltage, frequency variation, switching transients and harmonic distortion.
This means your greatest risks of data loss or system damage are preventable — or at least can be greatly mitigated.
In this paper, we’ll show you best practices that will actually save money and could save you from the potentially devastating effects of downtime or equipment damage. Here are 10 practical and affordable steps any business can take to reduce the risks to, and enhance the reliability of, IT systems. Learn more »
Download the white paper PDF | 92 kb
Preventing the Top Six Causes of Datacenter Fires and Equipment Failures.
The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) attributes 80 percent of computer room fires to unknown causes that originate within the computer equipment itself. Evidence suggests that a significant percentage of these cases come from the spontaneous combustion of conductive particulate coming into contact with circuit boards, micro-switches and other components. In addition to causing fires, it has long been known that there is a direct link between contamination in a Datacenter environment and its subsequent equipment failures — particularly within sensitive mass storage devices. Learn more »
More Hot Topics
AXCESS RFID as Mandatory Protection for Laptops
Laptop thefts and intellectual property losses are rarely made public. We used to watch with great interest the statistics on laptop theft published each year by computer insurer Safeware Inc. Even as the statistic topped a whopping 620,000 laptop thefts in 2002, few people voiced concern. Recent data shows the value of the intellectual property assets lost with those thefts has grown rapidly, threatening to ignite shareholder cries of poor corporate asset management. This is also true for the loss of confidential data, particularly from financial industry firms. Asset mismanagement has far reaching implications these days. Learn more »
Download the white paper PDF | 335 kb
Essential Cooling-system Requirements
Despite revolutionary changes in IT technology and products over the past decades, the design of cooling infrastructure for Datacenters has changed very little since 1965. Although IT equipment has always required cooling, the requirements of today’s IT systems, combined with the way those IT systems are deployed, has created new cooling-related problems which were not foreseen when the cooling principles for the modern Datacenter were developed over 30 years ago. In this paper, a systematic approach of identifying and classifying user problems provides insights regarding the nature and characteristics of cooling systems in next-generation mission-critical installations.
This paper focuses on the problem of removing power in the form of heat from the mission-critical installation. APC white paper #4, “Essential Power System Requirements for Next Generation Datacenters,” addresses the related problems of providing power. Learn more »
Download the white paper PDF | 184 kb
Energy-efficient Datacenters
Power availability is one of the most important challenges facing Datacenters today. In the past, Datacenter floor space has always loomed as the primary issue. Now, more and more Datacenters run out of power availability before they run out of floor space. In addition, cooling requirements for dense servers are driving power demand and taxing the normal Datacenter operational procedures. Operations are not properly “tuned” to accommodate the new energy-hungry environment. This paper illustrates existing electrical-consumption patterns and suggests various strategies for reducing consumption. Learn more »
Download the white paper PDF | 332 kb
How to Select KVM-switches to Assist with HIPAA Compliance
When the U.S. Congress enacted the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in 1996, information security became a top priority for every IT organization and business involved with health care. No company can afford to have its critical systems disrupted for any length of time, nor can it afford to have its key medical data or valuable customer information fall into the wrong hands. And no company can afford to ignore the mandate for accurate, reliable and verifiable health care reports. Learn more »
Download the white paper PDF | 144 kb
Disaster Recovery Site Improves Thermal Security
Increasing thermal loads at Datacenter operations combined with demands for increased operating security require operators to look for innovative methods of real-time thermal management. All corporate data operations require 24/7 uptime. In the event of a major outage the Disaster Recovery site's performance can literally determine the fate of the company. A major multinational manufacturer has recently added Thermal Security (the ability to adapt to and monitor changing thermal conditions) to its Disaster Recovery site to assure uninterrupted operations. As a side benefit, the solution also provides more efficient cooling. The greater efficiency will pay for the entire project in less than one year in electric savings, and will continue to add to the bottom line in subsequent years. Learn more »
Download the white paper PDF | 164 kb
The Role of Management in Assuring IT Infrastructure Uptime
Remote management can contribute to another set of enterprise initiatives which are becoming more and more top-of-mind in enterprise IT: security and compliance. Through flexible, but role-assigned, access control to monitoring and repairing devices supporting key applications, remote management can help ensure that operations is accountable in its support of critical business services.
This report addresses the role and value of remote management, including KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) - switches and other "Out of Band" (OOB) capabilities, in assuring IT infrastructure control in the context of broader market trends and current market alternatives. Learn more »
Download the white paper PDF | 656 kb
10 Steps to Solving Cooling Problems Caused by High-density Server Deployment
High-density servers present a significant cooling challenge. Vendors are now designing servers that can demand over 20kW of cooling per rack. With most Datacenters designed to cool an average of no more than 2kW per rack, innovative strategies must be used for proper cooling of high-density equipment. This paper provides a 10 step approach for increasing cooling efficiency, cooling capacity and power density in existing Datacenters. Learn more »
Download the white paper PDF | 790 kb
Watts and Volt-Amps: Powerful Confusion
This note helps explain the differences between Watts and Volts-Amps and explains how the terms are correctly and incorrectly used in specifying power-protection equipment. Many people are confused about the distinction between the Watt and Volt-Amp (V-A) measures for UPS load-sizing. Many manufacturers of UPS and load equipment add to this confusion by failing to distinguish between these measures. Learn more »
Download the white paper PDF | 540 kb
Calculating Total Power Requirements for Datacenters
Part of Datacenter planning and design is to align the power and cooling requirements of the IT equipment with the capacity of infrastructure equipment to provide it. This paper presents methods for calculating power and cooling requirements and provides guidelines for determining the total electrical power capacity needed to support the Datacenter — including IT equipment, cooling equipment, lighting, and power backup. Learn more »
Download the white paper PDF | 584 kb
The Myth of Firewalls
Almost every organization using the Internet for business has an architectural vulnerability to being compromised by external sources. Organizations remedy these vulnerabilities in a variety of ways, but most effective solutions include a prevention component as well as a detection component. Most existing intrusion prevention systems (IPS) require a high level of support, and their effectiveness frequently varies depending on the amount of IT staff attention they receive. Econet's "plug and play" proprietary intrusion-prevention system, the Sentinel IPS, conceals the network from malicious users while maintaining the utility of the network for other users. Learn more »
Download the white paper PDF | 540 kb
Can You Trust "Used" Media Tape?
There are many concerns regarding the alleged dangers of using so-called "used" tape in your Datacenter, including reliability. Not all suppliers of recertified tape produce the same quality product or utilize the same processes for creating that tape. DataSpan provides the highest-quality product in the industry and set a new standard by which all others will be judged. We completed a SAS 70 Type II audit on our processing of servo track media to prove that our processes, controls and 100% Certified Tape product are superior. Learn more»
A Checklist for Moving Your Datacenter
Having helped with hundreds of moves, DataSpan can assist you with the planning, facilitation and execution of the project, so that your business is up and running in the new location quickly and efficiently. Because we've been through the process so many times, we can help to ensure that you have the best plans in place and the resources to implement them. Learn more»
What to Do About Zinc Whiskers
DataSpan can help you identify, contain and clean up harmful contaminants known as zinc whiskers. Our specially trained staff, with years of experience working in the sensitive and critical Datacenter environment, will provide you with the knowledge and resources to resolve this issue with minimal disruption to your daily operations. Learn more»
For more information, please call Media Recovery at 1-800-688-2414 today.
