"Greening" IT

I've just been browsing through the latest crop of IT trade mags that drop onto my desk around this time of the month, and it never ceases to amaze me when I see headlines "Most efficient data centre to date".

Without exception every single story I have seen of late that has a picture attached, either an external shot of the building or an internal shot of one of the data halls, shows the damn thing has been built in a converted factory unit!

Whilst I will admit that there are a growing number of these that have some form of environmental containment, surely it's about time that people began to look at the buildings themselves and what can be included in the design and construction stage to lessen the need for the more expensive solutions.

And yes, I agree. If there's no option because your data hall has to be built inside an exisiting building with no hope of re-designing the structure, then containment is your only option.

Data Centre Headaches.

It's a bit of a pipe dream I know as I don't have any budget for this at all, but surely I'm not asking for the impossible or indeed the only person looking for something like this?

I'm looking after a few data centres and machin rooms at the moment and actually managing the power systems and environment needs automating badly! I have no remote monitoring of the power and I have some geriatric environmental monitoring systems that are seriously on their last legs.

What I need is a PDU to install in the racks that can give me:

• 2 inputs
• Static Switch between them.
• 8 - 12 outputs 
• Sequential start on each port
• Remote operation of each output
• Remote monitoring of each port
• Environmental monitoring of Teperature and humidity.
• Central management of the lot: e.g. stats gathering etc..

I keep looking but I never seem to find one that does everything, just a subset of what I've listed.

Deja Vu or Deja Moo?

In the news today, Toyota are having engine management problems: the car's brakes don't seem to want to work sometimes. It seems I've heard this all before somewhere... way back around 1998 with the Ford Explorer and Ranger models here in the UK having cruise controls that suddenly set themselves to some ridiculously high speed and wouldn't let go of the throttle.

This is not the most worrying aspect of this "occurrence" as far as I'm concerned. What I find more worrying is the initial response from both manufacturers was exactly the same when the problems first became apparent:

"Problem? What problem? There's no problem!"

In the case of Ford, it had to take a couple of severe accidents that couldn't be attributed to either mechanical defect or "pilot error" for them to even begin to admit there was a problem, and to show how widespread that problem actually was, the recall is well over 4.5 million vehicles worldwide as of the end of 2009.

At least Toyota were willing to entertain the possibility of a problem existing or though why the customer facing parts of Toyota in both the US and UK say they knew nothing until very recently says a lot about the "never admit blame, even if it's true" culture in both countries. Come on guys, what's better; admit that you may have got it wrong or have the stigma of at least one very large lawsuit hanging over the company's profit forecast for a number of years.

As my wife often says to Customer Service departments: "Better safe than sued!"

Oh, the definition of Deja Moo: "having heard that bullshit somewhere before."

I spoke too soon......

Actually it's not the boss this time... it's the trolls from the Finance Department. It seems that for the third year running someone has forgotten to budget for a set of software licences that the customer is paying us to renew...

Now I wonder whose office got re-decorated this year with that money!

Or is it a case of.... "Due to budgetary restraints, the light at the end of the tunnel has had to be turned off."
[deep sigh, wanders off to the coffee machine for a refill.]