Robert Lemos

How to Shrink The Data Center: 4 Lessons Learned

The business that manages New York City's hospitals consolidates 11 data centers into two facilities, dispensing with two-thirds of their physical servers for a predicted savings of $70 million over 5 years. Consider these four tips.

CIO

4 Data Center Revamp Lessons from a College CIO

Data center operators have to deal with regular peaks in demand. Some are bigger than others, but the influx of students into colleges and universities across the country measures as a massive spike.

To better prepare for its own rush of 10,000 young men and women, Villanova University in Pennsylvania prepared all summer, starting with moving its data center to a third-party co-location site with its own IT facilities management.

In May, the IT staff completed the physical move, ending the hosting of servers that started when the school first dabbled with computing. (Servers used for research are still hosted in those departments.)

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When Clouds Attack: 5 Ways Providers Can Improve Security

Criminals intent on attacking others can lease networks of compromised computers, or botnets, from other criminals serving the underground community. These resources could be considered "clouds" in their own right, but researchers warn that that operators of legitimate clouds need to worry about being used for illicit attacks as well.

In a presentation at the DEFCON hacking conference in August, two researchers did just that. David Bryan of Trustwave and Michael Anderson of NetSPI created a handful of virtual servers to attack a small financial company—a client that wanted to test its security against just such an attack. Rather than renting a botnet from criminals, the researchers used Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) to rent less than a dozen virtual servers to overwhelm the target's network with traffic.

The researchers claimed there was no indication that Amazon detected the attack and called for all cloud providers to take more care in monitoring how their resources are used.

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Lessons From a Data Center That's Got Game

Companies developing latency-sensitive applications for hosting in their data centers could take a lesson from the playbook of OnLive.

The startup company, which just had its coming-out party during the recent E3 gaming confab, runs resource-intensive computer games on its servers and streams the action to players throughout the United States. Despite the technical hurdles of delivering real-time games—many of them first-person "twitch" games—to consumers, the service has quickly become popular, says Steve Perlman, the company's CEO.

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Five Trends Shaping Data Center Designs

In the past, companies built data centers like parents buy clothes for their children: Buy big and wait for the kids to grow into them.

However, companies that designed spacious data centers ended up wasting a lot of money, powering unnecessary infrastructure. Today's data-center design decisions all pivot around maximizing efficiency, while giving companies a path for future growth, says Steve Sams, VP of global site and facilities services for IBM.

"We see our customers make very different design decisions than they used to," Sams says. "And the end result is that they are saving 30 percent in operational costs over the lifetime of the data center."

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Gaming Chips Score in Data Centers

When Axel Kohlmeyer, the associate director of the Institute for Computational Molecular Science at Temple University, needed a large cluster of computers on which to run his models of physical molecular interactions, he could not always get time on the supercomputers managed by the major academic centers.

"To do this number of calculations for the phase diagrams, you would not have the computer power locally, so you would have to apply to the supercomputing centers, but our research is not necessarily attractive to them, so we would not get the time," Kohlmeyer says.

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ISPs Under Pressure To Crack Down On Bots And Spam

For Internet service providers, e-crime is not cheap.

The problem of customers' compromised computers sending spam can dramatically impact an ISP's bottom line, according to a survey by Osterman Research released today: Nearly 40 percent of ISPs had their IP addresses blacklisted by the Real Time Blackhole Lists (RBLs) in the past year. A blacklisted mail server could lead to dropped e-mail -- and an increase in support calls to the ISP.

The outbound spam issue highlighted by the report is one example of the business issues that compromised computers pose for ISPs. One in six providers spends more than $100,000 attempting to prevent outbound spam from impacting their business, according to the report, which was funded by e-mail security service CommTouch.

DarkReading

HGTV Meets Travel Channel: An IT Merger's Ticket to Success

When lifestyle media company Scripps Networks acquired the Travel Channel in late 2009, its IT group had to deal with managing another network without an increase in staff.

The merger went fairly smoothly, Scripps IT leaders say, in large part because Scripps Networks—which also owns the Food Channel, HGTV and the DIY Network—had incorporated business service management (BSM) into its own operations. The company could automatically provision new systems and change policies. And failures and misconfigurations were detected before they cascaded into more serious outages.

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IT Jobs: Data Center Hiring Turns a Corner

Driven to austerity in an economy that only recently appears ready to expand again, companies will likely hire slightly more data center workers this year, according to experts.

Yet, would-be staff will find themselves buffeted by two opposing forces in their new roles: Management pressure to keep budgets low and a growing need for workers who can navigate the confluence of technologies flowing into the datacenter. Corporations adopting new technologies—such as virtualization, data protection, identity systems and cloud computing—are requiring different skills of job seekers, say experts.

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Cloud Computing: Early Adopters Share Five Key Lessons

While some large enterprises have moved their information-technology infrastructure to a third-party managed service to save costs, small firms—especially startups—have come to rely on cloud services to cut initial outlays and help them focus on the core services and products.

Infrastructure-as-a-service offerings, such as Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), typically are used by larger enterprises to give research-and development groups flexibility in resources. For startups, eliminating the large capital expenditure of a data center at the outset has allowed many to reduce seed money and keep their burn rates that much lower, says Oliver Friedrichs, CEO of antivirus firm Immunet, which launched its first product last August.

"It's a big win for smaller companies to leverage the cloud because you are really saving a lot—it is really avoiding a large, up-front investment," says Friedrichs. "Five years ago, we would have had to build out a data center and the sheer cost of that would have made it much more difficult to launch our business."

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