Monthly Archives: March 2011

HP Tech Day: Sustainable Data Center (#HPTechDay)

HP Fort Collins facility

I’ve had the privilege of being invited to another HP Tech Day.  This time, the event is being held at the HP Facility located in Fort Collins, Colorado.  This campus is located approximately 1 hour outside of Denver and sits between Intel and AMD’s campuses (see map .) 

The focus of this event is for HP to showcase their “Sustainable Data Center” concept.  Over the next two days, me and a team of other bloggers (listed below) will be meeting with key HP personnel like the Vice President of Marketing, Converged Infrastructure, to fully understand HP’s concept.  To give you some ideas of the messaging we’re likely to be exposed to, here’s a slide deck from two years ago: http://www.slideshare.net/hewlettpackard/sustainable-data-centers-hp-labs. Continue reading →

A Look at the Dark Side of the Force

When I go to San Francisco, I head over to the west side of town to peer through the closed gates of the hidden campus of Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) dreaming of catching a glimpse of the magic.  Recently Arik Hesseldahl, from All Things Digital, accomplished my dream and had a peek behind the curtains of what makes ILM run.  Arik interviewed ILM’s CIO, Kevin Clark and then toured the ILM data center.  Continue reading →

Blade Servers Causing Data Centers To Be Re-designed?

A recent article from AsiaOne.com reported that modern data centers are having problems handling the dense server environment that blade servers provide.  The article mentions that traditional data centers that were built less than five years ago were designed to have a uniform energy distribution of around 2kW to 4kW (kilowatts) per server rack.  With the growth of blade servers being at the highest since the inception eight years ago, today’s data centers are packed with dense blade servers that are now pushing the envelope beyond 12kW, thus putting a huge strain on the design of the data center.  In fact, according to Rakesh Kumar, a Gartner research vice-president, “‘A rack that is 60 per cent filled could have a power draw as high as 12kW.” The article goes on to mention that current data centers may need to be re-designed to handle the future power requirements of blades. Continue reading →

What Is Your Ideal VMware Lab Environment?

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been researching what are the “ideal” configurations for a home VMware vSphere lab.  Ideally, it would be small enough to run a few virtual machines and demonstrate high availability features like vMotion, DRS, HA or even FT.  The problem that I’ve run into is that I haven’t found a really good site that has a detailed list of parts and pieces to buy.  Continue reading →