Something scary is happening in the world of computing. Even though everything is getting smaller and more powerful, we’re faced with increasing demand for power to run systems, keep them cool and house them. Although disk drive capacity requirements double every year, if companies require more drives, the issues become
Grid computing would seem to be a simple concept: computers are linked together and the machines share resources such as CPU cycles, RAM and data storage capabilities. Free resources on one machine can be tapped by other users on the grid; in return, a machine in need of additional computing
It’s virtually a no-brainer. Your data is backed up the instant you make a change to it — any change, no matter how small. You can retrieve it immediately. That’s right; no need to hassle with locating and accessing the right backup tape. And the expense is easily justified by
One of the hottest prospects to address the high administrative, support and infrastructure costs of the data center is server consolidation. “In the long term, server consolidation is something you absolutely must do,” says Tim Pacileo, executive consultant at Compass American Inc., a metrics-based IT consulting firm based in New
Rapid change in technology is nothing new. But some things remain a constant: CIOs will always be under pressure to prove IT spending improves business growth and, at the same time, find ways to deliver more with less. These days, that means figuring out which parts of IT to keep
After being sidelined for years by low-cost PCs and servers, the virtues of virtualization are re-emerging. Its adoption is accelerating among companies of all sizes. “The world will be virtualized in several years,” says Sal Capizzi, senior analyst at the Boston, Mass. based Yankee Group. “In five years, they’ll be
Once just hubs that directed network traffic, network switches have steadily gained intelligence. They can now help with user access control of applications and enable fault tolerance to prevent network downtime. This increased functionality not only makes the corporate network run better; it can relieve some of the administrative load
In the perennial push for greater speed and more robust functionality, multicore servers have been promoted as the solution for the future. But despite their obvious benefits in cost-effective and faster parallel processing, there are significant trade-offs. Chief among these are pushback from application developers, skill transfer, memory limitations, provisioning
The cost of storage continues to decline even as the capacity of individual drives increases. But rather than move all data to the fastest — and most expensive — devices, most enterprises are implementing a tiered storage strategy, in which data is delegated to devices according to its importance. “Ten
A strange thing happened when St. Louis, Mo.-based Sisters of Mercy Health System began populating its data center with new servers. “We ran out of power capacity,” says Bill Hodges, director of the data center at Mercy, the ninth largest Catholic healthcare system in the country. Mercy found that the
