Data Center

The Next Green Initiative is Internet Sustainability

We are all aware of the pollution caused by burning coal and combusting oil. The results are obvious: exhaust spewing from vehicles, factories, and power plants. Many of us don't realize we are actively contributing to the unnecessary burning of energy (natural gas and coal in the US) to power the Internet. We wag our fingers at Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and data centers, but the fact is that our own organizations are wasting electricity every single hour out of ignorance or apathy. more

Yahoo’s 1 Billion Accounts Hacked is a Chilling Warning: Start Doing Things Differently or Die

Today, this is how easily "TRUST" by your users/customers can be shattered, your revenues devastated, your share value plunged into the abyss, and your business destroyed. Furthermore, conventional thinking belongs only in university libraries, not in board rooms. It is time to seriously consider other innovative Out-Of-The-Box Solutions and doing things differently, or start writing your business obituary. more

Cloud Services Drive Data Center Markets

Research from Infonetics shows that last year was a strong year for data centre network equipment sales, due to a rebound from bare-bones 2009 spending levels and, more importantly, fundamental trends favouring investments in the data centre, such as the explosion of content and traffic, use of virtualization, and increasingly, cloud-based services and architectures. more

Privacy Rules to Change in the EU, But What If ...?

In a presentation EU Commissioner Viviane Reding gave a preview of the new Privacy regulation her DG is preparing. As she states, privacy rules need to be brought up to date and harmonized. With all 27 member states having the same rules and tools to enforce, a company only will deal with one privacy commissioner... So, what if we, for the sake of this blog, take this initiative towards spam and cyber crime. What would this do to spam enforcement? more

German High Court Says No to Retaining Telecom, Email Data for Tracking Criminal Networks

The highest court in Germany has ruled against telephone and email data retention used to track criminal networks. Melissa Eddy of the Global and Mail reports: "A law ordering data on calls made from mobile or landline telephones and e-mail exchanges be retained for six months for possible use by criminal authorities violated Germans' constitutional right to private correspondence, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled. In its ruling, the court said the law failed to sufficiently balance the need for personal privacy against that for providing security."
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Obama’s Tech Stimulus Plan: Health IT, Broadband, and Smart Grid

Steve Lohr has a nice piece in the New York Times ('Technology Gets a Piece of Stimulus,' 26 Jan 2009, p. C1) this morning about the role that technology and innovation will play in the economic recovery (aka stimulus) bill supported by the Obama Administration. In the past, health IT deployment has been approached as an engineering problem: what computers have to be part of which networks exchanging which types of data? This loses sight of the purpose of electronic medical records... more

A Cynic’s View of 2015 Security Predictions - Part 2

Every year those in the security industry are bombarded with various cyber security predictions. There's the good, the bad and the ugly. Some predictions are fairly ground breaking, while others are just recycled from previous years -- that's allowed of course if the threats still stand. In part one of my predictions I looked at the malware threats, so let's take a look at big data and the cloud for part two. more

Battling Over Clouds

More than 40 years ago, the FCC was worried about telephone companies using their power over communications to control the then-nascent (and competitive) data processing marketplace. The Bell System at that point was already banned from providing services that weren't common carriage communications services (or "incidental to" those communications services)... In a 1999 article in the Texas Law Review, Steve Bickerstaff pointed out that Computer 1 meant that no one could provide a "computer utility" service... Today, we'd call the "computer utility" something different -- we'd use the term "cloud computing." more

Green IT Revolutionizing UK Cyber-Infrastructure via Networks, Cloud, Outsourcing, Finan. Incentives

As readers of my blogs may know I have long argued that advances in research and education through cyber-infrastructure (or eInfrastructure) can be largely justified, if not entirely paid for through the energy savings of using clouds, networks or outsourcing. But a big impediment in adopting cyber-infrastructure in most jurisdictions is the lack of financial incentives. The energy savings of cyber-infrastructure are usually earned by the facilities or estates department or rarely based on to researchers and educators. more

What’s Holding Back NFV Deployments?

Back in early 2012, the media was all over stack wars that reportedly were taking place between Cisco and VMware. This culminated in VMware's Nicira acquisition in July 2012, paving the way for the coming of software-based networking. Four years later, the market still remains in development mode. Many service providers and enterprises are trying to come to grips with Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN). more

Designing Secure Networks with Cisco Technology, Part 1

In this multipart series I will be presenting some of the leading industry-standard best practices for enterprise network security using Cisco technologies.... "Wisdom consists in being able to distinguish among dangers and make a choice of the least harmful." That quote is quite possibly the most accurate depiction possible of the never-ending struggle between network security and corporate budget. Providing a mechanism to defend the enterprise network from every conceivable threat is impossible in terms of both technology and funding. more

Iran Launches Its First Private Cloud Data Center

Iran has officially launched its first cloud data center in Tehran during a ceremony attended by the Minister of Communication and Information Technology," according to reports from local news sites. more

Hewlett Packard and Other Companies Deploying Zero Carbon Data Centers

I am pleased to see that several companies are starting to recognize that building zero carbon data centers is a more sustainable direction rather than focusing on energy efficiency (i.e. PUE). As China, India and the rest of the developing world starts to deploy data centers, GHG emissions will continue to increase in portion to the number of data centers regardless of the PUE. But building zero carbon data centers powered only by renewable energy means that as the world deploys many more hundreds of data centers, GHG emissions will remain virtually unaltered and close to zero. more

Microsoft Reveals Details on Project Osmium, Largest Data Center in US

A press conference in West Des Moines, Iowa, revealed Microsoft has chosen the city to build an estimated 1.7 million square feet data center, dubbed Project Osmium, spanning two counties (160 acres in Warren County and 40 acres in Madison County). more

Regulation and Reason

Imagine living in a country where it was necessary to register with your community government by providing a copy of one of the following... This may be necessary in perhaps a large number of nations. However, as a United States citizen and resident, I was quite surprised when my local community issued the request. I investigated and found much to my dismay, that my community in fact was required by regulation to survey its residents on a biennial basis. more