Thursday Links

I thought I would catch up on some of the surfing I have been doing this week and share some of what I have found. The Iowa flood victims are moving into clean-up mode and President Bush was in Iowa today to tour. Here are some things I have been reading lately:

• Greg Ness (VP at Bluelane) has a couple of excellent articles I enjoyed. The first one is "Data Center Security - 5 Critical Requirements", and the second is "Clouds - Clear Skies for Data Center Virtualization?".

• I think I had run across the following link a while back, but forgot about it. On the side I dabble a little in search engine optimization techniques, and the Google Data Center Research Tool is kind of fun. As my friend Ben would point out about their site though.... "C-Class" does not refer to IP Space, only to a Mercedes-Benz. :)

• Chris Brogan has a nice article on "Five Tools I use to Listen".

• GigaOm's site Ostatic has a post on Eucalyptus - Open Source Infrastructure for Cloud Computing.

• ComputerWorld - IBM Hits a Home Run - Globabally Distributed Data Center Virtualization.

• Here is an interesting story about the CERN particle accelerator network and distribution of 15 petabytes that the project generates annually.

• As confirmation to my recent Systems Management news article about Data Center staffing -- NY Times: "Demand for Data Puts Engineers in Spotlight". I would also remind people about Data Center University training and certification. I have been doing the online courses and feel they are excellent.

• I've been playing around with Summize a little more recently. I think this is a pretty cool little tool that has potential to be really useful. It basically searches twitter posts in real time, shows search term trends, and allows you to RSS your search.

Data Center Staffing

My latest column over at Systems Management News is out. In this column I discuss data center staffing needs and trends.

There is also an excellent article by Michelle Savage on Cloud Computing as well.

Techie Drought

A Miami Herald article explores the issue with recruiting and retaining IT employees in Florida. The article might as well be in most any newspaper across the country -- this is a huge problem that many tech companies are facing.

The article mentions Terremark and the fact that having internship programs has helped them out -- to train, mentor and then hire interns into the company.

Check out the article here.

Symantec State of the Data Center Report 2007

Last Tuesday Symantec (SYMC) announced the release of their 2007 State of the Data Center Report. The international study surveyed managers of Global 2000 and other large companies. The magazines, web sites and company white papers are constantly full of industry statistics and trend monitoring, but I think this report did a nice job of doing the legwork necessary to get real data from those facing the issues in the data center today and presenting it in a clear and concise manner. I think one sentence in the paper summarizes the main point nicely:

Essentially, data center managers are being asked to deliver more high-quality services in an increasingly complicated environment, yet their budgets are relatively flat. As a result, data center managers find they adopt cost containment strategies that make use of new technologies, including virtualization, and new management approaches, such as those that automate routine processes.

Here are some of the highlights that I gleamed from reading the report:

• Of the five issues (of factors impacting today's Data Centers) I think #2 and #5 are the big ones (in my mind). #2 is staffing and #5 is Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity Planning. Staffing has been noted several times in the press and is obviously becoming a large issue that managers must deal with.
  

• Better preparedness for a disaster now versus two years ago was listed by 53% of the repsondents. When thinking of locations for your DR and BCP plans, don't forget my Site Selection white paper.
  

• Not surprising, the always fun statistic proved true once again for a cause of downtime. Twenty-eight percent of respondents listed "change or human error"as a chief reason for downtime. Although some stories have down played ITIL, I think for this reason alone you will see an increased usage of the ITIL guidelines in data centers. This obviously plays into the staffing issues raised as well.
  

• The report has good information on virtualization plans. I think it will be interesting to see how Microsoft fits into this market in the near future. I don't believe they will pose a serious threat to VMWare, but will most likely balance out the market a little more and have a decent percentage. VMWare was the top product listed in the U.S. but almost half of Asia-Pacific respondents are using Microsoft virtualization, with only 35% going to VMWare. I haven't finished watching it yet, but here is a video of Eric Traut from Microsoft, presenting on Microsoft's virtualization technologies (it also mentions Windows 7).
  

• The outsourcing statistics were interesting. Fourty-two percent of U.S. managers said they utilize outsourcing, while 61% of non-U.S. organizations are. "Among the most common tasks outsourced by both U.S. and non-U.S. organizations are server maintenance, backups, storage management, archiving, and business continuity."
  

This is, overall, a very good report and worth the read. Check out the press release here