BY Greg Goode ON
Wednesday, 22 June 2011
 Benjamin Franklin once said, "The only things certain in life are death and taxes”.
Currently, the hot topic of discussion in Australia is the Australian carbon tax. The ramifications of this tax are not yet fully understood and the various political parties and independents who are negotiating the framework are themselves divided, so it is anybody’s guess as to the detail.
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BY Greg Goode ON
Thursday, 10 March 2011
With our planet shaking and stirring up the ground across the globe, this phrase has taken on a whole new meaning.
What does this have to do with data centres?
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BY Greg Goode ON
Thursday, 3 February 2011
Principles are wonderful things.
All throughout the data centre industry there are design principles. They pepper reference guides, vendor documents and design standards.
These principles provide guidance that is rooted in fundamental truths and theorems, though they are not specifically tying data centre users to a specific design outcome.
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BY Greg Goode ON
Thursday, 9 December 2010
You've probably heard the expression: 'The king is dead. Long live the king.’ It announced the death of one monarch and the immediate enthronement of the new monarch.
This expression could easily be adapted to a current trend in data centres, namely physical data cabling connectivity.
I'm here to shout from the rooftops that 'Copper is dead. Long live fibre!'
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BY Greg Goode ON
Thursday, 2 December 2010
Should the US data centre industry be afraid?
Could data processed in a data centre somewhere in the US be considered a dirty export?
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BY Greg Goode ON
Thursday, 11 November 2010
If ever a word has lost its significance, it's the word 'green' when it's used to imply environmental sustainability and energy efficiency ... especially when it's applied to the data centre industry.
So, let's disregard 'green' and instead talk 'energy efficiency'. And, more specifically, let's talk about the cost of ignoring it.
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BY Karl Medak ON
Thursday, 28 October 2010
 The use of the cloud is no longer being addressed by just the CIO of an organisation. The CEO, CTO and CFO all need to understand the environment.
There are many issues that need to be addressed to ensure that your ICT services can be met with cloud computing, and to ensure your organisation receives value for money.
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BY Greg Goode ON
Thursday, 23 September 2010
Years ago, data centre users and data centre consultants would have considered an 'energy-efficient data centre' to be an oxymoron. Ditto 'ecologically-sustainable data centre'. Data centres were considered energy soaks, and their construction was more like a cold war bunker.
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BY Greg Goode ON
Thursday, 1 July 2010
Damn the laws of thermodynamics! There are power losses all over the data centre which contribute to poor energy utilisation. These losses present themselves as heat. If it wasn’t for energy losses we would have perpetual motion data centres.
Loss of energy in data centres has focused the minds of many in the industry, especially since the advent of the 21st century, high-density computing and our obsession with global warming. And out of the desire to produce the most energy-efficient data centre has come one profound acronym: PUE.
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BY Greg Goode ON
Thursday, 27 May 2010
I happened to attend a debate presented by intelligence² titled Governments should not censor the internet. It was about governments’ role in censoring the internet (topical to us in Australia) to protect the ‘vunerable’ from content that is deemed too explicit or anti-social.
So, are data centres part of the problem, and do they have a part to play in ensuring the likes of you and I are kept safe from information that could corrupt us?
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BY Greg Goode ON
Thursday, 25 March 2010
Air. It's a wonderful thing. Little did 18th century researchers like Joseph Priestly (1733–1804) and Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (1743–1794), who investigated the properties of air, know it would become a cooling medium for information technology (IT) in the 20th and 21st centuries.
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BY Greg Goode ON
Thursday, 18 February 2010
The data centre pod has multiple constructs and the morphology varies. This is borne out by how data centre vendors have engineered their versions of a pod to address the data centre industry. The pod market reminds me of the expression on a tee-shirt I was given from someone who had returned from a Southeast Asian holiday: ‘same, same, but different’.
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BY Greg Goode ON
Thursday, 17 December 2009
Kyoto, Copenhagen, climate change, global warming, greenhouse gases, emissions trading scheme, carbon tax, carbon capture and sequestration, carbon offset, sustainability, renewable energy sources, data centres. Data centres?! Hang on. Back up. How do data centres fit in that list?
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BY Greg Goode ON
Thursday, 12 November 2009
Every year, the clothing industry attempts to re-invent itself as fashionistas boldly declare that some colour is the new black. In the case of the data centre industry, green is the new black. But this isn’t a fad or even re-invention, it’s r-evolution.
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BY Peter Wicklein ON
Thursday, 22 October 2009
 In today’s world, surrounded by instant answers and immediate reporting (think Twitter), it’s important to remember the value of clear thinking. The quick and obvious approach is no substitute for proper consideration of a situation in order to solve the problem, not just its symptoms.
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BY Greg Goode ON
Thursday, 15 October 2009
The ubiquitous universal form-factor shipping container: you’ve seen it transporting goods worldwide on ships, rail and by road, acting as building site offices or sheds, providing temporary and permanent housing, and even providing walls. Well, now it has entered the data centre industry construct—not only delivering a hermitically-sealed concentrated data hall for information technology, but also in providing the necessary facility infrastructure of power and cooling.
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BY Greg Goode ON
Thursday, 10 September 2009
You’ve probably heard the term ‘follow the sun’. Effectively, it is saying that as one set of staff are finishing for the day as the sun goes down in their part of the world, another set of staff, in a totally different location and time zone, are commencing their day. It’s used as a way to describe how, for example, call centres, help desks and financial dealing rooms can provide continuous service across a 24-hour day without having to maintain a shift roster of many people in one location. That all seems to make sense.
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BY Greg Goode ON
Thursday, 13 August 2009
Real-estate agents constantly chant the mantra ‘location, location, location’. Well, the data centre industry’s mantra is fast becoming ‘energy, energy, energy’.
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