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Use Smart PDUs to Gain Visibility Into Your Data Center
RJ Tee
July 31, 2017e were recently approached by a C-level executive who was facing a challenge. His company had recently acquired another organization, and was now in the process of trying to determine the best way to integrate its data center. The data center, however, was in need of a major overhaul. A big part of the problem was the fact that the former company’s IT team had been using traditional spreadsheets to track its devices and daily power metrics. These spreadsheets were rife with errors (and possible manipulation). For example, the team discovered several network devices in the data center that did not appear in any records.
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So, You Say Your Data Center Is Green? Prove It!
RJ Tee
June 10, 2017According to a study from Unilever, there is now a $1 trillion market opportunity for companies that can successfully explain their sustainability practices to consumers. For many companies — particularly technology providers — the data center is a natural place to start. After all, data centers have a reputation for being notorious energy hogs, often using as much power as a small city. So businesses like to flip the script and differentiate their services by focusing on steps they are taking to become more environmentally responsible.
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- Green Data Center
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No Room for Errors When Planning for Data Center Power Capacity
RJ Tee
February 10, 2017As a data center administrator, one of the most important parts of your job — besides maintaining uptime and staying under budget — involves monitoring and managing your department’s resources. It’s your responsibility to make sure that your data center is fully capable of meeting the current and future needs of your enterprise and its changing customer base. Of course, capacity planning is a broad topic that extends throughout all areas of the data center. It’s important to stay on top of resources like cooling, available rack and floor space, lighting and more. But all of these resources have one underlying commonality: They need electricity to function. So data center power usage should be a top resource to monitor.
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- Capacity Planning
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Three Things You Don’t Know About Your Own Data Center (But Should)
Josh Schaap
January 12, 2017This is your data center speaking. You think you know me pretty well, right? After all, you spend almost all of your time around me. Take a harder look, however, and you’ll see that there are some important things about me that you aren’t aware of!
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How Much Trouble Could One Technician Cause In Your Data Center?
Josh Schaap
October 31, 2016Just recently, eWeek ran a Halloween-themed article titled “The Data Center: Where the Stuff of Nightmares Lurks.” The article pointed out some of the darkest fears that IT professionals are facing. And one caught our attention: “The ‘Help’ Desk Tech from Hell.” “One of my greatest fears (brought about by an actual experience) is another absolutely pitiful on-site help desk tech who completely disregards procedures and starts moving cables around on network devices trying to get one device working again, but takes down six more in the process,” the article stated. It’s sad, but true: Help desk technicians —as well as interns and careless, or sleep-deprived IT workers — can create a great deal of trouble in the data center.
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Data Center Power Management: The Key To Success in Silicon Valley
Josh Schaap
October 24, 2016Silicon Valley remains one of the largest and most competitive data center markets in America. Right now there is a data center vacancy rate of just 8.2 percent in the region. And according to a new report, the market is expected to continue to experience further growth in the near future.
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- Server Technology
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Are you ready for the future of power consumption?
RJ Tee
September 17, 2016Consider this: In 2013, U.S data centers consumed about 91 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity. This is enough electricity, as the Natural Resources Defense Council points out, to power every household in New York City. Twice.
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Keeping Up With Data Demands In The Medical Field
RJ Tee
May 03, 2016Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Wise, biological scientist in the oncology lab of Christopher Cogle Things, as they say, change. This statement holds particularly true in the medical field, where advancements often take place at lightning speed. New technologies supplant old ones overnight, and best practices are rewritten with each passing day. No one knows this more than our client, University of Florida Health. As technologies such as X-ray and PET scans have been converted from film to digital imaging and as medical records transition from paper to digital, the need for secure, HIPAA-compliant servers has grown exponentially. As a result, UF Health has expanded from a single data center to four over the past decade, with Data Center Manager Joseph Keena overseeing each move.
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- Case Study
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Zombies In the Data Center: Exclusive Interview With Calvin Nicholson
Josh Schaap
March 13, 2016n a show like “The Walking Dead,” it’s relatively easy to dispatch a zombie. A quick headshot or katana slash will usually solve your problem. In the data center, zombies are just as prevalent, but not quite as easy to kill. First, you have to identify them. Data center zombies don’t exactly shamble around with their mouths agape, but they can do just as much damage as their fictional counterparts if left unchecked.
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Get Ahead with StartUp Stick
RJ Tee
August 14, 2015Over the years, we have heard many data center personnel state that DHCP cannot and will not be used for infrastructure pieces like cabinet PDUs. All Server Technology CDUs are shipped with DHCP enabled so that the user can setup the DHCP server to provide IP settings based on MAC address. For those installations where that is not a viable solution, Server Technology has developed the StartUp Stick for quick mass-deployment. Now, instead of walking the floor with a crash-cart and writing scripts to handle the initial network configuration, you can sit in the comfort of your office using our simple spreadsheet configuration tool and then walk the floor with this simple tool instead.
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