Best Practices in Building a New Data Center

Peter Sacco, founder and CEO of PTS Data Center Solutions and partner with nlyte Software, was recently interviewed by Barbara Morris, Editor, of The DCIM Advisory, nlyte's monthly online trade journal.

The article focuses on how to avoid the pitfalls many experience in mission critical facilities and centers around Pete's experiences visiting 50 to 60 data centers every year and having designed many more. His experience in and knowledge of data centers is vast and complex, but he breaks it down into four main points to consider:

• Defining data center management depends on your point of view.
• Data center challenges continue to be the lack of space, power and cooling.
• Mission-critical facilities have a finite life span.
• A data center infrastructure management (DCIM) solution simplifies data center management.

To read the entire article click here.

To learn more about nlyte's DCIM solutions click here.

Emerson Network Power's Smart Solutions Tour Review.

Hope you didn't miss Emerson Network Power's Smart Solutions Tour, but in case you did here are a few of the highlights: In addition to having a live SmartMod to tour, Emerson Network Power delivered compelling presentations on SmartRow & SmartAisle versus conventional builds for their new integrated infrastructure that covers integrated power, cooling, fire suppression, management and control. Case studies were presented where SmartAisle solutions save 9% in CAPEX, 60% in real estate & 27% in energy versus a conventional build for a medium size data center. Equally a SmartRow saves 9% in CAPEX and 27% in energy versus a conventional build for a small data center.

Emerson Network Power also showed new additions to their XD line offering more breakthroughs in Data Center efficiency. The XDR is a pumped refrigerant rear door passive cooling fanless heat exchanger module. The XDR installs as the rear door of an equipment rack, providing up to 20kW of room neutral cooling. XDS is a pumped refrigerant cold plate technology to remove heat directly from servers through conduction for high density server racks at 20KW or 40KW.

Emerson Network Power also presented their future on data center management & control tools where existing tools, such as; SiteScan, Nform, Aperture, Data Center Planner and DSView will roll-up to the new Trellis platform to be released in December of 2011. Trellis through data rolled up from these point solutions and analytics will empower stakeholders with recommendations for managing, planning & optimizing their data center facility and IT infrastructure.

2011 Smart Solutions Tour - April 5th

PTS will be participating with Emerson Network Power at an upcoming event called the 2011 Smart Solutions Tour. The event is on April 5th in Edison, NJ.

Don’t miss this opportunity to see how intelligent, integrated infrastructure can help you attain crucial data center objectives such as efficiency, capacity, availability and control – without sacrifice.

Plus take a tour of the unique, rapidly deployable SmartMod™ enclosure.

Visit http://www.ptsdcs.com/event-20110405-Emerson-Network-Power.asp to learn more and register.

Is It Time To Toss The Tape?

The ExaGrid disk-based backup appliance with deduplication replaces tape in the nightly backup process. Customers are moving to disk-based backup solutions to remedy a number of problems. These include long backup windows as data volumes increase, the slow (and often unreliable) process of finding and restoring files from tape, the need for a Disaster Recovery Strategy or remote site replication, and the desire to employ zone-level deduplication in the process to eliminate redundant data and maximize storage capacity. In a recent independent survey, 88% of respondents reported faster backup times using the ExaGrid solution.

The migration from tape to disk-based backups is also being driven by the low cost of disk, the speed advantages of disk over tape, and the long-term reliability of a disk-based solution for compliance and regulatory purposes in certain industries.

ExaGrid solutions are ideal for users with 1TB to 100TB of data and can be integrated and installed by the customer in less than one hour.

Our customers are no longer asking if they will replace tape with disk, but when? If you are considering the move from tape, you might find the “7 Key Steps to Overcoming the Limitations of Tape Backup White Paper” helpful. Click here to download and if you qualify, ExaGrid will send you a $100 American Express Gift Card if you request an individual web presentation with PTS and ExaGrid.

Possible Future Acquisitions by Hewlett-Packard

I recently came across the following Software Advice article on possible future acquisitions by Hewlett-Packard, http://www.softwareadvice.com/articles/enterprise/hp-mergers-acquisitions-who-is-next-1031401/.

In the article, the author discusses the likelihood of each potential acquisition and present an infographic that summarizes HP's recent M&A activity up until now. They have also included a survey to find out what readers think about each possibility.

I hope you find it as interesting as I did.

About PTS Data Center Solutions
Experts for Your Always Available Data Center

PTS Data Center Solutions specializes in the business strategy, planning, designing, engineering, constructing, commissioning, implementing, maintaining, and managing of data center and computer room environments from both the facility and IT perspectives.

Founded in 1998, PTS is a consulting, design/engineering, and construction firm providing turnkey solutions, and offering a broad range of data center, computer room, and technical space project experience. PTS employs industry best practices in integrating proven, ‘best-of-breed’, critical infrastructure technologies that result in always available, scalable, redundant, fault-tolerant, manageable, and maintainable mission critical environments.

Integrated Data Center Facility and IT Expertise

With a proven process for understanding and addressing client needs as well as integrated facilities and IT experience and expertise, PTS has a unique vantage point for executing data center, computer room, and network operations center projects.

In every engagement, PTS applies a disciplined, consultative approach to systematically survey and assess the situation and then develop effective plans for seizing opportunities and overcoming obstacles. And, PTS offers a full complement of services—from business strategy and planning to facilities engineering to IT design and implementation—to help transform those plans into reality.

From our corporate headquarters in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, and our office in Orange County, California, PTS works to fulfill our mission of creating satisfied customers by emphasizing planning and pre-construction services to provide the optimal people, process, and technology solution to meet our clients’ needs and results in an early and accurate alignment between scope, schedule, and budget.

For more information, contact PTS at 1-866-PTS-DCS1 / 1-866-787-3271 or visit PTS online at www.PTSdcs.com.

PTS Accepted into Con Edison's New Data Center Energy Efficiency Program

Franklin Lakes, NJ, February 15, 2011 — PTS Data Center Solutions announced today it has been accepted as a Market Partner in the Consolidated Edison of New York (Con Edison) Commercial and Industrial Energy Efficiency Program. Specifically, PTS’ focus will fall under Con Edison’s new Data Center Efficiency Program which Con Edison has launched in conjunction with NYSERDA.

The program is specifically designed to offer data centers an unprecedented opportunity to reduce operating costs, improve energy efficiency, and reduce carbon output. In particular, within Con Edison’s coverage area, PTS will assess data center operations and make detailed energy efficiency improvement recommendations of both a facility & IT infrastructure nature.

New York State contains the second highest concentration of data centers in the US and a Lawrence Berkley National Labs study found that data centers in New York consume an estimated 4.5 billion kWh/year at a cost of $584 million/year. The program looks to support data center operators who are capacity constrained and/or looking to reduce energy usage and, therefore, operating expenses.

PTS will leverage its long history in data center consulting, engineering, infrastructure, construction, and maintenance to deliver Energy Usage Assessments with clearly defined energy savings recommendations. These recommendations may span the facility support infrastructure and IT equipment as PTS incorporates a comprehensive and holistic approach to data center analysis and redesign.

PTS President, Peter Sacco, said “PTS is pleased to join the Con Edison Market Partner Network. We will provide exceptional Energy Efficiency Assessments supporting our reputation in the tri-state area as a leading provider of consulting services related to data center greening and optimization. We are excited to work with data center providers who understand the impact successful energy efficiency improvements will have on the environment.”

Energy savings services offered through the program include:

• Outreach, Education, and Marketing to recruit data centers into the initiative;

• Technical Assistance Studies for data center, computer room, and server room operators interested in identifying their energy efficiency options;

• Energy Improvement Installation Incentives to off-set the cost of energy efficiency improvements. Improvements could include lighting, cooling, insulation, VFDs, server upgrades, virtualization, storage consolidation and other energy-related measures; and,

• Customer Installation Support to provide participating data centers with a complete package that addresses all energy related issues critical to their facilities’ operation.

A customized portfolio of energy efficiency services will be tailored to a data center’s specific energy needs.

To learn more about the Con Edison program as well as other PTS Energy Efficiency services, feel free to contact PTS at 201-337-3833, visit http://www.ptsdcs.com/energy-efficiency-assessments.asp, or email us at marketing@PTSdcs.com. You can also get program information at the Con Edison program website http://www.coned.com/energysavings.

About Consolidated Edison Company of New York (Con Edison)

Con Edison is a subsidiary of Consolidated Edison, Inc. [NYSE: ED], one of the nation’s largest investor-owned energy companies, with approximately $13 billion in annual revenues and $35 billion in assets. The utility provides electric, gas and steam service to more than three million customers in New York City and Westchester County, New York. For additional financial, operations and customer service information, visit us on the Web at www.conEd.com, at our green site, www.coned.com/thepowerofgreen, or find us on Facebook at Power of Green.

About PTS Data Center Solutions

Founded in 1998, PTS is a turnkey solutions provider specializing in data center and computer room consulting, engineering, infrastructure, construction, and maintenance services. We offer a broad range of project experience in designing data centers, computer rooms, and technical spaces. We employ industry best practices in integrating proven, ‘best-of-breed’, critical infrastructure technologies that result in always available, scalable, redundant, fault-tolerant, manageable, and maintainable mission critical environments.

In today's highly competitive climate where businesses can't stop and downtime is measured in profits lost, PTS offers survey, assessment, strategy, planning, feasibility, engineering, design, construction, commissioning, implementation, monitoring, maintenance, and predictive analysis services for protection against of some of the leading causes of critical systems downtime, hardware damage, data loss, and decreased employee productivity. Highly respected in our industry, PTS sets the standard for ‘always available’ solutions for data center and computer room environments.

To learn more, visit the company’s website at www.ptsdcs.com.

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Contact Information:
Larry Davis
Director of Marketing
201-337-3833 x123
ldavis@ptsdcs.com

To COLO or Not To COLO Part II

There are many valid reasons to COLO or outsource part of your data processing and storage requirements, but we are finding that there are many misconceptions about cost benefits in making a decision to COLO and that cost is typically the determining factor even though there is no real savings. What is often overlooked in evaluating data center strategy options; owning and operating a data center versus COLO space is that even if I outsource the processing and data storage I cannot outsource the need for a local network and facility support infrastructure so I still need an environmentally controlled data center with conditioned power and back-up to support my local network, WAN connectivity, security & phone systems. You can never outsource the entire facilities mission critical infrastructure can you?

For a true comparison, we need to look at hosted space for my processing & data storage while owning a small data center to support my local network, facility and safety equipment with power & bandwidth costs for both the local & COLO spaces versus owning the data center to accommodate my processing, data storage, network, facility and safety equipment with its operating costs to support everything in that single facility. With the COLO option we can reduce CAPEX from having to expand the mission critical facility by hosting the need for additional servers & data storage, but building with modular scalable data center solutions can accomplish that goal with financing and an added bonus of tax depreciation. There are cases where costs for power in a location are over .20 per kWr that hosting becomes more attractive for my processing and data storage, but it would still be less costly to relocate your processing and data storage to an area with lower utility costs and continue to own as hosting facilities always have a mark-up on at least one facet of space, power, bandwidth and support. While COLO has a lower initial CAPEX, its higher OPEX absolutely ensures the COLO model will always be more expensive in the long run. So if COLO isn’t less expensive in the long run, why are COLO facilities popping up like rabbits in springtime?

The 3 real reasons to host & the cause of the COLO boom are:
1.) We can't keep up with the expansion demand; we’re going to run out of space, power or cooling for our processing and data storage before we can alter our facilities to accommodate the growth
2.) We don't have the internal expertise to effectively plan, build, manage and operate our own data centers to the availability requirements of our businesses. I'll expand on this one a little to say that many organizations haven't effectively planned, designed or engineered their data centers in the past so they only got 3 years out of their 10 year data center plan. They built structured cabling or power infrastructure to meet their needs for bandwidth and power today so their data center quickly became outdated. For organizations like this data centers were a bad investment. Perhaps they should look to make improvements in their decision making in this area or rely more on effective consulting engineers.
3.) We don't want to be in the business of owning and operating a data center and want to focus our attention to our core business. Careful with this one as I've yet to see an organization operate a facility without a network, security system and phone system which require a small data center, of course we can outsource the operations and maintenance of a small data center’s operation but not the responsibility.

If we are doing an effective job with management and decision making, it will always be less expensive in the long run to own and operate our data centers. Stakeholders and decision makers should be more careful in their dreams of getting out of the data center business as well because nowadays it is the business. COLO facilities don't alleviate us of the responsibility for effectively protecting and managing our mission critical assets. COLO facilities can only reduce the data processing & storage components to deliver what might be unobtainable in our existing facilities or difficult to obtain in time given an aggressive IT expansion in our own facilities. Yes there are numerous ways to effectively shed some of the responsibility, with hosting effectively shedding some of the processing, data storage and DR responsibilities, but we will never get away from all of the responsibility for our data center or the ultimate responsibility.

Energy Efficient Ethernet?

With just about every IT and Data Center project today including an efficiency initiative, I’m wondering how many are considering Energy Efficient Ethernet in their network & cabling plant designs?

Did you know that only copper not fiber can take advantage of energy savings from WOL – Wake on LAN and LPI – Low Power Idle, which are features covered in IEEE’s ratification of 802.3az for Energy Efficient Ethernet? Did you know that only copper, not fiber, can take advantage of existing power saving features like Power Back Off in today’s Ethernet standard?

With Data Centers (1) IT watt saved typically results in (2.8) watts saved overall due to the costs and losses incurred running the support infrastructure. So should we look to design our cabling infrastructure using copper standards? With FCOE, Infiniband over Ethernet and converged networks also running VoIP and video, it is clear the long range plan should be to continue support Ethernet standards. It is also best practice to design cabling infrastructure to support 2 levels of bandwidth ahead of our requirements today. Consider that CAT7a supports 40Gbps and in any cabling or IT design for that matter we also look to be backwards compatible, which is why ISO has adopted the GG45 connector that supports CAT7a with backwards compatibility to CAT5. Of course for distances over 100M we must design with fiber, but in many cases we should be considering MPO/MTP fiber as there are fan out cables to support the LC 10Gbps connections we need today where MPO will support the 40Gbps & 100Gbps we need to future proof my cabling infrastructure. For shorter distances the choice has typically been copper distribution and with the existing power saving features like Power Back Off and those to come in IEEE 802.3az WOL – Wake On LAN and LPI – Low Power Idle, I believe the preferred cabling distribution under 100M for Ethernet will continue to be copper. What do you think?

I’m really looking forward to hearing what industry experts from Berk-Tek, JDSU, and The Siemon Company have to say about running higher than 10Gbps transmissions over twisted paid later this month, perhaps you should check it out as well?
http://www.cablinginstall.com/index/webcasts/webcast-display/8987512704/webcasts/cabling-installation-maintenance/live-events/-twisted-pair_cabling.html

Here's an excellent article on Energy Efficient Ethernet in CIO magazine:
http://www.cio.com/article/601339/How_to_Migrate_to_Energy_Efficient_Ethernet?taxonomyId=3028

Cutting Back on Data Center Equipment Costs

In the November 19 issue of PROCESSOR, Carmi Levy examines how cost-conscious IT directors, CIOs, and CFOs are saving money by turning to the “gray market” to buy name-brand goods through nontraditional channels. The downside to cutting costs in this manner is that it “can impact warranty coverage, parts availability, and service turnaround and must be calculated into the ROI to ensure the cost savings justify these potential drawbacks.”

Key points of the article include:

• Choose usage scenarios carefully. Deploy gray market-sourced hardware in non-front-line applications such as testing and backup, where outages have less impact on business operations.
• Calculate energy costs. New hardware is typically more efficient than used equipment. Project lifetime power and cooling costs to arrive at realistic TCO figures.
• Know your vendor. Work only with trusted partners who own their quality control processes and stand behind their products.

Our team is sensitive to the budgetary needs of IT decision makers. Beyond shopping around for focused purchases of data center equipment, we encourage organizations to look for ways to get the greatest mileage out of existing equipment. To streamline this process, we’ve developed an integrated, best-in-class solution that enables more effective data center management and maintenance of all support infrastructure.

PTS’ Data Center Maintenance Management Software solution (DCMMS) is a turnkey, web-based application which helps organizations increase support infrastructure asset life, track maintenance details, predict and prevent equipment failures, improve labor productivity, reduce equipment downtime, minimize investment in inventory, and lower the total cost of data center maintenance.

This new class of data center management software is available for purchase or as a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution. The cost of the product is based upon the size of assets under management and is tiered to support large-scale data center management operations. For details, please visit http://www.data-center-maintenance-management.com/.

Cyber Monday Highlights Efficiency Issues

While consumers may save energy by shopping from home instead of driving from store to store, data center operators seem to be burning the candle at both ends. In the article, “Is Cyber Monday Really Energy Efficient?,” Michael Kanellos at Greentech reports:

In an average year, the top 40 retailers spend an estimated $110 million more on energy during than they should in preparing for Cyber Monday, the first workday after Thanksgiving that's been enshrined as the start of the online holiday shopping season, according to data center efficiency experts at Sentilla.

This leads to a significant increase in carbon-dioxide emissions and billions of dollars wasted on operations and capital costs. In fact, Greentech reports that many companies “go on buying binges months before and eventually install 30 percent more equipment than they need” for the holiday shopping season.

Energy efficiency is, perhaps, second only to performance when deciding upon data center facility and network design. The high cost of power alone can take a dramatic chunk out of seasonal profits. Furthermore, devices that consume more power require more cooling which not only further increases energy costs but impacts the physical design of the data center. The market has been flooded with various facility and product design techniques promising energy efficiency savings. To find out which specific strategies yield the best results, download a free copy of our newest white paper, “Impact of IT Upgrades on Energy Usage and Operational Costs” [PDF].