“I Want to Get Out of the Data Center Business”

CIOs everywhere are stating that they want to get out of the data center business and move to the cloud. Is this just a temporary, trendy shift or a long-term solution? Cloud providers such as Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Google, and Oracle are maturing their offerings and marketing their services as the optimal solution. While …

Office 365: Yay or Nay?

If your company isn’t in the process of implementing Office 365 by this point, there’s a good chance that some IT team members are at least giving it some serious thought. As with many aspects of Microsoft Azure, Microsoft is marketing Office 365 as the ultimate solution—and a good number of CIOs are drinking the Microsoft Kool-Aid …

Startups Use Distributed Cloud to Heat Homes

One of the big challenges of cloud scale data center operation is determining what to do with the waste heat. In a typical data center, cooling systems account for roughly forty percent of capital equipment costs, and thirty percent of the energy consumed in a facility goes into cooling. Data center operators are forever looking to new …

Microsoft’s Project Catapult Puts Custom Chips in the Cloud

Microsoft is testing a new server technology with Project Catapult that is likely to play an important role in future cloud computing environments—a server technology that can dramatically increase the performance of some data center workloads and breathe fresh life into Moore’s Law, all without significantly increasing server cost or power consumption. Microsoft Research’s Project …

How Much Change Have You Seen?

How much change have you seen in the way in which IT departments determine the number of people needed to best serve the infrastructure, especially since the introduction of virtualization and cloud computing? I have observed that those companies that decided to make the leap all at once immediately dropped their number of hands-and-feet people …

Skills Needed for the Data Center of Tomorrow

Last week I did a post regarding the future in the cloud computing space that focused primarily on the large number of unfilled positions in the modern-day data center. Employment options for this space should be rich and plentiful for the next decade or so, and I think that is a great thing, but there is …