When I first heard the term mission control it was back in the early 1960s when I was a child captivated by the Apollo Space Program. The space program truly inspired me and is one of the reasons why I decided to go into engineering. Nothing at the time even came close to the scale and magnitude of NASA’s science/technology advances and discoveries.
Early on a June morning, the temperature hovers at 52 degrees in the high deserts of Central Oregon. Even though the daytime highs can soar to 104 degrees in summer months, the cold nights are key to the sustainable cooling system in the Vault—one of the only co-location data centers in the nation that is dedicated to sustainable energy use and has Tier III Constructed Facility certification.
Over the course of the past decade, organizations have begun to rely significantly more on information technology (IT) systems to support business-critical applications. Organizations such as banks, telecommunications companies, internet service providers, and cloud/co-location facilities rely heavily on the availability of their data centers as many of their customers are paying a premium for access to a variety of IT applications.
In my most recent column, I noted that Solyndra made a solar product that could find application in the data center industry. To my surprise, Solyndra recently put itself into a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, citing Chinese competition as a significant factor.
A webinar I did for Mission Critical on August 22 inspired me to publish some FAQs about the subject of electrical safety. I included some questions asked by our audience during and after the event and many I have been asked over the years.
With respect to disaster planning and backup power requirements, Hurricane Katrina was a real wakeup call. Prior to Katrina, most hospitals and emergency medical facilities thought their trusty backup generators would provide all the long-term power protection they needed in an emergency.
The resume. Thud. The very utterance of the word brings dread to the job seeker. What kind of masochist likes working on his resume?
Hiring authorities have the pleasure of writing … ugh … job descriptions! Second only to writing a resume in terms of dreadfulness, at least the need in the organization helps to define the task.
Is putting end-users first a business philosophy
or a design philosophy, or both? Saying that end-users come first is easy, but
system designers and equipment suppliers find that putting end-users first can
be hard to do.
Data center managers are under the gun. Companies realize that to compete in the global marketplace, they need a strong data center to back them up. This puts the role of the data center manager front and center, as he holds the key to increasing infrastructure performance, cutting operational costs, and maximizing data center and power efficiencies.