Blogs: Data Center

Data center pilot fish is a programmer who works on his company's internal software, so he's the one who's called in when this user gets an unexpected error.

IT manager for this mid-size city really wants a computer used by the business office to be relocated to that area and out of the data center -- but after a year of trying, the business office still refuses to let it happen.

IT service tech gets a late evening service call for a customer's office, but when he arrives he finds everything has been shut down for the night -- so he has the night watchman open the data center and power up the machines.

The debate over whether disk or tape is the better solution for backup has been going on for some time now, and it seems the answer you get typically depends on who is responding to the question

It's 10:00 PM. Do you know where your data is?

Is it nestled securely within the firewalls of your data center, or is it more adventurous, spanning the boundaries of various public clouds? Cloud adoption continues to grow at unprecedented rates, raising concerns about data privacy and also about data residency, especially for organizations considering Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in a public cloud.

I just returned from the spring 2013 Storage Networking World conference (SNW), and I was amazed at how much smaller the conference is now compared to just a few years ago. The vendor booth areas were especially scaled back. The good news is the speakers were all great, and the content was stimulating and thought-provoking as usual, which is important since the storage industry is evolving faster than many other areas of information technology.

Flashback to 1991, and a crisis in this electronics manufacturer's data center: The company's large AS/400 minicomputer has gone down hard, and so have almost a dozen other servers running Unix and Windows.

The IT shop at this psychiatric hospital has the usual procedures for tracking staff -- and a manager who's a stickler for making sure they're followed.

The computer room at this bank has the usual amount of noise you'd expect, and it's very familiar to this pilot fish, who end up in there at least once every day. But this day is different.

This municipal government's geographic information systems (GIS) vendor is migrating city agencies to its new cloud-based service -- and all the necessary agreements are in place for a seamless transition. OK, not quite.