Another year successful year has gone by on the Green House Data blog. We're thrilled to surpass 150,000 views in 2018! Thanks for reading our humble blog. In case you missed anything, here are the five top posts from 2018, covering VM performance monitoring, GDPR, and a subject no modern blog should be without…millenials. And more!
Don't forget to tune in after the New Years for more great data center, cloud, and managed IT services content!
As more and more businesses move their applications and associated data to the cloud, managing all that information becomes more complicated.
IT no longer has complete control and insight over every aspect of the datastore; instead as multiple cloud providers are implemented and endpoint data is served and collected from widely-flung users and workstations, you’re likely to run into compatibility and versioning issues between various databases and storage platforms. The data management problem grows even larger as multicloud, the Internet of Things, and Big Data initiatives rise in popularity and real-world applicability.
Three ways to get all your ever-growing databases and datastores on the same page are data federation, data hubs, and data lakes. What are the differences between each, and what are some pros and cons of their use?
Researchers Warn to Mitigate and Migrate Inland
While the data center industry continues to get greener, it also continues to grow. Alongside that growth comes significant CO2 emissions, which are widely acknowledged by the scientific community as a primary contributor to global climate change. As the Earth warms and sea levels rise, data centers near the coast could in fact end up underwater – and vital connectivity infrastructure is likely to be lost as well.
That’s the conclusion drawn by University of Madison-Wisconsin and University of Oregon researchers in a new study that takes a look at the effects of climate change on internet infrastructure. The study even goes so far as to suggest that mitigation and migration action should begin immediately in order to avoid catastrophic effects on the way we connect to the internet.
Eventually all IT systems age out of their usefulness, marked by frequently required maintenance, mandatory end of life from vendor support, and increased costs for your business. You may even run into some downtime.
IT infrastructure that is on the verge of failure may still appear to be working fine — but it still leads to sneaky problems, including higher operational costs, lower reliability, limited agility, and less opportunity to embrace new applications or technologies. Legacy infrastructure can also be much less secure.
But how do you know when your infrastructure is truly about to kick the bucket? Here are six major warning signs that it’s time to bite the bullet and modernize your IT.
As we release our 2017 Sustainability Report, we wanted to see how the industry opinion on green data centers may have shifted over the years.
Back in late 2014/early 2015, Green House Data put out a survey for data center workers asking for their opinions on green data centers. We recently sent out a follow up survey and the results were surprising, to say the least. Read on to learn how the industry view of energy efficiency and sustainability in the data center has changed.
With all the talk about digital transformation and IT modernization, you’d think that everyone was all-in with the cloud at this point. But there are many legacy systems still in production, even at enterprise organizations.
Regardless of why you still have them, there are almost certainly legacy systems within your IT ecosystem, and keeping them secure is of paramount importance, especially if they’re past their support lifecycle and have become exposed to potential vulnerabilities.
Another year, another trend in the data center world. Although edge data centers first starting making headlines circa 2014 or 2015, they’ve become mainstream as more and more users slurp down increasing amounts of data. That takes serious bandwidth; to the point that many pundits are pointing towards the placement of workloads in edge facilities, rather than the traditional centralized data centers in major markets, as a sign that cloud computing is starting to wane.
On the contrary, edge data centers serve to supplement and improve the reach of even the major cloud computing providers. No major cloud service provider (CSP) is going to only place workloads in major markets. Just look at our neighbors in Cheyenne: Microsoft has a huge facility that they’re actively expanding. Amazon operates data centers in Ohio, which, while central for the US in general and equidistant from major population centers like Chicago and New York, is hardly a major market in itself.
And beyond large scale platforms like Azure or AWS, you have players like Green House Data, who offer smaller scale virtualization from data centers in a myriad of second and third tier markets.
But it's not just about the cloud spreading itself to the edge. Here's why edge computing will be important, but will also become more of a niche deployment model, with cloud remaining the king of application processing and data storage.
The Green House Data blog has hit a major milestone this month, rocketing from around 8,000 monthly unique visitors to 12,000 unique visitors in March. As we pass the 10k mark, we want to say thanks to everyone who has come to our little corner of the internet and also take a look back at our most enduring and popular posts over the years.
From cloud hosting to data center design to information security, the blog has covered a lot of ground in the past five or six years, with experts from our staff joining our marketing and content teams for weekly updates.
Here are the top 10 all time posts from the Green House Data blog.
The past five or ten years have been jam-packed with cloud computing hype. Indeed, the cloud is here to stay, without a doubt. But recent reports show analysts expect hardware sales for on-premise enterprise IT to tick up significantly.
High profile examples like Dropbox show that moving back to a more traditional data center can create efficiencies and free up cash flow. Is the enterprise data center – and by extension, colocation – about to put up a fight against the cloud?
Data centers are invariably focused on 100% availability, which comes down to reliability of power and various mechanical and electrical components throughout the facility. But energy efficiency is a major priority as well, even for data centers that don’t call themselves “green” or “sustainable”.
With electricity providing a bulk of the operating expense, any gains in efficiency can go a long way towards minimizing OpEx. Many data center efficiency measures focus on containment, cooling, and other measures within the white space, but critical power infrastructure can be a good target for efficiency gains as well.
Major UPS manufacturers often include an “ecomode,” or in the case of our Cheyenne data center, Eaton’s Energy Saver System (ESS). These modes can lead to efficiency gains of several percentage points, which sounds low, but in practice can lead to thousands of dollars of savings and carbon emission reductions in the hundreds or thousands of pounds.
