Why should you care?

So who is this (unmasked) man and why should I care what he has to say about data centers; mine or anybody else's? Well, you can read the brief bio, or you can check out my website, but the gist of it is I'm somebody who has been in the industry for a long time, and for the last few years has been consulting on data center design and implementation.  I even wrote an eBook last year on energy consideration in the design of new data centers and in repurposing older ones.

More important is the fact that I don't play favorites, don't have any reseller involvement or vendor entanglements, and make suggestions to my clients (and, in the future, to the readers of this blog) that deal with products, technologies and services that actually solve their problems, regardless of the supplier of those solutions. I'll do my best to bring that same independent thought to this blog.

You're also probably wondering exactly what a blog on data centers will cover that isn't already being covered elsewhere on ZDNet. Well, my take on this is that a data center is a symbiotic entity. While there will always be lots of coverage of things like servers, storage, backup, and networking, all of which are critical components of a data center, there is very little easily found coverage of the interaction of these items in the environment of the data center; how they interact with each other, the effects of energy usage, temperature control, racking, packaging, layout, and design.

How technical infrastructure and facilities infrastructures interact is usually only discussed in very solution specific terms, and, vendor claims notwithstanding, there are almost always things that can be done to improve the ROI of data center spending. With technologies like server consolidation and virtualization leading the way, data center infrastructure issues move to the forefront of IT concerns.

Be it at the device, rack, row, or room level, understanding the behaviors of your data center means understanding the interaction of all of the devices contained within. Managing the data center for the benefit of the business isn't a simple task, and as more businesses move to consolidated and virtualized environments, the lessons learned at the data center become applicable, in a big way, to smaller computer facilities throughout the corporate world.