Technology

Now, I’m not bashing anybody… but in early 2003, I did some beer-coaster calculations of the trends in power consumption caused by the advent of a new beast: blade servers. It seems the manufacturers had devised a way to jam an entire server’s electronics onto a blade, and stuff lots of those blades into a single chassis.

As technology continues to mature, the benefits of that technology trickle down to the enterprise at large. As developments in applications technology grow, so does the need for a more flexible and variable computing structure. In today’s world, for example, the dynamics of an e-commerce site might require the computational power of sixteen quad-core servers one week, and half that the next.

The long routes are those less travelled, less frequently. Here, the delta between “then and now” is more dramatic. On one of these rides, I might notice a new shopping center where once was a copse of trees or what was once a treacherous stretch of crumbling asphalt is now freshly-paved, inviting a more spirited ride. There is a point here – indeed, almost an axiom: “absence highlights change”. And so it is with our industry.

Typically, from an engineering standpoint, eco-responsibility in technical products affects two areas: Manufacturing, in the form of ROHS (Reduction of Hazardous Substances) standards, and in the design - for reduced power consumption.

Going back five years before cloud computing was really a part of our vocabulary, there was a degree of tension in most IT departments that often included two factions that butt heads.

What works best for the enterprise? Resilient servers or resilient apps? I was following an interesting debate between Amazon and Terremark from the recent CloudExpo conference.

Over the past couple of months we have seen tremendous interest in using cloud for disaster recovery solutions. Some of this has been fueled by CIO’s looking for a more cost-effective method of DR from traditional cold/warm/hot sites and others from cloud customers who have been impacted by some of the outages of late at Rackspace and Amazon.

A major advantage of colocation is that the business using the service still owns all of its own infrastructure if it so chooses, which ultimately keeps that business owner in charge, regardless of where the server is kept. For instance, if the business wants to install their own network attached storage (NAS) device to backup one or more server’s data, they can do so. If a firewall and router hardware needs to be installed, it can be done. If they want to set up a virtual local area network (VLAN) so that traffic between machines is faster,they can.

A major benefit involved with colocation is the convenience of not having to hire and maintain an on-site IT staff, alleviating concerns and allowing more time for business owners and managers to focus on running their business. Additionally, this practice frees up capital that would have be spent on hiring and maintaining an IT department.

So, I recently learned of an organization that is imposing new password parameters. You might want to sit down for this: the password MUST contain 3 uppercase letters, 7 lower case letters, 2 numbers and 5 special characters. Secure, right? Wrong. It’s this kind of password policy that guarantees you will find each user’s password on a sticky-note under the keyboard.