Digital Transformation Beyond the Cloud Five or ten years ago, digital transformation strategies often centered around cloud migration. Today, most businesses have adopted the cloud, but the results haven’t always aligned with expectations. To advance along the digital transformation path, forward-thinking organizations might consider cloud repatriation. This approach allows businesses to correct earlier missteps in their digital transformation efforts. Here’s why cloud repatriation should be integral to modern digital transformation… Read More
How Data Centers Will Be Impacted By Microsoft’s 2030 Carbon-Free Energy Plan
Taking another climate moonshot, Microsoft has set out to crack a problem that will require a complete rethink of the world’s electric grids. Microsoft has made another big climate pledge. The company recently stated that it will work to power all its offices and data centers around the world with carbon-free energy 100 percent of the time by 2030. This is a very different – and much larger – problem… Read More
How Data Centers are Breathing Life into Abandoned Buildings
The trend in data center construction has been to construct an entirely new building, designed to meet all kinds of demands, like maximum power and air conditioning efficiency. But alongside these greenfield developments, there have been some creative exceptions to the rule: old, abandoned structures which are given a new, modern life. Over the last few years, there has been an effort to convert abandoned buildings in densely populated urban… Read More
AI for data center cooling: More than a pipe dream
Today, artificial intelligence can be found all around the data center – helping manage and protect the network, filtering alerts, and moving workloads. However, the industry has been slow to apply AI to the problems of operational technology, rather than IT. And specifically, to the realm of the data center cooling system, sometimes responsible for as much as a third of the overall power consumption of a server farm. You… Read More
When Will Liquid Immersion Cooling for Data Centers Become Mainstream?
Microsoft’s Tiny Data Center Liquid Cooling Experiment Is a Big Deal. It’s even bigger than that time its researchers sunk a submarine-like data center in the ocean. It’s running production workloads. But the rack of servers submerged in engineered fluid inside a Microsoft data center in Quincy, Washington, is still somewhat of a science project, similar in its purpose to Project Natick, the hermetically sealed computer-filled capsule the company’s R&D… Read More
Why is Cloud Repatriation Happening?
More and more organizations who went all-in on cloud early are now finding that some analytics workloads are better on-premises and are pulling those workloads back. There’s a popular notion that all analytics workloads are headed to the cloud, and if an organization’s workload isn’t in the cloud yet, they’re lagging behind. There are certainly some situations where moving analytics workloads to the cloud makes sense, but cloud isn’t the… Read More
7 Colocation Trends to Watch in 2021
Customers with legacy workloads and stringent compliance requirements are making colocation a component of their IT strategies, alongside cloud. Cloud repatriation, for example, is landing workloads in colocation provider’s data centers. In addition, colocation has become a springboard to the cloud for customers who want to move IT assets off site but aren’t quite ready to commit to public cloud platforms. Colocation is also getting a boost from edge… Read More
The Future of Data Centers in a Post Covid-19 World
Not since the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic has the world experienced such a profound public health crisis leading to transformational economic and social dislocation. The measures taken to suppress the virus have almost brought the global economy to a shuddering halt and affected many aspects of individuals and business’ daily lives. It has also made us all aware of the sheer importance of the Internet and web-enabled personal and business… Read More
Edge computing and the Impact on Cloud: Cannibalization or Iteration?
There continues to be a conversation around what the emergence of edge computing will mean for the wider cloud computing and infrastructure services market. In this article, we take a close look at the recent predictions from a Forrester Research analyst and compare with similarly dubious commentary from a Gartner analyst a few years back. Forrester Research. Forrester claims edge computing will hit an inflection point in 2021 and its… Read More
Pro Tips for Creating a Successful Data Center Migration Plan
Many factors can precipitate the need for a solid data center migration plan – growth beyond current capacities, mergers and acquisitions, hosting provider performance, real estate changes, local data center economics, density requirements, staffing considerations, green initiatives, etc. A data center migration is one of the most critical and complex IT tasks organizations are faced with today. The margin for error is near zero and the move timeline is typically… Read More