Data-center owners and operators face increasing complexity and operational challenges as they look to improve IT resiliency, build out capacity at the edge, and retain skilled staff in a tight labor market. Meanwhile, use of the public cloud for mission-critical workloads is up, according to Uptime Institute, even as many enterprises seek greater transparency into cloud providers’ operations. These are some of the highlights of 2021’s Global Data Center… Read More
Data Center Solutions
Silverback’s Al Nichols for the AFCOM win!
THE AFCOM CHAPTER AWARD WINNERS 2020 had some amazing contributions of individuals and local AFCOM chapters who rose above to continue to advance the data center industry and keep AFCOM communities connected. Alicia Schap, AFCOM’s association manager, announced the winners at Data Center World in Orlando last week. The Volunteer of the Year Award recognizes a member whose membership, and local and national contributions and involvement, have made a… Read More
Five Reasons Cloud Repatriation Should Be Part of Digital Transformation
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
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
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
Hybrid Cloud and the Future of Colocation
The Future of Colocation in a Hybrid Cloud World: Infrastructure Strategies for 2025 and Beyond As enterprise IT strategy matures, one thing is clear: hybrid cloud is no longer a transitional architecture — it’s the end state. Whether driven by the limitations of public cloud at scale, the need for data locality, or the rise of AI and high-performance workloads, enterprises are re-evaluating their infrastructure mix. For colocation providers, this… Read More
Remote Hands: Why it’s more than a trend with smart Data Centers
Companies used to send their IT workers to colocation centers to perform routine maintenance on their hardware. As a result of COVID-19, companies have had to address the health and well-being of their employees in very specific ways. Over the last 12 months, there has been a 35 percent increase in Remote Hands services. While it used to be considered an add-on luxury at times, remote hands services have… Read More
