Trends
Seems like everyone's concerned about data
center power-management issues, and everyone
seems to have a solution—from virtualization
to hot/cold aisle configurations to thinner
cabling. Chatsworth Products, for example,
in partnership with Uptime Technology, has
unveiled a solution that the company says
solves the problem of data center equipment
cooling.
Their solution can reportedly reduce
electrical usage and decrease the carbon
footprint for cooling data centers by more
than 80 percent, while providing a means to
air-cool power densities four to five times
higher than conventional wisdom previously
claimed possible.
With data center cooling and energy
efficiency high on the agendas of most IT
managers, Communications News this
month begins a monthly column, Power Play,
bringing readers hands-on, useful ideas from
leading experts in the industry. This month,
David Yanish of ADC in Minneapolis explains
how energy efficiency demands have forced
managers to consider something known as
managed density. He offers several tips on
reducing energy consumption, including the
use of thinner cabling.
In coming months, Upsite Technologies will
offer a glimpse at how one major North
American auto manufacturer reduced the
temperature in its data center significantly
with several relatively minor adjustments;
Chatsworth Products will discuss passive
cooling technology; Server Technology will
explain the advantages and disadvantages of
using various types of power and how these
choices affect costs, cooling effectiveness
and billing; Emerson Network Power will
examine how economizers and supplemental
cooling systems can lower power use; and
Hewlett-Packard will explain its
chip-to-chiller energy efficiency
strategies.
The Chatsworth-Uptime solution stresses
the need to make a shift from regarding
server cabinets as enclosures for storing
servers, to identifying them as the central
architectural feature of the data center for
securing isolation between the room's cold
air and hot exhaust air. According to Ian
Seaton of Chatsworth, their solution, called
Kyoto cooling, can cost-effectively air-cool
cabinet heat loads in excess of 20 kW, with
the ability to raise the computer room HVAC
supply temperature from a typical 55˚F to
75˚F.
The technology, according to R.M. Lodder
of Uptime, utilizes outside air temperatures
as the cooling source for the data center,
during hours when the outside temperature is
less than the data center supply air
temperature requirement. This provides free
cooling, except for the nominal expense of
running a small number of high-efficiency
air movers and turning the "passive" heat
exchanger. In Lodder's native Holland, a
demo data center site uses Kyoto cooling to
deliver "free cooling" for nearly 8,500
hours a year.
Of course, this technology is one of many
options IT directors are examining—and the
reason Communications News is
providing an added emphasis on this subject
for our readers with the new
Power Play
column.
The "Top Seven Myths for Enterprise
E-mail Governance," according to MessageGate,
which provides e-mail governance service:
1. My company does not have a
data leakage problem. In reality,
all companies experience some form of data
leakage. (Research indicates that 80 percent
of all data leaks are unintentional.)
Web-based e-mail is the biggest culprit,
offering remote access outside of the
corporate network.
2. IT "owns" e-mail and is
ultimately responsible for its destiny.
On one hand, employees claim ownership of
e-mail as creator of the message. IT
departments, however, see it as their asset
to manage because it resides on the
corporate network. Neither is an absolute
truth. E-mail has become a legal business
record. As a result, the corporation, as a
whole, is ultimately responsible for every
e-mail traveling across its network.
3. IT must read every incoming
and outgoing message for e-mail controls to
be effective. Most IT departments
lack the budget and manpower to police each
and every message. A more appealing option
is to automate the process through e-mail
governance software using both lexicon and
contextual controls. These applications
prevent unintentional data leaks while also
educating employees on acceptable e-mail
use.
4. E-mail controls hamper
employee productivity. E-mail
controls software increases security, while
also ensuring that all employees follow
uniform archiving and other governance
policies.
5. Securing the corporate network
ensures e-mail confidentiality.
Employees often believe that e-mails are
only accessible to their intended
recipients. IT departments add to the
misperception by assuming corporate network
security efforts are enough. Employees,
however, create local copies of their
Outlook PST file to their local machine to
bypass burdensome security procedures. As a
result, there is little protecting the files
if the computer is lost, stolen or simply
left unattended.
6. Instant messaging is a bigger
threat than e-mail. E-mail is still
the largest communication channel used
within corporate environments, representing
the biggest data leakage threat.
7. Spam, e-mail viruses and other
incoming threats have diminished.
Incoming e-mail threats have not diminished.
In fact, analysts predict spam to grow to as
much as 80 percent of all e-mail traffic by
2011.
Keeping budgets under control is the most
pressing technology challenge facing small
and midsize businesses (SMBs) today,
according to research commissioned by the
Computing Technology Industry Assn.
(CompTIA). In a survey of 724 businesses
with fewer than 1,000 employees, 37 percent
said their biggest IT challenge is keeping
their technology budget under control. IT
budgets are the number one concern among
organizations in specific vertical markets,
including finance and insurance, government,
retail, wholesale and professional services.
The high cost of IT maintenance was cited
as the top concern by 26 percent of all SMBs
surveyed. Maintenance cost was the number
one concern among healthcare companies.
Using technology products and services to
increase worker productivity ranks as the
number three concern among all SMBs
surveyed, at 23 percent.
Ranked number four among top IT
challenges is keeping current systems going
for another few years. This was cited as the
top concern by 20 percent of SMBs overall;
and 43 percent of manufacturing companies,
making it their number one issue.
Another significant challenge, identified
by 15 percent of SMBs, is finding IT vendors
and solution providers who understand their
business enough to provide technology
solutions tailored to their particular
needs.
"SMBs want someone who will do more than
just sell them hardware, software and
services," says John Venator, president and
CEO of CompTIA. "They're going to work with
the vendors and solution providers who put
them in the best position to use technology
to its utmost today and in the future. The
IT companies that understand this are the
ones who will have the most success in this
growing market."
Network Instruments has pulled its
crystal ball out of mothballs and offers its
view on trends that will impact enterprise
networks in 2008.
Retrospective network analysis
(RNA). RNA solutions, TiVo-like
devices that store and play back network
traffic to immediately troubleshoot the
source of a problem, rather than spending
hours recreating the problem, will go
mainstream in 2008.
Steady adoption of 10-Gigabit
Ethernet and multiprotocol label switching
(MPLS). The MPLS market is driven
predominantly by carriers pushing clients to
MPLS from legacy technologies like Frame
Relay. MPLS advantages of quicker response
times and more efficient bandwidth
allocation when coupled with decentralized
applications like VoIP are also fueling
adoption.
Collaborate and listen.
Having Web-based applications, instant
messaging and voice over IP integrated
enhances business processes, but it can
overwhelm networks when application
performance is not closely monitored.
Virtualization. As
organizations harness the benefits of
virtual consolidation, they will also tackle
new problems of monitoring and
troubleshooting these far more abstract
networks.
Track everything.
Whether for compliance enforcement,
e-discovery or network troubleshooting, more
organizations are implementing tools that
record and store every packet traversing the
network.
High-level reporting integrates
with in-depth packet analysis.
Organizations increasingly want to
seamlessly drill-down to perform root-cause
analysis. High-level reporting offers quick
problem detection, and in-depth packet
analysis identifies the cause.
Business executives say unified
communications technology can help global
enterprises address challenges they face.
Yet, cost and complexity are seen as
barriers to implementation by more than half
the respondents to a survey recently
conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit
on behalf of BT.
Less than one-third of the companies
surveyed have deployed unified
communications technology to date, though
the adoption rate increases for larger
companies (40 percent for companies with
annual revenue of $1 billion or more and 47
percent for those with revenue of more than
$10 billion).
Regardless of whether or not a company
has implemented unified communications,
three quarters of executives responding to
the survey cited the primary benefits of
unified communications as increased
productivity and improved collaboration.
Among companies that have implemented
unified communications, most see additional
benefits, including improved disaster
recovery and competitiveness, better
customer/supplier/partner relationships, and
reduced costs.
"These results reflect what we often hear
from our customers," says Michael
Boustridge, president, BT USA and Canada.
"While they clearly see the potential
benefits of unified communications, they are
wary of the costs and implementation
hurdles. That's why BT does not advocate a
‘rip and replace' approach, but prefers to
help customers map out their own journey
toward unified communications solutions that
make sense for them."
Looking out over the next five years,
three quarters of survey respondents said
unified communications will play an
important role in their company's strategy
to improve collaboration, and 69 percent
expect it to help increase productivity.
Faster data
When Nice Shoes'
multiple divisions expanded into new offices
on either side of Manhattan's Park Avenue
South, it needed a cost-effective, reliable
means of networking its data. The company
chose the Canobeam DT-130 Free Space Optics
Transceiver, from Canon U.S.A.,
which provides secure, wireless 1.25-Gbps
data transmission for Gigabit Ethernet
networking. "With the DT-130, these two
geographically split facilities might as
well be in the same building on adjacent
floors," states Blake Cornell,
engineer for one of the company's divisions.
"In our business, it's imperative that data
transfers are moving at top speed, and the
Canobeam makes that happen."
Mobile messaging
British Airways has
chosen CommuniGate Pro from
CommuniGate Systems to drive
communications for the company's diverse and
worldwide mobile employee base. The scalable
communications platform connects the
airline's 30,000 frontline employees via
e-mail, giving the mobile workforce
convenient access to internal messages and
time-critical updates. "This is one of my
favorite programs because it has delivered
an enormous business transformational bang
for a very small investment buck," says
British Airways CIO Paul Coby.
"It works because it contains vital
services, is easily accessible and, above
all, is easy to use."
Traffic analyzed
Belron US, an automotive
glass and claims management service, is
using NetQoS SuperAgent and
ReporterAnalyzer to enhance network and
application performance over its WAN to
7,000 employees and more than two million
customers across the United States. The
end-to-end performance monitoring of
SuperAgent, combined with the
traffic-analysis capabilities of
ReporterAnalyzer help Belron US ensure
application delivery to its various business
segments and customer touch points. "These
products have been valuable as we deploy
technologies such as VoIP over our MPLS
network," says Gary Lewis,
manager of data networking and security for
Belron US. "We can track our current and
historical bandwidth usage, which helps us
forecast our future MPLS bandwidth needs."
Managed services
Deltek, a provider of
enterprise applications software, is
employing a wide range of Verizon
Business services to support its
rapid growth and portfolio expansion.
Verizon Business is providing managed
private IP, managed IP PBX, Web center,
voice services, conferencing and customer
premises equipment. "The primary goal of our
relationship with Verizon Business is to
build a communications platform that will
enable our fast-growing company to meet the
needs of our internal and external
customers, both today and in the future,"
says Lee Evans, vice
president of IT at Deltek.