Datacenters

Microsoft trying to blow the roof off datacenter design — Microsoft has seen the future of the datacenter, and oddly enough it's missing a roof.The company's future datacenter design, which will be its de facto standard in five years, is a cross between an electrical switching station, an RV-park and the closing "warehouse" scene from the 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark .[ Stay ahead of advances in technology with InfoWorld's Ahead of the Curve blog and newsletter. ]The company envisions a set of prefabricated containers the size of a semi-trailer filled with as many as 2,000 preconfigured servers. The containers can be parked next to and plugged into... [Tags: advances in technology, datacenters, de facto standard, film raiders, four walls]

Microsoft applies Model T factory methods to datacenters — Microsoft has come up with a faster, cheaper way to build its datacenters over the next five years, and it says other companies could use its methods too.Microsoft's approach, described by General Manager Michael Manos in a blog post Tuesday, uses a modular design in which standard units of computing, cooling, and electrical equipment are delivered to a facility on the back of a truck and assembled on site. The system, which Microsoft calls its "Generation 4" design, will allow its datacenters to become operational more quickly and cut the cost of building traditional, brick and mortar facilities.[ Find out... [Tags: brick and mortar, building blocks, clout, cooling systems, datacenter]

Open source developers set out software road map for 2020 — A group of open source software advocates set out a road map for the software industry through 2020 at the Open World Forum conference in Paris on Tuesday.The authors of the report, "2020 FLOSS Roadmap" (PDF), made a number of predictions about the role of FLOSS (free, libre, and open source software) in 2020, and 80 recommendations for the industry. Their use of the French word "libre" ("free," as in "unfettered") clears up the ambiguity inherent in the English word "free," which can also mean without cost.[ Track the latest trends in open source with InfoWorld's Open Sources blog. ]They... [Tags: business models, datacenters, different services, ecological impacts, electors]

Let’s say you are a bank, like Washington Mutual, and you’ve been forced to join another bank. What happens to your data center? How do the IT guys left in charge reduce cost? What other things are happening in the data center to squeeze cost out and return investment dollars fast? Well, today I went over to Cisco’s headquarters to see what they are doing in their datacenters. There I met James Urquhart (here is his Twitter account, he was just hired by Cisco because of his CloudComputing expertise and blog, titled appropriately “Wisdom of Clouds“) and friends who gave... [Tags: amazon, automation, cisco, cloud burst, clouds]

Amazon CTO: Cloud infrastructure keeps companies focused on innovation — On the night of the historic U.S. presidential election, news outlets across the country streamed live video of the news coverage on their Web sites. Obviously, the Web traffic that night, compared to others, was exponentially greater. But it’s not as if news organizations went out and spent boatloads of money to build massive datacenters [...]... [Tags: amazon, cto, datacenters, election news, infrastructure]

CA to discuss 'Mainframe 2.0' — CA is expected to announce a product and services initiative titled "Mainframe 2.0" on Tuesday at its CA World 2008 conference in Las Vegas.Along with IBM and BMC, CA is pushing tools and services aimed at making mainframe computing easier. This goal is said to be pressing because the mainframe workforce is graying, and the academic pipeline isn't healthy enough to replace those workers.[ Discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the InfoWorld Test Center. ]Meanwhile, due to lower-cost mainframe options from IBM, renewed interest in the platform for its perceived stability, and potential energy cost savings over large, distributed... [Tags: academic pipeline, bmc, business unit, complexities, datacenters]

Eleven tips for datacenter efficiency — Power consumption at datacenters is once again in the spotlight, after analyst house Gartner came up with a list of best practices in the datacenter, designed to save electricity and improve cooling.Gartner modestly claims that if companies follow all of its best practices, it could typically expect to save one million kilowatt hours. It says that in a conventional datacenter, between 35 and fifty percent of the electricity consumed is for cooling compared to only 15 percent in best practice or 'green' datacenters.[ Also check out "Four ways to cut datacenter costs," and for other ways to trim expenses, take a... [Tags: best practices, cold air, cooling system, datacenters, delta]

Amazon, Capgemini partner on cloud computing — Consultancy Capgemini and Amazon.com will offer application development and hosting services using Amazon.com's infrastructure, the companies said on Tuesday.The partnership seeks to capitalize on the growing interest in so-called "cloud computing," where companies run applications in remote datacenters that are managed and maintained by another service provider.[ Confused by cloud computing hype? Get the facts from InfoWorld's cloud computing primer. | And find out more on cloud computing's risks. ]The new offering will focus on implementing Microsoft's SharePoint content management and collaboration software and the transport and logistics module for Oracle ERP (enterprise resource planning).It can also be used for... [Tags: amazon, application development, capgemini, collaboration software, computer storage]

Hyperic takes on the cloud — Open source management software provider Hyperic introduced this week an upgrade to its platforms that lets IT managers monitor virtual environments, better plan for capacity, and track performance of services delivered via cloud computing.Cloud computing is the talk of many industry analyst firms who argue the pay-per-use model for compute, storage and other resources will attract more enterprise customers in coming years. IDC, for one, forecasts that spending on cloud services will reach $42 billion in the next five years, capturing 12 percent of IT spending growth in 2012. Vendors like Hyperic are building monitoring capabilities that can handle the dynamic... [Tags: amazon web, analyst firms, company officials, datacenters, director of marketing]

Making Sense of Microsoft’s Azure (Infoworld) — Last week Microsoft announced its cloud computing effort called Azure. Fitting in between current offerings of Google’s and Amazon’s, it represents a very big step towards moving applications off the desktop and out of a corporation’s own datacenters. Whether or not it will have any traction with corporate IT developers remains to be seen. Think of Microsoft as bringing more of a Wild West feel to the whole arena of cloud computing.  How to distinguish the players? If we think back to the late 1880s, Amazon provides the land grants and raw Linux and Windows acreage to build your... [Tags: 1880s, acreage, amazon, apis, ballmer]

Making sense of Microsoft's Azure — Last week, Microsoft announced its cloud-computing effort, called Azure. Fitting between Google's and Amazon.com's current offerings, it represents a very big step toward moving applications off the desktop and out of a corporation's own datacenters. Whether or not it will have any traction with corporate IT developers remains to be seen.Nonetheless, the Azure effort has brought more of a Wild West feel to the whole arena of cloud computing. If this were the late 1880s, Amazon.com would provide the land grants, as well as raw Linux and Windows acreage to build your applications upon. Google's general goods store would stock... [Tags: 1880s, alpha version, amazon, billy the kid, bits and pieces]

Faroo P2P Web Search — The idea of Faroo is simple. Faroo uses P2P technology to crawl the World Wide Web instead of using an infrastructure with thousands of servers and worldwide datacenters. If you think about it, users are already visiting websites all the time and the basic idea is to utilize those information to build and maintain an up to date index of the World Wide Web. Every user who is running the Faroo client contributes to the web search engine in two ways. So called words, some would say keywords, are stored on the user’s computer which are linked to websites. If... [Tags: cnn, crawler, datacenters, disk space, encrypted]

Microsoft to support Windows Azure with datacenter investments — Despite the economic downturn, Microsoft intends to ramp up the number of servers running in its datacenters worldwide by 15 times over the next five years.The growth, outlined in a presentation on Monday at its Professional Developers Conference, is designed to handle increased hosted computing demand from enterprise software running on its new Windows Azure platform , also announced Monday, as well as third-party services Microsoft hopes to attract.[ For more news from Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference, check out InfoWorld's special report. ]Microsoft expects to boost the number of datacenters it operates by three times, its power usage by 15 times,... [Tags: amazon, computing services, datacenters, economic downturn, exact number]

Earlier today at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) Microsoft has provided details on what we should expect from its promised cloud operating system. The offer that was revealed today was initially referred to as Red Dog or Windows Strata or Windows Cloud at different times. Today we know the real name and it is Azure. The community technology preview of the new platform is already available to developers while the commercial version of the new operating system will not be available at least until late 2009. Basically the cloud OS by Microsoft is intended to serve as a platform for... [Tags: application developers, community technology, datacenters, desktops, different times]

My Long Wait Is Over: Azure is here — Was it worth the wait? Well for me it was a weird morning…I went to sleep at 02:30 after writing a long email that goes out of out worldwide General Managers and a number of other people inside the business. The timing was crucial and I was editing at the last minute in the keynote room. We got it out…phew. It was weird that because I felt on edge, nervous even as I knew what was about to happen. 3 years or work, all about to be outed during 90 minutes of keynotes. I know a lot of the... [Tags: 3 years, business opportunity, christmas tree, cloud company, datacenters]

Update: Microsoft launches Windows Azure for the cloud — At Microsoft's PDC (Professional Developers Conference) in Los Angeles, Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie unveiled the company's much-anticipated cloud computing platform, dubbed Windows Azure.Primarily a platform for developers, Windows Azure plays host to the .Net Framework, SQL Server, SharePoint, Dynamics CRM, and an offering called Live Services, which, according to Ozzie, will extend Azure services "outward" to connect with locally running Microsoft software. Using this rich environment, developers will be able to build and deploy Web applications and services running on Microsoft's worldwide infrastructure of datacenters.[ For more news from Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference, check out InfoWorld's special report. ]Previously... [Tags: chief software architect, community technology, computing platform, corporate vice president, database services]

The end of IT Infrastructure as we know it! – Welcome to the cloud, Welcome to Windows Azure! — So, one has to ask the question.  Will Windows Server 2008 R2, and Windows 7 client be the last ‘normal’ Windows OS’s we see?  Personally, I think the answer is yes, and I sure hope I’m right. Disclaimer - First, let me say I am writing this blog post in real time while watching the PDC presentation, which is only about an hour in.  So, if I am jumping the gun a bit and get some stuff wrong, don’t kill me :) Windows Azure is Microsoft’s new ‘Datacenter’ OS.  The current IT infrastructure as we know it is based per... [Tags: active directory, datacenter, datacenters, directory servers, exchange servers]

PDC: Salesforce.com pitches its platform — With Microsoft expected this morning to announce inside the Los Angeles Convention Center a platform that will allow developers to easily create applications that run on the company's datacenters and then can be accessed via the Internet, rival Salesforce.com pitched its own offering outside.... [Tags: angeles convention center, datacenters, developers, los angeles convention center, microsoft]

Microsoft unveils cloud service Windows Azure — Microsoft’s chief software architect Ray Ozzie today announced Windows Azure, Microsoft’s idea of a cloud OS or “services platform” that will “set the stage for the next 50 years” of Windows, according to the executive. Previously code-named “Red Dog”, Microsoft believes that a highly available and easily highly scalable service will convince corporations to move their application development and deployment to Microsoft’s datacenters.... [Tags: application development, chief software architect, corporations, datacenters, deployment]

Gartner: Modernize datacenters or risk doubling energy costs — Datacenter managers need to modernize their operations, or risk doubling their energy costs between 2005 and 2011, according to analyst firm Gartner.Legacy datacenters made in the last decade are essentially obsolete in terms of environmentally sustainable IT, according to Gartner. New high-density, power-hungry equipment warrants more advanced power and cooling capabilities or costs will spiral, Rakesh Kumar, vice-president at Gartner warned.[ Also check out "Four ways to cut datacenter costs," and for other ways to trim a look at Tom Sullivan's "Five outside-the-box ways to cut IT costs." ]"If we assume that datacenter energy costs continue to double every five years, they... [Tags: analyst firm, capacity management, conceptual models, datacenters, density data]