In Depth

In Depth

Datacentre backup power and power distribution

• Datacentre liquid cooling: What needs to happen for it to become commonplace in colocation?

  As demand for increasingly dense racks and compute-heavy workloads increases within datacentres, could this lead to a wholesale shift in preference from air-to-liquid-based cooling systems? If so, at what cost to the environment?  Continue Reading

• Lean, mean and green: The datacentres of the future

  Working out how to develop more efficient datacentres in an increasingly resource-hungry world is not easy, but it is possible  Continue Reading

• Datacentres operators must move away from diesel backup generators to give back to grid

  While the diesel backup generators used by datacentre operators have a limited environmental impact, using them for extended periods of time to power sites to feed energy back into the grid is not a sustainable solution to growing electricity demand  Continue Reading

• Driving adoption: Are high costs putting public cloud out of reach to non-profits?

  Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s insights into the sky-high cloud bills faced by some non-profit organisations prompts questions about whether the public cloud giants should do more to make their services more accessible to the third sector  Continue Reading

• Log management: Helping IT admins to achieve infrastructure-wide visibility

  When properly configured and deployed, log management tools can unearth a veritable treasure trove of data that IT administrators can use to triage and diagnose problems in enterprise IT infrastructures  Continue Reading

• Evolution in action: The changing face of the datacentre

  The role datacentres play in the wider enterprise IT landscape is changing, fuelling the demand for a mix of different types of facilities that are capable of meeting the growing variety of enterprise data-processing requirements  Continue Reading

• Uptime and availability: Making sense of supplier SLAs

  Enterprises need to read the fine print of supplier service-level agreements (SLA) or risk finding themselves caught short during downtime incidents  Continue Reading

• Protecting your digital assets: Why it pays to invest in cyber insurance

  Cyber insurance offers financial protection against the worst happening to a company’s data and digital assets, and is something few businesses can afford to be without  Continue Reading

• Blackout after Brexit: UK datacentres brace for post-EU power supply and cost changes

  As the uncertainty over how the UK intends to extricate itself from the European Union rumbles on, datacentre operators are weighing up how Brexit might affect the availability and cost of the power they need to run their facilities in future  Continue Reading

• Dividing lines: EU bid to curb server energy use has the European datacentre community split

  An EU-backed push to curb European datacentre energy use has proven to be a divisive issue, as debate rages over the usefulness of using idle energy to determine the overall efficiency of servers  Continue Reading

• Data recovery disasters: Kroll Ontrack on how it helps enterprises bounce back

  Data recovery expert Kroll Ontrack provides a behind-the-scenes look at the challenges enterprises and consumers face getting their files and information back when disaster strikes  Continue Reading

• Are gas-powered datacentres all hype and hot air?

  As concerns about how the proliferation of datacentres will affect electricity supplies continue to be raised, some are experimenting with natural gas as an alternative energy source. But is it a viable, long-term solution?  Continue Reading

• The EURECA moment: Counting the cost of running the UK’s public sector datacentres

  The EU-backed EURECA project has spent the past 36 months assessing the state of public sector datacentres across Europe, and is revealing what it found  Continue Reading

• Staffordshire University goes all-in on Microsoft Azure for digital transformation

  Andrew Proctor, director of digital services at Staffordshire University, describes how ditching its datacentres and moving to the Microsoft Azure public cloud has set the organisation on the path to digital transformation  Continue Reading

• The Sanger Institute on using datacentre upgrades to help decode the human genome

  Paul Woobey, IT director at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, tells Computer Weekly why the organisation's HPC workload requirements cannot be fulfilled by a move to the cloud  Continue Reading

• Upset in Athenry: Examining the impact of Apple's delayed Irish datacentre build

  Apple is set to hear at the end of this month whether its much-delayed Irish datacentre build can go ahead. Computer Weekly examines the ins and outs of this complex case  Continue Reading

• Backup datacentre power: Using diesel generators to plug the UK's energy supply gaps

  Energy market stakeholders are calling on the datacentre community to help them close the UK's energy demand and supply gap by hooking up their diesel generators to the National Grid, but will it work?  Continue Reading

• Datacentre security: Why operators must give cyber and physical threats equal attention

  Datacentre operators often talk up the physical security measures they have in place, but are they at risk of overlooking cyber threats?  Continue Reading

• Microsoft’s underwater datacentre: The pros and cons of running subsea facilities

  Underwater datacentres can help providers save on land costs and cooling, but at what cost to the environment?  Continue Reading

• Modular datacentre helps Belgian IT firm support Dutch and German customers

  Cegeka commissioned a new datacentre when its customer base expanded and decided on a modular approach to get it up and running quickly  Continue Reading

• Top 10 datacentre stories of 2015

  Computer Weekly's top 10 datacentre stories and trend pieces of 2015  Continue Reading

• ARM wrestles its way into the datacentre with the help of 64-bit chips

  Intel x86 technology has traditionally ruled the datacentre roost, but could the power consumption benefits of ARM 64-bit systems change all that?  Continue Reading

• Datacentre PUE: Who's keeping score?

  With datacentre operators under increased competitive pressure to cut their PUE scores, are their ratings really all they seem?  Continue Reading

• Cloud boosts demand for datacentres in Poland and eastern Europe

  The datacentre market in both central and eastern Europe and Poland has recorded double–digit growth  Continue Reading

• Microsoft vies with VMware in the virtual machine market

  VMware launched live migration in 2003. Since then, its capabilities have seen many enhancements, but Microsoft is starting to catch up  Continue Reading

• Co-location services and datacentres feel the CCA heat

  A climate change agreement (CCA) for datacentres has come into force. How will its energy-efficiency rewards shape the industry?  Continue Reading

• Distributed power generation – Is it right for your datacentre energy strategy?

  As datacentre complexity grows, enterprises seek greener ways to power them. But is distributed generation right for all?  Continue Reading

• Get datacentre cooling under control

  Reviewing existing datacentre cooling designs and exploring new ones for efficiency may not be as hard as you think. Here's how  Continue Reading

• Can telcos tap into the datacentre business?

  Telcos have always run datacentres, but now many are hoping to give commercial providers a run for their money  Continue Reading

• BAFTA nominates cloud to boost web performance

  Arts organisation moves to Rackspace to handle awards-season peaks and help meet the ever-growing demand for rich media content  Continue Reading

• Blackrock: measuring risk in a datacentre

  How the investment giant handles the risk of managing $13 trillion of other people’s money  Continue Reading

• Human factors in the datacentre

  Whether to ensure business continuity or maximise returns, everyone from the finance director to the facilities manager needs further datacentre education  Continue Reading

• The UK’s problem with power

  Datacentre power buyers say Britain’s deregulated energy market is as complex as trading in derivatives  Continue Reading

• Get ready for the datacentre storm

  With a wave of innovations rolling ever faster towards the datacentre, analysts say 2014 is the year organisations must plot their course through choppy waters  Continue Reading

• Make a high-performance computing and high-availability datacentre

  High performance computing and high availability systems are no longer limited to engineers and scientists. But is your datacentre ready?  Continue Reading

• How Capgemini keeps its Merlin datacentre green and energy-efficient

  Capgemini's Swindon-based Merlin datacentre is one of the most energy-efficient in the world. But what makes it green?  Continue Reading

• Best of VMworld Europe User Awards: Entry Criteria

  All the information you need to know for the VMworld Europe User Awards.  Continue Reading

• Oh dear, our datacentre provider has gone bust

  Ensure that you enter into a sensible contract with your datacentre provider and factor in all possibilities including them going bust  Continue Reading

• How to effectively manage datacentre temperature and humidity

  A datacentre is a complex facility with different cooling equipment and power systems. Here's how to monitor its temperature and humidity  Continue Reading

• How to minimise costs when overhauling a datacentre

  Virtualisation and cloud technologies are pushing IT to take a revolutionary and replacement approach to datacentres. How can it be done efficiently?  Continue Reading

• Combining DCIM and BIM tools for effective datacentre management

  If datacentre IT equipment and datacentre building was combined, the building and cooling could be tailored to increase efficiency  Continue Reading

• Identifying truths and myths of datacentre efficiency

  There is no one-size-fits-all solution to optimising datacentre efficiency, so CIOs should consider all available options. Archana Venkatraman reports  Continue Reading

• Is wind energy just blowing in the face of datacentre cooling reality?

  Using renewable energy such as wind energy for datacentre cooling may not address issues of carbon emissions as directly as suppliers claim  Continue Reading

• Using fibre channel for storage networking

  Find out why Fibre Channel is still the network of choice in data centres.  Continue Reading

• Is cloud data storage right for your organisation?

  Find out if cloud data storage is a serious option for you with this evaluation of its suitability for primary, nearline, backup and archive data  Continue Reading

• Top five virtualisation case studies of 2011

  Our recap of 2011's most popular case studies shows how other IT users conducted their virtualisation projects and all about their challenges and the efficiencies they achieved.  Continue Reading

• The data centre boom: Finding the right site just got serious

  Our expert poses some basic, but important, tests of potential data centre sites, including location, connectivity and power, that companies should be aware of.  Continue Reading