Roundup: Data Center Skills, Juniper, Verisign

Here’s a roundup of some of some of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:

Deepening data center skills crisis. ComputerWorld reports on a skills crisis for data centers and IT departments everywhere, which we've previously reported about (see The Data Center Skills Gap from March 2009). The thrust of the problem is that people are not generally versed in the data center of today.  The data center of today means mixing facilities and IT, working with highly automated systems, and needs a wide variety of skill sets.  Add on an ever-changing IT landscape and economic recession and maintaining and managing skills becomes more difficult.  Joanne Kossuth, vice president of operations and CIO for Franklin W. Olin College notes that the "situation is exacerbated because IT folks who have lost their jobs during the downturn tend to have held specific jobs at large corporations."  In a 2009 Nemertes Research study it was noted that "at 37% of the organizations, IT executives reported having put projects on hold because of the skills shortage." Many of the people that businesses are looking to hire are multi-talented professionals and currently employed. However with demand starting to pick up again for higher-level, hard to find skills, there are plenty of opportunities to enhance skill sets and train on the job.

Juniper Upgrades T series core routers. Juniper (JNPR) announced a new generation of silicon that will enable customers to quickly, efficiently and non-disruptively upgrade existing T series core routers.  Juniper touts the T series as the only core router in the industry capable of supporting true line-rate 100 GigE interfaces.  The new chipset will lay a foundation for single half-rack system to scale to a total capacity of 4 Tbps (Terabits per second).  "The chipset we are introducing today is the next step in our core routing strategy, delivering unparalleled investment protection and enabling our customers to continually scale their networks," said Stefan Dyckerhoff, senior vice president and general manager, Core Business Unit, Juniper Networks.  The first products set to use the new chipset are scheduled for the second half of 2010 and will be available for purchase in early 2011.

Verisign data center consolidation. Forbes interviews Verisign (VRSN) CTO Ken Silva about a data center consolidation project. Silva discusses the issues with keeping services available at all times, even when migrating from smaller satellite data centers into larger facilities. Capitalizing on the data center moves, he also notes that this is when applications are inventoried, scrutinized and consolidated as well. In the June 2009 Domain Brief, Verisign noted that their average daily DNS query load was 38 billion during the first quarter of 2009. In 2007 Verisign planned a $100 million infrastructure upgrade, including new data centers, to manage the explosive growth in Internet traffic.