Perspectives: The Modular Debate, Ghost Servers, Earthquake Risk

earthquake-aftermath

Overturned computer and communication racks following an earthquake. Read more about seismic restraint and strategies to prevent this kind of damage in this week's Industry Perspectives columns.

Our Industry Perspectives thought leadership channel continues to bring interesting and sometimes provocative columns to our readers on a variety of topics important to the industry. As the number of submissions has grown, it's wonderful to see the way the data center community has embraced this opportunity to share their insight and expertise. If you're interested in participating, please see our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. Here’s a recap of this week’s columns:

Virtualization & the Application Delivery Controller - Due to the impact of virtualization, evaluating an application delivery controller's ability to support and operate in virtual environments is just as important as evaluating its ability to support load balancing, SSL acceleration, compression, caching, traffic management and security features, writes Paul Andersen of Array Networks.

Unlock Your Capacity By Unplugging Your Ghost Servers - Why are these power-draining assets called “ghost” servers? Because they are ghosts of what a productive server is supposed to be, no longer of any practical use to the business. Whatever the reason, servers that were once useful are now dead weight. They need to be turned off, writes Gary Bunyan of iTRACS.

Can Your Data Center Survive an Earthquake? How to Know Your Risk - Unlike the seasonal disasters that strike "tornado alley" or the U.S. Gulf Coast, in earthquake country, it’s always earthquake season. Earthquakes have no preferred time of day, tidal stage, or (as yet) predictable indicator. writes Keith Porter of SPA Risk and Molly Latham of the Association of Contingency Planners.

Four Myths of the Container Data Center Market - Mark Thiele of Switch writes that pre-fabricated containers many not be the answer to every data center need. With aggressive marketing for what many vendors are calling "modular data centers" that he would term PODs or containers, vendors are asking, “Why build a data center when you can buy a POD?” This column covers some of the drawbacks of utilizing PODs.

Hybrid Applications: Hybrid Cloud in the Real World - The term “hybrid” is arguably as over used today as “cloud.” The term is used to discuss the mix or use of both internal and external cloud solutions (public and private cloud by enterprise). However, a less common definition, but arguably a more common implementation, is to describe the use of a mixed architecture including both cloud and a traditional, single-tenant hosted infrastructure, writes David Grimes of NaviSite.

Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library.