Super January on SDC

We have been cranking out some quality content on SearchDataCenter.com this month, so I'm going to take this chance to toot my team's own horn. Here is a list of the best content we've pulled out in the last few weeks.

Data center design:
Green data centers tackle LEED certification
Achieving the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED certification is a tall order for power hungry data centers. Despite the challenge, two companies have certified their facilities.

Prefab data centers offer modular expansion alternative
Prefabricated modular data centers may provide a viable alternative to new construction. But the adoption of these "turn-key" data centers is yet to be seen.

Study ranks cheapest places to build a data center
Princeton, N.J.-based site selection specialists, The Boyd Company Inc., has published its list of the best places to build a data center, taking into account 50 cities in the U.S. and focused on the healthcare industry. The list compares the annual operating costs of building a 150,000-square-foot facility with 150 employees.

DC power worries data center planner
United Air Lines Inc. isn't sure if using DC power for a new data center will lead to a safe landing. The Chicago-based company is building the facility in Denver to consolidate disaster recovery operations and direct current is on the radar because of its reputed reliability and better energy efficiency. But there are concerns. For one, not all the hardware it needs is DC-compatible. And having grown accustomed to the power and cooling redundancy of AC systems, it's worried about a single DC-power input.


Systems and server news:
Best data center products of 2006
The editorial staff at SearchDataCenter.com requested submissions from vendors and users and we came up with four categories: servers, data center backup power, data center cooling and systems management tools. We selected three winners in each category. The winning products come from all corners of the data center industry: from well-established companies to companies you may have never heard of.

Sun beavers away at UltraSPARC server line
Sun announced speed improvements to its Sun Fire T2000 Niagara server and is hard at work on next-generation silicon for the platform.

HP server management software tracks power usage
Hewlett-Packard Co. announced upgraded server management software that controls how much power a system draws. HP Insight Control Environment is a software package targeted for the company's ProLiant servers and costs about $550 per server. It was originally introduced alongside HP blade servers back in June.

IBM BladeCenter H gets tenfold bandwidth increase
IBM introduced new networking capabilities for its high-performance blade server system today, including 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) connectivity to the blade, courtesy of a collaboration with Blade Network Technologies and NetXen Inc.

Sun boosts Unix partitioning on Solaris
Sun Microsystems Inc. has upgraded its Solaris operating system with Logical Domains, a partitioning technology on its UltraSPARC T1-based servers that, combined with Solaris Containers, can be used to create up to 32 separate Unix OS instances on each system.

Mainframe strategies and trends:
Third-party software costs killing mainframe growth
Attendees at the annual Gartner Data Center Conference sounded off in a survey published by the Stanford, Conn.-based analyst firm this week. Mainframers weighed in on third-party software costs, Linux on the mainframe, IBM's efforts to get new blood in the job market and more.

Mainframe year in review 2006
The mainframe experienced a lot of growth in the last year. This is a review of the stories, technologies and trends that shaped 2006, listed in chronological order.

HP makes the case for mainframe migration
John Pickett, Hewlett-Packard's worldwide mainframe alternative program manager, discusses who should "augment" their mainframes, who should migrate applications to another platform, and who should replace it outright.

We're actually on track to break a page view record this month, and we've got more content than we can even post. But come talk to me in July when I can't buy a story to write about...

Doomsday Clock tolls for thee

The end is nigh folks. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, has nudged the Doomsday Clock forward two minutes, putting us at 11:55 PM on the metaphorical countdown to Armegeddon. While this group of scientists listed North Korea's recent test of a nuclear weapon, Iran's nuclear ambitions, and a renewed U.S. emphasis on the military utility of nuclear weapons -- and they pointed to another danger.

From the report: We have concluded that the dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons. The effects may be less dramatic in the short term than the destruction that could be wrought by nuclear explosions, but over the next three to four decades climate change could cause drastic harm to the habitats upon which human societies depend for survival.

That said, is it time to start cutting down on your data center's power consumption? Or are we too far gone? Maybe it's time to run up the energy bill, bust out an umbrella drink and bring on the global warming.

I've gotten nihilistic since the last time I posted. I've been holding off, waiting for the new Data Center blog to get up and running, and it's getting to me.