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Servers are getting faster and faster, consuming more and more power, producing more and more heat. Removing heat from the data centre uses even more power. According to a November 2006 Gartner report, over 60% of total data centre power consumption is spent cooling the data centre environment. Making the cooling system less power hungry would be the best bet. Unfortunately, significantly lowering the power consumption of air-conditioning units is very difficult.

One of the biggest problems when developing a system, be it software or a website, is getting the customer to visualise how your proposed solution is going to work. Quite often, you will get a long way down the path towards producing your solution before you get any meaningful feedback. The big early career lesson for most programmers is showing an unfinished piece of software to the eventual users and assuming that they will be able to visualise how the software will eventually look and behave.

Facilities running the air-con in a data centre has to be one of the classical IT anti-patterns. You’ve got your nice shiny data centre, rows and rows of cabinets full to the brim with IT kit. Problem is, you don’t run the air conditioning, the facilities people do. So what you say, the facilities people eat air-con units for breakfast. That’s probably true, but what happens when things go wrong? Are you going to be told about the failure in time to do something about it?

Over the weekend my wireless adaptor at home gave up the ghost. Not being the greatest fan of my wireless network at home (I find it too unreliable and slow) I took the opportunity to look at power line networking. I took myself off to my local PC World and grabbed one of the Devolo Homeplug High Speed Starter Kits. Got home, plugged in; configured my PC with a static IP address; and hay presto I was up and running.

Brendan over at Sentinel has a good post with some background information about Robert Aronsson, the co-founder of Intellipool, the maker of a rather good network monitor. Darn, I was going to do that, but as you got there first Brendan, I may as well point to yours. 😄

“Few have made the connection between IT efficiency and green compliance” so says Steve Nunn in The Green Room, BBC’s green issues series. But I’m not so sure. I have noticed a significant increase in awareness at least in the IT press of the need to reduce power costs particularly in the Data centre environment, no doubt aided by the introduction of virtualisation which can reduce a Data centre’s energy bill by as much as 60%.

With the move to more applications being accessed via the web browser I am becoming more and more reminded of the bad old days under Windows 3. In the bad old days, if one application died it took all of your other applications down with it and any unsaved data as well. Along came modern 32 bit operating systems like Windows NT and the problem largely disappeared. Each application was protected from the behaviour of other applications.

It’s technical planning week this week, so I need to know about payment options you’d like to see. Most of you have no doubt heard of PayPal and the new kid on the payment block, Google Checkout. The general idea with both is to help secure your credit card information by restricting who has access to your credit card information. You can pay for things online without the merchant knowing anything about your credit card.

One of the big problems in a switched network is to access reliably network traffic for analysis or monitoring purposes. Many solutions require changes either to the hosts being monitored or require modifications to your network infrastructure. Many managed switches have the ability to mirror the traffic on one or more ports. Mirroring simply involves the switch copying network traffic from one or more ports to another designated port. The switch still sends the network traffic to its original destination.

JDSU were kind enough to invite myself and Denis to a Test-Um product training day at the JDSU offices in Basingstoke. Michael, the Test-Um trainer, is extremely knowledgeable about cable testing in general (as an ex-installer himself) and about the whole Test-Um range in particular. One heads up. The Test-Um name is going to start disappearing soon. All of the Test-Um range will be re-branded as JDSU Network and Enterprise Test.