Archive for the ‘Data Center & Colocation’ Category

Driving in Detroit’s Rut, is the Media Business Next?

By Tony Greenberg /Alex Veytsel

Media firms have been my clients for years. Most IT firms complain that media firms prey on IT services firms by offering to “reference them” for larger enterprise deals. WRONG. Media firms, much like adult entertainment firms, are the spaghetti slingers and early adopters of new tech. You have to love them for taking the arrows in their backs and mounting themselves on the fireplace altar as trophies.

Media firms are actually IT Heroes. While banks and automakers wax poetic about risk and return on investment, Disney, ABC, News Corp., Viacom, CBS, and Sony–all past or current clients–pave the yellow brick road. Hats off to you all for “boldly going where no man has gone before”. For now, let’s ponder what lessons we can learn from the carnage of auto and the future demise of IT. (more…)

Posted in Data Center & Colocation, IT Market, Managed Services, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Force Majeure (less secularly known as “Act of God”) clauses are standard contract language and should be included in your data center checklist. Having your data center wiped out by a meteor strike means you’re not getting service credits and there’s not much you can do about it (more…)

Posted in Data Center & Colocation | 2 Comments »

Today’s devious device is a playbook page that’s intentionally left blank. Omitting meaningful measurement from IT Service Level Agreements (SLAs) or leaving them to the discretion of the vendor can effectively nullify their effect along with service credits of 2%-5% of your monthly bill for a single violation up to 50% or more for serious / repeat violations (more…)

Posted in CDN & Streaming, Data Center & Colocation, Managed Services | 4 Comments »

In the recent Green Grid White Paper, “Impact of Virtualization on Data Center Physical Infrastructure“, there’s an interesting discussion about the impact of virtualization on data center density, capacity, and power waste.  However, most of the findings apply to in-house environments where the same entity that virtualizes has to deal with right-sizing the UPS, building a floor layout, etc.  But in the world of outsourced data centers, most of the time the responsibility resides outside of your business, and the implications shift accordingly.  Specifically (more…)

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Few if any data centers would admit to making money on power. For one thing, it’s something that could get them in legal trouble depending on the jurisdiction. However, throughout the US, co-location facilities are taking sizeable margins on power by buying on a usage basis and selling on a capacity basis. In fact, based on SPY Index™ data, we place that margin at more than 150% of typical cost – as much as $245K in a typical $1M co-location contract. Finding ways to identify your vendor’s real cost and either convert to usage based power or at least reduce the margin should be a top priority – with savings potential from 6%-25% of your co-location bill at stake. It goes without saying that a vendor will find many reasons, some genuine and some arbitrary, to limit that potential.

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