Early in my days as a Data Center manager I attended a series of talks focused on Data Center energy efficiency. The sessions covered everything from hardware chip design to application performance to physical infrastructure.
Even for a beginner, two things were immediately obvious. First, Data Centers consume more energy than other buildings – much more. Second, with so many different components drawing power there are a lot of opportunities to make a server environment more energy efficient.
One presenter, from a manufacturer of Data Center standby electrical systems, mentioned during his talk that electrical components operate more efficiently at higher loads. The closer they are to maximum capacity, the better they perform.
I thought about this for a while and at the conclusion of the session, asked: “If electrical systems operate more efficiently at higher loads, why do operators of Data Centers with redundant electrical infrastructure split the load evenly between the A and B sides? Why not put the entire load on side A and nothing on side B? Wouldn’t that be more energy efficient?”
To my surprise, the question stumped the presenter. Eventually, one of his co-workers in the audience stood up and said they had conducted experiments with that configuration and found that although it was more energy efficient, when a failure occurred on the A side and the full power load (in his words) “came crashing onto the B side,” the components sometimes failed. The redundant electrical infrastructure could reliably handle a sudden jump from 40 percent loaded to 80 percent, but not from zero to 80 percent.
Oh. Enter my third Data Center lesson for the day: energy efficiency is important, but ensuring availability is much more important.
Speaking of availability and Data Center power, this week’s question explores the use of rotary UPS systems that employ flywheel technology versus traditional battery UPS systems. See below for discussion of the pros and cons of each.
This post was written by Chuck Robbins, Cisco’s Senior Vice President, The Americas.
Today Cisco will be replacing its current HP print services with Xerox Managed Print Services (MPS), a more cost-effective way to produce and manage documents across all 460 of our offices.
Cisco is embracing the future of MPS, using managed print and cloud ITO services, to work within our company’s existing infrastructure, supporting multiple locations and mobile technologies.
By working and partnering with Xerox, we can further enable an anytime, anywhere, any device mobility strategy for our employees, as they won’t have any barriers to printing when they’re on the road. We’re making sure they don’t have to spend unnecessary time on print-related tasks when they’re in the office, too.
What does this mean for Cisco partners?Read More »
Yesterday we announced that Charter Communications, a leading broadband communications and entertainment provider and the 4th largest cable company in the United States selected the Cisco CRS-3 and ASR 9000 as part of a major network upgrade. This of course brings up the question our readers often ask – why? What is driving these investments? While we have our perspective (which we share regularly on the SP360 blog and other forums), it’s even better when we get the view directly from the customer. To that end, we had the opportunity to interview Bob Hunt, Charter’s VP of Network Engineering on Charter’s perspective on the network upgrade, the drivers, and the growth in DOCSIS 3.0 usage and the network efficiencies he’s forecasting. Read More »
The Edge of the network is a major focus for our customers, the market as a whole, and certainly for us at Cisco. The ASR 9000 System is the leading Service Provider Edge router in all three cases, and admittedly, the system is on quite a roll.
In our June ASR 9000 blog, we announced to the market the newest innovations in the platform – nV technology and the ability to scale the system to a whopping 96 Tbps (more than 36 times the capabilities of the nearest competitive platform and enough bandwidth for man, woman, and child in Beijing, London and Moscow to watch a streamed High Definition movie simultaneously). Along with that news, we had the honor of announcing five new customers joining the 500+ strong ASR 9000 family — China Telecom, NTT Playa in Japan, Tata Communications in India, Fastweb in Italy, Cox and Comcast in the US. Read More »
DISA’s Customer & Industry Forum 2011 provides a valuable opportunity to see and hear how the latest technologies can help the Department of Defense better achieve its mission while introducing greater efficiencies at lower cost. Read More »
