Data center management - should I quit the profession?

Data center management is such a tireless profession- should I quit it?

Should I quit this data center management profession and get a more "normal" job? This data center management job implies waking up at odd hours to answer the cell phone and have my family curse me every day

The only thing that seems to have changed in my data center management job is the move from beepers to rickety Motorola phones to a sleek IPhone. But irrespective, there is always a crisis situation that needs resolving

Data center management is simply not worth it

I started as a data center engineer specializing in Unix servers, and now head the entire data center but life hasnt changed much. My data center management job dominates my life and my family has been urging me to change my job for quite a while, but "job inertia" and the fear of going to another profession hold me back.

Do you think a data center management guy like me has any chance in another profession

All I long for is a 9x5 job and no production breakdown calls at night..

Data centers to turn green,3 steps to green data centers

Data centers should turn environmentally friendly soon

There is a generally global corporate awakening of corporates to ensure that data centers turn environmentally friendly and consume less power

As soon as the green data center movement started, corporate boardrooms and conference rooms have been filled with corporate honchos blowing hot air and consuming endless MWs of energy and generally doing nothing about making their data centers environmentally friendly!

Data storage virtualization holds the key to clean data centers and low power consumption

Virtualization simply means less servers, resulting in lower power consumption at data centers. Data centers can then exponentially reduce their power consumption, resulting in greener data centers

Server consolidation is another option for greener data centers

Server consolidation is obviously a great option for greener data centers. By using server consolidation, one need not invest in the technical expertise of implementing virtualization for the entire data center

An ideal option is to start with server consolidation, and then slowly move to virtualization, ensuring that the power consumption is minimized even when the virtualization project is underway

Inventory of your servers at your data center with their power consumption may lead you to some interesting insights for creating a green data center

You may be surprised, or rather will be surprised by the good old 80/20 rule in your data center- just replacing one bad server that consumes too much power or using server consolidation with one of your larger servers may save you thousands of dollars worth of electricity bills

Just remember, a data center not only looks good on your boss' s next appraisal,but is also good for the environment and also your company's bottomline

Kraken- the mother of all botnets strikes

Kraken is apparently the mother of all botnets and has spawned over 300,000 bots

Rumors in computer network security circles & antivirus forums including SearchSecurity.com suggest that Kraken is probably the world's most successful botnet

Kraken,the infamous botnet, has apparently infiltrated Fortune 100 companies across the world

Kraken is a botnet allegedly designed to evade popular antivirus programs such as Norton & McAfee antivirus software. Antivirus programs have failed to detect and control the Kraken botnet and the malicious bots are apparently spreading in huge numbers across the corporate world

How Kraken,the botnet, evades common antivirus programs such as McAfee and Norton

Kraken uses complex obfuscation techniques, by altering its binary regularly so that antivirus programs such as McAfee antivirus are unable to detect Kraken.

How Kraken appears to the unassuming user

Kraken infiltrates computers in the following way : Users see an image file,which doesnt load,causing the exe to load malware into the unsuspecting user's machine. The Kraken .exe then stays on the computer as a bot, ready to infiltrate the entire LAN

Kraken botnet has built-in redundancy features that prevent easy detection and damage control

The Kraken botnet has a redundancy feature wherein once the command servers shut down, the child botnet communicates with a new domain name,preventing damage control by shutting down a few servers

Kraken botnet is far worse than Storm, the original infamous botnet

The Kraken botnet is apparently potentially more dangerous than the Storm botnet and has infiltrated more computer servers than ever thought before. The Kraken botnet may spread slowly but its redundancy and binary rebuilding features make it more difficult to detect and control Kraken's damage

Network administrators need to wake up to the Kraken menace and put pressure on antivirus software makers for an early resolution to the danger posed by Kraken botnets

Virus hoaxes,beware of virus hoaxes

Virus hoaxes probably cause more damage to the antivirus software researchers than the viruses themselves

What are virus hoaxes? Virus hoaxes are messages/emails about viruses that are sent to innocent nice people who think they are doing the antivirus world a favor by forwarding the virus information to the rest of the world

Well, it usually turns out that it is not a virus after all, and the "virus hoax" is actually doing more damage than the real viruses by taking up the time of antivirus software researchers and network administrators and even taking up a lot of bandwidth

Watch out for virus hoaxes- its not your JOB to let the world know about viruses!

The altruistic nature of people who fall for virus hoaxes is appreciated- but people dont realize the damage done by the virus hoaxes. There are obviously more qualified people who are monitoring and dealing with viruses on a real time basis.

As any antivirus software maker's research department or your own friendly network administrator will testify,please do not try and be the nice guy and forward any information you hear about viruses to either the antivirus software websites or your network administrator

In summary, watch out for virus hoaxes and please do not forward any virus related mails

Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud,ideal for startup technology companies

Amazon Web Services has introduced the "Elastic Compute Cloud" for easy access to bandwidth and data storage

The " Elastic Compute Cloud " is a new innovation from Amazon Web Services that includes inexpensive storage and bandwidth that can be used for small startups.

The best part of "Amazon Web Services is that it is pay per use- you only pay when you use the server space or bandwidth. As a startup technology company, this is fantastic as the startup companies do not have to pay for expensive fixed cost servers

The Elastic Compute Cloud offered by Amazon has competitors but is definitely provided the best value price proposition especially for storage services

For example, the Simple Storage Services as part of Amazon Web Services cost just 15 cents for a Gigabyte of data for data storage services. The data storage services offered by Amazon are inexpensively priced compared to Akamai,Terremerk,IBM and Sun Microsystems and will probably be adopted even by major corporations,apart from technology startups

A cool innovation from Amazon, the Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2 will revolutionize the data storage industry and wipe out a lot of small data storage companies

Amazon's Elastic Storage Cloud or EC2

Kansas Disaster recovery

Kansas disaster recovery-President Bush announces a disaster recovery package

In the aftermath of the Kansas disaster, Bush has announced a disaster recovery package for Kansas

Interestingly, this Kansas disaster has prompted an early response from President Bush- the earlier poor response to the Katrina disaster in Florida has obviously alerted President Bush in this election year,where a poor Government response could have meant bad publicity for the Republican party

Anyways, irrespective of the reasons, a great response from President Bush to the Kansas disaster

Interestingly, the Kansas disaster recovery package also includes over 75% support from the Government for future disaster recovery mitigation plans for Kansas city

Data centers electricity consumption-Amazing facts

Data centers electricity consumption-Amazing facts from AMD

AMD has released some amazing data center facts- servers,data center infrastructure and cooling infrastructure consumed around 1.2% of the electricity consumption of the entire US market

Alternatives to lowering electricity consumption in data centers

Data centers need to seriously look at data center options such as server consolidation and virtualization, in the aim to use data center server CPU as a service

• Data center server consolidation:In a survey of data centers across the US, I can state with confidence that 80% of servers are operating at below 20% capacity. Data center server consolidation will not only save money for data centers in server cost but also help in reducing precious energy resources such as electricity consumption


• Data storage server virtualization:Data storage server virtualization assists data centers in optimally switching between blade servers to create a true CPU and data storage as a service data center. This server virtualization will also mean that optimal electricity consumption is taking place in the data center

Full AMD data center electricity consumption findings