Data Centre

The Defence department has signaled a raft of changes to its approach to information technology under a new ICT reform program.

With increasing amounts of incoming data threatening to overwhelm firms, Hitachi Data Systems CTO Hu Yoshida wants to make the economics of storage easier for non-IT executives to understand.

Environmental issues exposed by the media and driven by consumers have placed IT departments under pressure to develop "green" data centers. Factors including the reduction of energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions in large data centers often provide the impetus for becoming green. A recent report issued by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) highlights the need for data center efficiency and demonstrates the increased pressure that IT departments are under.

Running out of datacentre space has become a common feature among enterprise organisations as of late and thinking of ways to redesign the facility can prove to be quite a handful.

With 20 parks and nearly US$1 billion in sales, Six Flags is the second-largest amusement park operator in the world. Since coming to Six Flags as part of a management reorganization two years ago, CIO Michael Israel has overseen a bottom-up rebuilding of the IT architecture in the parks and in the company's data center, which moved from New York to Dallas. Israel describes the amusement park business as a shopping mall with rides. "Spend per attendee is everything," he says.

In an interview last month, Douglas Merrill, Google's CIO until he was hired Thursday as president of EMI's digital business division, talked about how the Internet search pioneer's IT organization is configured (not structured), how CIOs need to evolve and the most exasperating question that people ask him at cocktail parties.

Steve Schuckenbrock, president of global services and CIO at Dell, outlined his company's plan to deliver a hosted remote-management offering that it calls "IT as a service." In the following interview, Schuckenbrock spoke about the plan and what Dell is doing to polish its tarnished customer-service reputation.

Who should be responsible for your company's energy initiatives? Your organization may be grappling with the answer to that question. Controlling IT energy consumption has become a high priority for many companies as a way to lower costs, maintain business operations, and reduce their impact on the environment. It can be a rather daunting challenge, given that so many areas of a company's IT infrastructure -- from the desktop to the datacenter -- contribute to power usage, not to mention that various departments have vested and sometimes conflicting interests in those operations (for instance, users want might want more computing power -- but another department has to pay for it).

We've all heard the line about 'realigning IT with the business', which is sort of like saying we want our 'pivot to make better passes to the shooters' -- duh. But as crazy as that sounds, it's reality -- and it isn't getting better, it's getting worse.

There's no question that some companies pursue green solutions because it's the right thing to do. But plenty of them also do it for the cost savings.

Information technology is going green. At least IT systems vendors are, with announcements of new energy-efficient servers, data centre power and cooling products, and device recycling initiatives coming thick and fast these days