There are a number of best practices data center operators should follow to maintain the ideal environment for IT equipment, such as monitoring humidity levels and atmospheric corrosion, replacing dust filters in a timely manner, using chemical filtration systems, limiting foot traffic and using tak mats or sticky mats. In addition to following these best practices, data...
Unstructured data is growing exponentially year after year with the advanced capabilities of modern devices. These devices generate mass quantities of emails, images and audio and video files. Growing pools of unstructured data become difficult to organize, manage and search. This is where object storage comes in. Object storage is ideal for organizing, managing and searching...
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have continued to escalate year after year, and this year was no exception. Attacks have increased 125% since 2015. Source and target countries have shifted. Ransom as a motive has increased and attackers are getting smarter. See our DDoS infographic to gain an understanding of how DDoS attacks have grown and evolved from 2015 to...
Data center ownership is not usually something companies consider when they are looking for colocation or disaster recovery services. Security, redundancy and construction are often discussed. These are indeed important factors to consider when making a decision, but the type of ownership a data center is under can sometimes determine these important deciding factors and...
Environmentalist organizations often negatively target data centers because of their high energy usage. While it may be true that data center operators have a “responsibility and an opportunity to drive growth with renewable energy,” (Gary Cook, IT analyst at Greenpeace via The Atlantic) environmentalists should actually support data centers due to the fact that...
Last Thursday, Houston area data center professionals assembled on the club level of the University of Houston’s TDECU stadium for AFCOM’s Houston chapter meeting to hear a panel of local data center experts discuss The Good, Bad and the Ugly: Best Practices for a Successful Colocation Move. On the panel was Data Foundry’s Houston Network Operations Manager...
https://www.youtube.com/embed/Aohufm1TvMg?start=12 In 2007, a truck crashed into a utility pole at a Rackspace data center in Dallas, causing power outages and downtime for several major websites. In 2010, a squirrel chewed through power lines near Yahoo’s data center in Santa Clara, taking down half the data center. Apparently these “frying squirrel” incidents are...
Atlantic hurricane season is upon us. If hurricanes are a risk factor for your organization, it’s time to review your company’s disaster recovery plan, or DR plan. Strong winds and floods from hurricanes pose threats to business continuity, which is why Hurricane Preparedness Week (May 15-21) is the ideal time to ensure that your disaster recovery plan is up to date....
Let’s start by talking about why this is even a topic for discussion. It all comes down to the desire to have successful data center outsourcing initiatives – whether you are looking to completely outsource your data center operations or just pieces of them. Nobody goes into a project expecting failure yet there are plenty of stories about best efforts that went wrong,...
It’s not too late to establish an alternate location for your business servers, systems and networks for continuous uptime. Data Foundry can help you establish a secondary site at Texas 1, our flagship data center in Austin, TX, which is considered an ideal geographic location to house disaster recovery infrastructure. Hurricane Facts Infographic Data Foundry has developed...
Hurricane season is upon us, and according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center there is a 70 percent likelihood of 8 to 13 named storms, of which 3 to 6 could become hurricanes, including 1 to 2 major hurricanes. Of course, it only takes one storm to put an unprepared business out of business. According to the Disaster Recovery...
Guest Blog by Carl Herberger, VP, Security Solutions, Radware (a business partner of Data Foundry) According to US Gov’t statistics, 60% of Small Businesses fold before a one-year anniversary of a cyber-attack. Not even 18 months ago, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Small Business Subcommittee on Health and Technology Chairman Chris Collins (R-NY) led a hearing to examine...
We are a little over a month into the 2014 hurricane season. Are you comfortable with your company’s Disaster Recovery plan? In recent years we have seen everything from a hurricane season that produced only 2 hurricanes, to a season that generated 15. Regardless of the seasonal forecast, it only takes one hurricane to make a major impact on your critical IT assets. According...
In part 1, we provided a definition of cloud computing and talked about the difference between public and private clouds. In this post, we’ll look at the relationship between cloud services and data centers. The growth in the demand for cloud services has been facilitated by the growth in the data center marketplace. Demand for colocation, hosting and value-added services...
Most people have heard about cloud computing, the catchall phrase that represents computing based on virtual resources. However, there are multiple flavors of cloud computing that can make the whole subject a little confusing. We’ll take a look at the two broad categories, public and private and tie in some directions, trends, and threats to make it all a little clearer....