When you visit the office of a large enterprise CIO, you will notice the same report or set of reports very visible in their office. Some have a wall with availability charts of all their data centers showing each location with the failure rates clearly visible. Availability is a fundamental and key criteria for enterprise CIO's. 

In addition to availability, energy efficiency is another key measurement that is a focus area. As the need for more storage continues to rise at rates over 100% and density becomes the main requirement. Density and availability challenge every CIO because energy efficiency is the enemy of both. 

The old rules-of-thumb are no longer sufficient for managing energy efficiency in mission critical facilities. Market-leading organizations are increasingly relying on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) techniques in both Design and Operational Management of their modern data centers.  Efficiency (cost) for any data center is driven by the way that Total Power, Total Cooling and Total Space availability is utilized by the Owner/Operator, at any point in time.  To complicate matters, the IT load distribution within a facility changes over time, thus making operational efficiency and best use of total power available moving targets.  Furthermore, Owner/Operators have little or no control on the amount of power drawn by a piece of IT equipment.  This puts the cooling system at the forefront of any strategy to maximize data center operational efficiency. 

What's this all mean to the CIO looking at availability charts? It means that you need to look at new ways to measure your data center to understand the air flow and how adding new equipment impacts availability. There are sophisticated CFD techniques that can help analyze the data center and should be utilized.

Universities around the world are experiencing dramatic increases in “always on“ research capability and the need to offer cutting-edge applications . This places considerable strain on many of the older incumbent data center infrastructures. The need for more robust, powerful and efficient systems has left a number of institutions in a bind. Most universities have not planned for such changes and this disruption has strained budgets to have the resources to effectively remain competitive with other institutions around the world.

In a typical data center, density is restricted by both the cooling capabilities and the platform infrastructure. Space will always be an issue when it comes to data processing and storage. Verari Systems has taken steps to combat this with the BladeRack® 2 X- Series featuring our patented Vertical Cooling Technology™ which lowers TCO and space requirements while increasing performance. By utilizing Verari’s solutions universities can build an extremely efficient data centers with unrivaled density and maximum performance. In fact, the BladeRack 2 XM is the industry’s densest compute solution, supporting up to 96 blades housing 768 processing cores. That’s 768 cutting-edge processing cores running complex research equations or mapping DNA – anything top researchers need the muscle to crack – in just two standard data center floor tiles.

As I mentioned before some universities just don’t have the resources to improve their data centers. Or to be clearer, some universities do not have the immediate, discretionary income available to fund a new data center. Verari Systems counters this by providing a wide range of leasing and financing options designed to help organizations who find themselves in such a bind. We will even accept old, inefficient systems as a trade in towards new data center hardware that will save these schools money while attracting top researchers and grants. Our leasing solutions minimize the financial and technological risks that accompany a direct purchase.  We also offer a technology refresh program that protects the universities’ investment and lets them upgrade the equipment when the time comes to do so in an easy, planned manner.

I am constantly amazed by the amount of sheer data that we generate on a day to day basis. According to the International Data Group (IDC) 281 billion gigabytes of data was created in 2007 (up from 161 billion in 2006). This immense growth combined with growing environment concerns has created a dire need for ultra efficient, highly versatile and extremely dense blade-based storage solutions.

The “information superhighway” that was promised in the early 90s has come and gone, replaced by this exponentially expanding digital universe. The web has truly become the domain of the user, where everyone not only has a voice, but also a blog, YouTube account, FaceBook domain, online banking records and well, you get the picture. IDC estimates that this translates to approximately 45 gigabytes of data for every person on earth. Not only is that number growing but, obviously, so is the number of people on earth, expanding the digital universe even further.

That’s the first challenge to supplying the digital universe – the sheer size of it. At Verari Systems we have definitely taken up the challenge. Our FOREST container solution can provide just over 12 petabytes of storage capacity in a standard sized shipping container that is deployable nearly anywhere on earth. Our BladeRack 2 XL platform can support up to 672TB of storage capacity in just two data center floor tiles. Our nearest competitor can’t even come close to boasting that type of density. And the great thing about it is, like all Verari products, we have engineered these solutions to be the most efficient, resource saving products of their kind in the industry. Environment conservation is not part of our sales pitch – it’s the foundation of our culture and shows up in everything we do.

The second challenge to meeting the demands of the digital universe is the dynamic and diverse nature of the data. Each of our customers has a unique challenge and one size definitely does not fit all. With our new SB5165XL StorageServer we have the industry’s first high density, blade-based, all-in-one storage appliance that combines unified NAS and iSCSI SAN storage. This makes it an extremely cost-effective, easy to manage solution that is ideal for massive pools of unstructured data. For structured data that often requires extremely high availability we have our award-winning DataServer products which combine an ultra high density storage blade with a high performance compute node, eliminating networking bottlenecks and taking performance to new levels.