Harley-Davidson outsources datacenter to Indian company.

Infosys, a datacenter operator and service provider based in India, is the recipient of an IT outsourcing deal with American icon Harley-Davidson, which will result in the loss of125 jobs, including 83 jobs at Harley’s Wisconsin headquarters. To some this will make it yet another story of American jobs lost to offshore outsourcing.  But like many things that seem obvious, the issue isn’t that simple.Harley-Davidson

Though an Indian company, Infosys is committed to the US market and has a large presence in the US. They have 16 existing US facilities and, in 2012, hired over 1200 people to staff those facilities here (and have stated that they expect to expand to 2000 by the end of the year). The contract with Harley requires that they open a facility in Milwaukee, which will increase the size of Infosys’ US presence and will open up 125 jobs, equal to the number of jobs being lost at Harley-Davidson.  And before you jump to the conclusion that the Harley IT employees are being left in the cold, there are some additional points that you need to consider.

The first is that of the 125 jobs being created, Infosys says that 70 will be directly on the Harley project. Harley will be encouraging employees whose jobs have been outsourced to apply for these jobs, and will keep their base pay and years of service credit that they acquired while working at Harley-Davidson.

Second, Harley will be creating 68 new internal jobs it refers to as “information technology management positions” which will be open to employees who are affected by the outsourcing.

 

 

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Colocation Pricing Trends

Data Centers are growing very fast. The Reason is all information is managed in these only and these are now business critical. It is very vital to keep the cost of IT related expenses for organization. All companies need to have dedicated data centers as it might not have proper Return on investment. Colocation is solution to such companies and businesses. Building your own datacenter need lots of efforts, Time and money. In Colocation, Service provider provides you facility and some bundled services at affordable price.

Colocation provides some and more of following services to you to have datacenter established.

  • Space: It can be measured as Rack space or Square fts.
  • Cooling: Cooling remains one of basic necessity along with space.
  • Power: Electric power along with appropriate Power backup is also part of bundle service.
  • Physical Security: Only authorized people will have access to colocation area.
  • Facility related Services like fire safety, battery room, cleaning, sanitation etc are part of real estate and offered along with colocation.
  • Internet Links and other Communication services are charged separately and optional.
  • Managed Services like managing your servers and other infrastructure pieces are also offered.

Colocation cost varies from $1000 to $2600 per cabinet/Rack. It also depends on all factors we considered.

This list is very specific to Service provider or Colocation service and most of times these services are customized for customers so that it suits best to customer requirement.

As the trend for colocation is increasing day by day, these services are becoming more affordable and have better return on investment. Factors mentioned above influence the cost for colocation services. There are few more factors which affects the
costing offered by services provider:

Geographical Location of Colocation Data center:

Location of datacenter influences the real estate value of datacenter hence impacts rental value for colocation. Also how suitable is facility for the Disaster Recovery is considered factors.

How much do you need?:

More space you need provider will give better pricing. It is same as retail vs wholesales services.

Diversity Provided by Colocation provide for Communication links:

Are the internet, WAN and other telecom related links have robust and redundant paths. To provide this kind of facility, service providers have common area for Telecom service providers. This enables customer to select from multiple options.

Term or duration for which customer is looking for Colocation services.

Contract time duration also affects cost offered by Colocation service provider. Longer you stay more economical services are.

Scope for future growth and expansion

Colocation Service provider also enables you to expand or modify your space as and when needed. This keeps you out from worries of capacity planning for future.

Conclusion:

Most of times colocation is one of the best options for housing your business critical systems. With time Colocation service are getting more effective and affordable. It helps to keep your IT budget low compared to having your own data center. Colocation Service provider also provides better professional services for facility, Security, Cooling, Power, Power backup etc. Also have scope for future growth as needed.

With time colocation is becoming more and more competitive and cost effective. The Future is Colocation for small and medium sized businesses.

For more updates on data centers, visit Data Center Talk.

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Battery Room Compliance Checklist – Sponsored by EnviroGuard

Battery room is considered as heart of power backup for datacenter. Ride through of battery room decide for how long your datacenter can survive during disaster or power outage. Battery Room is housing batteries which are connected to UPS system and provide backup power as needed. As this is critical section of datacenter design hence there are many industry standards to meet design best battery room.

Compliance Requirements highlights many important and critical areas like :

  • Battery Spill Containment System
  • Neutralization and Absorption Pillows
  • Spill Clean-up Kit
  • Safety Protection Gear
  • EyeWash Station
  • Battery & Safety Signage
  • Hydrogen Gas Monitors
  • Acid Resistant Aisle Mats
  • Battery Terminal Covers
  • Battery Maintenance
  • Smoke Detectors
  • Fire Extinguishers
  • Training Program

Very good and useful checklist is Sample Flooded Battery Site Assessment Checklist

This check list is created by EnviroGuard

Also Data Center talk has nice article on Battery room

http://www.datacentertalk.com/2012/01/how-healthy-is-your-battery-room/

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Data Center Best practices for handling expensive IT equipment

Modern Data Centers  are equipped with heavy, sophisticated and expensive pieces of IT equipment such as server, switches and routers.. You definitely don’t want to risk mishandling this equipment or injuring yourself on the job. We have some best practices to handle these kinds of sophisticated equipment. This article will highlight some of these practices and will help you protect you and your equipment. Equipment vendors also advise to use better way to mount and rack equipment:

  • Design racks to have balanced weights.
  • Refer hardware vendor’s manual for allowed weight in given racks.
  • Prepare mix of equipment to optimized U space. Don’t forget, every U space has some dollar value associated.
  • Space is expensive so use it wisely.
  • Design Hot and cold space around racks.
  • Design sufficient space in front and back of racks.
  • Use Mechanical lift like server lift  to mount heavy equipment.

Mechanical Lifts are designed to facilitate data center maintenance requirements by providing a data center solution to install computers and other equipment. Customers’ need  to make server room safety a key priority when installing servers.

The SL-500X server lift is an advanced server and overall data centre installation lift. It provides easy installation and mounting. Technician can perform all related tasks in safe manner without sacrificing efficiency and effectiveness. In case, it has to be done manually, it can cause
injuries to person. Also need more resources to mount and install.

Some of Advantages of using server lift are following:

  • Protects from risks of physical injuries, medical bills, equipment damage, downtime.
  • Provides more efficient manner to handle expensive equipment.
  • Provides Peace of mind – facilitating up-time through efficient installation.
  • Improves Data enter safety compliance activities.
  • Reduces operating cost.

CONCLUSION:

Server lift is device with true Return on Investment. It provides efficiency, effectiveness, lower operating cost, streamline deployment. It helps to optimized installation and mounting. Protects equipment, avoid data loss. It also helps to protect safety of technician from disability injuries and back injuries. Datacentertalk.com recommends reviewing products from http://serverlift.com/.

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SURVEY OF DATA CENTER : AREAS OF INTEREST

While choosing site for data center, some points shall be pondered. Completed study with following area of interest will help you to indentify best location for your data center.

Physical Security

External

  • Anonymity
  • Protection (Barriers, Patrols)
  • Observation (Lights, Cameras and Monitoring Station)
  • Entry Points
  • Locks, Guards, Logs, Mantraps

Internal

  • Access Control (Passkeys, Compartmentalization, Creation and Review of Logs, Identification and Escort Requirements, Use of Cages/Rooms)
  • Observation (Cameras, Video Recording, Tape Maintenance and Review)

Environment Controls

  • Detection of smoke, heat, sound, water, humidity
  • Fire suppression systems
  • HVAC systems
  • Power plant (multiple power supplies, internal distribution and switching systems, UPS systems, testing)

Telecommunications

  • Multiple carriers
  • Internal distribution and switching systems
  • Control Center (location, staffing, scope of responsibility, monitoring systems, escalation procedures)
  • Testing

Network Management

  • Control Center (location, staffing, scope of responsibility, monitoring systems, escalation procedures)

System Configuration

  • Redundancy
  • Logical security (firewalls, IDS, DMZ, log management, backups)
  • Change management (plan review, authorization, testing)Capacity Planning
  • Performance characteristics
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Cloud Hosting Leaders – Strengths and Weaknesses

Cloud computing has been one of the biggest buzzwords in virtually every application of technology during 2011. No longer just IT jargon, cloud computing has evolved to become a staple in virtually every vertical of business. From test development sandboxes, web hosting, and fully managed:  email, contact management, invoicing, document collaboration, and more; cloud technology is has become a staple in every aspect of business.

When it comes to picking a cloud host for your company there is one key point to keep in mind before picking a provider. That point being cloud hosting differs from traditional hosting heavily due to maturity. Cloud hosting is still a rapidly developing field and therefore is an environment filled with vendor lock-in due to proprietary environments. While this is not a reason to avoid cloud technologies overall, it illustrates the importance of realizing the strengths and weaknesses of a host before placing your entire budget into one provider. Depending on your needs, a combination of vendors might prove best.

To help simplify picking a cloud vendor, below is a short piece of providing an overview of five cloud computing leaders outlining their key aspects and strengths along with weaknesses. ]

Amazon.com

Amazon.com has always been known for their innovations in ecommerce but recently Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) has allowed them to deeply penetrate the high-performance computing vertical. Despite their notable data center fiascos during 2011, Amazon holds the position as the most innovative company in cloud computing.

Strengths:

  • Has the largest pool of computing capacity
  • Cost effective offerings
  • Strong partner ecosystem
  • Flexible API which is supported by many 3rd parties

Weaknesses:

  • No managed plans means that clients must have their own expertise on hand to handle the servers

Conclusion:

  • Overall, Amazon.com is ideal for projects with highly variable scaling and self-managed cloud hosting for testing and development

Softlayer

Softlayer is another industry leader which focuses on highly standardized infrastructure which can be provisioned very rapidly to meet the needs of even the most complex project. Unlike many other providers which commonly share hardware between cloud clients, Softlayer provides clients with dedicated hardware for their projects.

Strengths:

  • Standardized infrastructure which can be provisioned very rapidly
  • Emphasis on cloud flexibility and agility
  • Provide dedicated cloud hardware to clients

Weaknesses:

  • Rigid support policies mean customers are limited to standard configurations if they need managed hosting

Rackspace

For clients needing excellent customer service and a diverse set of solutions to meet their project needs, Rackspace is the vendor most likely to be a solid fit. Long known for their excellent traditional hosting services, Rackspace has been making the transition to the cloud without missing a beat in overall quality.

Strengths:

  • Industry leading customer service and support
  • Excellent managed plans
  • Below market pricing for complex managed packages
  • Helped greatly with unifying the cloud by open sourcing their cloud software stack (Open Stack)
  • Ability to use their software to roll a cloud system on your own hardware, and still receive expert support

Weaknesses:

  • Managed cloud packages are below enterprise level
  • As Open Stack has recently been released it does not yet have as much of a proven track record as other systems

Media Temple

A boutique web hosting company which specifically focuses much of its advertising on websites for content creators and creative professionals Media Temple provides an excellent array of affordable performance cloud solutions that won’t break the bank.

Strengths:

  • By focusing heavily on creative professionals and companies, Media Temple’s packages are commonly a good fit for A/B website testing where the costs of a full performance solution are not justified
  • A great provider for testing micro sites and landing pages and other short term projects due to the plans rarely requiring contracts
  • Media Temple’s pricing is much lower than the packages offered by the other industry leaders making them an ideal fit for companies just breaking into cloud hosting, or want a reputable budget friendly host

Weaknesses:

  • As Media Temple uses Parallels for virtualization, it is not an ideal platform for enterprise projects
  • Media Temple’s hosting is analogous to “a shared host on steroids” meaning that while you do have cloud hosting, support and performance are significantly lacking when compared to the industry leaders

SunGard

SunGard is best known as being one of the largest enterprise IT solutions providers in the industry. In particular SunGard focuses only on enterprise systems. This focus has made them a leader in the space for clients who have very complex custom systems.

Strengths:

  • By focusing heavily on enterprises, SunGard is able to handle complex projects much more easily than most other vendors which have a more general focus
  • By having a conservative approach to their infrastructure SunGard is able to handle long term and legacy projects easily
  • Pricing for their services is at market averages

Weaknesses:

  • Customer service at SunGard is below market average levels
  • By having a conservative approach to their infrastructure, SunGard does not offer as many features as other vendors
  • Additionally the conservative hardware approach limits agility which can be crucial for projects operating under a rapid development cycle

We are keep updating cloud computing technologies

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Pros and Cons of SaaS

When it comes to the data center in your company, there are many things you will have to make sure of for it to be in perfect order. These things include the temperature and the air humidity of the data center, that all the software and hardware is functioning properly, all the servers and switches are functioning, and so on. In order to be able to do this, you will have to get to know all the aspects of managing the data center, and one of these aspects will include getting all the available information on the pros and cons of SaaS.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

SaaS is an abbreviation for the term Software as a Service. This basically represents any software in a data center that is used over the internet and is not present on any of the devices that use it. What this means is that a company sells you software you are able to use over the internet without the need to install it or take care of it. Some examples of SaaS are Fortiva or Live Office email services.  Even though this sounds great, here is a list of its pros and cons:

Advantages of SaaS

The most obvious benefit of SaaS is the fact that you don’t have to install the software on your computer, thus saving hard drive space. Also, there is no need to worry about someone illegally copying the software or fixing the problems with it, because it actually isn’t there on the computers.

Disadvantages of SaaS

There are two great drawbacks with SaaS, and one of these is security and the fact that it is used over the internet. The fact that the software in question is used over the internet implies that all the data will be leaving the company network, which is less secure than if it didn’t. Also, if it happens that there are some internet connection problems, the software in question will not be available to end users.

More details on Cloud and Software as a Service are available at Data Center Talk.

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How to Make Sure that You Have Enough Data Storage Space in Your Data Center

Whichever data center location you choose to go with, data storage will be crucial. Namely, all data center locations should be able to give you enough room to place all the hardware you need for your data center. On the other hand, not all of the data center locations available to you will be good in this respect. Therefore, you should always keep in mind that your data center location should be large enough to accommodate all of the hardware needed to operate a successful data center.

Plan For Your Future Growth

All data centers are not the same, as not all companies are the same. Namely, you might own a company which will need a pretty small data center at first, but as the company gets bigger, the data center requirements will grow alongside it. The main thing that you will need as your company continues to grow is data storage space, and this virtual space will eventually require more physical space in your data center.

Data storage space is basically hard drive space, as hard drives are where all of your precious data is most commonly stored. In order to have enough data storage space for a fast growing company, you will have to make sure that you have enough hardware to provide you with a means to store all of this data. More hardware will automatically mean having more physical space in your data center as well as more electrical power being needed, which will ultimately result in more effort being required to keep the data center’s temperature and humidity level at a desirable level. All in all, the best thing you can do in terms of ensuring that you will not run out of data storage space is to think ahead and choose your data storage location wisely, as moving your data center to another location will always be a hassle.

 

Read more on Hiring Right Data Storage Services.

To know more about data storage systems, please visit Data Center Talk.

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Hiring Data Storage Services

Storing their data safely has always been important to people and it doesn’t matter if this is data related to their private lives or to business. Despite the fact that technology has progressed a lot in the last couple of years, it still happens that people lose their valuable data. Now, when it comes to business owners, losing valuable pieces of information can result in financial loss or just be bad for their customers. Taking this into account, more and more business owners have started using data centers and data center services.

Data Storage Options

When it comes to storing data, companies are offered two different options – they can either do this by themselves, or they can hire storage services. Even though a company can store their own data, it is often the lack of information or time that stops business owners from enjoying the benefits of data centers. This then leads to a business owner hiring data center services, which include data storage and data backup services.

Why should I Hire Services?

In spite of the fact that creating a data center is more common that hiring data center services this does not necessarily mean that it is a better solution. Namely, hiring a company that will store the data that is important for your business is in many situations a much cheaper solution than creating your own data center. Creating a data room requires certain things to be done and sometimes a lot of money to be invested. This is especially the case with companies that have offices in many different places. These companies are always better off with hiring data storage services than having a data center for each of their offices. Therefore, it is easy to see when and how a company might decide to hire data storage services. However hiring these services has its benefits and drawbacks that need to be taken into consideration. Make sure you look up and compare the overall costs of hiring the services. Also ensure that the data storage services you are hiring has plans and resources to meet additional requirements you may need in future.

To know more about data storage systems, do visit Data Center Talk.

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Data Storage and Memory are Two Different Terms

Data Center Management

There are many things you will need to differentiate between and familiarize yourself with when talking about data centers and about data center management in general. Namely, when it comes to data center management, you will have to know everything there is about data centers in order to bring your data center management to the highest level possible. This includes being familiar with ways in which your data center works, ways in which you can improve your data center, and many other things. You will also have to understand the difference between data storage and memory.

Even though many people fail to see the difference between data storage and memory, the fact is that they are two distinct terms.Although both of these are basically systems which any computer uses to process and save data, and both of them are referred to in bytes, the difference between these two terms is substantial and very important to understand.

Data Storage vs Memory

On one hand, you have data storage, which is basically the memory capacity of any computer; also referred to as hard drive space. On the other hand, memory is either random access memory on any computer, or read-only memory. The data stored on your hard drive will be there even after you have turned the computer off, while the data stored in random access memory will disappear as soon as the computer is turned off, i.e the data is volatile. Therefore, if you are, for instance, using the computer to type some text, this text is saved only in random access memory while you are typing it. In order to permanently save it on your computer, you must save it to data storage, meaning on your hard drive.

Read on Types of Data Storage Used in Data Centers.

To keep yourself updated on the latest happenings in the data center industry, please visit us at Data Center Talk.

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