Posts tagged Power
“It Worked Yesterday!”
Nov 6th
The three most dreaded words a support technician can hear are “It Worked Yesterday.”
That phrase has a hidden implication trailing after it “…so what did you do?”
Well, usually, we didn’t do anything. People can accept that a car, or a furnace, or a TV can break someday out of the blue. We all know that those are machines, and we have some idea of how they work, and that they do break. The problem is, not a lot of people realize that computers are machines too. Sure, If you ask someone if a computer is a machine, they’ll say yes. However, if you show them the inside of a computer tower, they’ll usually shake their head and say “Is that it?”
Power, Power, Power, & Cooling
Nov 19th
Gas prices may be down, way down, but data center power costs are still going up. Data center power and cooling costs are going to be one of the huge drivers of increased IT costs in the coming years. Earlier this year, Network World ran a series of articles detailing the problem. Because servers, switches and routers have very few moving parts, generally power in is equivalent to heat out. Heat that then must be cooled.
ipHouse is working hard to position our network and data center for the future. This fall, we initiated a huge virtualization project. By using high-performance, efficient, virtual servers, we have been able to reduce the total number of physical machines used for hosting email and web services without impacting performance. Mike, our CTO, has been blogging about the virtualization project in his multipart series, “Virtualization and the ISP.”
