EasyStreet Blog

A little tidbit I thought I’d share from Adobe. Apparently there is at least one critical vulnerability in Adobe Acrobat and Reader. They’re working on a patch, but in the meantime suggest you disable JavaScript in Reader and Acrobat. (Specific instructions are given in the article, which can be found here.) They estimate a fix will be available by May 18. Adobe security bulletins and advisories can be found here.

Attention all geeks — you might want to attend BarCamp Portland III at CubeSpace on May 1 – 2.

BarCampPortland is an ad-hoc gathering FOR the Portland tech community, produced BY the Portland tech community. It‘s an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction. You never quite know what to expect. When you arrive on Friday, there will be an agenda framework, but the content for the sessions will be decided by the participants. EasyStreet is proud to support this unique “unconference.” Click here learn more about it.

In data centers large and small, climate control continues to be a big problem. As we all can surmise, larger centers face major cooling expenses — even as hardware continues to shrink, it generates more heat than ever — but smaller facilities are challenged because the physical space tends to be smaller.

Heat is a major danger to hardware, estimated to be responsible for 60 percent of all electronic equipment failure.

Ziff-Davis Media has unearthed another aspect of the problem. According to a recent study, 21 percent of respondents said power and cooling issues are forcing them to leave some rack space vacant — up to 18 percent unused, to be exact. That may not sound too bad, but every vacant position in a rack is a hidden cost, especially if the data center is near capacity.

A common dilemma for data centers—and EasyStreet is no exception—is that the person you can help the most may view you as a threat. “We see this too often,” says Jeff Biggs, CIO for Peak 10 Data Center Solutions. “The visionary CIO is not threatened by us. The tactical IT director is.”

Biggs was speaking in an interview with TechRepublic about the experience of Peak 10, which has a chain of mostly “boutique” data centers in the South, in cities such as Atlanta, Louisville, Raleigh, Nashville and Richmond. As with EasyStreet, a good portion of Peak 10’s business is helping businesses of all sizes offload portions of their IT infrastructure.

He says, however, that too many businesses attempt a standardized approach that isn’t always the right fit. “Whenever I see the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, I run for cover,” says Biggs. “The four horsemen are: ‘We’re going to have big Sun servers, Oracle databases, tons of bandwidth and a bunch of consultants.’ You need to start small and see if you can make it work. That way, you’re a customer for 10 years and not just six months.”

Biggs explained that most of Peak 10’s business originates with CEOs and CFOs frustrated with their own IT managers. “I frequently hear them say, ‘We can’t understand what our IT guy is talking about,’” Biggs says.

Server sprawl in large companies continues to pose major challenges for IT management. At the root, according to a large study recently conducted by the research company Quocirca Ltd. is the pressure on data center managers to handle more and more servers while budgets remain flat.

In fact, in surveying more than 300 IT influencers in large corporations across the US and Europe, a startling 87% of respondents said their IT budgets are showing no growth, which is taking a huge toll on the ability to manage.

Some of the survey’s findings:

• 28% don’t know exactly how many servers they now have.
• 22% said it could take a day to find a server that had gone down, and another 20% said it could take longer than a day.
• 11% of the surveyed data centers will run out of space this year.
• 14% have already hit their power-supply limit.

One of the survey’s observations: “Although a quarter of organizations are managing to shrink their server portfolio through consolidation, almost a half reported that server numbers are still growing, and for a significant number it is growing by more than 50% per year. This is more likely to be due to the management of the data center being out of control rather than due to growth in their server load.”