The sessions within this track present information covering all areas of Data Center Best Practices. Use this opportunity to find out how world-class data centers are overcoming challenges by implementing the best possible solutions for their facilities.
The following sessions are from the Spring 2008 conference:
BP01: Data Center Trends and Best Practice Performance
Mark Levin, Senior Partner, Metrics Based Assessments LLC
Over the past five years, data centers have grown in both size and complexity, and performance has improved for unit cost and staff productivity. However, basic data center functions, such as tape and DASD management, production control, problem and change management have not improved for most data centers. The gap between average and best practice performance for these areas continues to widen. This session will present a discussion of these trends (z/OS, UNIX and Windows), and describe what best practice data centers are doing to achieve outstanding performance. Many of the best practices discussed can be adopted by session attendees.
BP02: Best Practices in Data Center Standardization
Dave Leonard, Chief Technology Officer, Infocrossing
Standardizing a data center can yield significant cost savings and enable new levels of reliability and scalability. But undertaking such a substantial process can be overwhelming. This session offers one CTO's experience in standardizing a network of five data centers through a best-of-breed initiative of selecting the best tools and systems for each data center process. The end result is a lights dim standard that allows data centers to operate with fewer people, even while overall operations are improved.
BP03: Economizers: Free Cooling In Your Data Center
Dave Pickut, Vice President, IBX Operations Engineering, Equinix
Economizer systems are a recognized best practice within data center environments, with the ultimate goal of providing free cooling by leveraging the ambient air temperature outside of the facility. Economizers balance both temperature and humidity, thus reducing both energy costs and the use of cooling equipment. This presentation will compare and contrast the use of air-side and water-side economizers and provide prospective on the best options for the data center.
BP04: Best Practices for Data Center Cabling Infrastructure
Michael Carter, Director of Sales, Connectivity Technologies
The elimination of risk in the data center environment is a primary concern for all data center managers. Thoughtful planning and design combined with the use of appropriate products and cabling infrastructure solutions make it possible to significantly reduce the possibility of downtime and outages. This presentation covers the use of conveyance products, cable management devices, cabinets, trunks, cable assemblies, connector types, patch panels and management software in the creation of a low-risk fault-tolerant cabling infrastructure.
BP05: Think Global, Act Local: Data Protection Best Practices for Computing on the Edge
Richard Heitmann, Vice President of Product Management, EVault, Inc.
Managing data protection for remote offices throughout the country and/or around the globe is complicated. Participants in this session will take away a series of best practices for centrally managing and protecting critical information in both physical and virtual environments at branch offices as well as in the data center. Attendees will also learn how to think global, act local by selecting a solution that provides the best of both worlds—local high-performance backups and restores combined with automatic offsite storage at a centralized disaster recovery site. Other topics to be addressed include centralized administration; the ability to support heterogeneous platforms; end-to-end security; and data reduction, WAN optimization and data de-duplication.
BP06: Sharing Sensitive Information without Compromising Data
David McGinnis, Director, Security Operations Centers, IBM
The Federal government is working to create a central repository of raw but useful data collected from RFIs, RFPs, line-of-business research and the public sector. This data is specific and often identifiable to the sender and recipient. Should this collection of data be illegally accessed, used for unauthorized purposes, compromised or even destroyed, the affects would be far-reaching. This session discusses how to create data centers of excellence that employ best practices for cyber security and information assurance, enabling organizations to share the same data without the political and technical hurdles of ownership.
BP07: A New Approach to Best Practices in Data Storage and Retrieval
Carmen Carey, CEO, CopperEye
With demands from legislation on the rise, organizations need to be able to capture and store larger amounts of data for longer periods of time. Is your organization ready? In a time where data storage is vastly growing, it is crucial for data center managers to identify new ways of storing and accessing data. Companies today face the dilemma of bogging down their systems with immutable data and dealing with various storage and retrieval techniques in the industry, so it is important for them to be educated on the alternatives. In this session, you will learn how to meet the challenge of exponential data growth and how to manage it in a cost-effective, accessible and compliant manner.
