IT Expert Voice

One of the fastest ways to free up budget for new expenditures (or added profits) is to cut expenses. That’s easier said than done these days considering everything has been cut past the bone and down to the marrow already. Recessions are such brutal butchers.

The one juicy budget-hog left to slaughter is energy expense. Certainly the datacenter is adding more than its share to that expense and most of that comes from the need to cool the heat-producing, energy-gluttons squatting there. READ MORE

In a perfect world, the data center could be completely refreshed on a nice and tidy schedule. But sometimes the world is less perfect, and new equipment must be phased in instead.

“The important thing is to know when to squeeze usability from old hardware — and when to let go,” says Nick Twentyfive, datacenter operations manager at Bureau Veritas, a global quality assurance, health, safety, and environmental company.

If you find yourself squeezed between an increased productivity demand and a budget hard-line, here are some steps Nick suggests you consider to get the most from your old equipment until you can replace it. READ MORE

While everyone was looking to the cloud to make the data center simpler, hardly any one noticed it made mobile management harder.

“The challenge when moving mobility out to the cloud is twofold,” says Michael Skaff, CIO of the San Francisco Symphony. “There’s the potential increase of architectural complexity and vendor management complexity, given the potential web of inter-related vendor agreements and service architectures; and the need to guard against the diffusion of ownership or responsibility.” READ MORE

Many enterprises think going green is a matter of doling out greenbacks for all new energy-saving equipment. Plug it in and reap the savings on next month’s power bill, right? Wrong. To get full benefit from all that shiny new equipment, you’d better be paying a lot of attention to the datacenter layout itself. READ MORE

As a line item, energy costs burn in the red column, searing the enterprise’s bottom line month after month. Commonly, it is the largest number on the expense sheet and the least controllable. Despite the huge impact on company profits, until recently energy costs were of no concern to CIOs; they were the COO’s problem. But as energy costs continue to climb and technology increasingly adds to the demand, CIOs are moving closer to the hot seat with every new project decision.

CIOs are taking an interest in energy-saving hardware, infrastructure as a service, and the advent of the smart grid. Of the three, the smart grid is the least defined and the most vulnerable to a lack of standardization. Security issues surrounding the smart grid also rank highest compared to the other two. Even so, the smart grid is a near-certain reality as a near-future utility change. That being the case, here are the three most likely impacts on IT when a smart grid comes online. READ MORE

If you thought device convergence ended when a Blackberry, PDA and a dumb phone squeezed into a single smartphone device, think again. Convergence is a never-ending story for enterprises and consumers alike. Indeed, several chapters of the story blend consumer and enterprise uses into a single device. You could think of it as the black hole of communications and computing, wherein a powerful singularity appears to be the obvious conclusion as more and more devices and applications are sucked in from the event horizon. READ MORE