Tag: internet exchange

Personal

I'm joining RedMonk!

I have been working as a Social Media consultant in Ireland for around four years now and director of the Cork Internet eXchange data center for the last two years.

However with my imminent move to Spain in July, I will lose 90% of the revenue from these streams. I can’t reproduce those streams in the Spanish market because my spoken Spanish is nowhere the level which would be required.

With that in mind I have been actively looking for a job for the last 6-8 months now. I have had some fantastic job offers from some extremely interesting companies.

Recently I have been more and more interested in the Green IT space, writing on my LowerFootprint.com blog and the GreenMonk blog for industry analyst company RedMonk. And giving talks about Green IT at various international conferences.

The other night I watched Al Gore’s latest talk at the TED conference. It is a real call to action and clarified to me that I need to do something.

http://static.videoegg.com/ted2/flash/loader.swf

I have long admired the RedMonk model of open sourcing their (our) analysis and so, when James Governor of RedMonk offered me the opportunity to work professionally for RedMonk doing Green tech and sustainability research I nearly bit his hand off!

So effective immediately I am an Industry Analyst specialising in the Green tech area. Rock on!

cix, cork, data centre

CIX open day

Cork Internet eXchange (aka CIX) are having an Open Day on the morning of November 29th at 10am.

This will be your final opportunity to have a gander around the innards of a data centre in the making. After the 29th, ducts will be closed and off-limits areas will be off-limits!

If you are interested in having a look, drop me a mail so we have an idea of numbers (tom@tomrafteryit.net).

See you there.

[Disclosure – I am a director of CIX]

UPDATE – edited to correct my email address – thanks James

cix, data centre

US Data Center chillers not backed up by diesel generators?

Rackspace are a high-profile data centre in the US. They had a couple of outages in the last few days which have badly damaged their reputation. The main outage, according to Rackspace, happened when:

at approximately 6:30 PM CST Monday, a vehicle struck and brought down the transformer feeding power to the DFW data center. It immediately disrupted power to the entire data center and our emergency generators kicked in and operated as intended. When we transferred power to our secondary utility power system, the data center’s chilling units were cycled back up. At this time, however, the utility provider shut down power in order to allow emergency rescue teams safe access to the accident victim. This repeated cycling of the chillers resulted in increasing temperatures within the data center. As a precautionary measure we decided to take some customers’ servers offline.

When I read this, something about it didn’t seem right. I couldn’t understand why the chillers (the machines which cool the water for the aircon) would need to be power cycled. Then, an explanation showed up on the Texas Startup blog:

It turns out that in most multi-tenant commercial property in the United States, the building owner provides chilled water so that tenants can run their HVAC systems. In general, most buildings do NOT put these chillers on power with generator backup

If this is true, it is frightening!

In other words, if power fails to these buildings, the diesel generator will ensure that their aircon will be circulating air which is rapidly increasing in temperature because the water is no longer being chilled.

I’m director of Cork Internet eXchange, the first professional data centre in Ireland outside of Dublin and I can absolutely guarantee that our chillers are on power with a backup from our diesel generator. Of course they are. Why would you design it any other way?

Om Malik put it well when he said:

our Internet infrastructure, despite all the talk, is as fragile as a fine porcelain cup on the roof of a car zipping across a pot-holed goat track