There are several good articles in the current issue of Educause Review. The lead story among the IT shorts is about the relatively new Data Center Observatory at Carnegie-Mellon University. The DCO is a working data center that functions as a research platform for studying data center automation and efficiency. From the CMU press release:
The DCO's principal research goals are to better comprehend and mitigate human administration costs and complexities, power and cooling challenges, and failures and their consequences. It also aims to understand resource utilization patterns and opportunities to reduce costs by sharing resources among users.
The DCO is 2,000-square-feet and can support 40 racks of computers, “which would consume energy at a rate of up to 774 kW — more than the rate of consumption of 750 average-sized homes.†Some of the first research at the DCO will be on energy efficiency, storage systems and administrative costs. It will also be used for other CMU-specific research -- from data mining to CAD/architecture, visualization and real networked services.
I’ve been asked to give a speech on network automation and how it’s changed and continues to change the IT service world. I have yet to accept the invitation or turn it down and I’m not sure what to do yet only because there is so much to tell I don’t know whether or not I have the time to prepare for the seminar.
There are so many things and so many details regarding IT automation I almost don’t know where to start. Of course if I do speak I’ll speak about things like exin itil, itil management, and as always run book automation. Outside of that there’s always ITSM, server provisioning and smart ways to improve application availability but I’m just at a loss because I have no idea where to start. What would you guys recommend here? What topics would you cover first if given the opportunity?
Posted by bigspeggie on November 7, 2007 - 08:10 AM
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