Stories about: Emerson

Picture in your mind the facilities management guy or gal in your building: Are you envisioning someone in a pair of overalls and a screwdriver tucked in the back pocket?

Some CIOs and data center managers have found themselves having to wring performance out of monstrously deficient facilities. Ultimately, these three wrestled with their infrastructures, made major changes and won the day.

On the same day last week that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke gave a gloomy assessment of the US economy to members of a House committee, SAP announced plans to shift all of its users to a new support plan that will increase their software maintenance fees.

Call it a slowdown, a downturn, or the dreaded "R" word, worries about the state of the US economy have increased across virtually all sectors save one: technology.

It seems that almost all leading organisations in the IT arena are clamouring to establish their green and environmentally friendly credentials -- especially the purchasing of IT products.

Some enterprises have found ways to ensure their technology investments provide both environmental benefit and a quick return on investment.

IT company Digital Sense is developing Australia's highest density data centres with multi-million dollar infrastructure technology to support the growing demand for high-powered computing.

There is no topic hotter than global warming. After all, Al Gore won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in raising awareness, his movie "An Inconvenient Truth" won an Oscar, and terms like "carbon footprint" are now part of the common lexicon.

I've read about various types of datacenter designs and renovations over the past year and I've found it interesting to observe the diverse approaches companies take to make their facilities greener, in the broad sense of the word.

For years, Robert Wakefield and Dameon Rustin lived with the problems of keeping Snelling Staffing Services' old, poorly designed data center up and running. Not only were the intricate cable runs and varied server makes and models difficult to keep straight, but the building itself tended to compound their management headaches.

With all the fanfare for Al Gore, receiving an Oscar, Emmy and the Nobel Peace Prize all in 2007, one would think that global environmental concerns rank No. 1 on the list of "corporate social responsibility."