All that data flowing from devices into cloud applications or data centers will help drive business decisions, deliver new products and services, provide competitive advantage and insight, and help enable new market opportunities.
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Other options would be to expand facilities outside the country: they could build more retail stores, or add overseas data centers, or start building their own components.
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Businesses with server farms or massive data centers could eliminate performance bottlenecks and ensure long-term upgradability while saving significant operational costs in space and energy.
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Going forward, the hardest hit companies will likely be those whose offerings are strongly concentrated in high-performance hardware or software, rather than nitty-gritty tasks like outsourcing data centers or security and compliance spending.
In the future, corporations won't have private data centers or desktop software.
CenturyLink hopes to buy itself out of this problem with acquisitions of companies that do other things, like running data centers or providing business telecom services.
The tech community is split over AWS's troubles: Some commentators blame customers for failing to build more redundancy into their cloud products by spreading service over multiple data centers or regions.
Puppet Labs is the developer of Puppet, software that applies declarative programming to the task of system administration of compute, network, and storage infrastructure in traditional data centers or in the cloud.
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This caused many enterprise executives to conclude that IT was not required to be one of their core business competencies and either threw their data center management staff, or in many cases their entire data centers, overboard.
In a traditional physical environment, a typical approach would involve signing multiple years worth of contracts that are locked in with traditional IT vendors covering managed services, co-location facilities, or even building new data centers for disaster recovery.
Businesses today have many reasons to host data centers, virtualized or otherwise, in disparate locales.
Ordinary data centers use RAID 5 or 6 storage, which distributes data across 5 or 6 disks in the same server.
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It is already happening around you, although mostly through the data centers of the manufacturers or the medium of GPS navigation providers.
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The National Observatory of Athens, for example, sent five messages by fax, email and by the Global Telecommunications System (GTS), which allows the transfer of meteorological data by satellite or via terrestrial meteorological centers.
But without such information, IT is going to be flying blind when it comes to making huge decisions about whether to adopt SaaS-versions of applications, build new data centers, create private clouds, or use public cloud resources.
But even these data centers do not require all their applications or all their hardware back up and running immediately.
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The location of those data centers is important, Greenpeace argues, because data centers -- basically big warehouses full of computers that store data "in the cloud" or online rather than on home machines -- are such big users of electricity.
Businesses with large data centers can significantly reduce capital expenditure by disaggregating or separating compute and storage resources in a server rack.
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Environmental groups pressure tech companies to locate their data centers in places where green power is available or where less energy will be required to cool the plant.
In addition we have seen the rise of huge data centers with thousands of individual servers containing two or more of these processors (each with two to six cores), but they are interconnected through switches and network interface cards that have not scaled along with the processor performance.
Analytics and marketing applications-oriented software companies are today providing new solutions that enable marketers to target communications based on behavioral patterns revealed in data from social networks, customer loyalty programs, call centers or transaction histories.
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In a high percentage of data centers today, these racks would be populated with servers one or two generations old, depending on corporate refresh cycles, and the average server would be a standard 2u height.
Technology and financial companies that rely on data centers for information storage and communication (companies such as Microsoft or Goldman Sachs) need to be especially careful about minimizing the cooling expenses associated with these operations.
The bulk of digital content in data centers will remain on magnetic storage media either hard disk drives or magnetic tape.
Knuff said that Equinix has nearly 700 network connections inside its data centers, so a financial firm that wants to connect to South America or Asia or Europe has a choice of network providers.
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The racks would rarely be nearing physical capacity, but might actually be maxed out in logical capacity due to power or cooling constraints at the rack level (the mantra to avoid creating hot spots in data centers has actually made floor and rack use a lot less efficient).
Whether measured by fundraising data or by the members of Congress elected from the ZIP Codes where they live, the elite centers with the most clout in the culture are filled with people who are embarrassed to identify themselves as capitalists, and it shows in the cultural effect of their work.
And now, just as we buy our chairs at Knoll or Steelcase instead of building them, we can buy capacity in the cloud instead of building our own data centers.
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Amazon's Web Services, which pipe applications, processing and storage over the Internet, may eventually let companies escape the confines of their data centers and pay for cheap, scalable processing and storage as easily as they pay for water or electricity.
Amazon's (nasdaq: AMZN - news - people ) Web Services, which pipe applications, processing and storage over the Internet, may eventually let companies escape the confines of their data centers and pay for cheap, scalable processing and storage as easily as they pay for water or electricity.
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