Kate's Comment

As more people “wake up” to climate change we are seeing a lot of effort put towards starting to reduce our collective green-house gas emissions. Unfortunately however, there seems to be a lack of quantitative data being applied to many of these efforts, and consequently the media, individuals and business are often focusing on the wrong issues rather than putting the efforts towards combating the main contributors to our carbon footprint. Read article...
Tags: energy, lifestyle

I will be carrying on with the "Greening the data centre" series soon, but in the interim several people have recently been asking me about the concept of utility computing, and it has been a major theme of recent IT conferences. Despite the attention the concept is receiving there is still a lot of misunderstanding, both about what it is why it will be important over the next few years. So, what is utility computing all about? Read article...
Tags: hardware

I've written before about going green being important for business, but now I'd to focus on one area: the data centre. There has been a lot of interest recently in the topic of "green" data centres. however, many organisations still seem to feel that being more energy efficient in is just pandering to the general worries about global warming and of little importance to the fundamentals of the business (until they start running out of power at any rate!). In this, the first of three articles on reducing power usage in the data centre ("Why", "How" and "Measuring IT"), I'll make the case for why it is not just environmentally responsible to look at your IT infrastructure's efficiency, but that it makes solid financial sense too. Read article...
Tags: business, energy

In March, with the promise of Summer around the corner, I was eying up my somewhat battered bicycle and contemplating last year's resolution to actually use it to cycle to work when the weather was pleasant. Not only would it be better for me, but as the boss of a company with a serious commitment to minimising the environmental impact of our Web hosting services I really should be making an effort to reduce inefficient, short trips in the car. Read article...
Tags: energy, lifestyle

Does your business take green IT seriously? Well it should, because ignoring climate change could cost you money and harm your credibility. (originally published in .NET magazine.) Read article...
Tags: business, energy

Well, it has been over 3 months since I last posted, which is rather feeble! In my defense I have been insanely busy – winning various awards for service and innovation does rather take up one's time *looks smug*. Seriously though, trying to write a sensible blog (OK, look, I did say "trying"!) is surprisingly time consuming, but I am determined to get back to it again. This little hiatus has given me a chance to reflect on my blogging activities thus far, and to ponder their usefulness. Read article...
Tags: business, online comms, lifestyle

To give the guys a break I had been doing the Christmas on-call. Keeping a weather-eye on our plethora of monitoring systems I noticed a spike in bandwidth usage from one of our customer's servers. A few moments later the cause is obvious; some script kiddie has hacked in and started up a bit torrent site serving various illegal rips and wares. The proliferation of copyright infringement is enormous – are we witnessing the death of copyright? Read article...
Tags: online comms, lifestyle

We recently became the first UK Web host to be Carbon Neutral accredited, but does it actually make a real difference? In fact, are we going about all this wholesome planet-saving the right way at all? As an aside, our arch-rivals over at RackSpace claimed they were the first UK Web host to be carbon neutral on the 10th October, but I have a certificate stuck to the wall above my desk that says otherwise. Read article...
Tags: energy

"Corporate Social Responsibility"; yet another of those buzz-phrases that seems to be bandied about ever more, but there is more to it than perhaps first meets the eye and there are many ways in which socially responsible practices are good for business. What's more, IT businesses seem ideally placed to lead the way. Read article...
Tags: business, lifestyle

There is such a thing as a free lunch, and it is called open sauce software! Er, open source even. Did I forget breakfast again? Anyway! I am constantly surprised that, despite its massive and growing use in many areas, open source software solutions, and the benefits therein, are either unknown or shunned even by quite technically knowledgeable people when it can save businesses a lot of money. Read article...
Tags: business, open source

...was a shout to be head emanating from our office late on Friday afternoon. No, not an attack of killer-zombies, but actually some research & development work. We have been doing a feasibility study into using our Miniserver technology as a game hosting solution, and no it is not just an excuse to explode co-workers' virtual-selves with gigantic balls of flaming plasma death! Ahem. Read article...
Tags: online comms, lifestyle

When temperatures rise to record levels, it's not just trains and water supplies that go wrong; all sorts of infrastructure can be affected including the Internet. Read article...
Tags: hardware, energy

I'm frequently out and about and on trains (usually between Guildford and London), and always try to make good use of the time. The ability to work anywhere is important to me, and I think I might have finally cracked it! Read article...
Tags: hardware, online comms, lifestyle

Power is becoming ever more of an issue for data centres, and the prices keep on going up - doubling in the last two years! Not only that, but the energy ends up as heat, which then has to be air-conditioned (add another 30% to the electricity bill), and then it all just wafts into the environment. All that is not helping when I want to water my garden and there is another hose-pipe ban! Read article...
Tags: hardware, energy

"So, do you use Cisco firewalls as well as routers?", asks the client; "No, actually." is our response. Why, you might ask? Surely if you are running over a thousand servers and managing hundreds of individual firewalls you must be using Cisco or some other branded "firewall appliance"? But why must we? Read article...
Tags: hardware, business

Yet again I find myself tweaking our financial business model (essentially just a rather bloated and overly-complex spread sheet) and it reminded me again that dedicated server providers like us are slightly unusual in a business sense. Read article...
Tags: business

Hello LiveJournal! Read article...
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