Power and cooling systems for IT equipment are often an afterthought when it comes to day-to-day business operations. Yet they support the backbone of your entire organization, as most everything is connected to IT these days. Departments such as e-commerce, payroll, human resources and communications (think employees’ email or VoIP phones) rely on your servers to be up and running, and your networking equipment to keep everyone connected. A good way of thinking about power and cooling is to think of it the same way you think of your car.

Let’s say you want to take a trip and you forget to check the tire pressure before departing, or you haven’t replaced your tires in a long time and they are heavily worn. Something as small as a nail or a bump in the road can cause your tire to blow out, and now you are stuck changing a tire. The tires, the engine, the brakes, these are all important components of your vehicle, and if you don’t maintain them properly you may end up in some sort of unpleasant event, preventing you from completing your journey. This is similar to how you should be thinking about your power and cooling equipment.

With more people working remotely, end users must have faster access to critical information. Edge environments move that critical information closer to the end user, thus making them more efficient. This is the same concept streaming services use to distribute content to their users.

Imagine watching a movie in New York, but its content sits in California. That movie would freeze and pause so many times during the viewing that you would probably turn it off. By moving that content to New York, your movie would play seamlessly and you would be more inclined to watch additional content from that streaming service.

These edge environments are important to your business today because they keep your coworkers productive and your customers coming back. I’m going to provide some guidance on the questions that need to be asked (and answered) when setting up your edge environments.

North American weather is impacted by what is known as “storm season.” This aligns with hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to Nov. 30. These weather patterns can affect the entire country and they touch our commercial customers in many ways. Power can be disrupted by sudden severe weather conditions that can affect the power grid and produce downtime for your organization.

How can organizations prepare for storm season? Data centers and edge networks need enough capacity and secure endpoints for workers to access their files and applications from anywhere. Employees need access to cloud applications to take full advantage of collaboration tools available to them, and organizations need to protect their power. What follows are some key areas to focus on with storm season preparedness (and a solid work from home strategy), so your users will be able to stay productive and your organization stays functional.

Technologies such as virtualization and the cloud have changed data centers dramatically in recent years. One thing that hasn’t changed, though, is the need to keep them cool. While many organizations have moved data and workloads to the cloud, most keep some servers on-premises, often in smaller data centers or server closets. Because most physical…

Today’s post covers Eaton’s Integrated Power Management (IPM) software and how it can benefit data center administrators with managing power across a heterogeneous environment. IPM is a software solution from Eaton that provides a set of tools to monitor and manage power devices in both physical and virtual infrastructures. IPM helps ensure data integrity and…

It’s a competitive world out there. In order to remain relevant to customers, every organization must continue to innovate while keeping expenses in check. IT departments are no stranger to these challenges.