For Auld Lang Syne: Top 10 Data Center Blogs of 2015

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As a chorus of “Auld Lang Syne” resounds at the stroke of midnight every December 31, many people wonder what these obscure words really mean. Well, they are an homage to times gone by, appreciation for the future and, as Wikipedia, tells it, come from an old Scots poem.

In keeping with tradition, we take a look back at the top 10 blog posts from 2015. These not only show what was going on in data centers for the last 12 months, they also provide a glimpse into what’s next.

1. How Data Centers Help Win the Race for Scale: Scaling to meet demand almost always means balancing capacity with time and cost of deployment. Until now, regional data centers have offered a large-scale solution; local gateways and embedded devices catered to local increases in demand. The first is slow, but powerful; the second is quick but lacks capacity. Now, a third option offers the best of both worlds: Micro data centers.
2. 3 Things to Check Before You Leave The Office Today: As IT professionals, the pressure is on to make sure downtime is minimized and normal business operations continue as much as possible despite the physical office space being closed. What should you do if a blizzard of epic proportions is predicted?
3. Ready for the DCIM Cloud: How can customers get the benefit of DCIM data, analytics and insights, without necessarily becoming traditional DCIM customers? How can they hedge against future business performance without making big investments now? How can they avoid risk to the business?
4. Personality Test: What sort of Data Center Manager are you? Does your job in the data center make you sweat so much you could short circuit a server, or are you so cool you could put out hot spots with willpower alone? Our Data Center Manager Personality Test will tell you.
5. Updating the Sagrada Familia: Why a World-Famous Church Needs a Micro Data Center solution: We often talk about the need for data centers to scale and be flexible in order to meet business needs and, even though Sagrada Familia is not what we would traditionally think of in “business” terms, the centuries old church is no exception when it comes to technology requirements.
6. Data Centers in the Extreme: From Mountain to Sea: Why would anyone put a data center in an abandoned coal mine? And what about in deep inside a mountain? Or in the middle of the desert? Welcome to data centers in extreme places, which are more practical than you might think.
7. Micro Data Centers: What’s Big is Small: If you read any data center industry news today you are likely to come across the term “micro data center.” The question you might ask is: What is a micro data center?
8. If Hype Killed DCIM, What’s Next?: The well attended panel discussion at DatacenterDynamics Converged London 2014 drew some hard line questioning from an informed audience, as well as some interesting opinion from the expert panelists. Did they believe that hype had indeed killed DCIM?
9. The Triggers Driving Today’s Data Center Transformations: Whereas data centers once revolved around supporting internal IT systems and data—acting like big digital filing cabinets for enterprises—their role is changing rapidly. Today, data centers need to become agile foundations for companies transforming into digital businesses.
10. How do we stop DCIM becoming isolated from other enterprise management systems? It’s up to individual DCIM vendors to make sure this doesn’t happen. To do this will require vendors to think hard about managing the access and data to and from DCIM systems and other software platforms.