Somewhere up in the great state of Maine, there is a fabulous state park, providing gorgeous scenery, fishing, and hiking opportunities to visitors every year.

Unfortunately, the park doesn’t run itself, and has a number of park personnel keeping campers safe, monitoring the wildlife, and keeping the state’s property safe and protected. The park rangers are lucky- their offices are filled with the scent of pine trees and fresh air. Occasionally, however, one of them needs a break.

The IT VAR supporting the the park went on a two-week vacation this summer to a remote location and was completely incommunicado to his “office” mates. But when he was gone, they had a  system failure.

Lucky for the crew left behind, the IT guy had installed Avance, which prevented the failure and allowed the systems running applications such as communication, safety and weather reporting,  to continue running until the IT guy came back to fix the problem.

State parks, as well as other SMBs, are subjected to  federal laws of compliance, necessitating HA systems. With solutions like Avance, IT personnel everywhere can go on vacation and not worry about coming back to a catastrophe at work or subject to review due to non-compliance.

Last week I chatted with an IT director of a local wallpaper company. He went on a camping vacation this summer with very limited cell service.
Unfortunately, his job role did not go on vacation. The SAP system crashed, and the only person who could fix it was gone fishing. For eight hours, the company stood still until someone could be found to repair the server. Our camper was the single point of failure and disaster struck at precisely the wrong time.
Fresh off vacation, our camper is now trying to find reliable hardware and access to round-the-clock support. He is not virtualized yet, but is looking at options for consolidating his two web servers with his development and production SAP systems.
We chatted about the value of the ftserver, which could host the SAP systems in their main office, but also host the email, file and print servers for all the remote offices. The ftserver is also virtualization-ready. The best part? The Robo Promo is a sweet summer deal that will get him everything he wants- plus confidence in his systems so he can go camping again soon without the fear of downtime.

Recently, I visited a tech firm in Cambridge and was surprised to see that they had installed two very large chillers on each of two opposing walls in one of their data centers. But with the chillers blowing so loud and using so much energy, it is a wonder there was any left for the computers!

Increasingly companies are concerned about getting enough electricity in the building to cool their data centers –Stratus Technologies included.

IT staffers have to figure out how to get enough cooling into vast rooms of continually-heating computers. It is estimated that over ten percent of all energy is spent running computer. With larger data centers, it is almost as though you must pay twice: once to run them, and once to power their cooling units.

Companies with huge data centers, such as Google, have to constantly be researching better ways at keeping the temperature down, and have even made plans to build data centers on ships.

One of the biggest benefits to virtualization is it reduces the amount of electricity and cooling needed for data centers. The cost of cooling alone could pay for the virtualization technology.

How do you keep your data centers cool in the summer? Have you ever had the cooling units cause a power outage? Share your stories in the comments below!