RackForce Blog
Archive for the 'New Products' Category
April 15th, 2010 [by Doug Alder]
What do
and
and
and Data center 3.0
have in common? RackForce’s new Enterprise cloud is what! The XIV SAN is fast – it uses parallel processing instead of RAID to gain redundancy and speed and by doing so is better able to allocate IOPS across the entire user base. The Cisco UCS blade system is smoking fast with 4 (6 coming soon) core CPUs utilizing Intel Xeon Nehalem E5540 CPUs with each core running at 2.53Ghz connected at 4Gbps via Fiber Channel to the IBM XIV SAN and the whole arrangements inside a data center running Cisco’s Data Center 3.0 – a unified, virtualized 10Gbps fabric. Very hot stuff. If you are looking for an Enterprise class server go check it out and contact me at work (250) 448-2203 or dalder at rackforce dot com
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May 19th, 2009 [by Doug Alder]
In May of this year GigaCenter will open its doors for tours for prospective customers and customers can begin moving their equipment in June 2009. The design is scalable, we are starting with 30,000 sq. ft. and that will scale easily to over 100,000 sq. ft. This helps preserve the green footprint as less space needs HVAC. Internally the design is modular with up to 32 “GigaVaults” which are completely self-contained datacenter suites with it’s own power, cooling, networking etc. Each GigaVault can hold up to 12 x 42 u racks. Racks can be loaded to 1,000 watts per sq. ft. (note that with in-row cooling two 42u racks of in-row cooling would be required for 10 42u racks at 1000w/sq. ft.) As our president and chief visionary Tim Dufour recently said to us:
We have a design that provides the ultimate in flexibility, scalability, and maximum efficiency (Green). The beauty of the in-row cooling is that it allows us to build at virtually any density per vault. We have cold-aisle containment but can also provide hot-aisle containment to accommodate gas-based fire suppression systems. We have monster racks with additional rack space above that can be used for secure internal use (switches etc.) or customer purposes. Extra security can be provided with heavy diamond mesh over the top of the vault. Any version of an in rack ePDU can be provided as per customer requirements, 10 Gbps networking both LAN and WAN, low cost Internet, and the list goes on. I don’t think anyone on the planet can provide this kind of flexibility.
This is just the start folks, lots more to come 
stay tuned! If you are in need of colocation space and would like a tour of GigaCenter please contact myself Doug Alder (dalder at rackforce dot com ph: +1 (250)448-2203), Jay Robinson (jrobinson at rackforce dot com ph: +1 (250) 717-2340 ext:2303) or Paul Amodea (pamodea at rackforce dot com ph: +1 (604)535-5769 ) to set up an appointment. You had better hurry though as phase I is rapidly selling out and if you miss out on phase I then you’ll have to wait for phase II.
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May 9th, 2007 [by Doug Alder]
This is the way the world is going, . In our previous post we hit upon a couple of ways virtualization (Called DDS or Dynamic Dedicated Services at RackForce) can benefit server system administrators. Here are some more:
- – traditionally, moving from one RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks)configuration to a different one is difficult and fraught with danger. It is easy to lose all your data when going from say a RAID 1 to a RAID 5 configuration. In a virtual server with hardware RAID this ceases to be a problem as the RAID array is at the hardware level and exists outside of your virtual environment. Switching RAID levels in this instance only requires moving the virtual environment to the new hardware.
- : the same reasoning that applied in the RAID solution above also applies to any other hardware change. Simply move the environment to the new hardware then reset its resource parameters to reflect any changes. This vastly increases flexibility for sysadmins as it reduces labor costs as well as the length of time a change/upgrade takes. It also lowers the chance of something going wrong in the move to practically zero.
- Simplicity of backup/restore. Backing up your data is a simple matter of creating an image of your virtual environment. Your .vhd (Virtual Hard Drive)file can then be easily stored and retrieved from the SAN
- Multiple OS on the same hardware, each sand-boxed in its own environment and running simultaneously
Since we handle hundreds of customer issues, changes and upgrades every week we continually see the value of this approach. If you have a DDS server you likely have already experienced its benefits and your comments would be appreciated. DDS is a RackForce strategy with the goal of delivering “On Demand” services for everything the company does. In our next blog post you will read Part I of the Roadmap so you can gain a more in depth understanding of how your Infrastructure Provider (RackForce) will give you the best opportunity for success.
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