Every Data Center has its unique requirements and (usually) set of challenges to address, but, at the same time, there are common requirements that just seem all too difficult to solve because of the deluge of information and equipment choices available.  Here are a couple I've found in the past year to be indispensable.

10 Gigabit Ethernet

Fibre Channel is easy to hate:  The equipment is largely proprietary, requires long training cycles, is perpetually outmoded, and is ridiculously expensive to upgrade (scaling up or scaling out), plus you have to deal with all that crazy fiber running around the data center to get to your SAN.  It has been a necessary evil as long as it's been around, commanding 3-4 times the per-GB/per-Host cost of direct-attached-storage with little competition from the paltry bandwidth limitation (1Gb) of iSCSI... until now.

Yes, friends, 10GbE has reached prime time, and I love it.  With a per-port cost that's one-fifth of Fibre and per-GB cost at one-third (or less), 10Gb (and much higher in a few years) iSCSI has surely numbered the oligopoly days of the Fibre vendors.  You don't need a highly-overpriced SAN controller any more (your favorite OS will do) and fan-out is limited only by IP addresses.

I highly recommend Neterion's Xframe family of 10GbE cards: they have drivers for virtually every OS (even Mac & Solaris) and have proven the most capable cards I've used.  They're also the only 10GbE cards I could find capable of teaming in Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.

Don't forget to use CX-4 (copper) connectors to avoid paying the Fibre overhead if you don't need longer than 50' runs.

I use HP's 10GbE ProCurve equipment, notably the 5400zl line of modular switches:  Great bang for the buck.

The cost of one system-wide SAN controller upgrade can probably outfit (or retrofit) most fibre installs with a full 10GbE replacement.

Pervasive Redundant Power

Part of the IT job is continually mitigating single points of failure (SPoF) to ensure uptime.  Let's follow the path for power:

• Diverse street power. Check.
• Redundant generators. Check.
• Redundant UPSes. Check.
• Redundant power supplies in equipment.  Mostly.

The fact is that lots of equipment doesn't afford redundant power; this is especially true of "smaller" networking equipment or specialty one-offs (like environmental monitors)... usually all you get is one 120V (NEMA) connector.  I'd always struggled with this, since there had to be a better way; but, no matter who I asked, the answer was either that it was an acceptable risk or you bought two (which isn't always possible for the application).  Then, late last year and by happenstance, I found the answer: Server Technologies' Fail-Safe Transfer Switch.

The idea is so simple, it's obvious: Take all the failover wiring that goes into redundant equipment power and put it at the rack.  Ta da! Now one UPS can be serviced without requiring a macabre lesson in quick-plugging equipment to another UPS.  It's like magic and very inexpensive, especially for the peace-of-mind it affords.  They're available in a variety of input and output power configurations.

What about you?

That's it for today.  Do you have any must-have gadgetry that's made your life better?  If so, let me know.

The recent resurgence in web browser development has been marked by a number of advances, to a lesser degree with products than with the continuing evolution of portable-but-connected devices:

• On the desktop
  • Firefox 3
  • Microsoft's upcoming IE8
  • Google's (WebKit-based) Chrome
  
  
• On devices
  • Opera Mobile
  • Apple iPhone's (WebKit-based) Safari
  • Not to mention the new battle between Opera Mini, Mobile Firefox, and dozens of other microbrowsers.

Without a doubt, the advancements made by Firefox 3 showed Microsoft that it had rested on its laurels for too long:  FF3 is fast, capable, and chock full of usability nuances that make it a fantastic browser, not to mention the fact that it is cross-platform (which is becoming increasingly relevant) and Open Source (meaning that its continuing improvement is virtually inevitable).  Microsoft knew how to wage war with Netscape, but this endless-supply-of-free-development-resources makes Firefox a troublesome competitor.  Rationally speaking, no matter how many developers Microsoft throws at IE, Firefox can garner more and execute more quickly.  Ironically, it is the very fact that IE is so entrenched in the space that hinders its advancement:  The IE8 team has been up to their earballs trying to wrestle with 10 years of legacy compatibility.

This legacy compatibility issue is, in my opinion, what continues to plague Microsoft at all levels of its game... they simply can't abandon old code because millions of in-use applications will break and its customers (who have invested billions in developing those apps) might look at other platforms more seriously.  Apple did it with OS X and it could, because, hey, 2.5% of the market can deal with an evolve-or-die upgrade.  Mozilla did it with Firefox née Netscape by the same rationale.  But Microsoft can't, not without literally splitting its client base and risking significant forfeiture in the process.

So IE is doomed to be slower, but more broadly compatible with content (especially apps) than Firefox.  Firefox will likely continue to gain market share on the consumer desktop, but it'll be a long time before all of those enterprise apps are compatible.  That, itself, is a chicken-and-egg problem: Enterprises won't deploy FF because their line-of-business apps only work with IE, and the developers of those LOB apps have no compulsion to be FF-friendly since its clients all have IE.

And then there was Chrome.

Chrome irks me.  Not because competition is bad (although the subjective interpretations of the standards in this space have always been a problem), but because of Google Gears.  I'm all for Google making a public AJAX library: that's cool, just like Microsoft, Yahoo!, Script.aculo.us, and so on.  But now they've integrated it into the browser.  Hey, Microsoft's ActiveX pioneered the world of custom extensions and proved that it is a bad thing... are we going to see sites now that don't work without Chrome's integration?  Is that really okay by everyone?

What can I say, I'm not a Google zealot by any measure for a number of reasons.  Yes, they make a great search engine (still the only one I use), but the degree to which the bulk of the industry fawns over them is ridiculous... They have the worst case of Not Invented Here syndrome I have ever seen, even surpassing Microsoft or Sun.  And the money to do just about anything they want...

• GMail.  Compete with Hotmail and Y!Mail for the in-email ad space.  Got it.
• Google Apps: Hm, that's a lot of dev for occasional ad space and not much of a revenue plan.  But, hey, maybe you've got something.
• Google drops its OEMs and brings in-house a hardware team that designs and builds its servers, possibly building their own 10GbE switches, fiber equipment, and they're possibly snapping up dark fiber and laying their own cable.
• Google Base, Earth, Sky, Ocean, Checkout, Notebook, Picasa, Reader, SketchUp, Google's bid for a cellular band, Google's custom Silverlight (which is ironic to say the least)... and the possibility that Android/Chrome are destined for the desktop.
• And its outliers: Postini, Orkut, Knol, GrandCentral, Marratech, Google Wifi, Dodgeball, Jaiku, GreenBorder, and Zingku.
• Plus a 747 and a fighter jet.

... uh, what?  If any other company, especially Microsoft, had this broad a slate of ambitions, they'd be tarred, feathered, and tried swiftly as madmen in the court of public opinion.

 But cute'n'fuzzy Google? Nahh, they're snapping up every inch of valuable data for proprietary lock-in because they love us.