Plant Maintenance

How can ERP with Green SCM tools help manufacturers satisfy green supply chain requirements in order to satisfy customers and regulators? Find out now

"Adopting the Best Practices for Ongoing Data Management"

Data centers are large, important investments that when properly designed, built and operated, are an integral part of the business strategy driving the success of any enterprise, yet the central focus of organizations is often the acquisition and deployment of the IT architecture equipment and systems, with little thought given to the structure and space in which it is to be housed, serviced and maintained. This invariably leads to facility infrastructure problems, such as thermal hot spots, lack of UPS, rack power, lack of redundancy, system overloading and other issues that threaten or prevent the realization of the return on the investment in the IT systems.

Data centers are large, important investments that, when properly designed, built, and operated, are an integral part of the business strategy driving the success of any enterprise. Yet the central focus of organizations is often the acquisition and deployment of the IT architecture equipment and systems with little thought given to the structure and space in which it is to be housed, serviced, and maintained.

In this White Paper IDC sees the use of static x86 server configurations is quickly becoming an outdated concept with the introduction of modern solutions based on blade architectures, which can offer both intelligent configuration and management and the ability to perform physical-to-virtual migration to promote uptime and efficient resource usage. When combined with the quickly maturing x86 hypervisor technologies available from a variety of solution providers, the synergy of blade architectures and virtualization offers customers the ability to dramatically increase utilization of their server investments, boost uptime, provide a more resilient and available infrastructure, and roll out new infrastructure and services more quickly.

To accommodate increasingly dense technology environments, increasingly critical business applications, and increasingly stringent service level demands, data centers are typically engineered to deliver the highest-affordable availability levels facility-wide. Within this monolithic design approach, the same levels of mechanical, electrical, and IT infrastructure are installed to support systems and applications regardless of their criticality or business risk if unplanned downtime occurs. Typically, high redundancy designs are deployed in order to provide for all eventualities. The result, in many instances, is to unnecessarily drive up both upfront construction or retro-fitting costs and ongoing operating expenses.

The need for reliable data centers is growing, especially in the small to medium sized business market.  So too is the price of data centers -- both in terms of initial cost and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) -- as equipment, service and utility costs continue to escalate.  How is a data center manager going to support an IT-based business strategy that hinges on high availability, at a reasonable business cost?  Insource? Outsource? Build? Lease? This presentation looks at the factors driving data centers costs, their impact, how they can be controlled, and how to justify the data center you need.

When considering server virtualization, planning and design are critical.  How do you optimize your environment through virtualization?  How do you keep your server sprawl from becoming virtual server sprawl?  How will a virtualized environment help your business?  Will your existing data center meet current, and future, business requirements? Answer your Questions today!

When Alcatel bought out Lucent at the end of 2006, the two companies had already begun planning data center consolidations of their own, but the merger changed all that. As it turns out, the merged company created a plan to consolidate 25 data centers and 125 server rooms down to six data centers and just a few server rooms. This change has presented challenges, especially in terms of arranging downtime and dealing with employees' attachment to their servers and applications, but the company is on pace to meet it’s goal of reducing IT operational cost by 25% over three years.

Data centers are large, important investments that, when properly designed, built, and operated, are an integral part of the business strategy driving the success of any enterprise. Yet the central focus of organizations is often the acquisition and deployment of the IT architecture equipment and systems with little thought given to the structure and space in which it is to be housed, serviced, and maintained. This invariably leads to facility infrastructure problems such as thermal “hot spots”, lack of UPS (uninterruptible power supply) rack power, lack of redundancy, system overloading and other issues that threaten or prevent the realization of the return on the investment in the IT systems.

Today's IT executives are not only expected to create and maintain high-availability IT environments, but they are also expected to implement green initiatives to satisfy customers, analysts, and government agencies that are worried about the impact of modern, energy-thirsty data centers on the environment. Is such a dual mandate reasonable? Can companies be expected to maintain service levels and reduce their carbon footprints at the same time? The White Paper offers a description of the different types of services available to improved energy efficiency data center design and a prescription for successful implementation.

Identify a strategic entry point for data center transformation to achieve facilities that are scalable, modular, energy-efficient, and continuously available.

The recent release of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) study on data center energy efficiency is adding fuel to the fire in the research and development of new ways to reduce energy use in centers. The findings, summarized on the EPA website, are staggering: Data centers consumed about 60 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) in 2006, roughly 1.5 percent of total US electricity consumption -Energy consumption of servers and data centers has doubled in the past five years and is expected to almost double again in the next five years to more than 100 billion kWh, costing about $7.4 billion annually.

With the significant improvements in scanning technology today and the increased importance of all aspects of security, it is a good time to take another look at and update the factors that are important in selecting a scanni

The dangers posed by industrial Dust Explosions can affect a wide range of different industries. This article examines the topic, and gives recommendations on how to prevents such incidents from occurring.

Paint booth cleaning has evolved into a critical step in assuring customers of a high-quality finished product. Manufacturers must deliver this quality while meeting demanding production schedules and tight operating budgets. This has led to significant growth in the use of high-pressure water jetting as an alternative to the traditional methods of chemical stripping and incineration, or burn-off.

In this paper we present three case studies using online and offline motor analysis to prevent catastrophic motor failures. The online and offline analysis in our case studies use a battery of standard electrical tests including Current Signature Analysis (CSA) and Demodulated Current Spectrum Analysis (DCSA).

Over the past 20 years, Current Signature Analysis (CSA) has become an established tool for online fault analysis of AC Induction motors. Presently, very little research has been performed using current signature analysis on DC motors. This paper is a brief introduction to online fault diagnosis of DC motors using current signature analysis.