Outsourcing Community Shaken; Data Center Power Bill; the Force of Storage

A few questions to ponder as you kick off the week: Do you know your offshore providers disaster recovery plans? Do you have the plans in writing? Have you integrated your service providers plans with yours? Can your company adapt if youve farmed out business processes and your service provider suddenly cant deliver?

Those are big questions, but they need to be raised in light of the terrorist attack July 11 in Mumbai, India, that, as of press time, had killed at least 200 people. Executive Editor Stan Gibson examines the issue of disaster recovery planning for offshore outsourcing partners. Gibson gets an inside glimpse of Tata Consultancy Services disaster recovery plan and examines the questions you should be asking your provider right now. If you dont have answers, you need to get going, pronto.

Among other issues front and center for technology executives, Congress is apparently worried about your data center power consumption. As Senior Editor Jeffrey Burt reports, the House of Representatives passed a resolution instructing the Environmental Protection Agencys Energy Star program to study data center power consumption. In general, the technology industry is supportive, but some are wary. “Whenever I hear, We are from the federal government and were here to help, I tend to run in the opposite direction as quickly as possible,” said Jevin Jensen, director of IS at Mohawk Industries, in Dalton, Ga.

Meanwhile, our cover story this week, homes in on video storage and how leading entertainment companies such as Lucasfilms Industrial Light & Magic unit manage an onslaught of digital content. The media business just cant get enough storage given the increasingly digital distribution of video. “Everything we do here at ILM is stored away somewhere, from the smallest storyboard sketch to a final finished scene, complete with all the special effects,” said Mike Thompson, IT storage manager at San Francisco-based ILM. “We throw exactly nothing away, ever.”

In other words, ILM is a pack rat. And that means storage—lots of it.

Executive Editor/News Larry Dignan can be reached at larry_dignan@ziffdavis.com.

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