Unplanned IT downtime on any scale has a negative impact on all businesses, no matter the size or industry. To address the challenge of minimizing downtime, IT operations teams have begun to adopt change management best practices and processes, allowing for a smooth implementation of patches, upgrades and other changes to the infrastructure stack.

The need for standard change and release management is even more important because of the complexity of today’s production environments. Multi-tiered software infrastructures contain many components, processing paths, and inter-dependencies with other systems that are nearly impossible to fully understand. By adopting a change management process, IT operations can implement infrastructure changes into complex environments knowing that their risk to uptime has been assessed and significantly reduced. (…)

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The big data center players are seeing green. Green is the color to signify energy efficiency and also the revenues from the increased demand for services that rely on data center space. Microsoft like many other players in the internet services market has been increasing their data center square footage considerably in the past 10 years.

Recently Microsoft announced that they will be building new facilities that include one in Ireland and another in the Chicago, Illinois market. Both of these data center are now complete and will be going online in July.(…)

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