It was only a few years ago that the most common camera you would see out and about was the disposable camera – the winding sounds, temporary flash buttons, developed film and all. Today, mainstream photography has grown up a little bit -- we’ve matured to smartphones as a general go-to camera. Among other popular smartphones, the iPhone 5 and Samsung (News - Alert) Galaxy S III feature 8 megapixels for quality photos right in the palm of your hand. Once you get into actual photography equipment, such as the Hasselblad H4D-40, you get up to 40 pixels. Even though pixel count isn’t the only factor that contributes to image quality – the lens, the sensor, the ISO sensitivity all combine to make a great image – it is what seems to be the determining factor for a high quality camera when it comes to smartphone makers.
It may not seem like all of these factors, and photography in general, are related to data centers, but it’s true. Erik Stabile from Server Technology (News - Alert) explains in a recent blog post exactly how the two are connected. More than 43 percent of people use their cell phone as their primary camera, which translates to a lot of uploads to social media. Facebook sees around 300 million photos uploaded every day, there are nearly two days worth of video uploaded to YouTube (News - Alert) each minute, Instagram is nearing 100 million active users and 40 billion photos per day and Flickr has around 75 million users. During the 48 hours over New Year’s Day and Eve, Facebook (News - Alert) users uploaded a record 1.1 billion photos, nearly double the average upload count.
Image via Shutterstock
“Now imagine 50 or 60 percent of the population snapping photos with 15, 20 or even 40 megapixel cameras,” Stabile said. “The improvement of cell phone cameras will only help feed these social behemoths larger diets of pixel-rich imagery. It is a staggering amount of data and it only has one place to go.”
The next time you upload a photo to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (News - Alert) or any other social media platform, think about where all of those pictures will be processed and stored. There are about three million data centers that occupy more than 600 million square feet of space in the U.S. to help do so.
Data centers will accommodate all of this data with capacity planning. Server Technology’s Sentry Power Manager (SPM) is an affordable and accurate system to measure, monitor and trend data center power. The solution helps manage today’s biggest data center challenges, such as improving uptime, increased power costs, lower power availability, higher density cabinets, capacity planning, green initiatives and continuous movement.
The capacity planning tool in SPM lets users know where they have power and “U” space, a term used to describe equipment measurement in a cabinet, availability in their cabinets, and allows users to run reports by available capacity or “U” space. A rack unit, U or RU, describes the height of equipment intended for mounting in a 19-inch rack or a 23-inch rack – dimensions that refer to the width of the equipment mounting frame in the rack.
The size of a piece of rack-mounted equipment is frequently described as a number in "U". For example, one rack unit is often referred to as "1U", 2 rack units as "2U" and so on.
A typical full size rack is 42U, which means it holds just over six feet of equipment, and a typical "half-height" rack would be 18-22U, or around three feet high.
The trending capabilities available in the latest version of SPM, 5.2, are an example of how Server Technology is working to make power-related information more valuable and useable for IT. IT can configure SPM 5.2 to send an alert in the event a certain condition is trending to exceed a threshold, taking the guesswork out of the equation. To learn more, click here.
Edited by Brooke Neuman