Server equipment is going through an interesting transition.

While the U.S. was put through the polar vortex and dealt with the epic cold of Hercules, the IT infrastructure and data center industry soldiered on.

Downtime is not a word that data center operations strategists like to hear, but it’s one of the most important considerations for the effective planning and operation of a data center.

The cloud, networking and Wi-Fi solidified their positions at the top of the IT development heap in 2013, so it’s no surprise that innovations in these areas are some of the most intriguing stories of the first week of the new year.

Considerations for data center design continue to shift as new technologies become available and the expectations for data center performance and reliability scale upward.

Despite the holiday week, there are a lot of emerging data center management and IT stories that have implications for the year ahead.

Winter is here, and data centers can prepare themselves accordingly by channeling the excess heat generated from server hardware to keep others warm during the season. The excess heat produced by server hardware during winter can help data centers save energy and become more Eco-friendly. Server hardware can produce a lot of excess heat when