I then tagged this story as "!omfg", but I realize I was wrong, and for that I apologize. I realize now that I should have just tagged this story "meh".

I'm pretty sure that "Get over it" was the message when CDs came out, and yet we've got a resurgence of vinyl. Vive la differénce! Everybody wants something to hold and us and keep and love; media is not immune to that, and I am glad.

I wonder, how much of the current position is "We want everything stored digitally, through us" (more Apple), and how much of it is "We're tired of having to constantly re-engineer large areas of the OS in order to meet the 'you must lock this down tight' requirements of the studios?" (more Microsoft?) ?

For those who are actually trial lawyers, in the United States, and not just in their heads, I am wondering: How possible is it to change a ruling (from guilty to innocent, or vice versa) on what one person says while on the stand?

That's because they're looking at the wrong end.

For pretty much all of the crimes I can think of, in the United States, the defense "I did X, but I did not do Y", where Y follows from X, does not let you off the hook. For example, "Yes, I have drug X in my possession, but I did not consume". I could also take this into the world of inappropriate imagery, but I'm not (although you, dear reader, probably did).

Besides, this is the world of computers and the Internet. Do the images still exist, and if not, how much time was there between the image's capture and it's deletion? Are there any images kept around in backups, particularly daily or incremental backups whose tapes have not yet been overwritten?

If you have a stash of images, it is entirely possible – many will say likely; some will say guaranteed – that those images will make their way out onto the Internet, especially when being so in-the-news like this makes you a target, at which point those images will exist on the Internet forever, with each image eventually being linked to the person(s) included in the image. It is critical that (a) this be prevented, and (b) everyone at Lower Merion is made aware of what can happen (could have happened).

There are several factors which, in my opinion, must be considered when making a decision on what to do:

* Layout

Both hot- and cold-aisle containment require that you have either one row of racks, with a wall on the other side; or you have two rows of racks, both of which are of identical length and are aligned properly. This makes a long, thin room better for hot- and cold-aisle containment.

* Raised-floor

Is your environment going to have a raised floor, or (probably the more apt question) does it already? If you go for hot-aisle containment with a raised floor, you'll going to have an interesting time getting the hot air returned to the air handlers units. I think you'll also need a way to ensure air circulated in the under-floor area.

* External heat sources

Lighting and people impose an additional heat load, for which you must account. The same applies to the UPS. Also, don't forget about all of your networking equipment and patch panels that prefer living in two-post racks.

If I remember hot-aisle continment theory, the cold air being ejected from the in-row air handlers doesn't get very far into the room before it is pulled in to the servers in neighbor racks. If that is the case, and your room is big enough -- with enough space between rows and stand-alone equipment -- then you might end up with a hot-aisle-containment environment where the stand-alone equipment sits in a little hot spot, unable to draw any cool air from (relatively) far away in-row air handlers.

* Cooling Source

Most of the time, when you think of a data center, you think chilled water. That is not always the case, and I'm not talking about this newfangled stuff like using outside air. I mean some buildings simply don't have the capacity (in whatever way you want) to support the chilled-water needs of a data center. You might have to rely on an air-cooled solution.

* Humidity

You have to maintain humidity as well as temperature, and the humidification/dehumidification equipment takes up alot of space. When you're going for hot-aisle containment, you're likely going to use in-row air handlers. You want these to be as compact as possible, so plan on getting a separate unit to handle the humidity.

If you're doing cold-aisle containment, you're likely going to use stand-alone air handlers, which will include humidity control already.

All of the thoughts above were going through my head in the last 12 months. In the company where I'm working, at the start of 2010, it was looking like we were going to move into a new building. At the time, the building was an empty shell, so a data center was designed that was long (to get two aligned rows), thin (so no areas for hot spots to build up), and with no raised floor (to save the expense). We were going to go for hot-aisle containment, in-row cooling, in-row UPS, and a little stand-alone device for humidity control and backup cooling. The move was cancelled, so we started over. Besides, we learned towards the end that it would be air-cooled, not chilled water (in other words, bad).

The new plan would be to stay in our current building, extending part of our existing data center (standard raised floor, stand-alone chilled water cooling) into a space that would still give us two long rows, but the raised floor and chilled water availability -- along with the ability to re-use existing air handlers -- make me want to go cold-aisle containment. Unfortunately, that was scrapped as well.

In the end, it looks like we'll simply be taking down some existing walls in our data center, giving us several rows of racks, all of which are not aligned. Hot- and cold-aisle containment now looks impractical, unfortunately, but I did learn alot while doing my research. This move will also give me the ability to change out the hodepodge of racks to newer, deeper racks (one thing that can really help is to keep cables out of the way of the back of the server), and to install blanking panels over every open rack U (again, another easy way to keep hot and cold air mixing). I'll also be asking if it will if some of the ceiling tiles are changed out, replacing solid tiles with grates, allowing more hot air to float up into the plenum.

Good luck!