2007 was a big year for SearchDataCenter.com. We published our first purchasing intentions research and our first data center products of the year awards. We brought on new writers and experts and launched Server Specs — our data center blog. This post is a digest of the most popular and some of the most overlooked content from the calendar year 2007.

The research projects:
In the spring of 2007, we conducted our first annual data center purchasing survey. Subscribers were contacted by email and invited to participate. We had a total of 374 respondents in North America. This report can tell you what your peers are buying and why. It’s broken down across the data center spectrum — covering everything from x86 servers, to big Unix, to facility infrastructure. And if that weren’t enough, our panel of data center pros and experts ranked the best products  in our products of the year awards.

Shameless plug — Read our book: The green data center: Energy efficient computing in the 21st century. The first four chapters are available now — Chapter one lays out the business case for going green in the data center. Chapters two through four go into the tactical details for saving energy in your computing environment, covering servers, infrastructure and storage equipment respectively. Chapter five — putting together a green data center plan — is due out in January 08.

Server hardware management:
Get tips from the trenches with our writers like Chuck Goolsbee and Kyle Rankin. Goolsbee busts Dell and Apple in this post for making servers that are too long to fit in the racks and vows to whip out the Sawzall. “The new [server] is two inches longer, the ports (network and power) have swapped sides, and the rack mounting hardware is completely different. What should have been a 5 minute operation turned into a multi-hour ordeal.”

Speaking of multi-hour ordeals, Rankin, a sys admin and author from the Bay Area spent last year’s company xmas party trying to put together a blade server jigsaw puzzle. In other major server news, Bridget Botelho outlines the processor rivalries and roadmaps between AMD and Intel.

Systems management challenges:
Thanks to the the Energy Policy Act of 2005, system admins were springing ahead early for Daylight Saving. While it wasn’t Y2K panic all over again, several vendors released patches to keep time-sensitive applications up to date.

Configuration management database software seemed to be on every data center manager’s wish-list. Megan Santosus outlines what to look for in a CMDB and expert Jasmine Noel asks users to evaluate whether or not they need one.

Data center facility management:
There are a lot of debates raging in the data center facility management sphere. Is Direct Current (DC) power feasible in the data center? What about using outside air to cool your servers? Some of the better debates are even more granular. For example — what is the right way to manage humidity in the server room? Should ASHRAE expand its recommended temperature range for server equipment? Are raised floors in the data center obsolete? Should you consider liquid cooling? If so, check out our liquid cooling buyers’ guide.

Mainframes in the data center:
High profile mainframe migrations are still big news this year as the New York Stock Exchange dumped its Big Iron (1,600 MIPS) for commodity HP servers running Linux and IBM’s System P servers running AIX. This was one of the most viewed stories of 2007.

Other big news on big iron: IBM rolled out its latest mainframe operating system and resident mainframe guru Robert Crawford outlined his favorite z/OS 1.9 features in this review. Joe Clabby debunked the myth of the mainframe skills shortage. And IBM trotted out a demo of OpenSolaris running on the mainframe.

Disaster recovery goes bonk:
Disaster Recovery is a perennial popular topic. But this year there were a lot of high profile flubs, including the downtime at 365 Main. It pays check your generators — especially since new low-sulfur diesel regulations may be hindering your gen-set’s performance. It might be a good idea to doublecheck your runbooks against the resources in our DR checklist and  Web resource guide.

Data center site selection and construction:
It’s a fact — data center construction is booming. According to our 2007 data center construction survey, 22% of survey respondents said they were involved in a data center construction project in 2007. More than 60% of respondents will be involved with construction in 2008. With all these construction plans, companies are going to be looking for optimal places to put their data centers. So it makes sense that our articles on U.S. data center site selection and a look at the international market did particularly well with readers this year.

All of this demand is driving up the demand for data center space – which is manifesting itself in booming business for colocation firms. But the data center bust is coming, so companies are making hay while they can.