IT organizations are desperate to make their current data centers more flexible and higher performing before resigning themselves to building out new facilities.
The capacity (power, space, compute and network) and utilization/load profiles allocated for a facility when it was designed are almost certainly out of date within its first two years of operation. As a result, data center professionals are truly challenged to stay within their capacity constraints when estimating the impact of new projects. Given the rate of change in enterprise IT, this represents a significant problem, as it directly affects a business’s ability to compete effectively through strategic technology adoption and deployment.
New technology solutions such as the cloud, mobility and “big data” are changing the playing field for many companies—and, in turn, forcing them to modernize and evolve their infrastructures. These next-wave enterprise solution technologies are vastly more resource intensive than the solutions for which their data centers were originally planned. Moreover, although demand for these services is increasing exponentially and additional pressure is being placed on the infrastructure to deliver these services, IT budgets remain static and the data center itself understaffed.
The critical challenge facing IT is to deliver new, state-of-the-art technology solutions that successfully position an enterprise for growth in the highly rigid and inflexible environment of the data center. How can IT effectively modernize the facility and increase its overall capacity without affecting availability and without new capital expenditures?
