Data Center expertise: Hard to come by, harder to validate – Computerworld Blogs

Last week I spoke at Data Center World out in Las Vegas. This was my first time to attend this show and AFCOM did a great job with it. My presentation was on best practices for simplifying data center networking and not only did it draw a good sized crowd but some very engaging discussions during and afterwards.

Today’s data centers are significantly different than the data centers of even two or three years ago. First of all, the scope of our data centers now includes not only data services but we now manage voice and power as well. Data center consolidation has centralized a lot of our owned compute resources while cloud computing and SaaS providers have de-centralized our compute environments. Additionally, virtualization has made it possible to host more machines than we ever imagined within finite amounts of physical space. Lastly, these hyper-dense computing environments require huge amounts of bandwith and storage.

Data center expertise: Hard to come by, harder to validate – Computerworld Blogs

Alex Carroll

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Alex, co-owner, is responsible for all real estate, construction and mission critical facilities: hardened buildings, power systems, cooling systems, fire suppression, and environmentals. Alex also manages relationships with the telecommunications providers and has an extensive background in IT infrastructure support, database administration and software design and development. Alex architected Lifeline’s proprietary GRCA system and is hands-on every day in the data center.