Trends That Will Transform a Data Center and Your Business

The faltering economy in 2010 and 2011, the increasing demand for IT as a service, and the incredible pressure to keep costs down has lead to these overarching trends in data centers:

Consolidated data centers

The concept of multiple data centers for an organization sucks up resources, capital, manpower and energy. The cost of operating these redundant data centers is huge, involving infrastructure and software license investment, manpower investments, additional costs for data center space, cooling, electricity, etc. Moreover, businesses may find it difficult to have a consolidated regulation or policy during data center downtime and disasters. These factors push IT organizations to consolidate their data centers, infrastructure and servers.

Forget public – it’s time for private cloud

Privacy and governance issues still prevent businesses from going to the cloud completely. As they worry about security, and hackers provide daily reminders as to why they should do so, creating a private cloud seems to be the best media solution. Private cloud uses existing resources in a company – servers, web, internet, and applications – to create a private data center using modular commodity hardware. It’s private to the business, but is accessible via internet protocol to those who need to access it. Nothing new maybe, but private clouds can marry the best of both worlds to create a cost-effective and secure solution.

Virtualization and Efficiency

To compete with external cloud, IT organizations will need to house hyper-efficient and cost effective internal IT services. This introduces the need for virtualizing possible applications, servers and infrastructures, using storage efficient technologies like data duplication, virtualized servers, etc. These result in better capital savings and operational savings while broadening business agility.

We predict that towards the end of 2012 , the traditional, consolidated, virtualized and central IT infrastructure will transform into service oriented internal cloud that is economically sound and efficient. How’s that for a sharp trend in data centers?

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.