Cloud Computing: What Data Center Hardware Should You Keep?

Enterprises today have so much to think about when designing their overall data center strategies. It’s critical that a holistic approach be taken when laying out a data center design. The challenge for many CIOs and their IT organizations today is working with their partner to determine the best approach. First, what to do with the existing infrastructure in place?

With virtualization, many organizations rid themselves of physical servers, despite the significant dollar investment, and went to virtualization. Although many continue to do virtualization in a more phased approach, the understanding was that long-term, virtualization not only provided organizations with cost savings, but also better performance, agility, and flexibility, to name a few benefits. The point is, virtualization was not just about the cost savings, but about the value adds that it brought to the overall IT environment and ultimately, the business.

Similar challenges are being faced today. While enterprises are making the move to deploying cloud computing models in their data centers and leveraging external public clouds, it becomes difficult to determine what to keep and what to let go, particularly in terms of physical infrastructure.

True, driving cost out of IT is the goal, but what about the investment already made? It comes down to the old “rip and replace” story that has plagued so many emerging technologies in the past. Should an organization really consider getting rid of its infrastructure? What happens to all that investment made? Worse, what happens to the IT talent that managed it? It has always been a taboo for any IT executive to even consider this option.

more of the CIO.com article from Vanessa Alvarez

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.