IT Solutions Blog

Getting to the Next Generation Data Center

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Everyone pretty much agrees that the new data center will be more streamlined, more uniform, more efficient, and less costly to build and maintain than today’s data center. In some ways, of course, this is wishful thinking; that ideal data center with limitless capacity that requires no staff to maintain it and no energy to use just doesn’t exist in the real world, and never will.

Further complicating the matter is the fact that there are plenty of technical and political obstacles for most companies to build the next generation data center.

What the data center would look like

If you were to start over from scratch, today’s data center would look very different from most of the data centers out there today. For example, it would likely feature x86 virtualization servers, converged storage, converged networking, and even cloud services to handle when demand exceeds supply. All of the storage capacity in the data center would be shared. The network would be flat within the data center, eliminating plenty of unnecessary hops.

In short, a brand new data center would utilize the best of what virtualization and convergence trends have given us over the past several years.

Cold reality

So, what is it that prevents companies from creating this data center utopia today? Well, for starters, existing organizations already have significant levels of customization. Organizations implement solutions and them tweak them according to business requirements, turning them into valuable resources that can also become sacred cows.

Calculating TCO is key

Building a case for the next generation data center is made even more difficult by the fact that it’s often hard to express TCO for a given system today. Pulling in all of the components – hardware, software, and more – is sometimes tremendously complex to do in a meaningful way. This means that it’s much more difficult for CIOs and other decision-makers to make the right decisions about how they can make the data center more efficient.

One step at a time

Few organizations can simply wipe the data center clean and start from scratch. The key to getting to the next generation data center for them is to do it one step at a time. Utilize virtualization technologies, implement convergence whenever possible, and avoid adding complexities at all costs.