One of the biggest barriers to innovation today, is dealing with current datacenter complexity. This forces the largest IT investment dollars to be focused on keeping the lights on and containing infrastructure sprawl. The inability to focus a majority of time and investments on innovating and differentiating the business thru IT causes continued missed expectations and disappointment within the business user community.
It is essential to understand that past design choices resulted in complexity, waste, performance barriers and cost models that don’t work for the customer or best in class distinction. The lack of transparency of what has been done in the past and how datacenter build-out continues to be a “don’t change” mindset – results in continued misalignment with business needs. This prevents business agility and reduces shareholder value.
In our experience, datacenter infrastructure design has to become a holistic footprint of infrastructure (network, storage, compute, memory, disk, I/O, housing container, power, cabling) that is efficient and effective in design, deployment and provisioning. This footprint concept has to be thought of as a composition of service delivery units that can be consumed in a variable manner – on demand consumption and on-demand re-configuration.
Practically, entire datacenters cannot be converted overnight. Additionally, even if organizations adopt build an optimal footprint/design, it requires a bridge strategy to intersect with legacy design & infrastructure. The bridge strategy needs to begin with understanding the traditional datacenter design limitations. Below is a synopsis of design limitations that we have found in the past:
Horizontal Cooling – this approach contradicts natural physics. If heat rises, then optimal cooling strategies should naturally leverage this. The cause/effect of not doing so, results in tremendous performance impacts (user experience of the business suffers) and waste in terms of real estate space, additional power consumption and additional cooling infrastructure (ROE suffers).
AC Power – power to datacenter infrastructure in many cases goes thru a power distribution unit or PDU that transforms feeds into traditional plug connections into servers, network and storage equipment. This results in waste in terms of power loss (not a good thing with the global energy issues today besides additional costs) and potential instability when swings of voltage and current get out of time with each other (user experience can suffer as infrastructure stability can become erratic).
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