Four critical steps to datacenter transformation

Transforming datacenters is more than virtualization and automation. Here's how to do double the work on half the infrastructure

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A global 2000 Enterprise IT group is caught in a groundswell of chaos. The current economic malaise is forcing a challenge from the business to IT to cut operating expenses by 20 percent or greater while preserving capital ferociously.

All this while the IT team is faced with another reality, the main corporate datacenter has six to 18 months left in terms of shelf life. The datacenter’s power distribution and patch panel design was not built to handle the massive density and cooling power requirements. The sprawl of unstructured data, app servers, Web servers, and now virtual machines is proliferating at a pace that will force a space crunch in a time frame that is counter to the challenge from the business in terms of capital preservation and opex reduction.

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Sound familiar? Is this a challenge you're facing?

What does a firm do? The standard playbook is consolidate, virtualize, and automate. This strategy is absolutely critical and is part of a target foundation that must be built. However, it will not solve the challenge of above.

A different approach needs to be taken. The approach starts with a fundamental principle: IT delivery must be "as needed/when needed," and all things IT are services that should be delivered in a real-time utility model. With this as the fundamental theory, below outlines four key steps for firms to institute and apply in 90-day building blocks to achieve radical results. It's important to note these steps can be executed in parallel and in a continuous, iterative. and concurrent manner.

Tags: data center architecture, infrastructure services

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