Data Center Design Today Has to Account for Constant Change

While most legacy application workloads never go away, new ones get added all the time. That puts a lot pressure for data center operators that need to be able to continue to support legacy applications while addressing the needs of emerging ones that now often appear without much notice.

At the Data Center World conference in National Harbor, Maryland, this September, Trevor Slade, product manager for IO, a provider of data center colocation services, will show how a modular approach to data center management enables IT organizations to not only “future-proof “ their data centers, but also achieve higher levels of IT agility.

His session is titled “Strategies for Responding to Demands for Increased Capacity”

Slade said one the biggest challenges that IT organizations now face is pressure on the data center facility crated by the rise of hyper converged systems. It’s now easier than ever to scale out systems.

As those systems scale out, the amount of power and cooling required to support them changes considerably over time.

Given varied levels of density inside the data center, IT organizations need to better isolate those workloads to make sure the needs of one set of applications doesn’t wind up impinging on another, Slade said.

Over time, this approach also makes it simpler to absorb refreshes to the systems themselves.

“You need to think about it as managing data centers within data centers,” he said. “That way [you] can future-proof from an operations standpoint.”

Just as critical, future-proofing also needs to encompass making certain that the physical network can extend to external cloud services, which should really be treated as a logical part of the overall virtual data center environment.

There’s no doubt that managing data centers is a more complex endeavor than ever. To rise to that challenge, the data center itself needs to be fundamentally designed from the ground up to absorb as much change as possible with the least amount of disruption to IT operations.

For more information, sign up for Data Center World National Harbor, which will convene in National Harbor, Maryland, on September 20-23, 2015, and attend Trevor Slade's session titled "Strategies for Responding to Demands for Increased Capacity”