Enterprise Data Center Strategy for the 21st Century

The set of factors companies have to consider when devising their data center strategy has changed drastically. They have to take into account things like cloud services, mobile workforce, delivery of services at the network edge on top of the traditional requirements to maintain uptime and anticipate growth in capacity requirements. This April, we focused on what it means to own an enterprise data center strategy in this day and age. Here's a collection of stories we ran on this subject this month:

Intel: World Will Switch to “Scale” Data Centers by 2025 - One Intel forecast about the future of computing and data centers helps put the company’s restructuring announcement in April in perspective. Between 70 and 80 percent of systems going into data centers ten years from now will be what the processor giant calls “scale computing” systems.

Survey: Half of IT Pros Have No Edge Data Center Plans - While an interesting and relatively new topic, the amount of interest IT professionals have in actually using edge data centers turns out to be mild.

Build or Lease? Creating the Best Data Center Strategy - The volume of data generated today is growing at an astonishing rate, and demand for data center space has reached an all-time high, consistently outpacing supply in the top markets. Many organizations are struggling to develop effective data center strategies, frequently facing the familiar question: build or lease?

Setting Up the WAN for Cloud Connectivity - When it comes to WAN considerations, administrators must be aware of the type of cloud they are deploying and what they will be hosting. When working with a private, public, or hybrid cloud environment, planning will be the most important deployment step.

What Cisco’s New Hyperconverged Infrastructure Is and Isn’t Good At - It’s a great start and a great technology for an organization that already has a massive user base with the UCS and networking ecosystem. The HyperFlex architecture integrates directly into existing Cisco management environments to allow for complete data center scale. Still, as many first releases go, there are some limitations.