The modern data center is an absolutely critical piece of today’s business. In fact, entire business capabilities are built around the capabilities of IT. We’re seeing major shifts in infrastructure spending as more companies use data center design to create a competitive advantages. A recent IDC report pointed out that total spending on IT infrastructure products (server, storage, and Ethernet switch) for deployment in cloud environments will increase by 18.9% in 2016 to reach $38.2 billion.
“For the majority of corporate and public organizations, IT is not a core business but rather an enabler for their core businesses and operations,” said Natalya Yezhkova, Research Director, Storage Systems. “Expansion of cloud offerings creates new opportunities for these businesses to focus efforts on core competences while leveraging the flexibility of service-based IT.”
Get this data center design best practice white paper from the Data Center Frontier White Paper Library. Download Now.
So – we’re seeing how the data center is important to business growth and innovation. We’re also seeing that reliance around data center technologies will only continue to grow. With that, comes a big challenge: how do you keep it all healthy? Efficiency is a key objective when designing a data center. Efficiency gains are typically focused completely on power and cooling. Efficiencies can be realized in many other areas resulting in additional cost savings, reliable network performance, easier maintenance, flexibility, and scalability.
Keeping up with the growing demands is becoming a very large problem for the data center manager day. Although important, a good power and cooling strategy doesn’t guarantee a good data center design. Even the most efficient power and cooling design doesn’t guarantee reliable network performance; a cable could be kinked or unplugged causing costly downtime. A good power and cooling design doesn’t simplify the installation and management of the infrastructure. The physical infrastructure can even hinder supplying power where needed and cause the cooling system to be less efficient. The success and efficiency of the data center can be maximized by considering five key elements; which is what this whitepaper from Legrand will cover. This includes:
- Performance
- Time
- Space
- Experience
- Sustainability
Remember, Data centers are growing in size and complexity but often require faster deployment times. They must be able to adapt quickly and easily to support changing business requirements. Selecting infrastructure solutions that optimize time (while still taking performance, real estate, and efficiency into consideration), result in faster deployments, reduced cost, and easier moves, adds and changes.
As we mentioned earlier today’s data centers deliver critical services for the business. Trying to maximize efficiency in a data center design focused only on power and cooling strategies is short-cited. There are other efficiencies that will enhance the data center’s ability to cost-effectively adapt to business strategy changes and increased computing demand. Download this whitepaper today to learn these additional data center design best practices.
