The average data center in the United States is 18 years old. This means that many businesses are relying on infrastructures that were built when 16 MB RAM was considered to be a lot of storage and iPhones were the stuff of science fiction.
These aging data centers were designed in a different compute era and cannot meet today’s power, cooling, redundancy, and other technology requirements. If you’re trying to run a 21st-century business on a 20th-century infrastructure, then you should consider updating your data center.
The Data Center Of The Future Is About More Than Just Four Walls
Data centers need more and more power to operate. In 2012, global data centers used 1.5 times more electricity than New York City. By 2020, they will require six times the electricity of New York City.
According to IT Business Edge, “Changes in the hardware infrastructure environment have focused a lot of attention on the capabilities of data center facilities. The problem lies in the amount of power and cooling that new high-density infrastructures require. Most data centers are not designed for such power increases and the commensurate rise in costs is typically unsustainable when using older facilities.”
High power consumption is only one challenge that aging data centers face. You should also consider the changes in how we communicate and stay connected using the cloud and mobile devices. According to Skyhigh Networks, organizations run an average of 545 services in the cloud. Meanwhile, analysts stated that 30.2 percent of computing workloads are expected to run in the public cloud by 2018. Since your information now resides on both personal and corporate devices, you should adjust your data center strategy to keep your information secure.
Use The Data Center To Drive Business Innovation While Cutting Costs
IT faces a Catch-22: Drive innovation to give your business a competitive advantage while cutting costs. One way you can do this is by finding green opportunities in the data center. For example, you can determine how efficiently a device is using power and then look for ways to reduce your power consumption. You might discover that you have a server operating at 15 percent capacity and that virtualizing it will reduce your power consumption, hardware and rack space.
