Strategies for today’s data centre transformation
Data centres have long been at the heart of most IT infrastructures. Recent trends have seen moves away from the static, inflexible, production-oriented data centres of the past to more dynamic, flexible, service-oriented delivery centres, says John Hope-Bailie, technical director of Demand Data.
“This transformation is all the more important as costs associated with data centre optimisation are now under the spotlight in the wake of the recent economic downturn.”
Hope-Bailie says companies are adopting virtualisation technologies to achieve these goals – and to simultaneously reduce business risk.
“Virtualisation is rapidly becoming the standard for new application deployment in modern data centres which are now running core business applications, test and development operations as well as business continuity systems on virtual infrastructures.”
He says the pace of virtualisation uptake in South Africa has increased significantly over the past two years, with many companies looking at some form of virtualisation.
“Virtualisation is no longer the preserve of large organisations as the technology is becoming available to mid-sized companies as well. It continues to demonstrate benefits such as improved energy efficiencies, downtime risk mitigation, upgraded security and business continuity protection that cover all sizes of companies.
“What’s more, today’s virtualisation technologies are able to reach beyond the data centre and across enterprises to orchestrate the delivery of services and use of resources with business partners and customers in line with changing business needs,” says Hope-Bailie who, nevertheless, points to a key challenge associated with virtualisation implementation.
“The management of virtualised systems will depend on the measurement of IT performance, so as to quantify the benefits. However, many of the tools for measuring performance and return on investment are designed for physical environments. New tools are quickly becoming necessary in the virtualised world.”
In this light, Hope-Bailie says that, in many cases, traditional software vendors and their respective licensing models are ‘out of sync’ with virtualisation developments.
“Virtualisation allows organisations to transform their data centres in a phased approach making use of independent projects instead of taking a broad, integrated approach.
“By aligning various autonomous projects to an overall data centre transformation strategy, an opportunity exists for CIOs to maximise the value of their transformation initiatives without relying on the conventional thinking associated with out-of-date or rapidly obsolescing solutions,” he adds.
